By Mark Musick, Tilth Alliance Board Member

I was saddened to learn of Wendell Berry’s passing on August 31, but comforted by the knowledge of his enduring legacy, especially here in the Pacific Northwest.

I first met Wendell on July 1, 1974, when I was serving on the documentation team for a series of environmental conferences at Gonzaga University in conjunction with Expo 74 in Spokane. Wendell’s “culture of agriculture” speech that day became the starting point for his landmark book, The Unsettling of America. Below is a video of his speech, which is the earliest known recording of Wendell speaking in public. The video quality is poor, but his eloquence and passion shine through.

He wrote, “The crisis is not in land use. It’s in the lives and the minds of land users…. Good land use is going to come about either by hard necessity or by some kind of teaching….and so I’m asking you, from where you are, can you see any possibility of another kind of agricultural symposium…. Suppose you could get together representatives of farm workers unions, NFO and any other such groups, family farmers, urban consumer cooperatives, small farm co-ops, organic farming and gardening co-ops and organizations, the publications of dissident agriculture, and the conservation organizations, wilderness societies, etc. Could such a meeting be made to happen?”

Wendell Berry’s letter was like a match thrown on dry tinder. Gigi Coe, to whom the letter was addressed, shared the letter with me and we mailed a copy to Woody and Becky Deryckx, who were homesteading at Poplar Hills in southeast Washington. The timing was perfect. We learned that Woody had already been brainstorming about an alternative agriculture conference with his friend Michael Pilarski. 

Gigi and I met with Woody and Becky at Poplar Hills in early August and we began plans for a major regional conference that November. When the time came to name the organization we would form to host the conference, Becky suggested the name “Tilth.” A quick check of the dictionary told us this was exactly the word we were looking for to express our connection with the soil and the roots of traditional agriculture.

About 800 people gathered in Ellensburg on November 21-23, 1974, for the first Northwest Conference on Alternative Agriculture. It was a seminal event. People from across the Northwest and as far away as California, Arizona, South Dakota, Ohio, and North Carolina came together to begin the process of building a new kind of agriculture.

The Ellensburg conference struck a deep chord and its impact reverberated throughout the region, leading to the incorporation of the Tilth Association and the formation of Seattle Tilth and other local chapters. These were the early roots of several organizations that would, decades later, grow into Tilth Alliance.

Twenty years later, in November 1994, Wendell returned to the Northwest to deliver the keynote address at Tilth’s 20th Anniversary Conference in Troutdale, Oregon. Woody Deryckx introduced Wendell, giving one of the best description of the word “tilth” I’ve ever read, followed by Wendell’s reflections on his visit to Spokane.

Another two decades later, in November 2004, Wendell’s wife Tanya and daughter Mary Berry, Director of The Berry Center, visited the Tilth gardens prior to Mary presenting the closing keynote at Tilth’s 40th Anniversary Conference in Vancouver, WA.

Wendell’s last visit to Washington was in late May 2011. While here he toured the WSU Mount Vernon Research Center and met with local farmers. Hannelore Sudermann took this photo of Wendell talking with Tom & Cheryl Thornton and Anne Schwartz during his visit to the Skagit Valley. Tom was a founding board member of the Tilth Association, Cheryl continues as an ag community activist, and Anne was a longtime leader of Tilth Producers and former Tilth Alliance board member.

In early April 2013 my wife Terry and I flew back to Kentucky to attend The Berry Center’s “Resettling America Conference,” which included the taping of Bill Moyers’ interview of Wendell for public television. The video, which was released a few months later, provides an excellent introduction Wendell’s lifelong devotion to advocating for a saner way of life.

We will miss Wendell’s abiding presence, but he left us a wealth of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays sufficient for several lifetimes. Though progress has had its challenges, I know Wendell was encouraged by the growth of the sustainable agriculture movement he helped foster in the Northwest and around the country.