Editors Note: As we enter 2026, Barn Raiser marks the New Year by republishing “Finding Common Ground at a Montana Barn Raising,” an excerpt from Daniel Kemmis’s 1992 Community and the Politics of ...

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 family farmers (like his own) and ...

Since October 1, the majority in Congress has decided to shut down the government rather than make a deal to pass a budget that extends affordable health care. Even as Congress has disrupted vital ...

This is the second story in a two-part series on the public history of trees, centered on the essay collection Branching Out: The Public History of Trees. Read the first part here. Until the 20th ...

“You are forbidden to go to Old Hickory,” Brian Dempsey’s mother told him as a child in the Mississippi Delta. So, of course he went—though not right away. He describes Old Hickory as “an island of ...

Anna Sekine works as the Midwest Farmland Associate at American Farmland Trust. In this role, she supports programs focused on farmland protection, next-generation land access, and farm transfer ...

This article draws from the author’s research for her book Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America, which examines health care in rural immigrant communities on Maryland’s Eastern ...

On a sunny day in late April, Barbara Damrosch, 83, stepped into boots and out the back door into the stone courtyard of her home in Brooksville, Maine. Thyme crept over the tidy rock pathways and ...

Thomas Tweed’s transformative new history, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press), begins and ends in the same place: a farm outside of Waco, Texas, where in ...

International food aid—the food grown by American row crop farmers—has been a hallmark of United States foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. Its untimely end by the Trump administration ...

The preamble for the next war over water is here. Aggressive corporations are coming after the few remaining pristine places on Mother Earth—mainly on the land of Indigenous people. Nowadays, it’s not ...