What Does Rural Have to Teach Us?

Lee Miller: Welcome. This conversation will explore what rural places can teach those of us living urban and suburban lives—particularly whether the rhythms and relations endemic to rural life offer lessons for societal cohesion and ecological harmony.1

Kerilyn Schewel: We're joined by Brooks Lamb, author of Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place and Special Advisor for Strategic Communications at American Farmland Trust, and Grace Olmstead, journalist and author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind. Welcome both.

To start, could you each share what drew you to write about rural America and how your backgrounds shaped your perspectives?

Grace Olmstead: Absolutely. I grew up in rural Idaho in a town of about 3,000 people. My family were farmers for generations. My great-great-grandparents traveled from poor communities in Europe to the Midwest and tried to eke out a living there up until the Dust Bowl. Eventually, everyone ended up in rural Idaho. Even though things were tough there, especially during the Great Depression, they decided to stay.

I moved away for college and then to Washington, DC, for a writing job. Although I loved DC, I really missed rural Idaho and that community. That homesickness and love came out in my writing about farmers, sustainable agriculture, environmental stewardship, and community empowerment. More than anything, my family taught me this idea that being part of a community should require something of you. It requires a sort of neighborliness that can be quite costly in terms of time and energy, but that neighborliness also holds a lot of rewards.

I've been rereading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and a character says everyone is really responsible for all, to all, and for everything. That’s a huge and demanding idea, but I think that idea does live on in many communities in the United States. As a writer, I began to notice communities that have always struggled, that have been low on economic resources or wider influence. They can be unimportant in the eyes of the world, but through these rhythms of shared work and deep community solidarity, they’ve actually created networks of rich social capital.

The implications are twofold. First, there's a sense of hope and meaning because you realize that, while economic capital matters, a lot of US communities manifest their greatest strength in cultivating social capital. Secondly, you can't divorce the impact of exploitative economic practices and policy from the well-being of those communities. We have to ask: How are we incentivizing or building social well-being and community solidarity, and where are we actually disincentivizing or breaking it down?

Brooks Lamb: My story is very similar to Grace’s. I grew up on a small family farm in rural Tennessee, about fifty miles south of Nashville. It’s a family farm in the fullest sense of the word—we actually work the land together and care for it as a family. I always appreciated the farm, but I didn't realize how much it meant to me until I left for college. I was terribly, painfully, awfully homesick. It wasn't homesickness for friends or even family. It was homesickness for the land.

I started to nurture that homesickness into service. I got involved with community gardens and started volunteering at an urban park in Memphis called Overton Park. I realized that I could find those connections to place—connections to the earth itself—even in that urban context. I worked alongside other volunteers from the community and heard all these powerful stories about the park. I thought that if other people could hear those stories, they might feel more called to care for that specific place and other places as well, so I wrote an oral history of Overton Park, which was my first book.

After graduating, I chose to go back home. I went to work for a statewide nonprofit, The Land Trust for Tennessee. In my role, I was talking daily with rural landowners—many of whom were farmers—who were thinking about permanently protecting their land. I heard and saw their intense, sometimes visceral commitments to place and their willingness to make tremendous sacrifices for the sake of good stewardship. Their efforts inspired me to look closer at my own family's background and realize we also made those sacrifices to maintain our farm.

After two years of on-the-ground conservation work in Tennessee, I went to graduate school at the Yale School of the Environment, where I researched these place-based devotions and interviewed dozens of farmers and local leaders about their connections to the land, the challenges they face, and their reasons for resilience. That master's thesis became the foundation for my book, Love for the Land. I now work for American Farmland Trust, where I get to write about these things and try to put them into action.

Grace mentioned responsibility toward each other and toward our places. Grace and I are both very influenced by Wendell Berry, who writes about the idea of membership in a community. Community is something you have a responsibility to and you also benefit from. It requires work and time, but belonging to it can be an uplifting experience.

Kerilyn: Let's dig a bit into what these rural communities look like. I think listeners are familiar with two unhelpful tropes: either they're seen as dead ends, backwards, flyover states, or they're like an ad for a Ford F-150 with rolling hills and amber waves of grain, where hard work and family values are all you need to wrestle a decent life from the bucolic landscape. Brooks, can you paint us a more honest picture? If we came to visit you in the rural place you know best, what would you show us and who would you introduce us to?

