How To Love Your Place

Author Q&A with Brooks Lamb

Robert Polhill Bevan, A Lonely Farm [Hawkridge], 1900

Dear readers,

I’m grateful to share these insightful words from Brooks Lamb with you all this morning. Brooks is the author of Love for the Land: Lessons From Farmers Who Persist in Place. While reading it last year, I was struck by Lamb’s thoughtful explorations of virtue and its vital relationship with place. Virtue theory can feel very displaced at times: focused on people and their relationships with each other, but not necessarily on our lived geographic reality. This book considers how the two must relate to each other, and how farming serves as a vital point of convergence for our considerations of both virtue and place.

Brooks also considers themes that were very important to me while writing my own book: issues of suburban development and land loss, racial injustice and displacement, and multigenerational land care, among others. Brooks and I are hoping to talk more on some of the themes below later this spring, and so I hope this interview serves as a helpful introduction to his work, and inspires some thoughts and questions that we can explore in the days and months to come.

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Can you describe your family's farm and community, and what it means to you?

I grew up on a small family farm in Holts Corner, Tennessee. Holts Corner is about 40 miles directly south of Nashville. It’s an unincorporated rural community nestled along a two-lane highway and a network of backroads. Holts Corner is a close-knit place, a community, maybe a little less so now than a few decades ago when the area’s small farms were more plentiful, when more neighbors were swapping work and stories. That still happens, and I love to pop into those moments when I can, but the community has changed. There are fewer farm families, largely because of rural gentrification and diminished economic viability for smaller-scale farms. My wife and I live in Memphis now, which is about three and a half hours away, and we’ve looked at trying to move onto a small farm in Holts Corner to root back into the land. Because it’s so close to Nashville and some other popular smaller cities, the area has gotten so expensive that, at least at this point in our lives, I’m not sure how we’d afford it.

My family’s farm is about two miles from the “center” of Holts Corner. The land has been in our family since the early 1890s, but the ownership hasn’t exactly been linear. My great uncle was farming this place into the 1990s, and when he died from cancer, my parents bought the farm from his heirs. All that to say, we know both the joys of multigenerational family connections to place and the burden of still working to pay down a farm debt.

My parents have about twenty-five cattle on the farm, and my wife Regan and I have five cows that run with their herd. We raise hay to feed our cows through the winter. My family still puts in a big garden every year, and my parents tend a flock of about two dozen chickens. Regan and I get back whenever we can to help out, usually once every few months. No matter where we live, that farm will always be “capital H” Home for me, if that makes sense.

How did you start working for The Land Trust for Tennessee? What did you learn while working there?

I graduated from Rhodes College in the spring of 2017. I had offers to work in a few different, faraway places. As enticing as those opportunities were and as hard as it was to turn them down, I kept feeling called home to the people and places who had shaped me. So after graduation, I started working with The Land Trust for Tennessee, a statewide nonprofit conservation organization devoted to conserving open landscapes. I was the rural conservation projects manager, which meant I traveled around the state and worked with rural communities, especially farmers, on land conservation. In feed stores and on truck tailgates and around kitchen tables, I listened to farmers talk about their devotion to the land. People from different geographies who had different political views, different religious beliefs, different ideas and backgrounds shared similar commitments to place.

Not all these people decided to place conservation easements, or permanent legal agreements to maintain their land as open space, on their land. Many farmers couldn’t withstand the economic sacrifice of that, and understandably so. But their love for the land was palpable, even visceral. In some ways, those conversations were like an informal ethnography of sorts. Time and again, they highlighted the power of people-place relationships, especially those rooted in attunement and affection. They showed the writings of folks like Wendell Berry in action. I wanted, even needed, to better understand how love stimulates and sustains good stewardship. So after two years with The Land Trust for Tennessee, I left for graduate school at the Yale School of the Environment, and I dove into those questions in earnest. My book is the result of that effort—and the result of reflecting more on my own family’s commitments to place.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has suggested that folks ought to "let the land own them." What do you think that means? How would such an attitude change the way we farm and work?

