 Well, it's awfully nice to be here this morning. It's good to be here in my mother's home country. If you all will indulge me just a minute, I'm going to tell you a little personal story, and I don't see how you're going to get out of it, so I'm just going to go on with it. My mother was born in Berkeley and grew up traveling between Mill Valley, California, and Lexington, Kentucky. She and my father, Wendell Berry, met in 1956 on the campus of the University of Kentucky, married in 1957, and have now lived and farmed in Henry County, Kentucky for over 50 years. My California relatives referred to Kentucky as the dark and bloody hunting ground, where Indians had sense enough not to live, unlike my father's family, who had by then lived there for close to 200 years. In fact, they referred to my parents' marriage as a kidnapping. None of this has anything to do with the matters at hand or with my dear friend Sarah, but I never come to San Francisco without thinking about the miracle of my existence. What a fine thing it is to be given the chance to come here, to take part in this meeting, and to have the opportunity to introduce my friend Sarah to you. Sarah and I are native Kentuckians. Sarah is from our state's biggest city, and I'm from a rural county about 40 miles northeast of there. In rural counties like my own, the food editor, for what was once our great newspaper, The Courier Journal, was a celebrity, and Sarah had that job for 25 years. Consequently, I was a fan of hers for a while before we actually met. I think my first words to her were, for heaven's sake, don't print that. She had asked my father what he liked to cook, and he answered, I don't cook, my wife does. What I knew she couldn't know at that time but does now was that my mother let no one cook in her kitchen, including me. Sarah did a good deal of excellent work during her tenure at The Courier. Without her, Louisville's thriving farmers markets would not be as numerous as they are, nor as successful as they are. Her work in seeking out excellent local food and giving people in needed information on how to get it and how to prepare it was essential. My family and I were raising and processing pastured poultry around the time I first met Sarah. Sarah wrote an article about us on a year's worth of chicken sold in a couple of days. A generational farmer from an adjoining county told me recently that her article about his CSA, the first in Kentucky, written in the early 90s gave his business the foundation it ran on for 15 years. I imagined that I could spend my allotted time on stories like this. Her work at The Courier Journal turned out to be invaluable training for her work now with Louisville's Farm to Table program. Her tenure at The Courier coincided very neatly with the end of the tobacco economy in Kentucky. I'm very certain that no one at the paper told Sarah to take up the cause of farmers who were losing their major cash crop. It was certainly possible 25 years ago to be a food editor and treat food as the marketplace has treated food as disconnected from the land and the people who produce it. Sarah had in place the local affections in the good sense to see the possibilities and the problems associated with the huge cultural shift that was hitting Kentucky's land and people. The people she helped were tobacco dependent farmers. It is important to mention that these were, for the most part, very good generational farmers, highly diversified farmers who understood good land use. I was one of them. Because the tobacco program, a program that brought parody to the conversation, protected farmers from overproduction and was a price support, not a subsidy, Kentucky today still has 84,000 small farms. A lot of us have been working for a while now to make sure that farmers can survive the loss of tobacco. No one has worked harder than my friend Sarah. I believe that her work funded by the tobacco settlement money is to put back together the long broken connection between Louisville and its surrounding countryside, finally ensuring the health and well-being of both. The scope of Sarah's job is huge. This is a partial list of her responsibilities. Working with farmers who are already growing food for local markets. Finding farmers who are interested in producing food for local markets. Finding markets for local food producers. Trying to balance supply and demand. Working to establish prices that allow both producers and businesses to make a fair profit. Helping all concerned to understand the need for economic connections between the city of Louisville and the countryside around it. I'm a country person. I love a particular place and I have watched it now for 55 years. Our present economic assumptions are failing in agriculture and to those who having eyes to see the evidence is everywhere in the cities as well as the countryside. The singular demand for production has been unable to acknowledge the importance of the sources of production in nature and in human culture. Of course, agriculture must be productive. That is a requirement as urgent as it is obvious. But as urgent as it is, it is not the first requirement. There are two more requirements, equally important and equally urgent. One is that if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land and the fertility and ecological health of the land. The land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. Nothing that has happened in the agricultural revolution of the last 50 years has disproved or invalidated these requirements. Though everything that has happened has ignored or defied them. We now see that the demand for local food going up in urban places has met the rural culture coming down. It was bound to happen. Sarah has taken up this cultural work, work of the highest order, our most necessary work. I have found it necessary in my work at the Berry Center to call people's attention to or back to rural places. The devastation suffered by rural America is not an accident. It is a crisis by design. We will not solve the problems we face now without dealing with the whole problem. Sarah has the indispensable ability to see the whole problem, to deal with whatever needs to be dealt with and to get things done. She has gotten more done for the place than the people I care most about in the last three years than I have seen done in the last 30. She has my gratitude, my admiration, and my love. Please welcome Sarah Fritschner. Thank you.