Undoing the Power of Big Ag

Given the power of this corporate consolidation, how can people in rural America stand up for the health of their communities, farmers, water, land and air. How can they employ the tools of democracy to create rural communities where all can thrive?

That is the question Sonja Trom Eayrs poses in her 2024 memoir Dodge County, Inc. (Bison Books), which recounts her family’s three-plus year legal battle against several concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that set up shot near their family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota. (Her book has been listed as a finalist for this year’s Minnesota Book Award.)

In his review of the book for Barn Raiser, Matt Barron wrote, “What Trom Eayrs has lived through and chronicled has had a devastating effect on farmers and rural communities, and now in the age of Trump, has accelerated levels of mistrust and polarization across large swaths of rural America.”

So what is to be done? On Tuesday, March 4, Barn Raiser and Farm Action hosted “Undoing the Power of Corporate Ag in Rural America,” a webinar in which Trom Eayrs and Farm Action’s co-founder Joe Maxwell discussed how people in Rural America can stand up to agricultural conglomerates. What follows is a condensed and edited version of their conversation.

Sonja Trom Eayrs is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, and Twin Cities attorney. She is involved in several rural advocacy organizations, including the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Farm Action, Land Stewardship Project and Dodge County Concerned Citizens. Trom Eayrs serves as the business manager for the Trom family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota. 

Joe Maxwell is a co-founder of Farm Action. Along with his brother, Joe raises hogs, sheep and grain crops on their fourth-generation farm near Laddonia, in Audrain County, Missouri. His experience in farming, building agricultural supply chains, practicing law, serving in the Missouri House and Senate and winning election in 2000 as Missouri Lieutenant Governor (the last Democrat to hold that position) are keys to his successful policy development and campaign strategies.

Sonja Trom Eayrs: My story begins in 1892.

My great-grandfather immigrated from Norway and settled in Dodge County, Minnesota.

These were the days when immigrants were building rural communities. My great-grandfather was the chief architect of little Westfield Lutheran Church, which is patterned after his home church in Norway. The church is situated on the same square mile as our family farm.

This year marks the 100th year that our farm has been in our family. We’re immensely proud of our farm. We have lots of family connections in the immediate area, along with connections to other families in the immediate area.

We’re involved in production agriculture, so corn and soybeans. I’m actively involved in the operation of the farm today and work with other siblings.

In 1993, we witnessed the first swine factory farm that was installed one mile north of our farm.

During the 1990s, my sister Shelley and her husband Dave farmed just outside our home town of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. They were independent farmers, which meant that they owned their own hogs.

Dave, my brother-in-law, would take hogs down to the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, 15 miles from our hometown. During the mid-90s, Dave noticed that the wait times were getting longer at Hormel. He would have to wait 45 minutes to an hour to deliver a single load of hogs, while the big semis that were coming from these area factory farms were rushed through the facility.

1998 was the breaking point for independent farmers like Dave and Shelley. It’s the old saying we’ve all heard a million times: “Get big or get out.”

They opted to “get out.” Like other independent farmers, they were essentially locked out of the marketplace. They could not deliver their hogs to Hormel, even though they’d been doing so for years and years.

But our problems didn’t begin and end with just pigs.

In 2001, our attention shifted to a large dairy factory farm that was going to be constructed about three miles north of our farm. My family, along with other neighbors, fought the installation of Ripley Dairy, which at the time would have been the largest dairy factory farm in the state of Minnesota. Our neighborhood worked with an advocacy group in Minnesota called Land Stewardship Project. And that fight went on for three to four years, as the community—a bipartisan group—fought installation of that big factory farm.

During that fight, most of the meetings occurred at little Ripley Town Hall, which used to be a one-room schoolhouse and later turned into a town hall. But one evening, the meeting was moved to the old Claremont High School.

The neighbors and the township residents were blindsided. When they walked into the meeting, they found 200 chairs set up in the auditorium. And those chairs were occupied by corporate executives from Land O’Lakes, Hormel, Cargill, AgStar Financial Services, Monsanto and other industry giants. Today, Claremont High School serves as dormitory housing for area factory farm workers.

In April of 2014, my dad called me. He was fit to be tied because he’d received only 10 days’ notice that yet another swine factory farm was going up in the area. We already had 10 in a three-mile radius. Today, we have 12 in a three-mile radius.

If you love something, and you love someone, you fight for it! I helped my parents find legal counsel so that they could take on yet another battle. The planning commission and the county board were populated with industry insiders that waved through an incomplete application form. It wasn’t a fair process.

