Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Brooks Lamb is a writer, and the land protection and access specialist at American Farmland Trust. He grew up on a small farm in Marshall County, Tennessee, and lives in Memphis now. His recent book, Love For the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place, is a portrait of two changing Tennessee counties and the people who populate them – those who’ve chosen to stay in their changing hometowns in the face of development pressures and agricultural agglomeration.
Enjoy our conversation about Wendell Berry, the fall of tobacco, and “right-sized” farming, below.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Can you talk a little about your upbringing and how it led you to a career in agricultural advocacy?
Brooks Lamb: I grew up on a small farm in rural Tennessee. The land has been in our family since 1892, but the ownership hasn’t exactly been “linear.” My parents bought the farm from my great uncle’s heirs when he passed away in the 1990s, and we moved onto the farm when I was 4 or 5 years old. Before that, we – me, my parents, and my two older brothers – were living on a smaller farm a few miles away. All that to say, we know the joys of multi-generational connections with the land as well as the burden of still trying to pay down a farm debt.
My parents both worked full-time off the farm. My dad worked in a car factory for nearly 40 years, and my mom managed the elementary school cafeteria in town. We raised a small herd of cattle on the farm, as well as the hay to feed them through the winter. We always had a big garden. We grew pumpkins for several years. And when I was in high school, around 2009, I started a community garden on our farm called “Project: Plant a Seed.” The Great Recession hit our county pretty hard, and the unemployment rate rose to around 20 percent. I was searching for some way to help. Since we had land—and we also had a good relationship with the local Farmer’s Cooperative, which generously donated seeds, plants, and fertilizer—a garden felt like a good way to support the community. With a ton of help and encouragement from my parents, that garden was active for four summers, providing a lot of fresh food for people in our county.
We also raised burley tobacco until I was a junior in high school. For a long time – until production controls were lifted in the mid-2000s – tobacco was a critical crop for smaller-scale farmers. Even by just raising three or four acres of tobacco, families could make a respectable return that helped their farm’s economic viability. Yet when those production controls were lifted, and even though there was a buyout intended to help farmers who stopped raising it, tobacco joined the “get big or get out” chorus that has been plaguing American agriculture for decades. A crop that was pivotal to many small-scale farming communities across the South and elsewhere went away.
I understand the dark history of tobacco and its devastating impacts on human health as well as anyone. Cancer killed three of my four grandparents, all three of whom smoked. But tobacco was also an important element of our local agrarian economy. It’s complicated. This is something that people like Wendell Berry and bell hooks have written about, too. Now, the Berry Center in Kentucky is trying to take key parts of the former tobacco program – fair prices, controlled production, cooperation – and apply it to other realms, like beef cattle.
I should mention that our farm was, and still is, a family farm in the strongest sense. We tended the land, crops, and animals together. We repaired barns and fixed fences and hauled hay before school and after work, over holidays and breaks, and on the weekends. From my brothers, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and especially my parents, I learned the science and arts of agriculture. They also taught me to love the land. To care for it. Those lessons stuck.
I’ve gone on far too long in this response, but I’ll close by saying: I understand the challenges of rural communities and small and midsized farming because I’ve lived them. I’ve lived the beauty and grace, too. In other words, I know the joys and discomforts of agricultural life. That experience inspires my work today.
DY: How’d you choose the two community case studies in the book? What did you find particularly illuminating about Robertson and Maury counties?
BL: I anchored the “field” work, farming pun somewhat intended, in Robertson and Maury counties for a few reasons. First, I am of and from a place much like these two communities. Marshall County, which is my home county, is adjacent to Maury County, so I’ve spent a lot of time there. Robertson County is a little further away—maybe 60 miles to the north—but it’s also similar. I watched tractor pulls and played high school football games there.
These common experiences were important because I could empathize with the farmers and local leaders I interviewed. My accent resembles theirs. I have an agricultural background, so I could talk about my favorite breeds of cattle and joke with them about why green tractors are inferior to red ones. That ability to empathize and engage led to trust. I wasn’t just a researcher extracting information. I was sitting down for a conversation. Because of that, people opened up in our interviews, even when it was difficult. And I am so grateful to them for doing so.
I also chose Robertson and Maury counties because, in a lot of ways, these two places are microcosms of agricultural communities across the country, especially in terms of the adversity they face. I wanted to understand why some farmers continue to care for their land and persist in place. To truly dig into that question, I needed to explore places where persistence isn’t easy. Where people have to work at it. Statistics and firsthand experiences show that’s the case for many smaller scale farmers in these two counties.
There are three primary kinds of adversity I focus on in the book. The first is farmland loss from haphazard real estate development, the kind that leads to rural gentrification. It’s truly rampant in Tennessee, where some data suggest that over a million acres of farmland will be compromised by development in the next two decades. The second is the issue of agricultural consolidation. It’s that “get big or get out” mantra that has hurt so many rural communities and economies, not to mention the land and ecosystems and environment itself. Finally, for farmers of color and especially Black farmers, I looked at issues of racism and injustice – in the past, but also still in the present. The difficulties farmers of color have faced, from loan denials and delayals to underrepresentation on agricultural committees, racism from government officials, dispossession of land via heirs’ property exploitation, and more, not to mention that verbal and physical violence, are widespread and infuriating. Robertson and Maury counties have seen all these forms of systemic adversity.
The fact that some smaller farmers are resilient in the face of these difficulties? It’s worth asking why they persevere and what motivates them. These two communities are, in my mind, great places to do that.