Brooks: If you were to visit my home, we’d have to get there first. I'd have you fly into Memphis, where my wife Regan and I live now, and we’d head east toward my family’s farm in Middle Tennessee. I would start by pointing out a few general trends we could see in the landscape.

First, you’d see fewer but much larger farms. Consolidation is really impacting my community and others throughout the nation. The Census of Agriculture shows that Tennessee alone lost nearly 7,000 farms between 2017 and 2022—about ten percent of all the farms in our state.2

What’s more alarming is that about ninety-seven percent of that decrease came from farms less than 500 acres in size. At the same time, the largest farms actually increased in number. As we drove, I would point out how farms have gotten bigger and how there has been more of a disconnect between people and land.

I would also point out the explosion of real estate development. We're seeing huge population growth and a tremendous amount of farmland conversion in Tennessee. Closer to my home area, you’d see extremely expensive new homes—mammoth houses, millions of dollars—sitting right next to someone living in a single- or double-wide trailer. You often see this intense wealth inequality side-by-side.

As we got closer to my hometown, I'd point out the new “small-box” dollar stores. My hometown is within a fifteen-minute drive of at least eight of these stores. That’s concerning for a few reasons. For one, it’s really hard on small, locally owned businesses. There are also widespread reports of employees not being treated particularly well in these sorts of stores. And, while they provide a service for people who need to stretch their dollars, customers are often paying more per unit for products than they would at other stores.

Next, we'd stop and talk to a handful of different people. We'd go to the farmer's co-op and talk to Ayla, the store manager, who could tell you about the challenges and the beauty of farming. Then we’d stop at the funeral home to meet Tommy, who has managed it for decades, and ask him what it's like to help people grieve together. Finally, we'd pop into the local bank to talk to a friend named Jimmy, who sincerely cares more about helping people than he cares about making money.

Then we’d go where I most want to take you: my family's farm. Once there, we’d go for a walk—through the woods and fields, past the old tobacco patches and the pond, into the barn and up to the loft. I recently had a friend visit and on our walk we came across a newborn calf. We got to watch him stand up for the first time—it was the idyllic high point you think about for a visitor. But we kept walking and, under a cedar tree, there was a dead calf. The mama had had twins, and one was stillborn.

I share that because, in all communities, and especially rural ones, we often have to hold moments of profound beauty and power alongside moments of pain and struggle. Both are true and honest. If we focus only on one or the other, we don't get the full picture.

Grace: Brooks, I love the way you painted this as a journey. The first thing that's lost in this vision of flyover states or of the Ford F-150 commercial is just how topographically and geographically diverse rural America is.

Just to give a tiny taste of that, the South is this beautiful area of the country that gets a lot of rainfall and that has particular soil types, which Brooks could get into more than I could. As you move into the Midwest, you're going to hit the area of the country that's known as the Great Plains, some of the most beautiful grasslands that we have in the entire world.

At one point, we had grasses so deeply rooted that the soil was healthy, shaped by the Indigenous tribes who lived there and cultivated that region, as well as by bison hugely instrumental in the health of the heartland. There is a particular climate, soil type, and way of life in the Midwest. Past the hundredth meridian into the Pacific Northwest and the Mountain West, conditions shift. Washington, Oregon, and California get quite a bit of rain and are very green, while the Mountain West is high desert and we don’t get as much rain; we’re technically desert.

If you had come to Idaho hundreds of years ago, you would’ve seen sagebrush everywhere—beautiful sagebrush with deep taproots nurturing its own ecosystems—and mountains that, to an East Coaster, would look very brown and very dry. We have a very big underground reservoir that the city of Boise relies on. There’s a growing industry here for tech companies that actually uses a lot of water. The reality of water as a finite resource and what it means to steward it well is a central theme here.

Boise is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. When I grew up here, if we had driven into the outskirts of Boise, you would've seen farmers planting crops: onions, sugar beets, mint, and corn. Now, almost all of that land is suburban development for upper-middle-class individuals. There are very large homes with sprawling lawns and a lot of golf courses, raising concerns about the long-term hydrological impacts.

