Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Ryan Dennis is a man of many hats: writer, editor, bookseller, and more. But first and foremost, he’s the son of a family of dairy farmers from rural upstate New York. Growing up on the farm, he witnessed firsthand the detrimental effect of the “get big or get out” ethos of federal agriculture policy that drove tens of thousands of small family farms out of business in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Dennis family farm.
Dennis writes about the state of agriculture in the late 20th and early 21st century in his new book Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm. Part-memoir, part-history of agriculture as we know it today, Barn Gothic provides a deeply personal look at the devastating consequences corporate agriculture brings upon the people who built rural America.
Enjoy our conversation, below.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Carlson: I know it can be many years between the seed of a book idea and when it becomes a reality, so tell me about this book’s origin.
Ryan Dennis: I grew up in the 90s on a dairy farm. I was born in the 80s, but I say I grew up in the 90s and I feel younger. It was a time when the dairy industry was really changing, and there’s two aspects about that time in my mind that are particularly heinous.
One is that no one was telling the story of what was happening to people like our family, our neighbors, other people who had family farms. They weren’t in books, weren’t in movies, and the farm journals we read didn’t really reflect what was happening either. So it didn’t seem right that no one was telling the story.
And the second thing was it seemed like the farmers themselves didn’t know why the economic conditions were what they were. I knew the mill price was too low and the costs were too high, but as far as what the mechanisms were behind a desk somewhere that created the situation, no one seemed to be able to pin it down or to put a face to whatever it was that was creating this situation.
So I think I knew one day I would try to write a book that filled both of those gaps that told what one family’s lived experience was going through that period, but also try to pin down at least one person’s opinion of all the political decisions and forces at work that led to it being extremely difficult for a family dairy farm to stay alive in the United States.
How did losing so many farms in the region affect Canaseraga, the town closest to where you grew up?
Ryan Dennis: With smaller farms, with family farms, money stays in the community more. Larger farms, it doesn’t. And just like many small towns across the U.S., Canaseraga was supported by small farms. And once those farms disappeared, the town shrank. I think our school from my father’s generation to present day has less than half the students it used to. Agriculture was both something that kept money in those communities, and provided some jobs in those communities. It gave a reason for people to stay in the communities as well. And once that was gone, those communities dried up.
You write about the phrase “family farm,” and how a lot of large farms are technically run by families and often co-opt the term. What are your thoughts on why that phrase might be important to preserve?
Ryan Dennis: I’ve heard that argument as well, that the large farms are owned by families. The one large farm that’s mentioned in the book that has bought up all the other farms in our area is a family. It’s four brothers. But I don’t think large farms really have access to the term because I think there’s an agreed-upon ethos of what family agriculture means, what a family farm is, and how that farm operates in a community, how it treats the land, and things like that.
Family farmers have paid a price to use that term already. So I don’t think that large agriculture, regardless if it’s a family that owns it or not, I don’t think they really deserve access to that term because I think the consumer has an understanding of what the term family farm is and what that means. Regardless of who actually owns it, family farms means small agriculture. I think it has to be synonymous. Beyond that, it’s just probably kind of a wasted exercise in didactics.
Why do you think family farms are struggling?
Ryan Dennis: Maybe the simplest way to describe it is that the government privileged cheap food over the people who made it. In this case, the price of cheap milk created a system where farmers had to keep expanding to survive and eventually nearly all farmers have come to a point where they can’t expand enough to survive and they have to exit the industry, and the type of farming changes as you expand as well.
Politically, agriculture isn’t an issue that gets presidents elected anymore, but the price of groceries is. And so I think ultimately there’s been decisions made that favor cheap food, which can be okay if there’s work being done to make sure the farmer receives a fair portion on every gallon of milk, but that work hasn’t been done.
That involves restructuring the pricing of milk and taking on corporate influence. And I don’t think there’s the appetite or the will to do that. There’s the saying that whenever a Republican comes into office, they believe in the free market so they don’t touch anything, but the free market doesn’t work in agriculture. And when a Democrat comes into office, they think the problem’s too big to handle in one or two terms, so the problem persists.
This book, while it’s about everything we’ve just talked about, it’s also deeply personal to you and about your family. I’m curious if writing this book taught you anything that you didn’t know about your family.
Ryan Dennis: It was with a little bit of trepidation that I showed an early draft to my mother and sister because I didn’t know what their reaction would be. Luckily, they were very generous with their reaction and very supportive. And once I showed that early draft, it felt like something had been achieved already because in order to get that far, I had to take the pieces of our history I thought I knew and then take the pieces they could offer and try to put it together. And so in doing that, I probably learned more about my sister’s experience in particular. And I might’ve not been as aware that she was also thinking of being involved in the farm more as well. It probably made me more empathetic to her and to my mother, having to stop and think through their parts of the narrative and their perceptions.
I also recognize that there’s a lot that I don’t know and there’s probably things I didn’t get right. I think you have to approach a project like this with a certain bit of humility knowing that there’s probably some secrets or things that happened that I’m not aware of that maybe even people somewhere alive know about.
But one kind of fun aspect of the book coming out is that people who I might not have known well, but who might’ve known someone else in my family, will come up to me and give me a little piece of information here, a piece of information here, or describe a great uncle, something that happened in the past. And that’s been a fun and interesting part of the project, too.
Ryan Dennis is the author of Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm, and the founder of the Milkhouse, a rural writing collective.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Ryan Dennis on the History of Agriculture appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
