When I was a teenager, I called nearly 50 leaders in the dairy industry and asked them one question: How can we fix the American dairy industry?
Teenagers are full of big ideas and righteous anger. It was the turn of the century, and the internet was still new. The fact that I could find phone numbers for the economists, dairy science professors and farm journal editors I sought out was all the proof I needed that I should contact them. Regardless, I wasn’t ready for the answers I received.
All but two of them said there were no problems with the dairy industry. The system was fine.
Although I can’t remember at this point, I suspect that the milk price was high at the time. Everyone involved in dairy farming knew how volatile the farmgate price was, but it might have spoken to another truth I would eventually learn: that agriculture can be a shortsighted industry. I saw how people like my family and our neighbors often struggled to keep a family farm alive, and the responses I got at the other end of the line didn’t fit with that. It was probably not coincidental that none of the people I asked were farmers themselves.
It turns out, it’s possible for 48 out of 50 people to be wrong. Between 2003 and 2020, the U.S. lost 40,000 dairy farms, or about half of its herds. One of the worst aspects of those two decades was that no one was telling the story of how that happened. Ultimately, that’s why I became a writer.
When I decided to write a book about the American dairy industry and our family’s experience trying to survive what it had become, I asked my father for his understanding of it. He was generous in sharing his thoughts and allowing me to write what was, largely, his story. He knew it would involve disclosing the type of personal details that are usually kept private and that an honest narrative includes all the bad with the good. Still, he gave his consent, perhaps believing I could get our story right, and if so, allow it to give voice to thousands of others who experienced something similar. I interviewed my father twice before he died unexpectedly.
After my father passed, a book that was already tough to draft suddenly felt impossible. The emotional weight behind trying to write about him made it a difficult project to return to every day, and often it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. The years dragged on, and my writing career essentially stalled because I couldn’t finish the book. Still, I couldn’t give up, because I knew I owed it to my father and those like him.
On Nov. 13, my memoir, Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Farm, will be published by Island Press.
Barn Gothic explores how my dad, my grandfather and I tried to be fathers and sons to each other while our livelihood fell apart, including the times that we failed. It chronicles the specific dramas of our farm, from dealing with accidents to the sinister actions of banks and other institutions trying to take the farm. It recounts the extraordinary lengths my father went through to keep farming, as well as how we tried to figure out who we were and what redemption there might be in what we were doing.
In addition, Barn Gothic seeks to do something that, as far as I know, hasn’t happened in any other book yet: give a detailed account of the specific political decisions that have led to the decline of small dairy farms. The memoir seeks to make the argument that the loss of family farms was not inevitable or a consequence of a world moving forward. Instead, it was the result of particular actions from certain people and organizations that had something to gain. In short, I wanted to give the answer to my teenage self that no one else did.
Those who farmed in the 21st century gave of themselves in a way that most people don’t have to. They worked hard and struggled, and the most they got from it might have been a way to understand themselves. I believe that the loss of those 40,000 farms was an injustice that needs to be recognized. These farmers deserve to see what happened written down and for everyone else to see it too.
I hope I got their story right.