I would have to drive a lot further to take you out to see the farmland I grew up with. But if you drive out of the Boise Valley and over the foothills, you come down into the Emmett Valley. In that area, I would love to introduce you to the Williams family, who grow produce and orchard crops and chickens for local markets. If we were lucky, we could get some cherries, which is what Emmett was known for. After our cherries, we would drive down to see the Dills, Peter and Susan. They have a regenerative agricultural operation. They rotate cattle, have a dairy, and produce beef, hogs, chickens, and a beautiful vegetable garden. They are constantly working to grow more diversity in the soil, plants, and insects to cultivate the health of the land. They are driven by the vision that “we can always do better, we can always do more.”

One thing I'd note is that, in the decrease of these kinds of diverse farms, we begin to see something happening across rural America as a whole: homogenization and consolidation. Increasingly, due to government incentives from things like the farm bill, we see farmers ripping out diverse crops and grassland and focusing on one or two crops such as corn and soybeans.

That's often referred to as monocropping. If you get into the science of what that does to the soil, it has massively detrimental impacts over the long term. I would note that those “amber waves of grain” we so often associate with rural America helped decimate the health of the United States heartland during the twentieth century, leading to one of the greatest environmental crises our world has known—the Dust Bowl. Sadly, those same poor agricultural practices plague a lot of rural communities to this day.

Lee: Each of your most recent books centers people-place relationships and builds extensively on new agrarian philosophies that view the land as a subject in communion with people, rather than just an object. Grace, in Uprooted you observe that we suffer from a cosmopolitan-dominated view of what flourishing means—a view often disconnected from a particular land base. What does it mean to be deeply rooted in your home place?

Grace: I think both rural and urban spaces currently suffer from an acceptance of transience—the idea that we need not, or even should not, stay in one spot for very long. In rural America, this translates into messages we give high schoolers, who are encouraged to leave, to move away from home, to pursue success elsewhere—to literally “go far.”

Christopher Lasch wrote in the late 1970s that "ambitious people understand that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.”3 That overarching narrative of transience as the way to success is what I think we associate with cosmopolitanism. The idea that you have to leave to get ahead, that you have to be able to move around, to desert long-standing ties and not be close to family in order to have a successful career or life—we see the long-term impacts of that.

Two of my favorite exemplars of rootedness are Jane Jacobs in New York City and Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights advocate and farmer from Mississippi. Jacobs lived in Greenwich Village when it was a blue-collar, working-class community. Hamer lived in Montgomery County, Mississippi, where she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and also founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which bought up land that Black farmers could own and farm collectively.

Both of them give us this incredible vision of what it means to love your neighbor and to invest deeply in the place where you live. I think they suggest that the idea of rootedness is a mindset that is applicable in both places. For Jacobs, it meant fighting city planners who wanted to demolish her neighborhood and build a freeway. For Hamer, it meant fighting for voting rights and tangibly supporting Black farmers. This vision is one in which we invest—we root ourselves in our communities, look for their needs, pay attention to those needs, and then respond however we are able.

Lee: Brooks, in Love for the Land, you talk a lot about the virtues of imagination, affection, and fidelity that underpin care for the land in the face of adversity. Could you describe how these virtues motivate people to “stick with it”?

Brooks: I like the way you framed thinking of place as a subject rather than an object, Lee. We are much better off when we view place not just as a passive setting where stories unfold, but as an active character in the story itself.

Anyway, you mentioned these virtues, or character dispositions, that encourage us to act in certain ways: imagination, affection, and fidelity. These are ideas driven forward by Wendell Berry. I think it's worth taking just a second to describe them individually.

Berry writes about imagination in a way that's different from what our popular understanding of the term might mean. I think we often hear the word “imagination” and picture a child who closes her eyes and starts dreaming up a magical forest with singing animals and dancing trees and smiling sunshine and all these kinds of fantastical notions.

