New book details how ‘barons’ took over American agriculture

by Saul Elbein - 03/26/24 6:00 AM ET

Iowa’s food landscape can become like Italy’s — if the “barons” who captured the American farmstand can be defeated, a new book argues.

“Barons,” published Tuesday by Austin Frerick, a native Iowan and Yale University food policy fellow, argues that a runaway process of monopoly has gutted rural America while bleeding the taste from American food.

In the book, Frerick tells the story of the consolidation of American agriculture since the 1970s through the rise of seven “baronial” families that rose to dominate entire sectors of a once-diversified American food system.

The subjects of these agricultural sagas range from the Waltons’ conquest of the grocery market, in which Walmart now has the same market share as the second- through eighth-largest grocery chains combined; to the Cargill-MacMillan family’s consolidation of a quarter of the grain market; to the McCloskey family’s commanding position in dairy.

Frerick told The Hill this consolidation of the market has led to a collapse in American consumer choice. To take one example of many, the Reimann family of Germany — which employs 180,000 workers globally — now owns virtually every American coffee chain aside from Starbucks and Dunkin’: Peet’s Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Pret A Manger, Panera Bread, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee, Trade Coffee and Keurig.

The Hill has reached out to the above companies for comment.

In addition to its impacts in strip malls around the country, this market change has led to a staggering change in American landscapes, Frerick argues in “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.”

Rather than today’s Walmarts and factory farms, a driver crisscrossing the country in the mid-1980s would have passed through a landscape of small farms.

In what is now the corn, soy and hog country of Iowa, for example, they would have passed cows grazing on the landscape, and in late summer could have smelled the state’s once-extensive apple orchards.

Now that landscape is marked by the sight and penetrating smell of vast hog barns, where tens of thousands of pigs are kept in close confinement — amid hectares of corn and soy intended for biofuels.

Frerick told The Hill that consolidation has left Americans with food that is more expensive and less nourishing than in any other developed country.

That’s a change that he argued has led to “an underappreciated collapse in taste,” as American food has become ever more curated for features that make it transportable across long distances — rather than taste or nutrition.

“This is dark … and I think most people know it,” Frerick said, “Anytime you talk to Americans who go abroad, they’ll tell you: Food is better and cheaper abroad. Italians have cheaper, better food than we do.”

To Frerick, Italy is a model for what Iowa could have been — and might still become. The Midwestern state boasts some of the country’s richest farmland: thick, nourishing black earth plowed and fertilized by the slow, implacable ice sheets that once covered the northern U.S.

In 1982, that land nourished a great deal of corn — but it also held more than 12,000 acres of vegetables, a number that had plunged to 7,500 by 2022, according to the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Over the past 30 years, the number of farms in Iowa fell by 25 percent, and surviving farms increased in size by 30 percent — part of a broader “hollowing out” of rural America that The Hill has previously reported on.

Between just 2017 and 2022, the number of U.S. farms dropped by 142,000. The one category of farm that didn’t decline was those that encompassed more than 5,000 acres.

Three-quarters of American farm income now comes from operations that make than $1 million in annual sales, according to the USDA.

“It all fell apart in my lifetime in Iowa,” Frerick said. As he got into food policy, he was haunted by a question: “How did the animals disappear from the landscape in Iowa?”

That question, he gradually concluded, was related to another one: “How did a hog baron become the largest political donor in our state?”

The farmer in question is Jeff Hansen, who with his wife Deb expanded a tiny three-sow hog business to become one of the nation’s key players in the consolidation of the hog market — bringing to pig farming the techniques that helped consolidate the chicken business in the 1990s.

That change has corresponded to a dramatic shift in the agricultural geography of Iowa; since 1992, the state’s factory farm-based pig population has “increased more than 50 percent while the number of hog farms has declined by over 80 percent,” Frerick writes.

Hogs now outnumber Iowans 7 to 1 and produce more manure than the human populations “of California, Texas and Illinois combined,” he writes.

Representatives of Iowa Select, the Hansens’ company, argue that’s a good thing: Much of that manure is spread on Iowa farmland as fertilizer, which replaces the synthetic fertilizers that have to be generated with fossil fuels. A company-commissioned study found that farms treated with hog manure had less erosion, better soil health and higher profits than those that weren’t.

The companies’ involvement in Iowa has “kept thousands of Iowans involved in agriculture and farming,” Iowa Select communications director Jen Sorenson told The Hill.

