Berry taught at New York University in the early 1960s before returning to Kentucky, where he taught at the University of Kentucky and farmed at Lane's Landing in Henry County, near Port Royal, alongside his wife Tanya Amyx Berry, whom he married in 1957. He had earlier been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. That decision to leave the New York literary world for a working farm became the organising fact of his career: his poetry, fiction and essays all argued that culture, community and agriculture cannot be separated, and that an economy which treats land as an extractable input eventually destroys the communities depending on it.