Imagination, as Berry describes it, is not a fantastical notion. Instead, it is profound knowledge of a place—a connection that is as real as it gets. It is knowing a place so well that you could be a thousand miles away, shut your eyes, and put yourself there in all the uniqueness and detail that makes that place different from anywhere else.

Knowing a place so well and having that sense of imagination, which can lead to connection, also tends to move people toward the virtue of affection, or a deep and enduring love for a place. And a love that is rooted in imagination often leads to this ultimate virtue of fidelity, or a long-term commitment to caring for a place and providing for its well-being.

I write about these virtues as they relate to place, but there are also human-focused analogies we can use to understand them. Friendship comes to mind. Friends are people who we know well. We've spent a lot of time with them. Sometimes we know them so well that we can walk up and, without them saying a single word, immediately know how they’re feeling.

Knowing a person that well leads to affection for them. Because of that love, you want to do whatever you can for them, within reason, because you care about them. That leads to this ultimate sense of fidelity, where you might even be willing to sacrifice your own well-being to help care for this person because they are your friend.

So if we think about our connections to place, centering that analogy of friendship and the virtues of imagination, affection, and fidelity, we start to cultivate symbiotic relationships, and we can do what Aldo Leopold has written about: view land as a community to which we belong rather than as a commodity we trade for economic benefit.

Kerilyn: I want to build on that idea of applying those virtues to other places; I want to expand it to the strong interdependence and mutual support systems that sustain many rural places. This seems to fly in the face of older agrarian mythologies that emphasize the solitary, self-sufficient yeoman. What are some specific practices or traditions from rural places that emphasize this social or economic solidarity? Can they be adapted to foster stronger communities in urban or suburban settings?

Brooks: TThat pervasive myth of individuality is misleading. The reality is that, in our current economic system, small farmers cannot do it alone. We have to work with others to have a chance at survival.

In terms of specific practices, I’ll pull two from my experience: one about working and one about mourning.

In my community, where many families used to raise tobacco before the federal production controls that made this a viable crop for small farmers ended, there was a common tradition of swapping work. Everyone is planting, weeding, and harvesting at the same time. These are big jobs. Neighbors would go to one farm and help that family harvest their crops, working collectively for two or three days without pay. The understanding was that the favor would be returned when they needed it. This creates a powerful form of solidarity, of partnership.

Another example comes from grief. When someone died back home, families would be flooded with food. People made all sorts of dishes, dropped them off, and spent a few minutes chatting on the porch. This provides a tangible benefit—you are fed—but also a bit of comfort. Knowing that you’re not mourning alone can be profound for people.

Both of these traditions translate easily to urban areas. On my own street in Memphis, a couple of people borrow the same lawnmower. When my wife and I bought our house—we went from renting a home to buying one two doors down—we had six or seven neighbors offer to help us move. The same thing happens when neighbors get sick or have hard days: we share food and time together. This idea of supporting one another is powerful, no matter the geographic setting.

Grace: I love your answer, Brooks. It immediately made me think of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, specifically the chapter on gift economies.4 She explores what happens when you build a social framework not around transactions, but around the idea of indebtedness. A debt is actually something you don't want to pay off in these neighbor relationships; you should be growing indebtedness to each other as a way of building community.

I talked to a young farmer who was farming my great-grandpa's old property. One of his neighbors got cancer and was undergoing chemo right in the middle of harvest season. Without ever asking permission, this farmer’s neighbors showed up, took shifts, and harvested his crops for him so he could rest. Even if he could never pay that back, it was their responsibility for a neighbor they cared for.

This idea of responsibility is also important in urban contexts. Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, has a famous chapter called “The Sidewalk Ballet.”5 She noticed that, in her neighborhood, the grocers and barbers would actually sit or stand on the sidewalk when no one was shopping. She referred to this as having “eyes on the street.”

These business owners had a very strong sense of responsibility for those sidewalks. They were paying attention to the children and the people walking by. She recounts a time when a local shop owner intervened to stop her child from doing something dangerous. Even though he was a stranger, he stepped up because the child was at risk. What she was capturing was this idea of a dance in which the people who live in a community have this sense of shared ownership over that space. They believe it’s their responsibility to help ensure safety and well-being.

