A Mobile Butcher Meets a Critical Need of Small Livestock Farmers
Connor Barnes brings his butchering craft straight to small-time livestock farmers via a custom-made box truck, a relief to many in a consolidated industry.| Barn Raiser
This is the third article in the six-part Barn Raiser series “Rethinking Immigration and Health on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” drawn from the author’s research for her book Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America. Mid-sentence during our interview, David, a local physician and community clinic director on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, paused, looked past me out the window of his office, and said quietly: “No matter what I do, I feel like I am just putting Band-Aids ...| Barn Raiser
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here. They came with promises of transformation: thousands of jobs, surging salaries and a foothold in the booming electric vehicle market. Imola Automotive USA, a Boca Raton, Florida-based startup, pitched officials in small, struggling towns in Georgia, Oklahoma and Arkansas on a bold vision. The company planned to build six EV plants, create 45,0...| Barn Raiser
https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/mp_20250718_seg_MMR_-_Rural_Health_64.mp3 A last-minute scramble to add a $50 billion rural health program to President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending law has left hospital and clinic leaders nationwide hopeful but perplexed. The Rural Health Transformation Program calls for federal regulators to hand states $10 billion a year for five years starting in fiscal year 2026. But the “devil’s in the details in terms of imp...| Barn Raiser
In June, the assassinations of Melissa Hortman, the speaker emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband Mark Hortman, and the attempted murder of Minnesota State Sen. John Hoffman, his wife, Yvette, and their daughter Hope, shocked the nation. “This isn’t just a murder case,” Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson told the Associated Press in July after a court hearing for 58-year-old Vance Boelter who was charged with the killing, “This is a political...| Barn Raiser
As the debate over the safety of adding fluoride to community water supplies roils federal institutions and state and local governments alike, it is incumbent for those exploring such a contentious public health to examine their sources. Since 1901, fluoride research in the United States has been linked with pediatrics and the health of children’s teeth. In 1945, when Grand Rapids, Michigan became the first community in the world to add fluoride to its water supply, it did so as part of a s...| Barn Raiser
One early morning in December 2024, a national controversy arrived in the rural community of Woodlawn, Tennessee. About 15 people—a few residents but mostly dental professionals—had gathered in the backroom of the Woodlawn Utility District (WUD) building roughly an hour’s drive northwest of Nashville. Surrounded by filing cabinets and bookshelves, they waited to address the district board before it decided whether to stop adding fluoride to its water supply. Since fluoride was first add...| Barn Raiser
Connor Barnes brings his butchering craft straight to small-time livestock farmers via a custom-made box truck, a relief to many in a consolidated industry.| Barn Raiser
In the early 1980s, Michael Evans began his career as an organizer, first with the United Auto Workers in Michigan, then organizing working-class neighbors in Indianapolis, tenants in Seattle, congregations in Louisville and housing advocates in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he now lives. Today, at 72, Evans calls himself a “senior citizen organizing senior citizens” in helping build bipartisan opposition to the GOP’s cuts to Medicaid, Social Security and the Supplemental Nutrition Assista...| Barn Raiser
“Habitat loss … habitat loss.” Hannah Maltry points to her paintings of birds displayed on her studio walls. She explains, one by one, why each species is today just holding onto existence. “With us chewing up the natural landscape, they’re all suffering,” she says. Maltry, a 34-year-old Columbus, Ohio, artist, is painting the portrait of every one of the 2,000-some bird species in North America. So far, she’s completed more than 200 for a project she estimates could take 10 yea...| Barn Raiser
Iowa elected officials are preparing to trash 60% of the state’s historical archives with no transparency or input from the public.| Barn Raiser
On the street, one sign read “Defend Public Lands,” with an image of an assault rifle. Others bore creative and bilingual profanities directed at Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees most of the country’s public acreage and Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, who on June 11 had proposed a large-scale […]| Barn Raiser
For health care providers serving rural immigrant communities, moving beyond the framework of legal status opens up new possibilities for care.| Barn Raiser
The Senate budget bill threatens the viability of rural hospitals across the country and imperil millions of low-income Americans.| Barn Raiser
How Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is leading the fight against Christian Nationalism in the U.S. military.| Barn Raiser
Wendell Berry writes that too many journalists have "never looked at or imagined our country from a country person’s point of view."| Barn Raiser
Readers respond to Wendell Berry's critique of NYT Paul Krugman and the rural-urban divide and the price of progress.| Barn Raiser
Wendell Berry, poet, essayist and novelist, tends a farm with his wife Tanya near Port Royal, Kentucky. In 1958, he was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University's creative writing program, where he studied under Stegner in a seminar that included Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen and Ken Kesey. His first novel, Nathan Coulter, was published in 1960. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is his best known work of nonfiction.| Barn Raiser
Jonathan Durtka is on a mission to make spearfishing—and conservation—a vital part of the Great Lakes region.| Barn Raiser
Investigations into farm employer labor violations have fallen to record lows. These labor organizers are speaking out.| Barn Raiser
Barn Raiser connects local and national perspectives through a network of writers and contributors who live in and care about rural and small town communities. By giving voice to shared concerns, and by reporting on local organizing strategies, Barn Raiser will leaven the commons with local connections.| Barn Raiser
Democrats have outgrown their rural roots. Can investments in local infrastructure and better candidates turn that around?| Barn Raiser
Fact-based reporting of politics, history, culture, religion, environment, agriculture, and Native people of rural and small town America| Barn Raiser
For more than a decade, the Country Queers oral history project has documented LGBTQ+ rural folks who have “always made a way out of no way.”| Barn Raiser
A lawsuit against the Wisconsin town of Eureka, backed by the state’s business lobby, could undermine local control over polluting livestock operations.| Barn Raiser
We welcome and encourage accredited news organizations to republish our original articles. Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles under a BY-NC-ND 3.0 US Creative Commons license. (Here’s the legal code). Here’s what it comes down to: Attribution. You must give appropriate credit and provide a link to the original story. You may do […]| Barn Raiser
If Mr. Krugman was serious about having good ideas about rural America, he would get to know the people who live there.| Barn Raiser
Rural America is losing affordable housing at an alarming rate, fueling a growing housing crisis and surge of homeless residents.| Barn Raiser
