Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America
Autor Sonja Trom Eayrsen Limba Engleză Paperback – noi 2024
In a compelling firsthand account of one family’s efforts to stand against corporate takeover, Dodge County, Incorporated tells a story of corporate malfeasance. Starting with the late 1800s, when her Norwegian great-grandfather immigrated to Dodge County, Trom Eayrs tracks the changes to farming over the years that ultimately gave rise to the disembodied corporate control of today’s food system. Trom Eayrs argues that far from being an essential or inextricable part of American life, corporatism can and should be fought and curbed, not only for the sake of land, labor, and water but for democracy itself.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496234995
ISBN-10: 1496234995
Pagini: 344
Ilustrații: 17 photographs, 1 table, 4 charts, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: BISON BOOKS
Colecția Bison Books
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496234995
Pagini: 344
Ilustrații: 17 photographs, 1 table, 4 charts, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: BISON BOOKS
Colecția Bison Books
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Sonja Trom Eayrs is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, and 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 also serves as the business manager for the Trom family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota. For more information about the author, visit sonjatromeayrs.com.
Extras
1
Moving to the Country
“Living in the country can be a wonderful way of life for your family. The
experience will be more rewarding and enjoyable if you recognize the challenges
of rural living and plan accordingly.”—Minnesota Farm Bureau
Foundation, “Moving to the Country”
It was fall harvest in Dodge County. As I had done hundreds of times
before, I drove up the long driveway leading to the farmhouse on my
family’s 760-acre farm, our slice of heaven in the once-idyllic rural
countryside of southeastern Minnesota. After I parked, I spotted my
father, Lowell Trom, in the field just south of the house. I made a beeline
for the field and joined him on the combine. At the ripe age of
eighty-nine, my father’s hands were rough and weathered, yet he still
found such joy in fall harvest.
For farmers, fall harvest is the emotional equivalent of bringing in
the herd for cattle ranchers. We watched the yield monitor and smiled
when it jumped to over two hundred bushels per acre. Technology had
changed considerably during my father’s lifetime, but Lowell expertly
traversed the field in his beloved John Deere combine equipped with
an autosteer system. The yellow corn, like liquid gold, poured out of
the hopper and into the grain wagons waiting at the end of the field.
From there, my brother Jim pulled the wagon to the farm site, where
the grain was dried to just the right moisture content, then stored in
towering steel grain bins.
This harvest would be the last with my father, who passed away
the following year, in October 2019, at the age of ninety. His twilight
years were consumed by a series of legal battles that he and my mother
initiated in 2014 to protect our family farm from the encroachment of
industrial factory farms that had scarred the rural landscape, polluted
the air and water, harmed the economy, and affected human health in
Dodge County. Despite the lasting emotional costs of these lawsuits,
I wouldn’t hesitate to help them all over again. As my father once said
of the corporate takeover of Dodge, “Enough is enough.”
The Trom family farm is the heart of this story, and it’s where we
begin. The land was originally acquired in 1925 by my grandfather Elmer,
who was raised by my great-grandparents on a neighboring farm in
Dodge. Our operation is unusual for its meticulous layout, the result of
decades of careful planning. If you look at an aerial photo of the farm,
its core buildings—the farmhouse, the grain leg, the equipment sheds,
the grain bins—are surrounded on four sides by a towering perimeter
of more than five hundred arborvitae trees, which my father and uncle
had planted in straight rows going north and south or east and west to
provide a protective barrier from the high winds crossing the prairie.
For many years my mother, Evelyn, planted pink petunias each
spring all around the farmhouse. As her Parkinson’s advanced, she no
longer planted fresh flowers, instead opting for perennials. To this day,
her gardens and flowering crab trees burst with color each spring. The
greenery and flowers are joined by wildlife making their appearances
in seasonal turn: tundra and trumpeter swans in early spring; great
blue herons and egrets in late spring; foxes, rabbits, and bald eagles in
the summer; and, in the winter, the elusive snowy owl.
In my childhood memories of growing up on the farm, nothing was
ever out of place. You didn’t just drive along the field; you walked the
field and picked up rocks. You didn’t just mow the lawn; you carefully
trimmed around each tree and building. You didn’t just plant the fields;
you pulled weeds and cut “volunteer” corn out of the bean fields. If there
wasn’t work, I think my parents created work to keep us six kids busy.
Today, the Trom farm looks much as it did during my childhood,
notwithstanding the painstaking improvements in layout and technology
made over the years, a reflection of my father’s commitment to
the operation, his pride and joy. But when you leave our land and turn
onto the rural township road, it’s a different universe. You are abruptly
confronted with the realities of modern agriculture and industrial-scale
hog production, and they aren’t pretty.