It was at that point that my parents, in May of 2014, initiated their first lawsuit against county officials. But as the three separate lawsuits continued for almost three years, I realized the enormity of this fight. One lawsuit or two lawsuits or three lawsuits were not going to make much of a difference.

But it was important to fight because there are two courts: the court of law and the court of public opinion. So, we kept this information in front of the public.

I realized we were fighting corporate power and for the right of not only my family to stay on the family farm, but for the rights of all farmers to stay on the land.

Through this process, I discovered that the big multinationals had created a corporate pyramid scheme. At the top of the pyramid, you have the multinationals such as Tyson, JBS, Hormel, Smithfield.

In the middle, you have integrators—companies such as Christensen Farms, Iowa Select, Holden Farms and others, such as Schwartz farms. These integrators own the supply chain. They own the hogs that are flowing through that system.

They also provide the hogs and the feed and the veterinary services to those at the bottom of the pyramid, the “contract growers,” what we have traditionally called farmers.

This is a closed system.

The multinationals have reorganized the marketplace and created a closed system where all the profits flow to the top of this pyramid. That allows them to control the pricing that flows all the way down to the contract farmer at the bottom. And what I’ve discovered in all of this is that my family’s story is not an isolated story—that probably many of you who are listening [or reading], share the same story.

Joe Maxwell: Sonja, telling your story and putting a face on the story is extremely important for us to get the information out.

Unfortunately, Dodge County is not the only place that this type of business model, this pyramid, has shown up across the country.

These integrators, these processors, these meat packers—they own the system. They own the baby pig. They own the feed that’s going into that pig. They own the opportunity to price gouge the consumer at the grocery store. They own the right to pollute the land, to destroy the natural resources. They own the right to drive the farmer off the farm.

For those of you from rural America, think back prior to the time of factory farming. Think about how dried up your towns have become. It’s because these corporations are extracting, have extracted, the wealth, the natural resources from your communities, from rural America.

When I began farming, there were 512,000 of us independent hog farmers in America. Today, there’s less than 61,000 left.

Those farm families are no longer in rural communities. The wealth those farm families made off of their hog productions, that was the cash flow on our farm. The sale of those pigs is what put gas in the car. It’s what put kids through school. It was the source of wealth that helped support local communities. That’s gone from rural America.

It’s not just happening in the Midwest. We saw China’s WH Group, which owns Smithfield, build out their operations in North Carolina.

They targeted Black, Latino, poor communities to build their hog houses because they knew that those communities had less of a voice. Their voice was weak when it came to the politics of their communities, their counties, their cities and their state. WH Group built out these massive hog houses, putting thousands of head of hogs into one building.

Those people, over time, they found that they had higher respiratory disease. They had less life expectancy. Their children were sicker. They found that they were walking in an airstream of fecal matter that clung to their clothes, to their homes and their automobiles. This is the environment that the industrial agriculture model has brought to rural America.

And it’s not just in hogs. We see it in poultry and beef, too.

Consider the way egg prices have made headlines recently. Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg producer in the United States, is making record profits off of the avian flu. Yet in the last decade, farmers have only seen the price they get paid per egg go up a penny.

These companies do not put wealth back into rural communities. And it’s not just in meat production. Economists say that abuses are likely when 40% of the market is controlled by four dominant firms. There’s not a market sector left that has any hope of providing economic opportunity for rural America.

That’s where we are. It’s not just in Dodge County. It’s not just in my home state of Missouri. And it’s not just in North Carolina. This is the story of rural America as we saw corporate greed come in and extract our wealth.

Sonja, what are you hearing from the folks after you published your book?

STE: I keep getting handwritten letters, in addition to comments that I receive on my author website.

I hear three comments from people. People say, “Thank you,” because this book has truly hit a nerve.

The second is, “I had no idea.”

But the third reaction is the one that really motivates me. And that is, “what can I do? How can I get active?”

JM: Sonja, you mentioned 1998 as the breaking point for independent farmers. That’s the year I remember the price for hogs falling to eight cents a pound. Farmers committed suicide, went bankrupt.

Back then, I made a mistake far too often of letting people say, “Well, that’s the way it is.” Or, “You know, big is just going to get bigger.”

But I was wrong. I was wrong for not standing up and saying, “No, it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Our government at local, state and federal levels have encouraged the pillaging of rural America by industrial agriculture. Understand that market power equals economic power, because when they extract all the money out of your pockets, all the money out of rural communities, they put it in their pocket. They now have economic power. And then they use that economic power for political power.

