When Pigs Fly
Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry
Julie Gammack and I hosted an interview on Monday with Austin Frerick, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. Julie posted the interview here.
It’s an important and compelling read. I was pleased to see my friend Alan Guebert, journalist and author of the Farm and Food File, in the Zoom audience. Alan wrote a review of Austin’s book and I am reposting it below with his permission.
The first economist, Scotland’s Adam Smith, had it right almost 250 years ago when, as writer Eric Schlosser notes in the foreword of an important new book by Iowan Austin Frerick, that “...merchants and manufacturers were ‘an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public.’”
Few groups know this better than American farmers and ranchers who have seen the most vital sectors of their food-producing business like meatpacking, grain merchandising, and seed technology overtaken by today’s ever-growing, ever-grabbing “merchants and manufacturers.”
Frerick, like Smith, gets it right from the start in the callout title of his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.
(Full disclosure: Frerick is a valued colleague and friend. Barons includes a handful of references to previous Farm and Food Files.)
In it, Frerick digs deeply into the rise of seven of these powerful, largely unknown baronial food families to tell how each came to dominate their respective sectors and how they now wield their accrued market power to make everything, from their neighbors to the environment to you, pay for it.
He begins with the compelling story of Jeff and Deb Hansen, two of the most unlikely hog farmers you’ve never heard of. Both were Iowa farm kids who, after marriage, began a hog enterprise with three sows. Their drive, skill and innovations soon led them to expand. Then expand again. Then really expand.
Now their company, Iowa Select Farms, Frerick writes, “employs more than 7,400 people… and brings about five million hogs to market annually.”
Iowa Select became a cornerstone for the CAFO, or concentrated animal feeding operations, takeover of Iowa’s – then the nation’s – hog sector. Since 1992, Iowa’s CAFO-based hog population statewide has increased by “more than 50 percent while the number of hog farms has declined by over 80 percent.”
That rise delivered the Hansens a private jet (whose tail is reportedly emblazoned with the humble brag, “When Pigs Fly”), multiple homes and kingmaker status in Iowa’s agbiz-dominated state government.
Their home state, however, hasn’t fared as well. Pigs, for example, now outnumber Iowans seven to one and produce the “manure equivalent to the waste of nearly eighty-four million people,” or “more than the population of California, Texas and Illinois combined.”
Some “farmers,” huh?
Wait until you read about dairy barons, Sue and Mike McCloskey, whose cows produce 4 million school cartons of milk each day and 430,000 gallons, or a staggering 16 times more, manure.
Or the “faceless” Reimann family of Germany whose Luxembourg-based JAB Holdings is now the “world’s second largest purveyor of coffee” through brands like Peet’s, Caribou, Krispy Kreme, Panera Bread and others too numerous to name. What is known, however, is that JAB entered the coffee slinging business just 12 years ago and is now a global, if unknown, baron.
Other barons include the Cargill-McMillian family, the world’s most dominant grain merchandising company; “The Berry Barons,” J. Miles and Garland Reiter, who own Driscoll’s through which they control “about one-third of the U.S. berry market” while not “actually growing any berries” at all; the Brazilian “Slaughter Barons,” Joesley and Wesley Batista of JBS infamy; and the Walton family whose domination of American grocery retailing continues to grow.
Frerick’s skill as both a serious academic and gifted storyteller keeps the pages turning as his colorful cast of characters build empires with everyday dinner items like pork chops, milk, coffee and strawberries while few Americans even know who they are.
And even fewer know the ruinous impacts their rise in market power has had on rural America’s environment, economy and people.
Frerick, a Fellow at Yale University, knows and his Barons warns us that these modern “merchants and manufacturers,” just like their 18th century counterparts, are nothing more than naked mercantilists.
The Farm and Food File is published weekly through the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, events and contact information are posted at www.farmandfoodfile.com.
capitalism:
an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
free market:
an economy operating by free competition.
