Sheriffs walk a thin line between law and legend. Throughout rural America, sheriffs oversee most of law enforcement. Yet in the American cultural imagination, sheriffs are also the subjects of tall ...

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 ...

Dustin Watson looks over the pastures and woodlands he grew up on. Behind him is the farmhouse his great-grandfather built, not far from the chicken coops and tractor sheds his grandfather raised ...

The following is the fourth 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s not likely that the word “overproduction” will feature much in this year’s farm bill debate. But in many ways, the status quo of overproducing corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton and a handful of ...

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 ...

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 ...

First developed in the late 1970s, so-called right-to-farm laws sought to limit nuisance lawsuits loosely related to farming practices. But since their adoption, these laws have greatly expanded in ...

“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 ...

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 ...