That’s how they take it over our rural communities. I encourage everybody to check out what Farm Action has put together with its data hub on agriculture concentration. We also put out a report called “Kings Over the Necessaries of Life.” And you will see that in the past people became knowledgeable and informed and communities joined together and neighbors joined together, and change occurred.

Sonja, where do you see people getting involved and taking action? What can people do?

STE: I’m involved in a few of these fights. One of the frontlines is in North Dakota.

In 2019, North Dakota changed their law to take away local control. They have now created a situation similar to the state of Iowa.

God help our friends in North Dakota, because the state is trying to push for corporate agriculture. And people on both sides of the aisle are getting involved.

It’s a constant fight. It’s always the same thing. It’s community versus corporation.

It’s happening in North Dakota, it’s in western Wisconsin, it’s in northern Minnesota, where they’re pushing into our beautiful lake country and they’re going to ruin it the same way the industry has ruined Iowa, and southern Minnesota where our farm is located.

People need to get active. Find an organization. It could be Socially Responsible Agriculture Project.

It could be Land Stewardship Project here in Minnesota. It might be Dakota Resource Council or Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. There are a number of these groups that are trying to work with communities.

JM: I want to highlight one thing. You mentioned local control.

Every one of us ought to want to set the destiny for our own community and be able to make decisions at the county or parish or precinct or township level, however your state is organized.

These corporations, these monopolies with their power come in and want to say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And therefore you shouldn’t be the decider of your health and welfare decisions. They want to strip that right of local control, for example setting the boundaries for how far away from a school one of these manure factories should be.

The first thing we need to do is be informed. You can’t push back unless you’re armed with information.

If you are interested, Farm Action has a program we call Local Leaders. We work nationally, but we need to have local voices helping push against corporate interests, and we also need to hear what’s happening on the ground so we can make the right decisions.

Otherwise, it’s the voice of Big Ag in your community. And they sit back in that coffee shop and they spout out all this information about how great everything is and how much money and the return on investments they get on checkoff funds.

What you need to do is know how much has been extracted from your community, how many farmers you lost in your county over the last two decades, what that’s done to your schools, your tax base.

Hold them accountable for those facts and all that mouth they’re putting out in that coffee shop. It begins at the local level.

STE: This reminds me, Joe, of Food and Water Watch’s report, “Factory Farm Nation.”

It is absolutely eye-opening. You can see the thousands and thousands of factory farms in Iowa and southern Minnesota and how these big meat packers have ruined these rural areas. Schools have closed or consolidated, churches have closed, local businesses have closed.

These corporations are powerful, but people acting together as part of a community are powerful. And, as eaters, you can also be intentional about your food choices by buying directly from local farm families and independent producers.

JM: We can also dispel the myths and misinformation put out by Big Ag. We do this at Farm Action with our blog “Big Ag Mythbusters.”

I’ll give you one of those myths: Industrial Agriculture is the only way to feed the world. This agricultural system does not feed the world. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even feed us here in the United States. What it does is raises cheap feed grains so that these meat monopolies can have access to feed grain that is below production costs, subsidized by your tax money, called the Farm Bill programs, that go to benefit China’s Smithfield, Brazil’s JBS, and the Cargills and Tysons of America.

We’re benefiting them. We’re feeding their livestock and these huge CAFOs all the time, extracting the wealth from the rural communities and leaving behind a wasteland. That’s one of the myths that needs to be busted.

We feed pigs in crates. That’s what we do in America.

STE: I’ll tell you who else we feed. We feed the corporate bottom line.

JM: That’s right. Again, take Cal-Maine, the country’s biggest egg producer.

Look folks, avian flu is real.

These big egg companies have taken advantage of that. They’re screaming about avian flu, saying egg prices have got to go up. Yet, Cal-Maine, made more money in a single quarter last year than they made the whole year before the avian flu. That’s the power that industrial agriculture has over the food system, over the consumer and over the farmer.

Audience member Cameron D.: What is the impact of industrial ag as it relates to chronic diseases and the health of rural communities in general?

STE: Last fall I participated in an event at Drake University about industrial agriculture public health. Top public health officials from across the United States attended the conference, which revolved around the book Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health edited by Bob Martin at Johns Hopkins and Dr. James Merchant. That’s a superb resource.

JM: There’s certainly a parallel in the rise of chronic illness along with the rise of industrial agriculture. We’re the sickest industrialized country in the world. Farm Action recognizes that food—our diet, the types of food that we have access to in America—is making us sick.

