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 ...

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 ...

The following is the first installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and ...

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 ...

Until recently, if you drove down the main street in Cairo, Illinois, a majority Black community at the southernmost point of the state, you wouldn’t have been able to find a grocery store. Like many ...

On the day of his inauguration, President Donald Trump claimed his administration would end the “censorship of protected speech.” But actions speak louder than words. Thanks to a leaked email memo, we ...

Today’s young farmers contain multitudes, as varied as the paths—conventional and unconventional, the adventurous and sometimes tortuous—that lead them into farming. For Iriel Edwards, 25, higher ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...

Annie Contractor, 39, is the policy director at RuralProgress, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission to “empower everyday rural Americans with the nonpartisan movement building tools they need to create ...

On the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, a dream died in 1890 in a brutal massacre. Today, 110 years later, on that same creek, a dream was born. That’s the work that Alex White Plume, traditional leader ...

In his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (Island Press, 2024), Austin Frerick identifies contemporary “Barons” in seven different corporations—such as ...

This is the first article in a series of stories and interviews in which we ask rural organizers, elected office holders and political strategists what lessons are to be learned from the 2024 General ...