Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm

by Ryan Dennis

When Ryan Dennis’s father was crushed by heavy machinery on their New York dairy farm, both men accepted the accident as a risk of agricultural life. But it was harder to comprehend being crushed by low milk prices, big banks, and the policies that destroyed America’s family farms.

Even though Ryan grew up watching his father and grandfather struggle to survive, he always thought he would follow in their footsteps and take over the family farm. But as he milked cows and fed calves, the world outside the barn was changing. Between 2003 and 2020, 40,000 dairy farms went out of business in the United States.

Barn Gothic is an elegy for family farmers and an intimate portrait of three generations laboring to be fathers and sons while their livelihood falls apart. Beautifully told with a farmer’s restraint and a poet’s grace, it is a story of personal loss amid corporate corruption and of finding a way forward when everything you know disappears.

Genres: Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

Published November 13, 2025

Reviews

[Kayleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admittedly, I picked this book up because I've been reading a lot about dairy farms and dairy policy in the last couple of weeks and thought this one would fit right in, and it did.
Barn Gothic tells the story of Ryan Dennis and his family, who own and operate dairy farms. His father and grandfather both ran dairy operations in New York and Ryan grew up thinking he would next inherit the day to day routine that they lived with.
Dennis gives us a first hand account in the changes to the dairy industry, from changing milk prices, to updated machinery impacting the yield of their herd, and even some tales of the gentleness of the animals around them (looking at the barn cats).
While Dennis goes off to college and is struggling with whether he wants to take over the farm, his family struggles under the debt of predatory loans, complicated government support and dairy offsets, and eventually, the accident that nearly takes his fathers life.
The audiobook was incredibly well narrated and heartfelt and I didn't want to put this one down.

Barn Gothic will be published 11/13/2025 and I received an advanced copy from Netgalley in exchange for my review.

[Chantal · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars

A fantastic American memoir about the struggles of modern agriculture and farming. A family struggles to keep the dream alive, passing it on from generation to generation, when the dream isn’t in every family member’s blood.

This book can only be truly appreciated by people who have an understanding for the agriculture and/or the dairy industries. It is heartbreaking in so many ways. Sometimes, you just need to go your own way and carve your own path.

The audiobook is very well narrated and I would own a copy of the physical book in a heartbeat. Good job by all.

(I received this ALC via NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thank you.)

[Marl · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2.5 stars rounded down]

Barn Gothic is a memoir about being the son of a New York dairy farmer during the collapse of American family farms and the author’s struggles around his decision of whether to take over the struggling business that disabled both his father and grandfather or not. The memoir is written as mostly chronological vignettes from the author’s childhood through after his father’s death.

As a few reviews I’ve read have noted, I think you really need to have seen family struggle in either the family-owned agriculture industry or business owning as a whole to appreciate this memoir. I think that it could be an amazing companion to someone who grew up witnessing that lifestyle and the toll it took on their family, but my dad’s a second generation male nurse so I’m clearly not in that group, haha. I feel like the author, whether intentionally or not, is writing to a much smaller audience than he needed to. An amazing book can come out of that, of course, but this one just did not really work for me, personally.

Dennis is a strong writer and I can imagine that his fiction writing must be very good. He can describe people and locations very well and really bring out emotion from the reader. Frustration and grief are the main driving forces of this memoir. In the early chapters around Dennis’ childhood you feel like a little kid teetering around the edges of your parents’ financial/business struggles while you know that something is wrong but you can’t comprehend it (though the farm and dairy industry as a whole was in a much better state in his childhood than it was later on). When we enter his teenage years we feel his frustration and sense of childishness when he still is not being brought into the business conversations, even when he directly asks. As it goes on there’s this sickly sense of uncertainty as he can’t tell whether or not he regrets his choice regarding his grandfather’s farm. It is some really strong deciphering of memories onto the page in a way that a lot of other memoirs fail at (I cannot stand a memoir that is just retellings of a person’s day-t0-day life, for the record). Though I have issues with both the formatting and a few other areas of this memoir, Dennis’ writing skills and style is never one of them.

I hated the formatting of this book. I listened to the audiobook, so it was just constant 5-10 minute vignettes of the author’s life growing up and early adulthood. If you enjoy short, very episodic chapters in a memoir, then you would enjoy this one. I prefer a memoir with very little meandering and a strong central focus on something, so it just did not work for me. The execution of the chapters was generally fine and Dennis is not a bad writer at all, but it’s just a preference thing and, for me, the memoir felt like it was just droning on and on with not enough focus or weight on any of its central points.

