“The urge to take control of our food supply is a sane one in times of insecurity, especially if we can do it in our own backyards,” she writes in her latest book, A Life in the Garden: Tales and Tips ...

In 2023, Trump-appointed Judge Iain D. Johnston of the U.S. District Court for the District of Northern Illinois ruled that John Deere must face similar claims from farmers who filed a class action ...

I knew the envelope’s postmark, too: Vanleer, Tennessee—a place with green hills and old tobacco barns and fences that no longer mark much, a place my third graders used to struggle to find on a map, ...

As Americans in communities across the nation prepare to celebrate No Kings Day, Barn Raiser is honored to share the following essay by novelist Robert Jackson Bennett. It was originally published in ...

On the main street of Republic, Washington, a community of about 1,000 near the Canadian border, the plain vertical façade of the town’s one-room public library belies the wealth of activity crammed ...

In recent years, public schools have been under attack from from outside groups that profess “parents’ rights” and advocate for “school choice.” The leaders of this anti-public school movement has ...

PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” are used by industry and are found in consumer products such as nonstick cookware. They can cause cancer, birth defects, liver problems, damage to the immune ...

S andy Smiley loves her home in Michigan’s Keene Township, a rural community of some 680 households, half-an-hour east of Grand Rapids. Her house sits on a 10-acre lot, which she uses as pasture.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Barn Raiser talks to prominent Native leaders and mentors, who tell us in edited interviews how and why their communities have long endured, even in divisive and ...

“If both rural and urban people have the same set of facts with which to express their concerns, perhaps they can reach common conclusions,” writes Gilles Stockton in his new book, Feeding a Divided ...

In 2011, Dakota artist Mona Smith set out to change that with the Bdote Memory Map, which includes a spoken glossary of Dakota terms, resources for educators and videos of Dakota people sharing their ...

For the past half century, the Christian Right has been mastering the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and end it. The methods and the players have evolved over time, but the goal of ...