“Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm” by Ryan Dennis

c.2025, Island Press, $30, 264 pages

It’s hard to ignore a polka-dot hill on a sunny day.

Imagine it: a black cow here, a brown one there, a black-and-white one there and there and there against impossibly green grass with a vivid blue sky. If you can see it in your mind’s eye, well, you know. And you also know there’s more to a cow than its color, and in “Barn Gothic” by Ryan Dennis, there’s more to a farmer than his cows.

He was meant to be a fourth-generation farmer.

When he was 10, Ryan Dennis woke up before the sun to follow his father to the barn, to milk their cows, help with chores, and spend some time with his dad. He understands now that those mornings were as important to his father as they were to him, that his dad really had no interest in many of the things they discussed then, but he learned about them because Dennis was interested in them.

Their mornings together were also meant to teach: the hope was that one day, Dennis would take over his grandfather’s farm right next door on a hill in upstate New York. But then one quick event changed the course of their lives: Dennis’s grandfather was working in the milk parlor and fell to the concrete floor, hitting his head, sustaining a quiet brain injury. A stoic, financially daring man before the fall, his behavior worsened. He began spending money he didn’t have.

The family noticed but they thought everything was fine. Rollercoaster milk prices, predatory lending and government policies had always meant that the Dennis men struggled and adjusted. But getting loans for equipment started to become impossible; planting crops, difficult. Dennis went away to college and his father worried that he’d never return to the farm.

The worries escalated when Dennis’s father sustained a life-threatening skidder injury, and nearly died. But that pain was nothing compared to the hurt that was to come...

Anybody who’s ever been stepped on by a cow knows how it feels: not fun. But trust this: what you’ll read inside “Barn Gothic” will stomp your heart just as flat.

Here’s a hard, hard story to read, wrapped inside tales that are joyful and awe-struck. Dennis shares the spotlight here with his father, grandfather, neighbors, the land they loved, and the act of farming itself. Readers in the know will recognize the unique pleasures he writes about – tending the fields, harvesting them, and knowing the cows – but they’ll also gulp hard at what ultimately happens here. It’s an ending that might be altogether too familiar. It will pull you up hard and make you think deeply about the things we do to survive and how we manage to forgive.

“Barn Gothic” is a good heartfelt read for anyone who thinks about our nation’s farmers today, or who eats, drinks milk or derives pleasure from a good farm scape along the road. If you’re a family farmer now or once upon a time, you’ll find it spot-on.