What strikes me is how similar that is to Wes Jackson’s idea of the eyes-to-acres ratio. This idea is that there's only so much that you can properly steward, and it extends about as far as your eyes can reach. So, in an urban setting, I would encourage you to ask: Where do you see opportunities to exercise that sort of care and ownership, and how can you contribute?

I’ve seen a practical example of this lived out with a neighbor here. She was pregnant when she found out she had a brain tumor. The community stepped up: A woman nearby takes her younger kids every Wednesday so she can rest. People have been contributing meals for months to take pressure off the family. That idea of what it means to steward, to care, and to own our neighborhoods—there’s a lot that can be learned from that example.

Brooks: I want to jump in quickly. Grace, regarding your comments about Jane Jacobs, two words jumped to my mind: notice and attention. The word often used to describe how farmers care for their livestock or crops is “tending.” Tending literally means caring for something, but it has the same root as “attention.” It implies that we need to not only look but also see and observe and notice so that we can provide good care, whether it is for a plot of land or a community of neighbors. We can practice imagination, affection, and fidelity wherever we are—just as you said.

Lee: I want to stick with this theme of tending and the idea Grace brought up of the eyes-to-acres ratio. Could you describe what we mean by sustainable farming, how it contributes to ecological harmony, and what challenges these practices face in today’s fragmented social and economic systems?

Grace: I mentioned monocropping earlier. A lot of these commodity crops like corn and soybeans are not for direct human consumption. Most US agricultural land is being used to grow things that are either cattle feed or get turned into products like corn syrup and ethanol. The impact of these practices on the land is very bad—in terms of soil health, water health, and water pollution. I would also argue it hurts the local community, because when you’re only growing thousands of acres of corn, you are preventing a town from having the diverse inputs and outputs that would actually grow a healthy local economy.

So what is the opposite? What are we trying to draw people to in order to build greater health in our agricultural landscapes?

One approach is high-density rotational grazing. Instead of feeding cattle corn and grains—their stomachs didn’t evolve to digest those well—you put them back on grass and move them from paddock to paddock so they stay healthy and strong. They usually don’t need antibiotics or hormones because the diet is better and proper grazing encourages grasses to grow deep roots that store carbon and improve soil health. It also supports mycorrhizal fungi—a whole web of life under the soil that’s integral to plant health and to the animals that graze. High-density rotational grazing is a big piece of what people mean by “regenerative agriculture.”

There’s also silvopasture, which means integrating trees and forest forage into grazing so animals have more shade and farms are incentivized to plant trees rather than remove them. Add to that diverse crop rotations, growing multiple crops and rotating them in ways that build soil health instead of relying on just one. Some folks go further with permaculture, planting perennials rather than annuals whenever possible, so deep-rooted plants store more carbon and improve the land over time. And groups like Wes Jackson’s Land Institute have worked for years on perennial grains, letting farmers grow cereals while actually building soil health. These are just a few of the practices.

The outworking of this is that healthy farms grow food and create jobs to a degree that an average farmer farming 4,000 acres by himself cannot.

Brooks: I agree with everything you shared, Grace. It’s important to note that those same practices you mentioned that are good for the environment, good for soil health, and good for ecosystems are often also good for farmer economics. When you practice these more regenerative methods, it typically leads to healthier soils, meaning you don't have to use as many chemical inputs and synthetic fertilizers, and it can lead to healthier livestock, meaning lower vet bills. So there are cost savings and profit increases.

That said, two things concern me about regenerative practices and the way they're currently positioned in our farming system. First, I don't want regenerative agriculture to become a generic prescription that someone in a lab or an office 500 miles away concocts and says: “Hey, farmers, do this, this, this, and this,” and then we stop there. We must let and help farmers look at their land. They’ve spent time there. They understand it. We must let them see what it needs. We need to be particular in how we apply these practices, avoiding large overly prescriptive approaches.

The second concern is that we currently have a farming and economic system that does not really value these regenerative practices. Instead, that system wants to produce as much food as possible as cheaply and quickly as possible. We need to work to adjust that by altering our farm policy on the national and state levels. We need to stop doing the “same old, same old” that benefits the very few “farmers” and businesspeople at the very top.

