Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed fields behind Belgian draft horses, died at his home in Port Royal, Ky. on Monday. He was 92. His daughter Mary Berry confirmed the death. A prolific writer, Berry produced over 50 volumes of poetry, fiction, and essays advocating for small family farms, local foods, and interdependent communities. He railed against chemicals, most technologies, and agribusiness, arguing that the national economy destroyed rural America.

Berry’s work earned comparisons to Thoreau and Thomas Jefferson. Advocates embraced his writing as an eloquent expression of agrarian and ecological causes. Toward the end of his career, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011. Raised on a Kentucky farm, he studied at the University of Kentucky and Stanford with Wallace Stegner. At 30, he returned to an ancestral cabin on the Kentucky River, where he lived and wrote for the rest of his life. There, he rebuilt the Long-Legged House and championed sustainable agriculture. His work emphasized the vital connection between land stewardship and individual liberty, warning of the rapid disappearance of farming towns due to topsoil erosion and pollution.

He is survived by his legacy as a prophetic voice for agrarian justice and environmental conservation, inspiring generations to reconsider the cost of industrial progress.