Drive the back roads of Green County in June and the landscape still looks, at first glance, like something Wisconsin has managed to keep for itself. Green hills roll into deeper green valleys. Fence lines bend with the roads. Holsteins gather in the shade. And here and there, bright red barns stand against the countryside like punctuation marks in a sentence we all think we understand.

They are bucolic. Picturesque. Almost too familiar to notice.

But look again.

Some of those barns are leaning. Some have roofs opened by weather. Some no longer hold cows, hay or anything else. Others disappear quickly, one week standing beside a county road and the next week reduced to a bare foundation, a pile of timbers or an open view that somehow feels emptier than it should.

Southern Wisconsin is losing its barns, and with them, it is losing one of the most recognizable features of its rural identity.

“Those historic barns have become icons of Wisconsin’s farming heritage and are worth saving,” Citizens for a Scenic Wisconsin says in its barn preservation materials.