Kerilyn: I want to pivot and ask a slightly different question about who we envision when we envision rural America. Grace, in Uprooted, you don't shy away from the dark sides of this history: a logic of extraction for economic gain, dispossession and violence against Native American communities, and systematic marginalization of other minority groups. Today, rural America is largely treated as synonymous with white America, yet that image masks the racial and ethnic diversity that's been part of rural America's past and promises to be part of its future. Between 2010 and 2020, for example, America's overall rural population would have declined substantially if it weren't for growth in its Hispanic population. So, looking forward, how does this racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity challenge our social imaginary about rural America? And what are its implications for finding new pathways to rural flourishing?

Grace: Treating rural America as synonymous with white America threatens to erase so many important stories. Idaho's history makes clear how complex this is. At one point, Idaho had a higher ratio of Chinese-American residents to white residents than any other state in the United States. The state is home to five major Indigenous tribes: the Kutenai, Coeur d'Alene, Nez Perce, Shoshoni, and Northern Paiute. Japanese and Basque immigrants built much of Idaho's agricultural diversity. However, the history is complex, including tragic stories of dispossession and the de facto segregation that pushed many Black residents out of Idaho in the early twentieth century.

Today, the Idaho Commission for Hispanic Affairs noted that the Hispanic community represents thirteen percent of the population and is a substantially growing voting bloc, bringing so much vibrancy and health to Idaho's rural communities.6 Boise also welcomes around a thousand refugees every year from countries like Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Ethiopia. All that to say: the stories in just one “flyover state” are so complex and diverse. We must tell and recognize both the stories of resilience and solidarity alongside the tragic stories of dispossession and injustice. We can try to stop speaking of Appalachia or Iowa or the Pacific Northwest through stereotypes and see each of these places as holding and reflecting a history and a present and a future that is both troubled and beautiful—and unique.

Kerilyn: Brooks, you've written about how, for more than four centuries, racial injustice has been an insidious hallmark of US agriculture. What do you want to add on this question of how our narratives of the past and our vision of the future need to embrace a wider story than just the white story?

Brooks: First, I’ll agree with Grace. Stereotypes inherently lack effort and empathy. Anything that lacks both of these things probably isn't a lens we should use in our perceptions of others or ourselves. Second, it's important to note that a lot of the roots of regenerative agriculture actually come from the leadership and wisdom of Indigenous communities and communities of color.

I write about Black farmers. The challenges they have faced are numerous, ranging from systematic loan denials by the USDA to severe underrepresentation on local agricultural committees to issues around “heirs’ property,” which has led to the dispossession of millions of acres and billions of dollars.

That history is dark, but it's important that we don't dwell only on the hardships these farmers have faced. We also need to celebrate their successes and their resilience and persistence. We must lift them up as exemplars for the next generation interested in an agricultural or environmental vocation. In rural diversity, we can find strength.

Lee: This has been such a rich conversation. To close, could each of you describe one big takeaway about how the principles, practices, and traditions from rural places can help guide us toward a more sustainable and cohesive society?

Grace: I want to draw us back to the idea of attention that Brooks mentioned. The root word has this idea of leaning into something and giving it the “fullness of your presence and of your thought.” I'm very curious what would happen if we were to attend a little better to the places in which we live.

The other thing is the idea of “stopping,” from a Gary Snyder poem. What he means by stopping is to not be transient—to not constantly move from place to place, but to actually embed yourself somewhere.7 This isn't possible for everyone. For those whose careers require transience, there is a different calling to find ways to deeply embed yourself in a place for as long as you will be there, giving intentional care. But if more of us were to say, “I'm just going to stick here”—despite better opportunities or a bigger paycheck somewhere else—I wonder what sort of social and economic health we could build if that became even a little more common.

Brooks: TThat’s beautiful. My big takeaway is the idea and the truth that rural and urban communities need each other. We have much more in common with one another than we often think or are told. There are lessons we can learn from each other, and there are ways that we can be more supportive to people in both urban and rural areas.

Like Grace, I encourage everyone to look around, to see what's happening in our own communities, and to put in the effort to pay attention together. From there, we can go to work for a better world, one place at a time.