A Middle Tennessee Writer Explores Issues Affecting Small-Scale Farmers in a New Book

The issues that afflict small-scale farmers are often overlooked. Those issues, which exist throughout the U.S. and Middle Tennessee, include the loss of land due to sprawl and racial injustices and inequities. One writer wants you to know about what’s happening in that regard in the area and sets out to do so in Love for the Land: Lessons From Farmers Who Persist in Place, which published last summer.

Brooks Lamb, a land protection specialist at American Farmland Trust from Holts Corner, Tennessee (he now lives in Memphis), interviewed folks and did field work in counties outside of Nashville for the book, which focuses on two changing rural communities. Much of the book’s ethos is inspired by Wendell Berry, a writer and environmental activist from Kentucky who promoted ideas like sustainable agriculture and healthy rural communities.

In that vein, Lamb offers hope to small- and mid-scale farmers who care for their land, even when faced with adversity. In his own words, Love for the Land “highlights the power and potential of people-place relationships” and argues that overlooked farmers “show rural and urban people alike a way forward, one that serves people, places and the planet.”

Love for the Land: Lessons From Farmers Who Persist in Place. Yale University Press. $32.50