It’s a fascinating line, and I think it echoes other well-known environmentalists and their philosophies on good stewardship. In short, I think Emerson’s quote encourages nurturing community with the land rather than practicing domination over it. We have far too often taken the latter approach in the United States, especially in agriculture. Larger systemic forces have encouraged farmers to exploit the land and extract from it. Our system elevates profit and competition above all else—think of the opening lines of Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Those forces and their results are, in my mind, at the center of large-scale, over-industrialized agriculture, the kind of farming that destroys the soil and water and local economies and close-knit communities for the gain of a relative few. Not to shift gears too much, but the latest Census of Agriculture reveals that these trends have worsened across the country over the last few years. The data is alarming. I looked at the findings for Tennessee, and wham, it felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

None of that is to suggest that economic viability doesn’t matter. It does. We need farms, particularly “right-sized” farms, to make money and be viable. Financial security is a conservation strategy. But we shouldn’t prioritize profit above all else all the time, and we need an understanding of “enough.” We need to center virtues and values like affection, connection, and devotion. Fidelity, patience, and care. The same virtues that should guide our relationships with friends and neighbors should shape our relationships with place. That is, at least in part, what I think Emerson’s quote is suggesting. It’s a recognition that in farming and beyond, people and place need to work together.

You and I have both looked at the impact of suburban development and sprawl on farmland. In your examinations of the problem in Tennessee, you note that Robertson County has seen a decrease of 3,520 agricultural acres per year (about 9.6 acres per day). What is exacerbating this land loss?

Well, I should first mention that your writings on this topic are excellent. Uprooted was very influential for me. I still remember exactly where I was when I finished the book. I remember where I was the first time I read your writing in a New York Times op-ed in Spring 2021.

Different data sources show different things, but they all reveal the same trends: in many places throughout the country, we are losing a tremendous amount of farmland to sprawl and haphazard real estate development. That’s certainly the case in Robertson and Maury counties, the two communities where I anchored the field work, farming pun intended, for Love for the Land. These counties are close to Nashville, where the population and cost of living are exploding. Interstates run through both these counties, making it easy to get into and out of the city. These factors and a host of others push more and more people out into once-rural communities, where they buy a newly-built home either in a subdivision or on a few acres. Those subdivisions and large-acre residential lots are typically built on former farmland. Maybe a farmer desperately needed money, or maybe a farmer’s heirs weren’t able to carry on the farm. With prices where they are, maybe a young aspiring farming couple tried to buy the land but were outbid by deep-pocketed developers. Whatever the case, many pastures, fields, and woods are being replaced by housing developments. Because a lot of people only sleep in these new homes—they work, shop, eat, and recreate in a nearby city—it turns many rural communities that are within driving distance of an urban core into “bedroom communities.”

I work for an organization called American Farmland Trust. Our data suggests that if recent development trends continue, the United States will convert or compromise about 18 million acres of agricultural land between 2016-2040. If conversion trends worsen, as evidence is suggesting, that figure balloons even higher. Data also show that small and midsized farms are more impacted by conversion than larger operations. Strip malls, warehouses, and subdivisions are overtaking them. Whether we live in a farming community or not, we should be concerned about farmland loss and its implications for all of us.

Why do subdivisions (low-density residential development) present such a unique challenge to farmers?

Low-density residential development—where a 100-acre farm is turned into twenty 5-acre tracts, for example—is a pretty inefficient pattern for growth, yet it’s pervasive. When we think of farmland loss, we think of typical “sprawl,” where the outskirts of a city just keep creeping outward. That happens, of course. But American Farmland Trust’s research shows that low-density residential development is responsible for a greater share of farmland conversion.

There are environmental harms that come from farmland loss. Diversified farm landscapes provide important wildlife habitat, they can help control flooding by absorbing water in fields and pastures, and if tended carefully, they can draw down carbon from the atmosphere to help address climate change. There are economic impacts, too. Agriculture is essential to many rural economies, and maintaining farmland in an area is also important for local government coffers. Lots of local leaders think replacing farmland with residential development is a net fiscal gain, but when you look at all the services that must be provided to these new developments—new roads, schools, sewage, stoplights, sidewalks, police and fire protection, etc.—communities often lose money through inefficient growth even if property tax revenue increases. There are also agricultural impacts. People want local and regional food systems. Restaurants want to embrace farm-to-table offerings. But if we continue to replace farmland, especially near cities, with other uses, the foundation of these food systems will be gone.