“I would also point out that as our rural communities continue to decline in population, those with livestock farms decline at a slower rate.”

But the question of best practices in manure management is part of a broader problem of who gets to regulate the farm stand, University of Iowa professor Chris Jones has written.

“Iowa’s approach to agricultural water pollution has always been to let farmers decide whether and how to reduce the contaminants sourced to their own fields,” Jones wrote.

Some of these voluntary methods do work, Jones wrote. But they contrast to an approach based on regulations — which would force farmers to adopt best practices shown to improve water quality, and which large agribusinesses have campaigned to weaken.

To Frerick, this lopsided relationship between big producers and the public isn’t restricted to Iowa: It helps explain the transformation of the food system in California, the Great Lakes, the Southeast and beyond from being marked by small farmers to being increasingly dominated by what, in other countries, might be called oligarchs — single families presiding over vast holdings that are often worked by undocumented immigrant labor.

This consolidation has drawn together unlikely bedfellows on the progressive left and populist right — uniting groups such as The Heritage Foundation and ThinkProgress behind the idea that the farm bill needs to be drastically reimagined, if not torn up.

“It’s this weird issue where you have Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley on the same issue,” Frerick said, referring to the Democratic senator from Massachusetts and the Republican senator from Missouri, respectively.

“That’s a political piñata saying, ‘Hit me! Hit me!’”

But opposing this drive for reform is a decades-old political consensus that is equally bipartisan and far more entrenched — a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who over the past half century reshaped the massive farm bill omnibus and paved the way for the rise of the “barons.”

That process began under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, as conservative legal theorists including Robert Bork pushed through a novel idea: that regional monopolies were not harmful as long as they didn’t raise prices for consumers. A generation of conservative judges took it as read that companies would not do so.

At the time, “if a big company puts a small company out of business as a result of anti-competitive action, but as a net result the consumer has a lower prices available, [courts ruled] that’s not anti-competitive,” Alex Harman of Public Citizen told The Hill in 2021.

But the other dramatic change came under a Democratic administration. In 1996, President Clinton presided over the passage of what Frerick calls “the Wall Street Farm Bill.”

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In that legislation, Congress drastically altered the thrust of the farm safety net, which had been designed after the Dust Bowl and Great Depression to guard the nation’s farmers from the result of the overproduction of commodities. The bill replaced old farm bill protocols that had sought to control production with measures designed to support production while juicing demand to absorb it.

The same year, Congress also elected to underwrite crop insurance for commodity crops such as corn, but not for “specialty crops” — a category largely comprised of the fruits and vegetables most people eat.

Between 2017 and 2022, Congress gave commodity crops $142 billion in insurance payments and supplemental disaster assistance, according to a new report from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Report author Billy Hackett told The Hill that this money has disproportionately gone to shield America’s biggest landowners from rising climate risk.

Hackett told The Hill that this dynamic means that taxpayers are in effect being forced to subsidize these farmers’ decision not to transition to more diversified and sustainable forms of agriculture.

These measures have also led to an America awash in the kinds of cheap processed foods that can make use of derivative products such as high fructose corn syrup, Frerick said, noting this has had serious implications for the nation’s public health.

“That’s a consequence of the overproduction of grain — processed food gets less expensive to produce,” he said.

The result, he said, is that “we have a bifurcated food system; it takes money to be healthy in America now,” Frerick said. “It says a lot that Iowa has some of the world’s best soil — and some of the highest obesity and cancer rates.” The state ranks No. 2 for incidence of cancer and has the fastest growing rate of new cancer, according to an investigation by The Gazette.

Frerick argues that to address those issues, the federal government should “strip the USDA for parts, and give the antitrust authority to the Federal Trade Commission,” whose Biden-appointed Commissioner Lina Khan has been aggressive in fighting monopolies, including by detonating a proposed merger Albertsons and Kroger in February.

Second, Frerick thinks Congress should “end the Farm Bill and the entitlement programs as we know it — starting with crop insurance. That’s already blowing up within the Republican Party, and a coalition could be formed to sunset that program.”

Finally, he said, “let’s get animals back on the land.”

Asked what individuals can do, Frederick offered some suggestions: lobby local school districts and other public-sector interests to procure their food from local farms; spend to support “places that you think do it right.”

But he argued forcefully against the idea that individual decisions could pull America back from what he sees as a systemic problem. “I’m very conscious of the fact that my husband and I have the income to ‘buy our values,'” he said.

“At the end of the day, my goal is to improve the food quality at Dollar General.”