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If you're at a conference and you find yourself being hailed for the next session with a cowbell, chances are you're at a conference on agrarianism.

Or, rather, a conference for agrarians. That's certainly who congregated for "The Future of Agrarianism" conference, held this April at Georgetown College in northern Kentucky. Said cowbell, locally grown food for snacks and lunches, a Sierra Club bumper sticker in every registration packet, and plenty of jeans, cowboy boots, and ponytails: no academic meeting this, despite the presence of many professors and college students. It was a convening, some 300 strong, of the committed.

Fred Kirschenmann, director of the Aldo Leopold Center at Iowa State University, set the tone in his opening address. We've arrived at a "historic moment—we have some opportunities here," Kirschenmann made clear. As agriculture becomes increasingly global, a public awareness has been emerging, he and others contended, that something as basic as food cannot—must not—be entrusted to multinational mega-companies, so vulnerable to terrorist attack and so unscrupulous in governance. The fundamental agrarian response: responsible living demands a different kind of economy—or better, many, many more economies.

But is a world of small, overlapping economies even possible any longer? Kirschenmann pointed out that currently in America there are three times as many farmers over 65 as under thirty-five. One speaker, discussing the "old agrarianism," asked bluntly: "Where are the farmers going to come from?" The rise of the "food dictatorship" (as Indian eco-feminist and physicist Vandana Shiva termed it) and the consequent decline in the farm population led Kirschenmann to suggest that there exists a ten- to 15-year window for the American agrarian endeavor: without deep changes in the coming two decades, the unspeakably dominant corporations will be importing much of our food supply, while what rural communities still exist will morph into housing for migrant workers—troubling conclusions for those who believe the corporate order to be incapable of caring well for the earth, its people, and their food.

The conference's formal occasion was a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of writer and farmer Wendell Berry's agrarian manifesto, The Unsettling of America, and Berry, present at all of the sessions and involved in several of them, had his own thoughts on the subject of the future of agrarianism. With his customary confluence of sly wit and pointed prophecy, he described "agrarianism" as a "term and idea that has been called forth, none too soon, by industrialism"; it is, he emphasized, the opposite of industrialism and the alternative to it: apart from economies of local scale, in which consumers and producers enjoy sufficient proximity to ensure safety, quality, and increased neighborliness toward each other and their land, the degrading of the earth and all life upon it will continue in rapid, disastrous fashion.

Not a hopeful prospect. Berry's mood, though, matched that of Kirschenmann, Shiva, and others: not so much weary as soldierly. He acknowledged that a "cloud. … hovers over this meeting," noting that in the 25 years since Unsettling the number of farmers in America had dropped by half. "For now," he stated, "victory is not the issue—endurance is."

The next two decades loom large for a different, equally jarring sort of reason: within that period, in all likelihood, agrarians will witness the quieting of their most eloquent, versatile champion. Born in 1934, Berry has long been an unparalleled presence on the American scene as agrarian philosopher, prophet, and poet, and his death will leave a void impossible to fill. The conference itself seemed to be an implicit pronouncement of the need to make serious strides while his presence abides.

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46