Audience member Elizabeth H: When the U.S. Department of Agriculture sends out $10 billion to make up for recent farm losses, who gets this money? Also, what are your thoughts around investments in so-called climate-smart programs, especially when they pay for things like manure pits and anaerobic digesters?

JM: Elizabeth is referring to about $10.5 billion that was passed by the Congress in the last CR [continuing resolution]. It’s the way Congress kept the government funded to extend the 2018 Farm Bill, and they put in there a $10.5 billion payment to farmers. It makes me furious.

First, if you are a farmer and you make 75% of your income on the farm, you get more money than if you are a farmer who is financially strapped and makes less than 75% of their income off the farm. That means, if you’re a farmer who also has to go hustle a job in town or your household has a spouse that works in town to help pay the bills, you get paid less. That’s an example of how our government supports big over small and medium farmers.

Second, those farmers had to come to Washington, D.C., and ask for $10.5 billion to help offset their losses from the 2024 crop. As I tried to explain a while ago, farmers are overproducing, corn and soybeans. They’re selling it for less than their production cost and have to come to Washington, D.C., and ask for taxpayer money to bail them out.

Now, who benefits from that? I’ll tell you who does. It’s the very people that drove all those families out of Dodge County because they’re getting cheaper feed grains than what the market price should be. Ultimately, that $10.5 billion winds up subsidizing the very meatpackers we’re talking about tonight. That’s who gets it because they got lower-than-production-cost feed grains.

On the issue of “climate smart” money, Farm Action called out former Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack and others for wanting to put happy-face lipstick on the pig, when they proposed investing in digesters to try and solve the environmental impact of these huge buildings with their huge manure pits. They wanted to convert the manure through these digesters into “biogas.” We were not pleased at all with a lot of the expenses on “climate smart” programs.

Some of the climate smart money went to the right people. But unfortunately, a lot of it, once again, became another example of how big industrial agriculture has achieved political power by securing market power and economic power, and they used their political power to steer what could have been a tremendous program for the health of our planet and the health of our communities, and the financial health of our farmers, to the very people we came tonight to discuss.

Audience member Daniel R.: I agree. We need to be informed and tell others in our community and beyond. So, what is the next step? These corporations have control over our rural communities, our supply, and our lives, and they are not going to give up that power willingly.

STE: First of all, speak truth to power.

I have one foot in the Twin Cities metro area, and one in southern Minnesota. When my family started pushing back, we started to receive all kinds of harassment and intimidation that went on for years. I describe that in the book.

What I discovered was that my family was not alone. There are lots of frontline families. Unfortunately, farmers in these rural communities have been silenced by the big multinationals.

You have a voice. Use it. For me, quite honestly, the most empowering thing is knowing that if I’m attacked personally, I’m on the right track. For the last 10 plus years, I knew I was on the right track.

When they pointed fingers at me, I knew to keep going.

JM: I absolutely agree with Sonja.

Firstly, we need to organize at the local level, so that we can have the tenacity and the courage to stand and grin at them. But a lot of people have been pushed back, pushed down, stepped on, and they just don’t have that spirit in them anymore. Help lift them up and let them know that they aren’t alone and that you’ll be by their side.

It’s not just the farmers’ fight, right? It’s also the fight of people living in rural towns and elsewhere. There’s many farmers that feel beat down. They’re not the enemy.

Organize, get to know each other as neighbors. Then, once you build a collective of power at the local level, in your neighborhood, express that at your county level. If your county has planning and zoning, push for it.

Remember, these are industries. They’re not farms. Go to the state level. Learn your environmental laws. Depending on the permitting process, many of these companies are using the same track of land to spray the manure on.

Hold your Department of Natural Resources or your local branch of the Environmental Protection Agency accountable to ensure that there’s not too many of these darn buildings built. Let them know that the land won’t hold all the nutrient value they’re spraying on it, and it winds up in groundwater.

Go out and test the water in your area and collect a baseline. Record around these facilities any changes in the water—in the surface water, as well as any of the wells in the area.

Join the efforts of Farm Action and Farm Action Fund. Farm Action Fund is our (c)(4) organization. It does the lobbying in Washington, D.C. We’re always happy to have people help lift up their voices and help us get in the doors of their members of Congress and their members of the Senate.

STE: People are doing things to get the word out there.

This isn’t just my story. It’s our story as people of rural America, and I want to hear from you, and I want you to go out, contact your local newspaper, contact others, share your story, and tell what’s going on. Because I know there are hundreds and thousands of us in the same boat.

Justin PerkinsMore by this author →

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is currently finishing his Master of Divinity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.