Moving to the Country
“Living in the country can be a wonderful way of life for your family. The
experience will be more rewarding and enjoyable if you recognize the challenges
of rural living and plan accordingly.”—Minnesota Farm Bureau
Foundation, “Moving to the Country”
It was fall harvest in Dodge County. As I had done hundreds of times
before, I drove up the long driveway leading to the farmhouse on my
family’s 760-acre farm, our slice of heaven in the once-idyllic rural
countryside of southeastern Minnesota. After I parked, I spotted my
father, Lowell Trom, in the field just south of the house. I made a beeline
for the field and joined him on the combine. At the ripe age of
eighty-nine, my father’s hands were rough and weathered, yet he still
found such joy in fall harvest.
For farmers, fall harvest is the emotional equivalent of bringing in
the herd for cattle ranchers. We watched the yield monitor and smiled
when it jumped to over two hundred bushels per acre. Technology had
changed considerably during my father’s lifetime, but Lowell expertly
traversed the field in his beloved John Deere combine equipped with
an autosteer system. The yellow corn, like liquid gold, poured out of
the hopper and into the grain wagons waiting at the end of the field.
From there, my brother Jim pulled the wagon to the farm site, where
the grain was dried to just the right moisture content, then stored in
towering steel grain bins.
This harvest would be the last with my father, who passed away
the following year, in October 2019, at the age of ninety. His twilight
years were consumed by a series of legal battles that he and my mother
initiated in 2014 to protect our family farm from the encroachment of
industrial factory farms that had scarred the rural landscape, polluted
the air and water, harmed the economy, and affected human health in
Dodge County. Despite the lasting emotional costs of these lawsuits,
I wouldn’t hesitate to help them all over again. As my father once said
of the corporate takeover of Dodge, “Enough is enough.”
The Trom family farm is the heart of this story, and it’s where we
begin. The land was originally acquired in 1925 by my grandfather Elmer,
who was raised by my great-grandparents on a neighboring farm in
Dodge. Our operation is unusual for its meticulous layout, the result of
decades of careful planning. If you look at an aerial photo of the farm,
its core buildings—the farmhouse, the grain leg, the equipment sheds,
the grain bins—are surrounded on four sides by a towering perimeter
of more than five hundred arborvitae trees, which my father and uncle
had planted in straight rows going north and south or east and west to
provide a protective barrier from the high winds crossing the prairie.
For many years my mother, Evelyn, planted pink petunias each
spring all around the farmhouse. As her Parkinson’s advanced, she no
longer planted fresh flowers, instead opting for perennials. To this day,
her gardens and flowering crab trees burst with color each spring. The
greenery and flowers are joined by wildlife making their appearances
in seasonal turn: tundra and trumpeter swans in early spring; great
blue herons and egrets in late spring; foxes, rabbits, and bald eagles in
the summer; and, in the winter, the elusive snowy owl.
In my childhood memories of growing up on the farm, nothing was
ever out of place. You didn’t just drive along the field; you walked the
field and picked up rocks. You didn’t just mow the lawn; you carefully
trimmed around each tree and building. You didn’t just plant the fields;
you pulled weeds and cut “volunteer” corn out of the bean fields. If there
wasn’t work, I think my parents created work to keep us six kids busy.
Today, the Trom farm looks much as it did during my childhood,
notwithstanding the painstaking improvements in layout and technology
made over the years, a reflection of my father’s commitment to
the operation, his pride and joy. But when you leave our land and turn
onto the rural township road, it’s a different universe. You are abruptly
confronted with the realities of modern agriculture and industrial-scale
hog production, and they aren’t pretty.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Readiness for Responsibility
Part 1. The Takeover
1. Moving to the Country
2. Fertile Soil
3. The Big Pig Pyramid
4. The Meeting at Lansing Corners
5. Get Big or Get Out
6. The Battle in Ripley Township
Part 2. The Lawsuit
7. The Economics of the Great Pig Explosion
8. In the Tank for Big Ag
9. Getting to Know Your Neighbors
10. Industry Watchdogs
11. Risk of Pollution
Part 3. The Resistance
12. Don’t Drink the Water (or the Kool-Aid)
13. The Corporate Bully
14. In the Trenches
15. The Three-Day Stink Out
Part 4. The Reclamation
16. Corporate Indoctrination
17. The Pork Board
18. Feed the World
19. On the Front Lines
20. Expanding the Corporate Empire
21. A New Vision for Farm Country
Notes
Index
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Readiness for Responsibility
Part 1. The Takeover
1. Moving to the Country
2. Fertile Soil
3. The Big Pig Pyramid
4. The Meeting at Lansing Corners
5. Get Big or Get Out
6. The Battle in Ripley Township
Part 2. The Lawsuit
7. The Economics of the Great Pig Explosion
8. In the Tank for Big Ag
9. Getting to Know Your Neighbors
10. Industry Watchdogs
11. Risk of Pollution
Part 3. The Resistance
12. Don’t Drink the Water (or the Kool-Aid)
13. The Corporate Bully
14. In the Trenches
15. The Three-Day Stink Out
Part 4. The Reclamation
16. Corporate Indoctrination
17. The Pork Board
18. Feed the World
19. On the Front Lines
20. Expanding the Corporate Empire
21. A New Vision for Farm Country
Notes
Index
Recenzii
"Rooted in the intimate experiences of Sonja Trom Eayrs's farming family, Dodge County, Inc. is a powerful manifesto against the excesses of factory farming."—Willem Marx, Foreword Reviews