I also felt like the author had very little to say at way too many points. There are enough moments, especially in the last third as we approach modern day, where he reflects on how he feels about certain choices of his. For the majority of the book, though, the author doesn’t know what to talk about. He will recount a memory and then finish off with some variant of “I don’t remember how I felt about it during the moment…”, “I can’t remember now what I said to my father about xyz after that…”, or “My father never kept a journal, so I don’t know how he felt then…” and it just gets frustrating after a while. It’s frustrating both because, as I discussed earlier, Dennis has such a strong handle on emotions and recounting memories that it feels like wasted opportunities as well as it being very repetitive. And, like, of course I don’t think Dennis should have just made something up in his reflections. I just think some other handling of this issue should have been done. It feels like we’re missing a part of the heart of this memoir.

I think that a lot of people will really enjoy Barn Gothic. The descriptions of the labor and general farm environment is fascinating and I also really enjoyed the dives into how governmental decisions that most people outside of rural areas only heard about on the news once or twice directly influenced the lives of farmers and their families. Seeing the changing farming methods and equipment was also so interesting to see from an on the ground perspective. This one ended up being a very middle of the road read to me and my dislike of the larger scale features like the formatting style and some general frustration just pushed it down too much for me, but I know that for many others this will be a great read.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't really the type of book I would normally seek out (one of the last books I read was about a first contact mission to outer space led by a vampire) but it ended up in my to-read pile and I'm glad it did. My connections to farming feel tenuous these days but they make up a lot of core childhood memories that this book drummed up. Long after my dad quit farming I still thought of him as a farmer. Our old place had been a dairy once too, but my grandpa had got out of that business long before I was born. Farming is already hard and milking made it harder, something that definitely comes across in this book as the Dennis family takes all the hard knocks that life on the farm can deliver. It's described as the author's memoir but his father is at the forefront, portrayed here as a man who is as capable of shouldering a narrative as he was at running a farm and taking care of his family. The writing is excellent, I finished the book in 2 long sittings which I didn't intend and which annoyed my wife. Strong recommend.

[Naomi L · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who spent many years immersed in family farm life and the mother of a dairy farmer faced with unfair challenges of the volatile dairy market, I was sure to attend Ryan’s book reading in our home town and continue the reading on my own. If you are, have been, or know a family who farms, or just want to expand your understanding of small dairies, this book is for you to relate to or to learn from. Beautifully written, Ryan uses his words in a way that paints the reader into the story, where you see, hear and smell the environment, feel the heavy pressure, betrayal, frustration and grief. Family farming is conducted by legends who live and breathe the often romanticized life, and sadly the personal passion and drive to carry the history of the family farm to the future is not enough without policy change. This book highlights his family farm’s glory and struggles, his own difficult decisions and regret, and the ultimate loss of the farm, along with exposing the failed policies and practices that contributed to it. I highly recommend!

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barn Gothic was a fantastic read! Ryan Dennis did an exceptional job explaining the rise and fall of the small family farm through his own experiences. Sharing his own personal stories along side the changes in US agricultural policy, he was able to spotlight how damaging they were to tens of thousands of small farmers in the United States. I think anyone with a background in agriculture (or those who don’t) will enjoy this book and have a better understanding of how our food system got where it is today.

[Greg Mager · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I've read in years. Ryan Dennis does a fantastic job of bringing the story of a farm family struggling to hang on to a way of life as their machinery, grandfather and the industry fails them. Traumatic and heartwarming. The journey of father and son as they leave the world they knew behind. Everyone touched by farming can relate to this powerful story that needed to be told for all the farms and farmers that were lost.

[Lorri Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily the best book I've ever read. Ryan's descriptive writing talent is impressive. He drops you inside the story. You can hear, see, taste, and feel the story swirling around you. An incredible journey of a father and son as they weather the loss of their farm and way of life, as they struggle to maintain and hold onto the fragility of a dying farm to it's very last day.

[Lindsay pinkcowlandreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an absolute tragedy- it was devastating to read how mega agriculture and fractured family dynamics breaks apart this particular family dairy Dynasty.

I found myself absolutely riveted to other Ryan Dennis’s memoir the details, the history of his family farm, and the changes to it internally and externally as agriculture processes and dairy policy changes throughout time.

The time this book is heartbreaking along with being incredibly informative. It was an excellent Reid and I highly recommend it.

The narration provided by Will Tulin felt personal and brought this book to life. He did an excellent job, expressing the emotion we needed and giving the side bars of policy and information in a no nonsense way. Excellent audio.