The book is a memoir by a farmer’s daughter who leaves the family farm to become a lawyer, but later returns to help her elderly parents fight a three-year legal battle against powerful corporate interests that have destroyed rural communities across the country with little accountability.

Her story is set in Dodge County, Minnesota, a verdant slice of the Corn Belt in the southeast part of the state. It was here that the author’s forebears settled on a 760-acre farm after emigrating from Norway. Lowell Trom, Trom Eayrs’s father, is the kind of yeoman farmer that President Thomas Jefferson held up as the virtuous defender of American democracy. Lowell Trom is a pillar of the community, reminiscent of a figure in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Growing up, Trom Eayrs recounts how her dad lovingly cared for the land, employing sound conservation practices to protect soil and water. It was a time when animals grazed on pasture and farmers raised a mixture of crops and livestock on diversified homesteads. But following the high inflation of the late 1970s and early 80s, changes came to the hinterlands. The farm crisis of the Reagan era took hold. The number of independent livestock auction houses and sale barns declined. So did the family-owned slaughterhouses, gobbled up by the giant meat packers whose market share increased as government antitrust actions fell away.

In the 1990s, a new production model was taking hold, first in poultry and then in hogs and dairy—concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In CAFOs, animals are packed together by the hundreds, cheek by jowl, and never see the light of day. They are fed a diet laced with growth hormones and antibiotics. Trom Eayrs writes about the “Big Pig pyramid,” which finds meat packer conglomerates like Smithfield, Tyson and JBS at the top. In the middle are the “integrators,” the “corporate go-betweens facilitating the swine supply chain,” who recruit the contract growers and provide feed and other services. At the bottom are the contract growers or “producers.” No longer called farmers, they are more like serfs, beholden to the packers and the integrators who dictate how they will operate these factory farms and what price they will receive for their hogs.

As Trom Eayrs shows in graphic detail, CAFOs come with major issues like waste management, especially if the permitting system allowing their construction and operation is weak and enforcement is lax. CAFOs housing thousands of pigs, or a hundred thousand chickens, generate a shit load of manure and that excrement has to go somewhere. Unlike human waste it is usually not treated and is stored in giant holding ponds called lagoon or anaerobic systems. Much of it goes on fields theoretically as fertilizer for corn and soybeans, the monoculture crops of choice that are used for animal feed and biofuels. Usually, more CAFO waste is applied than the cropland can absorb. Much of it runs off into streams, rivers and lakes, contaminating waterways and people’s wells and drinking water with a toxic stew of nitrogen, phosphorus, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and other pollutants.

By the time Barack Obama sought the presidency, CAFOs were raising more than 40% of all U.S. livestock, each year comprising an ever-larger share of the livestock industry. As he campaigned across Iowa, Obama got an earful about the negative effects of CAFOs to the point where he pledged to regulate them if he got to the White House.

As his campaign wrote in his 2007 rural policy agenda, “In the Obama Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency will strictly monitor and regulate pollution from large CAFOs, with fines for those who violate tough air and water quality standards. Obama strongly supports efforts to ensure meaningful local control.”

Obama also said he would limit funding for CAFOs from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s popular Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which provides financial support to farmers seeking to improve the environmental quality of their operations. The candidate’s white paper stated, “Unfortunately, the 2002 Farm Bill lifted the cap on the size of livestock operations that can receive EQIP funding, enabling large livestock operations to receive EQIP payments and subsidizing big CAFOs by as much as $450,000. Obama supports reinstating a strict cap on the size of the livestock operations that can receive EQIP funding so that the largest polluters have to pay for their own environmental clean up.”

But after Obama won, he named Tom Vilsack as his secretary of agriculture. As governor of Iowa, Vilsack was a huge cheerleader for CAFO development across the Hawkeye State. When he took the reins at the Department of Agriculture, where he served from 2009 to 2017, Obama’s promises on regulating CAFOs went down the shitter.