DY: You take Wendell Berry’s three stewardship virtues – imagination, affection, and fidelity – as a starting point. What were you trying to accomplish with those concepts, or what were you trying to add to them?
BL: Wendell Berry has been a huge influence for me. His novels are moving, his short stories are engaging, and his poems are beautiful and sometimes subversive. But his essays have been most influential for me. His writing on those concepts you mentioned – imagination, affection, and fidelity – have impacted me most.
Berry writes that imagination is one of the most intimate forms of knowledge possible. For him, and for me, it’s far different from our popular understanding of the term. Usually, when we hear “imagination,” it’s in the context of a child dreaming up other-worldly scenes. Instead, imagination as Berry describes it is as real as it gets. It’s knowing a specific place in all the richness of detail that makes it unique. It’s similar to familiarity, awareness, and attunement. It’s a knowledge that evolves over time, and it sparks connection.
Affection is a deep and enduring love for a place, one that is hard-earned and learned. It’s not reactive or sentimental or nostalgic. It’s forceful. It reckons with difficulties and reality. It’s honest about struggles. Yet it remains. And importantly, it informs and motivates actions.
Fidelity is a lot like loyalty or devotion. It’s a desire to care for a place over time, to commit to the place and the people and the creatures within it. Imagination leads to affection, and affection yields fidelity. When that fidelity is rooted in love, it becomes a welcome obligation, a responsibility we cherish.
In the book, I frame these concepts as “virtues,” or character dispositions that encourage us to think and act in certain ways. They’re more than just emotions. When nurtured, these virtues become part of our identity and help define who we are. They bring good to us and the wider world. They’re traits that we are constantly working to refine and strengthen. All these features make them pivotal to good stewardship of land. In my mind, they’re indispensable qualities of good farmers, yet they’re relevant far beyond the farm, too.
I wanted to show that these virtues don’t just “work” on the page. I wanted to see if they encourage action on the ground. Time after time, in dozens of interviews with farmers and local community members, I heard that these virtues inspire resilience. I saw it firsthand.
Now, I’m not sure if I heard a single person use the words “imagination,” “affection,” or “fidelity.” But they talked about knowing their land. They talked about loving it. Some said that it was their calling to care for it. They refused to “get big” because they wouldn’t be able to tend their farm in the same way, and they turned down unsolicited offers from developers who offered them $30,000 or $40,000 an acre for their land. They used different verbiage to describe their commitments, but the same concepts are there.
I think we have a lot to learn from people who are practicing these virtues and committing to place. Whether it’s a farm or an urban park, a community garden, or a tree planted in the sidewalk, we’d do well to cultivate these connections with, and affection for, place. It’d lead to better care on the local level, and collectively, it would lead to better care for our states, our country, and our world.
DY: What do you most hope for readers to learn from the people who persist in small-scale agriculture today?
BL: Two things: First, that we need to be doing more to support right-sized farming in the United States. “Right-sized” may have varying definitions. A “right-sized” or small or midsized farm may be different from Tennessee to Kansas to Montana to Connecticut. It even differs within those states, and it differs from one production focus to the next. But we need to nurture a farming system where imagination, affection, and fidelity can flourish. We need to create changes in policies and programs so that these virtues can be assets that empower rather than liabilities that demand constant sacrifice and struggle. Economic viability is important. In fact, viability is, or should be, a conservation strategy. But we can’t constantly prioritize profit over affection. Love and care need to be at the center. That’s essential for a healthier environment and economy, it’s essential for helping support the next generation of farmers and stewards, and it’s essential for the advancement of justice and equity.
Second, I want people to see the potential of people-place relationships, especially those rooted in affection. And I want more of us to emulate the farmers in this book. They’re not perfect people. No one is perfect. But they show us a path forward that can lead to better stewardship. In order to better care for places, the planet, and each other, we’ll have to make hard choices. We can’t “technology” ourselves out of environmental and social crises. We’ll have to do what’s hard instead of what’s easy. We will have to sacrifice. Many of the smaller scale farmers in this book show us how to do that.
DY: How do you cultivate your connection to the land you live on now, in urban Memphis?
BL: I should note that my wife, Regan, and I are still actively involved with caring for my family’s farm. We get back whenever we can, at least once every couple months. In fact, I’m going back in a few weeks for a short weekend trip and am crossing my fingers for good weather so I can spend as much time outside working as possible. Or if the weather’s bad, I’ll look forward to feeding hay in the barn and watching our cows and calves eat. That’s one of my favorite things to do. The farm will always be home for me.
Yet, as you noted, Memphis is a home for us, too. We love this place and feel a connection to it, and we act on that love in several ways. In an environmental-specific context, that means composting in the backyard and using that compost in the raised beds we built last spring. It means taking good care of our yard and the soil in it, a responsibility I particularly enjoy. It means frequently visiting Overton Park and caring for it, even if only in small ways. It means picking up trash on walks through the neighborhood and biking to the post office.
But that connection transcends the land itself and flows into the place, which includes people. We have generous, loving neighbors who make our street feel like a community. We share and laugh and mourn and work together. I’m not sure how we lucked into such a kind group of people here. We also have an unbelievable group of friends who care about this city and each other. We have mentors here.
Regan and I hope to move onto a farm of our own in the next few years. Land access challenges make that difficult, which is a topic for another conversation. But we want to root into a rural community and the land itself, and we hope that can happen soon. Until then, we’ll be grateful to call Memphis home and practice affection where we are.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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