From a May 16 speech given in acceptance of the annual Louis Bromfield Society Award. Novelist and conservationist Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) was the author of over thirty works of fiction and non-fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Early Autumn. Berry’s new collection of poems, Leavings, was published by Counterpoint in October. His essay “Faustian Economics” appeared in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

I read Louis Bromfield’s Pleasant Valley and The Farm more than forty years ago, and I am still grateful for the confirmation and encouragement I received from those books. At the time when farming, as a…