‘Homesick for the Land Itself’

Brooks Lamb is in the “sticker” tradition of American society. He has dedicated his life to protecting farmland and ensuring new generations of farmers have access to that land.

Lamb works as the Special Advisor for Strategic Communications at American Farmland Trust (AFT), a national nonprofit devoted to “saving the land that sustains us.” According to AFT, an estimated 2,000 acres of farmland are lost to non-agricultural uses such as real estate and commercial development each day. By 2040, one-third of America’s farmland may change hands as aging landowners sell their properties. Meanwhile, as many farms are losing topsoil at alarming rates, the demand for food production is only expected to increase in the coming years.

These trends jeopardize not only the future of agriculture but also the land and ecosystems upon which we depend. But as Lamb knows, this is not cause for dismay—it is reason for action. And the best route to action is not through fear, but through love. As Berry said, “Stickers … are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

This was the impetus behind Lamb’s 2023 book, Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place, which sought to understand the crisis of America’s loss of farmland through the lens of Berry’s own writing as well as in interviews with farmers and local leaders in rural communities confronting the firsthand consequences of this loss.

Mary Berry, executive director of the Berry Center, put it this way: “Brooks Lamb has taken seriously my father Wendell Berry’s assertion that we don’t have an agricultural crisis in America but a cultural crisis. He dares to take the virtues of affection and fidelity to particular places as economic necessities.”

Lamb grew up on a family farm in Holts Corner, an unincorporated community in Marshall County, Tennessee, where his family has cared for the land since 1892. He now lives in Memphis, Tennessee, and he continues to help steward the family farm. He is also an adjunct professor at Rhodes College, where he teaches a class called “Agriculture, Society and the Environment.”

This interview is part of a series of “Meet the Barn Raiser” interviews, where Barn Raiser explores the lives and stories of the rural writers, organizers and civic leaders who are carrying forward the spirit of barn raising in rural America today. The interviews are available on video and in print.

How did you find your passion for preserving farmland?

I grew up on a 75-acre family farm about 50 miles south of Nashville. That land is still in my family, and that place, more than anywhere else on Earth, has shaped me into who I am.

When I graduated high school, I left home to go to college at Rhodes College, where I now teach as an adjunct professor, here in Memphis. I loved Rhodes. I loved my new friends and my professors, and I loved Memphis. I still love Memphis. But at the same time, I was miserably homesick. Not for friends back home or even my family, although I did miss my mom and dad. I was homesick for the land itself. I was not used to being in an urban setting. I felt like I had uprooted myself and tried to replant in a place where I didn’t know if my roots were going to take.

So, I moped around for a little while my first couple months of college and then I started to leverage my homesickness into service. I was a service scholar in undergrad and I had a chance to get involved with some community gardens. It was really impactful for me. I also started volunteering at an urban park here in Memphis called Overton Park. And for several years I engaged with that place and cared for it. I was able to sort of find myself again and my connections to the land through working in that urban park.

It was that sense of homesickness and missing the land itself that helped me understand, for lack of a better term, my calling, what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to try, in whatever small way that I could, to make the world a better place.

What values guide your writing and work?

I try hard with my writing and my work to nurture empathy, to cultivate what Wendell Berry calls Imagination, this deep, attuned understanding of place and of the people who call it home. When we have a sense of imagination like that, where we can close our eyes and be a thousand miles away and put ourselves in a specific place, in all the richness and detail and uniqueness that make it different from anywhere else on Earth, we can start to develop a sense of affection for it.

That kind of affection is an enduring, forceful love, not some wistful or nostalgic or sentimental sappy love, but one that is active, that motivates action. In that sort of affection we find the possibility of care, of fidelity, of loyalty to a place. When we can root our care and our stewardship for places and for people in affection, we can better weather the adversity that we face.

Rural communities are facing a lot of adversity right now, and we need that sense of love and affection in order to persevere together.

Why does rural storytelling matter?

If you flip on the nightly news or open a major newspaper, you probably see an urban-focused media outlet telling stories about big population centers and big issues that affect millions or billions of people. These are important topics, but too often rural issues are glossed over. Or they are reported on with little depth or nuance.

I would argue that if we eat, if we drink water, if we breathe air, and if we clothe ourselves in fibers and other things, then we should care about agriculture. We should care about food systems. We should care about the rural places that make a lot of urban lifestyles and livelihoods possible. And if we care about those things, then we have to be informed about them, and informed in a way that can lead us to make good decisions, sometimes courageous decisions, to understand the complexities and not just settle for the quick or easy explanation.

Are you optimistic about the future of farming and rural communities?

My oldest brother, Michael, is a scholar of hope. He researches these issues as a moral and political philosopher. He teaches at Wake Forest in North Carolina, and I’m going to borrow from him a little bit for this answer.

