Austin Frerick’s captivating and necessary book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (March 2024, Island Press), is a road trip through America’s heartland — but not the one depicted in Grant Wood’s paintings of rural Iowa. Where Wood depicted an early 20th century lush with rolling fields of green, Frerick’s contemporary America details manure lagoons, algae-bloomed lakes and windowless buildings overflowing with cattle.
For many Iowans, these depictions won’t be new. Even for those of us who haven’t visited our local concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, the fetid stench and filthy water are a daily reality here (one University of Iowa professor described their source as a “Mt. Everest of waste”). But the byproducts of industrial ag are only background in Frerick’s Barons, which focuses instead on the cause of these terrors — corporate consolidation and abuse of power in the U.S. food system.
Through engaging and richly researched storytelling, each chapter centers around “barons” — the individuals and their companies — that monopolize different food sectors: pork, grain, coffee, dairy, berries, beef and grocery. In these captivating vignettes, Frerick shows how agriculture, which once featured an abundance of family farms, robust competing businesses and thriving small towns, has been decimated and replaced by single corporate behemoths like Cargill, founded in Conover, Iowa and today the country’s largest private company.
As the book unfolds, Frerick deftly illuminates how decades of big-business-friendly government officials have worked to undermine and reverse labor, environmental and other laws. In particular, Frerick focuses on years of erosion of the U.S. antitrust laws, which were enacted to ensure robust competition and impede consolidation of power through accumulation of capital. Interestingly, the nation’s first antitrust law was enacted in the 1800s right here in Iowa, and it was farmers — reacting to abusive business practices by monopolistic grain elevators and railroads — that led the effort for fair markets and competition.
It is ironic then that 150 years later, underenforcement of antitrust laws has allowed ag companies to merge and concentrate market and financial power, at the expense of regular Americans. Frerick shows how, through this power, big ag has been able to raise prices, lower quality and undermine workers’ rights.
For example, Frerick explains how, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as beef prices soared (increasing 25 percent in June 2020, year-over-year) supposedly due to supply chain and inflation issues, meatpacking monopolists “paid out more than $3 billion in dividends to shareholders” while “exporting record amounts of meat.” Meanwhile, slaughterhouse jobs, once a path to the middle class, continue to be among the lowest paying and most dangerous in the country.
Amassed political power also paved the way for the degradation of local communities and the environment: When Iowans’ popular opposition to CAFOs threatened construction plans, Frerick says agricultural monopolists used their power to influence government officials, while cutting local communities out of the permit approval process. Today, CAFOs can be constructed closer to streams and homes, with devastating consequences to Iowa’s waterways and human health.
Frerick is a Cedar Rapids native whose career has been in agricultural competition policy, so his choice here to examine corporate abuse of power in American ag makes sense. I met Frerick in 2022 at an antitrust conference, when he was a fellow at Yale’s Thurman Arnold Project (an organization named after the former trustbusting assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division). Prior to Yale, Frerick worked at the U.S. Department of Treasury and Open Markets Institute, an antimonopoly nonprofit.
Although this road trip through Iowa and beyond is a far cry from the green hills of Grant Wood’s paintings, it is not all corruption and greed. Frerick’s book shines light on the commonality among us that is so often lost in these dark times. Iowans are more similar than we would otherwise be made to believe. In Frerick’s world, the true division is between the corporate elite, extracting as much from our state as they can, and Iowans who just want to drink clean water and live in a town where community, opportunity, and hope exist
Map: Frerick’s Barons Road Trip
This article was originally published in Little Village’s April 2024 issue.