It’s also important to look at the psychological toll of farmland conversion. When I asked farmers during interviews how it felt to see their communities changing, here are some of the words and phrases people shared. Several said it’s heartbreaking. Some said it’s traumatic. One person said he has a recurring nightmare about the land around his family’s farm turning into fast food restaurants. Another farmer said he didn’t know whether to cuss or cry. And a couple quiet, stoic people broke into tears when trying to explain how hard it has been to see their family, friends, and neighbors pushed out of the place they called home. Two people described the pain that came with selling some of their own land to cover unexpected medical bills. That experience still haunts them.

All of these factors—not to mention the logistical difficulties of farming in an area that is no longer an agricultural community, meaning the mechanics, feed stores, small businesses, and hired help have also moved on and been replaced by people who may be unaccustomed to the sights, sounds, and smells of nearby farms—make it hard for many farmers to persist in place or next generation farmers to step in, even if they desperately want to do so. When we talk about “gentrification,” it’s typically in an urban context. But rural gentrification happens, too.

Another huge challenge to today's small and midsize farmers is "the 'get bigger approach,'" in which farmers buy up thousands of acres and work on an industrialized scale. You write that this sort of growth "has been fueled by government and corporate forces," and that it's "now standard for one person to control five thousand acres—ten times larger than the biggest midsize farmer who was interviewed for this research." How do giant, industrialized farms threaten the livelihood and wellbeing of small and midsize farmers?

One quick note: “Small” farms and “midsized” farms may look different from place to place. A small farm in Tennessee may be different from one in Idaho, Connecticut, or Montana. Definitions may vary in different geographies within the same state, and they also shift by production systems. For the two counties where I rooted my interviews and conversations, I set a somewhat-arbitrary range of 50-500 acres because that’s what the local context suggested I should do.

Massive, industrialized farms squeeze smaller-scale farmers. These large operations are typically very well capitalized, and they get a lot of financial support from the government. A huge amount of federal funding is being funneled to large-scale farmers who are already wealthy while working-class smaller-scale farmers are struggling to keep their farms afloat. So the deck is stacked against small and midsized farms. To show how that shakes out on the ground, I’m going to share a text that I sent to some friends a couple weeks ago. I wrote it after looking at the new Census of Agriculture data for Tennessee that I mentioned earlier:

“From 2017-2022, there was a decline of 3,381 farms between 50-179 acres in size in Tennessee. Overall, the state saw a decrease of 6,878 total farms. So 49 percent of the decrease came from a drop in 50-179-acre farms alone. On the flip side, farms that are larger than 2,000 acres increased by 131. These farms also now cover 638,234 acres more in 2022 than they did in 2017—from 2,085,072 acres in 2017 to 2,723,306 acres in 2022.”

This shows two things: First, my texts can be too long. Second, smaller-scale farms are being hemorrhaged while bigger operations are thriving. That’s a broken system, and it doesn’t just affect small farmers themselves. Picture a rural community with fifty 100-acre farms. Picture the local businesses and churches and schools those families support. Now imagine those fifty farms replaced by one 5,000-acre farm owned by one individual. Maybe that individual has a few employees. What happened to the rural churches and schools and cafes when all those families went away?

Your chapter "Systemic Struggles" examines the role that racism and structural discrimination have played in U.S. agriculture over the centuries: "For more than four centuries," you write, "racial injustice has been an insidious hallmark of US agriculture. People of color—particularly Black people—have long been treated unequally and oppressively, despite the invaluable knowledge and skills they have brought to the field." How do we reckon with this past, and counter the legacy of dispossession and injustice it represents? How have the Black farmers you interviewed worked not just to build flourishing farms, but to support and empower their communities?

First and foremost, I think we should reckon with racism by being honest about it. We need to acknowledge the injustices that have happened, and we need to acknowledge that they’re still happening. In other words, prejudice, mistreatment, and racism are in no way confined to history. That’s one reason I sometimes get frustrated with the term “historically underserved farmers.” These farmers are still underserved.

So we need to talk about it, but we also need to do something about it. Action can occur in various ways, including listening to the people who have been so deeply harmed and, with their leadership and guidance, advancing policy that starts righting wrongs and cultivating authentic opportunity for a more equitable future.

