When a northern writer arrives in a rural Tennessee town to better understand the culture for his novel, he is put through a harrowing night by the menfolk who, in the course of an elaborate joke, convince him he has inadvertently killed the son of his hosts.

In a small rural farm town, a middle-aged poet struggles with aging and finding meaning in his life.

A boy learns from his father’s best friend the history of his family and the value of man’s relationship with nature, but is interrupted by his father’s death and his mother’s sudden arrival.

On the Great Plains, an aging farmer and his wife struggle to sell their produce amid an increase in frozen food manufacturing. The farmer must figure out how to avoid the fate of his neighbors, who were pushed out of business and into welfare dependence.

A ranching family stays optimistic during tough times by remembers their good luck last summer when they persuaded a generous rancher to work on his farm.

When a girl from the city impulsively marries a country boy and moves to his farm, she finds that his family’s dark history of violence will overcome them both if she cannot defeat it first.

A middle-aged man and his wife struggle to fight the cold, care for their kids, and maintain their marriage as they build a house on a ranch in Washington state during several years filled with set backs and heartache.

Reeling from the death of her first husband, a woman living alone on a Montana homestead finds peace as she slowly falls in love with the logger living next door.

As the era of American farming comes to an end, it proves more difficult than expected for one young man to convince an old woman that she should leave the land for more fruitful prospects.

An old man reflects on his youth in the countryside in twentieth-century Kentucky, and thinks of the freedom now lost to industrialization and displacement.