Corporate Monopolies Have Transformed Every Aspect of Our Food System

FARMER AND WRITER Wendell Berry has reminded us for decades that eating is an agricultural act, a daily, sacred practice that connects us to the land and people who produce our food. But given the story Austin Frerick tells in Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, it’s fair to say eating is now an industrial act.

Frerick, an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy, grew up helping his grandparents farm near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He watched dramatic changes in the state’s landscape over time: Corn and soybeans replaced diverse crops. Pigs and cows disappeared. Family farms and the local businesses that supported them faded away, replaced by industrial-scale farms.

Frerick looked for answers and found a handful of tycoons driving these changes across the U.S. He profiles seven of them, showing how their corporate monopolies have transformed every aspect of our food system.

Jeff and Deb Hansen are the hog barons. The Iowa couple has built an empire of hog confinement facilities, warehouses in which thousands of hogs are packed until ready for slaughter. It’s more profitable for meatpackers to buy these hogs than those from family farms, which has put thousands of small farmers out of business. Frerick writes that since the Hansens started their company in 1992, “the state’s pig population has increased by more than 50 percent while the number of hog farms has declined by over 80 percent.”

How did the Hansens amass such power? Frerick documents their cozy relationship with researchers at Iowa State University and staff in the governor’s office and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those relationships — and the couple’s political donations — have given them advantages such as Iowa’s H.F. 519. This law limits challenges from family farmers and rural communities coping with the confinement sheds’ environmental destruction. Runoff from massive manure ponds and fertilizer have made more than half of Iowa’s rivers, streams, and lakes unsafe.

Other barons operate on an even larger scale. Walmart, for instance, controls more than one-third of the U.S. grocery market by putting local grocers out of business and paying its workers poverty-level wages. The Cargill-MacMillan “grain barons,” which handle more than one-quarter of the world’s grain trade, have shaped and benefited from weakened laws — such as the U.S. Farm Bill — that favor Big Ag over family farms.

Frerick builds his case methodically and in plain language, with empathy, extensive research, and even humor. He shows the cumulative effect of deregulation and weakened antitrust laws: Our rural communities are dying. Workers in the U.S. food system — which account for 10% of all jobs — don’t earn sustainable wages. We’re importing more crops, which require more fossil fuels for transport.

This is very different than Berry’s values of responsible stewardship, of caring for God’s creation and everything in it. Solutions will require restructuring who has power. Frerick concludes with ideas I hope will be developed in a second book, including phasing out industrial animal operations, ending the Farm Bill’s massive subsidies for commodity crops, and implementing measures to limit the ability of companies like these to exploit workers, farmers, and local businesses.

Once we see the decisions that have shaped our current food system, Frerick writes, “we can opt to create a different system that better reflects our values.”