Wendell Berry never wrote a handbook for growing cider apples or making cider. But his ideas about farming, land, community and the people who tend both helped shape generations of growers… including pomologist Mike Biltonen of Know Your Roots.
Wendell Berry died this month at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at the age of 92.
By Guy Mendes – Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29726407
For those who already know his work, the loss is significant. Berry was a poet, novelist, essayist, farmer and one of America’s most influential voices on agriculture, land stewardship and the consequences of separating food from the people and places that produce it.
But plenty of people — including people who care deeply about apples, orchards and cider — may know the name without really knowing why Wendell Berry matters.
That seems worth correcting.
Born in Kentucky in 1934, Berry eventually returned to his native state and farmed near Port Royal while producing an extraordinary body of essays, fiction and poetry. His landmark 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, challenged industrial agriculture and the idea that efficiency and production should be the primary measures of successful farming, arguing instead for agriculture rooted in place, stewardship, community and long-term care of the land. He went on to write more than 40 books across poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and received the National Humanities Medal in 2010.
Those ideas extended well beyond any particular crop.
They also found their way into orchards.
Berry spent decades asking questions that remain remarkably relevant to cider today: What happens when agriculture becomes an industry rather than a culture? What is lost when farms disappear? What responsibilities do farmers have to a particular piece of land? And what happens to communities when knowledge accumulated over generations disappears with the people who carry it?
“The Mystic at the Top of the Mountain”
When eCiderNews reached out to people in the cider and orchard community to ask what influence Wendell Berry had on them, Mike Biltonen of Know Your Roots sent back more than a quote — he sent a reflection worth running in full.
Biltonen is a pomologist, orchard consultant and longtime advocate for organic and ecologically grounded orchard management. Cider Chat listeners will know him from Episode 408: Cider’s Pomological Life Coach | Know Your Roots, NY.
Here is what he told us, lightly edited for clarity:
“Wendell Berry, as many people know, was a profound writer, poet, and farmer. He was kind of a Lorax of his time for farmers, but not in a shouting-from-the-treetops way. He loved the land and he wrote about it in a way as if you felt you were right there with him as you read it.
The Unsettling of America is perhaps the most profound and moving book I have ever read, even though it’s been a few years. It ranks with Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold among books that had the greatest impact on me as I was developing my craft. Unsettling speaks to agriculture, farmers, and the land in a way that’s not simple reverence, but in a way that speaks with deep appreciation for agrarian culture and to the dangers we face in losing them for so many different reasons.
Among the four principal people that seeded and nurtured my love of farming, Wendell was the mystic at the top of the mountain. They all spoke volumes through the way they lived their lives and supported land-based agriculture: my grandfather (a cattle rancher and wheat farmer in Kansas), Wes Jackson (Land Institute), Rudolf Steiner (father of biodynamics) and Wendell Berry.
I didn’t learn how to farm from Wendell any more than I learned to farm from my grandfather. But what I did learn was to love and revere what I did — and appreciate why I got into farming — in a way that you only get to by standing on the shoulders of giants. Everything I do as a farmer is because of those that came before me — none more important than Wendell Berry.”
— Mike Biltonen
Know Your Roots LLC · Grow Organic Apples LLC · Know Your Roots Ferments! LLC
Substack: Radical Pomology! · Website: Know Your Roots LLC
That distinction may help explain Berry’s influence. He wasn’t telling farmers how many trees to plant per acre, when to prune or how to manage disease. He was asking them to consider what it means to be a farmer in the first place.
Farming as More Than Production
Berry became a persistent critic of industrial agriculture and of economic systems that treated farms, communities and landscapes as interchangeable units of production. At the same time, his writing wasn’t simply an argument against something — it offered a vision of agriculture built around care, limits, local knowledge and responsibility to place.
That philosophy made him enormously influential among farmers, environmentalists, writers and advocates of sustainable agriculture. Yet the farm remained central to his thinking. For Berry, agriculture wasn’t merely the production of commodities. It was culture.
Those arguments were made nearly half a century ago. They don’t feel particularly old.
Small farms still disappear. Agricultural land is still developed. Farmers still struggle to make the economics of growing food work. Knowledge is lost when farms change hands or orchards are removed. And agriculture continues to wrestle with questions of scale, consolidation, soil, technology and what constitutes a sustainable way of producing food.
Cider sits squarely within that conversation.
The modern cider movement has helped renew interest in forgotten apple varieties, old orchards, regional growing traditions and fruit whose value isn’t necessarily measured by how it looks on a supermarket shelf. When cidermakers talk about preserving an old orchard, planting bittersweets, discovering a nearly forgotten seedling, paying growers enough to keep trees in the ground or making a cider that expresses a particular place, they are participating in a much larger conversation about agriculture — one Berry spent a lifetime having.
Why Berry Belongs in a Conversation About Cider
There is an interesting temptation in cider to begin the story at the bottle. Berry’s work encourages us to walk backward.
Before cider, there is fruit. Before fruit, there is a tree. Before the tree, there is soil. And somewhere in that chain is a person making the decision to plant, prune, graft, harvest, preserve — or walk away.
Cider’s renewed fascination with varieties, terroir, old orchards and regenerative agriculture makes Berry’s work particularly relevant. His writing provides language for thinking about why maintaining agricultural diversity and local knowledge matters beyond nostalgia.
An old apple tree isn’t valuable simply because it is old. A farmer isn’t important simply because farming seems picturesque. Their value comes partly from relationships built over time: between people and soil, growers and communities, varieties and climates, knowledge and generations.
That was Berry’s territory. And perhaps that is why his influence can be difficult to measure. It isn’t necessarily visible in a particular farming technique or bottle of cider. It shows up in why someone chooses to keep doing the work — as Biltonen put it: “Everything I do as a farmer is because of those that came before me — none more important than Wendell Berry.”
Why This Matters to Ciderville
Cider likes to talk about heritage, heirloom varieties, old orchards, regional identity, the story behind the fruit. Wendell Berry is part of the intellectual root system underneath that way of thinking, whether or not most of us in cider have ever picked up one of his books.
When someone in this industry argues for keeping a marginal orchard in production instead of pulling it for something more efficient, pays a grower more because the trees matter and not just the yield, or names a cider after the specific hillside the apples came from, they’re confronting questions Berry spent his life asking.
They may never have read him. That’s partly the point: cider keeps running into these questions.
That’s also what makes Biltonen’s tribute worth more than a passing quote. He’s not citing Berry as an authority to score a point. He’s naming him as one of the people who shaped why he does this work at all, a different, harder-earned kind of influence.
As cider keeps growing, professionalizing and facing pressure to scale, Berry’s questions aren’t going away.
- Who is this land for?
- What do we owe the people and places that grow our fruit?
- What gets lost when farming becomes only a business?
Ciderville doesn’t need to have settled answers. But it’s worth knowing that Wendell Berry spent a lifetime asking these questions and that his passing is a good moment for us to ask them on purpose rather than simply encounter them by instinct.
Read & Listen
Cider Chat Episode 408: Cider’s Pomological Life Coach | Know Your Roots, NY
Mike Biltonen talks apples, orchards, pomology and the knowledge required to grow fruit with intention.
Start with Wendell Berry
For readers new to Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977) is an especially fitting place to begin. Its questions about agriculture, culture, land and the people who farm it remain strikingly relevant nearly 50 years after publication.
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