Back in summer 2021, I urged readers to listen to a Matt McNeil Show interview with eventh-generation Iowan and fellow at Yale University Austin Frerick.
He's just as worth readers' time in Minnesota Reformer story posted Tuesday morning, along with a Book excerpt: ‘Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry’.
The book came out today.
Q&A with author Austin Frerick on farm policy, Cargill and food industry ‘barons’
By Madison McVan
Certain familiar images shape public understanding of American agriculture: The struggling farmer working long harvest days to feed the world and his family; the cattle rancher on horseback; pitchforks and hay and green John Deere tractors.
In “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” author Austin Frerick instead tells the story of the agriculture industry through a series of “barons” — a word choice meant to evoke the likes of John. D Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan — each of whom controls a large share of their respective market: hogs, grain, coffee, dairy, berries, meatpacking and groceries.
The story of each baron is intertwined with some other aspect of the agricultural system: the Farm Bill, monopolies, working conditions and modern-day indentured servitude, and more.
Frerick, a seventh-generation Iowan and fellow at Yale University, has long taken an interest in shaping agricultural policy through writing, research and public office — he ran as a Democrat for Iowa Senate in 2022 and narrowly lost the primary.
Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Frerick witnessed firsthand the rise of large-scale, concentrated hog operations — “animal warehouses,” as Frerick calls them in his book — proliferated across Iowa and southern Minnesota.
In Barons, Frerick takes on the family that drove the adoption of these ultra-packed (or ultra-efficient, depending on your point of view) hog operations that lined the barons’ pockets while contaminating Iowa’s waterways.
Minnesota’s own MacMillan-Cargill family, which still controls the vast majority of Cargill shares, is featured for its role in the global grain trade. Cargill deals in far more than just grain, which Frerick makes clear; America’s largest private company is more comparable to the British Empire than it is to any other contemporary company, Frerick argues.
Minnesota is facing a renewed debate over how to handle agricultural pollution, particularly in the southeast portion of the state, where the groundwater is especially vulnerable to runoff from farms and livestock operations.
Barons comes out on March 26. Frerick will be in conversation with Minnesota Farmers Union antimonopoly director Justin Stofferahn at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis on April 3 at 6 p.m.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you land on the “barons” framework to write about different aspects of the food system?
I had been writing about agriculture monopolies for a few years, and a conversation at a dive bar in Des Moines is when the baron framework locked into my head … 2018 was a really competitive Iowa governor’s race and this political operative was bullshitting to me about how the largest donor in Iowa was this hog baron. And he not only had a private jet, but on his jet was rumored the phrase “when pigs fly.” I was like, that’s good copy. How do I tell that story? I just realized, this is a really powerful way to tell structural stories.
How would you explain Cargill to someone who doesn’t understand what they do?
Cargill is the closest example to a modern day Standard Oil. Cargill is not consumer facing, but they own the middle — they own the grain from when it’s harvested to when it’s put on the grocery shelf. Just like Standard Oil, they’re all about moving the commodity.
Actually, if anything, they’re more than just Standard Oil. I really think they’re the closest thing we’ve seen to a modern day version of the 19th century British Empire. Their global reach is incredible. We’ve never seen something like this before in agriculture, where the sun never sets on Cargill’s grain empire. The undercurrent of that chapter is there’s so much we just don’t know about them still. It’s like we just saw the tip of the iceberg that hit the Titanic. What we’ve seen so far — the example I mentioned in that chapter about Cargill secretly buying up land in Colombia — it’s really scary. It’s a really good example of the dark undercurrents of that much power in one secret, private entity.
The Minnesota Legislature is debating how to reduce nitrate pollution from farms. The state has historically tried to reduce pollution by encouraging voluntary adoption of “best management practices” to reduce fertilizer and manure runoff. You’re pretty tough on the voluntary “best management practices” approach in your book. Why?
They just don’t work. At the end of the day, these companies want to sell product. Cargill wants as much grain grown as possible, so they can process as much and transport as much as possible. Anything that reduces that — which honestly cleaning up our water requires we can’t plant grains right next to creeks — Cargill doesn’t like. In the rampant, greedy era we live in, these companies don’t care. To me, maybe 20 years ago I could have been convinced of that strategy. But these have been the default solutions for the last few decades, and these situations have just gotten worse. Volunteer doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. The fact that Iowa waterways are basically an open sewer at this point, tells you how much that notion of a volunteer framework works.
What kind of public policy approach do you think would work better?
Biggest picture, the Farm Bill is picking favorites, and it’s heavily subsidizing the overproduction of grains.
I don’t want to blame farmers who are barely getting by, and the margins are so tight that they have to push their land in order to keep their land, survive, make a living … I just think of corn — I mean, ethanol just caused a massive explosion of corn production in the Midwest. To me, moving away from the current Farm Bill reduces that demand. Moving away from ethanol reduces demand. I mean, the largest use of corn is ethanol which I think is wild. I mean these people love saying they want to feed the world, yet we’re burning most of the corn in cars — just tells you how hollow the rhetoric is.
For the nitrate stuff, to me, this is just regulation. What I see the most is just people farming right up to the creek, and that’s usually a renter. And that’s because the owner of the land lives in like Long Beach, California, they inherited the land from a grandma who passed away … And the person renting it is barely getting by, and so they’re going to engage in pretty destructive farming practices because why not squeeze a few extra dollars out of that land.
You use this term “animal warehouses” in the book. I covered the meat industry, and I know the language used to describe these operations can be very loaded. How did you land on “animal warehouses” instead of, say, “concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)” or “factory farms”?
I’m so glad you picked up on that. I was very intentional about language in my book. I think so much language now is designed to keep people out. It’s anti-democratic. It’s technocratic. It’s designed to hide what’s really going on. The other one is “H-2A.” I mean, that’s like an agricultural term for some type of visa. That’s just indentured servitude. My strength — and I think it’s because I’m a first generation college student — is that I’m pretty good at explaining complex things in simple language. And like, these animal confinements, they’re just animal warehouses. They’re just glorified metal sheds with animals stuffed in them. I also like pushing buttons a little bit with industry because they don’t want people to know what’s really going on.
There’s just so much language we use in this space right now that’s designed by industry, designed by the barons to their benefit. So I just want to push back on that.
Why not “factory farm”?
Because they’re not farms. I don’t want to use the term farm in that way. An undercurrent to this book is, what is a farmer? I mean, if you take my dairy baron, he might proclaim to be a farmer. That’s how he publicly identifies, but he lives at the Ritz Carlton in Puerto Rico. I would argue that the undocumented men — in most industrial dairies, they’re run by undocumented men — I would argue that they’re the actual farmers. Most of them … were farmers until they were displaced by us dumping our surplus corn on them, causing them to migrate for economic reasons. Now they’re doing most of the labor in these industrial warehouses.
Photo: Austin Frerick. Courtesy photo.
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