In his memoir, the author courageously shares his story, in particular, his dad’s story and his struggles keeping the dairy farm in Canaseraga, a rural town in Upstate New York. It is a story of ...

A version of this story first appeared in The Iowa Mercury. Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms. The ...

In 2007, David City, Nebraska residents Allen Covault, a retired Nebraska high school science teacher, and Anna Nolan, another retired science teacher who had moved to Nebraska ten years before from ...

Sheriffs walk a thin line between law and legend. Throughout rural America, sheriffs oversee most of law enforcement. Yet in the American cultural imagination, sheriffs are also the subjects of tall ...

When Suzan Erem reached out to Barn Raiser in July, she thought she was only writing a letter to the editors. “While Iowa’s Republican administration brags of a budget surplus (hoarded from the Biden ...

Things have been looking up for the Democrats after this year’s elections. In Virginia, where I live, the headline in November was the governor’s race, where former U.S. Rep. and CIA officer Abigail ...

In 2025, Barn Raiser made a commitment to stories of resilience and resistance in rural America. Telling such stories meant responding to rapid and fundamental shifts in federal policy, helping rural ...

Wendell Berry, in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, saw in American history a constant tension between the honest struggle of small farmers (like his family) to ...