In Haitian Kreyòl, there’s a saying: Lè w pa gen manman, ou tete grann—“If you can’t get breast milk from mom, you get it from grandma.” Darline, a Haitian immigrant on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, ...

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 ...

While the media is full of details about how the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores was organized, one should focus on how strange this act is: Venezuela is now de facto occupied by ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...