Oftentimes we think of hope in the same vein that we think of optimism. I have been asked before if I’m optimistic about our future in agriculture, and I am not at all optimistic about our future in agriculture. I’m not optimistic about the future of rural communities. Optimism, to me, is the same as wishful thinking. It’s putting blinders on and saying “Everything’s going to be fine.” “Everything’s going to work out,” like, “It’ll just happen,” or “We’re going to be all right.” I think optimism is very different from hope.

Hope to me instead looks out at the challenges that we face, at the adversities that we face. It’s honest about those and it reckons with those. And then it doesn’t casually say, “Well, everything’s just going to be fine.” It says, “How do I get to work, in light of these adversities and difficulties, to try to bring about a better future?”

In some ways hope is like the mean or the middle between optimism and despair. I am hopeful about the future of agriculture and rural communities.

Can you share an example of how storytelling leads to change?

Along with a coalition of many others across my home state, I have been fighting for a new program to fund farmland protection in Tennessee.

Last year the idea for this program, called the Farmland Preservation Fund, couldn’t even get out of the Senate Agriculture Committee in our state legislature. This year it passed the Tennessee Senate 25-4, and it passed in the House 84-8. It set aside $25 million for farmland preservation in Tennessee.

Tennessee is facing tremendous threats from suburban sprawl and agricultural land conversion. This fund is going to help slow that down, enhance the viability of rural and agricultural communities, and make it easier for the next generation to get a start in agriculture. A big coalition of folks pushed for that. I mentioned it in the last chapter of my book Love for the Land.

We told stories in op-eds and articles and policy briefs about the impacts of farmland loss on rural communities, and it made a difference! People started to give a damn, which was pretty surprising given the lack of interest in previous years.

So that’s one example. Here’s another: Earlier this year, I was out in Colorado for my work with American Farmland Trust. I talked to a ranching couple in their early 80s. That couple is uncertain about the future of their family’s ranch. They don’t have an heir who would like to take over. They have worked their entire lives to build this place, to have a productive and viable ranch, and they’re not sure what’s going to happen moving forward. It’s a difficult situation.

What gives me hope is that this couple drove five hours to speak with me for a podcast interview. They didn’t have to do that. But they showed up and we interviewed them in the room of a Best Western motel on the outskirts of Denver because they wanted to share their story. They believed that if they can share their story, then maybe someone in another ranch in the West or on a small farm here in Tennessee might hear about their struggles with succession planning and maybe learn from them.

People in different parts of the country are going to extraordinary lengths to try to envision some sort of better future for rural places and rural people. That takes work. It takes time. It takes commitment, and it takes affection. But when all of those things come together, I think we have the capacity for an authentic and grounded hope. It’s these folks who are willing to go to work that really give me hope.

Can you tell us a little more about the work of American Farmland Trust?

American Farmland Trust is a national conservation organization whose mission is like a three-legged stool. The first leg is to focus on farmland protection: How are we making sure that we have agricultural land moving forward into the future to produce our food, to produce our fiber, and to underpin rural economies?

The second leg is focused on promoting sound conservation practices: How do we make sure that practices are serving the land and the soil, that they’re maintaining water quality and using water efficiently, that they are good for the climate, and that they’re also good for the immediate communities and people around them?

The third leg is what we call keeping farmers on the land. What that translates to is economic viability for farmers and for rural communities. It also translates to solving the questions: How we help aging generations of farmers transfer their farm to the next generation successfully? How do we help young and aspiring farmers navigate the tremendous land access challenges that are facing the next generation of farmers?

That’s often known as the biggest challenge facing the next generation of farmers. How they are they going to afford land? So we are trying to help them navigate those difficulties. We come at this work from multiple perspectives. I think that’s one thing that makes American Farmland Trust unique. We view these challenges and opportunities as a complex system and not just some one-off cause that we can try to solve on its own.

How do we bridge some of the divides that harm rural communities?

Given the divides that we face in our society, I think it’s really important, where we can, to cultivate common ground. And every word in that phrase is very intentional for me.

I don’t think we need to “find middle ground,” because I don’t know that there’s always some magical ground right in the middle where everyone can compromise and come together. But I think if we try to cultivate that common ground, we’re actually working to figure out where it may be. And when you cultivate you don’t just snap your fingers and something happens, right? You actually have to go out to work. If you think about an agricultural setting, you’ve got to go hook up the plow or the disk. You’ve got to drive out to the field. You’ve got to make sure the tractor is ready to go, or the mules or the horses or whatever power you might be using.

And then you have to get to work, finding the right places and the right angles from which you can actually till that ground so you can go in and plant seed that’s going to grow up and hopefully bring a good harvest around.

And it often takes a team effort, right? If we can work together to actually cultivate that common ground, find things for which we all could care about—some may have different ideas, and we need to hear those different ideas while standing firm where needed—we might be able to come together and figure out some sort of way forward. That’s where I think we have a promise, a hope for a better future for rural communities. If we can do that, it’ll benefit all of us.

Justin PerkinsMore by this author →

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.