Honeyman Accepts Sustainable Ag Award

Vic Madsen may have tugged at a few heart strings at the annual meeting when he introduced Mark Honeyman, recipient of PFI’s Sustainable Agriculture Achievement Award. But when Honeyman quoted Wendell Berry in his acceptance speech, there were actually teary eyes in the quiet audience. Mark shares Berry’s verses here once again. They are from Farming: A Hand Book, by Wendell Berry, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1967.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hand reaches into the ground and sprout,

to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water