The Black farmers I interviewed shed light on these challenges. They show through stories how various adversities—from loan denials and heirs’ property exploitation to diminished educational opportunities and ever-present microaggressions—have hurt them and their families. Yet their experiences shouldn’t be boiled down to an “ain’t-it-awful” list of harms. Some of these farmers have also flourished in the face of adversity. That provides inspiration, and it shows us a path forward. Aligning with the writings of bell hooks, who too often isn’t considered an agrarian writer, these farmers have helped forge a sense of belonging in some rural communities for themselves and others. We can look to the Black farmers I interviewed, who are also very good farmers in that they provide loving care to their land and livestock and neighbors, as examples to emulate. And we can chip away at systemic inequities so that more people of diverse backgrounds can also thrive in agriculture should they choose to pursue that path.

Your book emphasizes virtue (or, more specifically, "eco-virtues") as constituting a vital response to the environmental challenges we confront. Sometimes it feels as if we've lost the language of virtue, and struggle to define or understand it. Why is the language of virtue so important to issues of land stewardship and care?

It’s important because it suggests that we, as individuals, have something to contribute. Sometimes, it can feel terribly overwhelming to hear about the many environmental and agricultural crises we face. The problems are so big that they might make us feel stuck. Or to borrow some language from my brother Michael Lamb, whose writings focus on hope in the face of difficulty, these mammoth crises can tempt us with despair.

Focusing on our own relationships with the earth—and emphasizing virtues like imagination, affection, and fidelity, all of which are promoted by Wendell Berry, whose work and example are so important to both of us—can help us resist despair. We can take actions rooted in love on a local level. That might be tending a small farm, or it could be picking up trash in a public park, planting a backyard garden, or watering a street tree that we pass every day on the way to work or school. Just imagine if we were all committing to and caring for place. Picture the ripple effect that would have on specific places but also on the entire planet.

Everyday actions alone won’t solve our problems. We need policy and programs that are courageous, that create the conditions where a culture of affection and fidelity can flourish. But we also need more individual responsibility and action. Conservation can become more effective when it’s part of our character. Environmentalism will be more resilient and impactful if it’s empathetic. Virtues and the language around them lead us in that direction.

Several of the virtues you consider—especially those of imagination and affection—could be seen as romantic, sentimental, or "emotional" to some. Yet you describe them as deeply practical virtues. How have we misunderstood these virtues? How can we correct our vision?

Yes, the charge has been made that affection is wistful and nostalgic. And as we know, nostalgia can be dangerous if it becomes too dominant in our lives. So how do we avoid that?...

That question returns us to a discussion of language around virtues, and specifically the definition of virtue. My understanding isn’t perfect, but I think of virtue as an enduring character disposition, a part of our identity. It must be a trait of moral excellence that helps moves us toward goodness—both internally as part of our character development but also externally, so that acting on the virtue has some sort of positive impact on our community. I also think that virtue must be acquired, that it must be something we learn through practice and, if possible, from watching others we admire. We’ll all struggle at times to be virtuous, and we will inevitably fail. But it’s essential that we keep trying.

When thought of in that way, virtue ceases to be some fluffy, squishy, feel-good concept. Instead, as you note, it’s deeply practical. Virtues can order how we live our lives—and encourage us to live them in a way that meaningfully benefits others while helping us flourish as individuals. Let’s apply this in an agricultural setting. A good farmer is working for the health—ecological, agricultural, economic, and otherwise—of her farm. She’s striving for excellence. Maybe she learned the science and art of good stewardship from a family member, a mentor, or a neighbor. She’s likely practiced this art herself time and again, sometimes failing but always trying. Pursuing excellence and providing loving care isn’t some one-off chore she does. It’s part of who she is. Because of that, her farm, her family, her neighbors, her community, herself… They’re all better off.

A widespread vision of virtue that manifests in this way could be transformative, especially if accompanied by systemic action and change. Embracing virtues like imagination, affection, and fidelity makes us better stewards of the earth. These virtues also make us better friends and neighbors. I’ll steal my own thunder here and close with the final line of my book: “For the sake of people, place, and planet, we should live with love for the land.”

Brooks Lamb has worked on local, state, and national levels to serve people and places, especially in rural and agricultural communities. He currently works as the land protection and access specialist with American Farmland Trust and writes on agrarian and environmental issues. His writings pay particular attention to the intersecting topics of land, conservation, justice, stewardship, and community. Find out more about his work, and his book, on his website.