It was during the Obama years that the first applications for CAFOs bordering the Trom farm in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, began to appear. Citizens worried about the obnoxious stench and threats to their water and rural quality of life took their concerns to their local planning and zoning commissions and boards of county supervisors. But that “meaningful local control” that Obama referenced was nowhere to be found. Trom Eayrs writes about how she and her neighbors were dismissed and overridden when they tried to get their local officials to make sure that CAFO operators were adhering to state laws and application requirements. Some members of these local governmental bodies had gross conflicts of interest—for instance, some were approving the CAFO applications of relatives.

When CAFO opponents pointed out that certain information was missing, like details of how the manure management system would work, county officials removed the troubling questions from the entire application. “See, problem solved!” When residents appealed to state environmental regulators, they were greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. “Sorry, but we’re understaffed,” was the usual response. Finally, in 2014 the Troms filed a lawsuit to try and halt the construction of a CAFO directly abutting their farm. In the end, they lost the case on a technicality.

This book is a depressing look at the raw political power of big, corporate agriculture. Those who try and thwart CAFOs are intimidated and silenced. During one of her father’s final harvests, he vomited and almost passed out as neighboring CAFO owners spent three straight days lathering their fields surrounding the Trom farm with tanker after tanker truck of liquid manure. Trom Eayrs writes of residents unable to use their well water because it was rife with E. coli, Salmonella, listeria and nitrate contamination.

She also documents how powerful groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation (a.k.a. the right-wing in overalls) and key industry players like National Pork Producers Council team up with government agencies to fight any attempt to regulate CAFOs by using greenwashing strategies to burnish the image of pork producers as just the folks running Old MacDonald’s Farm.

The industry has been successful in pushing so-called “ag-gag” laws through many state legislatures, that bar people from taking photographs or videos at factory farms or criminalize employees from documenting animal abuse or violations of farm safety. Other so-called right-to-farm laws have handcuffed local governments and citizens from regulating CAFOs in their communities. The big commodity groups also underwrite the materials for agriculture in the classroom, so that sanitized curriculum is spoon-fed to young students to make sure they know that large scale corporate farming is now the default setting for American food production.

To make the spread and siting of CAFOs as easy as possible, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture even runs an Animal Ordinances Web Map where “prime locations for livestock operations” can be identified and counties with lax rules on feedlots highlighted.

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. With Trump set to return to office, the meat packers and CAFO proponents are ready to enjoy a sympathetic ear in the White House and at the USDA.

The statistics Trom Eayrs cites are grim:

Since the mid-1990s, 70 percent of hog farmers have gone out of business. The meat packing conglomerates seized near-total market control, while their loyal contract farmers have captured an ever-dwindling proportion of profits. In the mid-1980s, 37 cents of every dollar that Americans spent on food went back to farmers, but by 2019, that had decreased to 15 cents of every dollar. More than half of all farmers have lost money every year since 2013.

Trom Eayrs notes that in 2017, the Wall Street Journal called rural America “the new inner city” noting that the data “showed that rural areas trail urban and suburban areas by virtually every key measure of socioeconomic well-being: poverty, college attainment, death rates, population rates, teen pregnancy rates and other benchmarks.”

“In Minnesota today,” she writes, “many have turned a blind eye to the corporate takeover of farmland and the corresponding environmental degradation and loss of community and economic vitality. An age-old cultural attitude supports the belief that capitalistic expansion at all costs is smiled upon from above, a manifest destiny reserved for those few who benefit.”

Trom Eayrs tries to sound an optimistic note in her concluding chapter, “A New Vision for Farm Country.” She lists several organizations that fighting against industrialized feedlot development. But just as readers will be saddened to learn that when Lowell passes away in 2019, his CAFO-owning neighbors disrupt his funeral and burial by engaging in an orgy of manure application so that some family members cannot even leave their vehicles to pay their last respects. Big Ag still holds all the cards. Thanks to generous campaign contributions to politicians of both parties, the ag lobby pretty much gets its way on Capitol Hill, as well as in most state capitals.

As Trom Eayrs writes:

What’s unique about the corporate model isn’t its enhanced success at feeding the world but its efficiency at running independent farmers off the land, erasing inter-generational farms, and creating a vertically integrated, top-heavy profit model where the majority of capital is siphoned away from farmers and rural communities.

Matt L. Barron

Matt L. Barron is a political consultant and rural strategist based in Chesterfield, Massachusetts where he runs MLB Research Associates.