“Sonja Trom Eayrs has written a fast-paced legal thriller, filled with a few good guys and too many villains. I wish it was fiction, but it isn’t. Dodge County, Incorporated exposes the connection between lax regulation of a dangerous type of farming and the disastrous consequences to human health and the environment. . . . Buy it; read it; this is an important book for urban and rural people.”—Sarah Vogel, author of The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm
“Written with passion, meticulously researched, and vibrantly told, Sonja Trom Eayrs’s Dodge County, Incorporated gives a riveting insider’s account of how major food corporations infiltrated rural communities, hollowing out their economic vitality and leaving behind environmental ruin. The story of the Trom family farm and its intergenerational legacy draws us in, showing how individual lives have been harmed by the food monopolies. This is a must-read for anyone wanting a behind-the-curtain understanding of why rural farm communities are struggling—and a blueprint for reclaiming rights and equitable opportunities for family farmers.”—Joe Maxwell, cofounder of Farm Action
“Family farms have historically been a source of wealth and power in rural America. But greed and greater corporate consolidation in agriculture have hollowed out rural communities and forced family farms out of business. Sonja Trom Eayrs rings the alarm in Dodge County, Incorporated, speaking poignantly from her personal experience about how the American dream in southern Minnesota has been taken away from so many. It also reminds us that the people have the power to fight back and reclaim our broken food system for farmers, rural communities, and all Americans.”—Cory Booker, U.S. senator (New Jersey) and member of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
“Sonja Trom Eayrs draws a straight line between the stranglehold of Big Ag and the cruelty, stink, rampant waste, and degradation of water and land that plagues America’s heartland and threatens the livelihood of America’s independent family farmers.”—Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States
“This book is an absolutely urgent warning sent from America’s heartland. Sonja Trom Eayrs has spent years fighting the corporate takeover of the rural community where she grew up, and the story she tells here is riveting. This is a real-life David and Goliath story that matters to everyone who eats and everyone who cares about the future of farming and small-town America. While the pollution, animal cruelty, and exploitation of Big Ag can be dismaying, the fighting spirit of Trom Eayrs and her neighbors is truly inspiring.”—Christopher Leonard, New York Times best-selling author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business
“For more than a generation, the relentless—and reckless—profiteering of Big Ag corporations has decimated the rural economy, hollowed out tightly knit communities, and turned once-proud independent farmers into modern incarnations of the sharecropper and the serf. . . . Sonja Trom Eayrs brings this Kafkaesque upheaval to life in a narrative as personal as it is essential. Hers is the story of one farm family’s stand against a multi-billion-dollar global juggernaut, a searing indictment of Big Ag’s rapacity and greed, and an inspiring vision—still a ways off but attainable—of a food system and a rural landscape redeemed from the oppressor’s hand.”—Corban Addison, author of Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
“A riveting tour of one family’s journey fighting the barons that control our food system.”—Austin Frerick, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry
“Dodge County, Incorporated is the wrenching saga of how the rise of industrialized hog farming upended the work and the quality of life of a multigenerational Norwegian farm family in rural Minnesota. But as Sonja Trom Eayrs relates to us in her gripping account, the Trom family is just one of many rural families thrust into crisis in recent decades by dangerous changes in agriculture. These mega-farms do indeed produce more pork, much of it bound for Mexico and Japan and China, but they leave a trail of victims in America’s backyards. Communities hollow out, with the holdouts unable to fill the pews, not able to keep the hardware stores open, and too scattered to help raise a barn. This book is a firsthand account of an unfolding crisis and a wake-up call to policymakers that the industrialized model of agriculture is a cancer in rural America.”—Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy and New York Times best-selling author
“Sonja Trom Eayrs’s Dodge County, Incorporated is a rare firsthand, blow-by-blow account of the battles of a farm family and their neighbors defending themselves against the environmental and public health threats of large-scale, corporate-controlled concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. The book also reveals the global context within which these local battles are fought . . . [and] the inhumanity, if not outright evil, that seems an inseparable aspect of industrial animal agriculture. Trom Eayrs’s book is particularly compelling because hers is a story of a conventional farming family that, when surrounded by CAFOs, decided to take legal action and discovered the corporate takeover of their county.”—John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia
Descriere
In this compelling firsthand account, Sonja Trom Eayrs tells the story of one Dodge County family farm in rural Minnesota to expose the abuses wrought by corporate factory farms in terms of pollution, cancer clusters, waste, the destruction of local communities and economies, and the erosion of democracy.