Capitalism is, by definition, amoral and unaligned with the interests of the public. Profit is the capitalists’ only goal. To be sure, individual capitalists may be moral and do good things, but if they do, they often compromise shareholder earnings, and so they are few and far between in the corporate world. And, as Frerick shows us, there is no free market.
Where we hope our lawmakers would work to protect the public’s interests, many are instead working toward serving the interests of the barons as Frerick documents.
corporatism: the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction.
We are arguably in a post-capitalist stage called corporatism which is buoyed by the forces of rising authoritarianism and white “Christian” nationalism. Corporatism, authoritarianism, and white “Christian” nationalism are perfectly aligned today in an attempt to form a theocratic oligarchy to serve corporate interests.
oligarchy:
government by the few
a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes
Donald Trump has warned us how he will consolidate power if reelected, and here in Iowa we have had a clear view of how Governor Kim Reynolds is doing the same. This is the Orbanization of the United States, and Iowa, as Republicans work to remake our country in the image of Victor Orban’s authoritarian and repressive Hungry so they can hold onto power and keep us—you and me, our children and grandchildren—under the bootheel of our corporate overlords. Historians, political scientists, and economists, please pull apart this observation. Do your best. Your critique can only make my argument more informed, and you will have my thanks.
And don’t think for a moment that Donald Trump alone is the problem. He’s a useful fool for corporate interests, nothing more nor less.
Sure, go ahead, and say my arguments are hyperbole, and that I’m over-reacting. Read for yourself what Trump is saying that aligns with corporate control of our government under the guise of an American theocratic oligarchy.
If I’m wrong, so be it. I hope I am.
But if I’m right, and you vote Republican before we are over this crisis, you will forever regret sleepwalking through the end of democracy and into an authoritarian regime.
Our greatest generation didn’t fight and defeat authoritarian regimes generations ago in anticipation of us weakly cowering to them today.
Thanks to Frerick for identifying the corruption in the food industry, and how the barons have manipulated our system for their purposes under the American myth of the “glory” of capitalism and free markets.
Frericks book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, is a shot across the bow of the corporatocracy. He’s coming to Iowa in an Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement tour of our great state from March 26 to April 11. Come out and see him, support his work and that of Iowa CCI whose simple mission statement is “We talk. We act. We get it done.”
And they do it for us, our children and grandchildren, not our corporate overlords.
I’m honored to have been asked to moderate the visit to Iowa Falls on April 11.
For a chilling presentation of how our elected officials are refusing to protect us and the environment over the interests of corporations, check out my friend Chris Jones’ column from yesterday, The Coop Cowboys Ride Again—Why does Agribusiness Hate Clean Water?
Here’s a spoiler…
Q: What’s the fine for an agribusiness killing a river? A priceless river?
A: In Iowa, $6,000.
One more thing. My friend and fellow Iowa Writers’ Collaborative member Beth Hoffman is hosting writing opportunities and a memoir workshop on her farm (baby goats included) in April and June. Follow her newsletter In the Dirt for more information.
No, one more thing! Sorry. This post just came in. If you aren’t reading Chuy Renteria’s “Of Spanglish and Maximalism, it’s your loss. No, our loss.
Do me a favor. No, do US a favor. Let Chuy rock your world. Saddle up, and get ready to learn.
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I grew up on a farm that had an orchard from which we sold fruit, a garden of vegetables which we canned, or stored for the winter. We had a small but diverse population of animals which we butchered for food. My dad was at the tail end of farmers who raised horses and mules as draft animals. Today most people have no idea where their food comes from nor do they realize the damage that is being done to the environment to raise both crops and livestock. I don't know what it takes to make more people aware that our very existence depends on paying attention to what it is happening where it is produced.
This one is another really informative and insightful exposition. One can not only be frustrated but also intensely angered that so few people care to realize what is happening. I think of the Perry plant closing with such massive loss of jobs. Almost certainly our Republican legislature has more concern with getting more guns into the Perry school than it has with the Perry workers and families whose lives are so disrupted. They gleefully reduced unemployment benefits earlier, of course, to please their corporate masters.