Barnflower : A Rhode Island Farm Memoir

Osborndale Ivanhoe was a bull who became

 an unlikely celebrity. He defied e

xpectations and challenged long-established

notions of what constituted a champion

Holstein. But his fame was dependent on one

 man’s stubborn insistence that the animal

was, indeed, special. Carla Panciera spent

years with her father and his famous herd

traveling from county fair to county fair,

and answering the same questions: “Is that Aldo Panciera?” and “Are you Aldo’s daughter?” This memoir is based on the real man and his very real effort to make a living at what he loved. He was a demanding teacher and an unappeasable boss, but he was also a father who finished night milking and took his daughter for sled rides down a frozen hillside, or for a spin on the local carnival’s Ferris wheel, or who paused, plowing fields, to pick her the first wildflowers of the season. Barnflower is about a man and his work and what that life demanded of his family. Read about the bond between a father and daughter and their love for the kind of life they shared, a kind of life that is both a critical and a vanishing part of our history.