A book review of ‘Dodge County, Inc: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America’

By Madeline Luke

mzlnd@yahoo.com

Ferguson Books in downtown Fargo hosted Sonya Trom Eayrs in November for the release of her book about the takeover of rural southern Minnesota by large animal factory farms or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). She is a Minneapolis lawyer, but also the farm manager daughter of a third generation farmer, Lowell Trom, who — until he died at the age of 90 — worked his 760-acre legacy farm and fought those who would ruin it saying, “enough is enough”.

There are now 30,000 hogs living within three miles of the farm and on the weekend of Lowell’s funeral, “local operatives spread manure on the land for nearly 36 hours…They spread it just steps from the funeral home in Bloom Prairie on the day of visitation…Brad (her brother) suffered a bloody nose caused by the raw waste hanging over the area with its noxious and inescapable stench. Spreading continued through the night and the following day. As our family gathered around my father’s rural gravesite, several family members had to remain in their vehicles, unable to bear the foul odor.”

Ms. Eayrs painfully documents the legal battles between her family and others concerned about loss of clean air, water and community cohesiveness, to say nothing of loss of economic development. She describes township and county officials with obvious conflicts of interest refusing to recuse themselves from permit decisions, takeover of township meetings by highly paid attorneys hired by CAFO operators, intimidation and harassment of not only the Trom family, but also anyone willing to oppose a CAFO. The dirtiest trick was intentionally swapping out the chair of the Dodge County Commissioners at the last minute so that the wrong person was served for the hearing on a lawsuit brought by the Troms. The lawsuit was thrown out on this technicality without a hearing to examine 500 pages of evidence of the harms to the Trom farm.

In addition to recounting the blow by blow action on the local level in Dodge County, Ms. Eayrs describes in highly footnoted detail how farmers went from independent business owners to largely contracted workers in a highly concentrated meat industry. In Iowa from 1990 to 2019, the number of CAFOs (which mostly raise hogs) increased 500%. Since the mid-1990s, 79% of hog farmers have gone out of business. While the profits of companies like Smithfield skyrocketed, the amount of money spent on food going to the producer decreased from 37 cents/dollar to 15 cents/dollar from the mid-1980s to 2019. Population loss and increased poverty levels follow the CAFOs.

Neither Republican nor Democratic administrations are willing or able to stand up to the meat industry, which thrives on anti-competitive practices. Ms. Eayrs follows the money trail that supports industrial animal factory farms. Profits from highly consolidated non-animal agriculture funnels money to the few banks that give out loans through the federal agency Farm Credit Services. Truly independent farmers are shut out from access to capital.

Check-off programs, a mandatory fee paid whenever an animal is sold, goes to industry lobbying that actively supports CAFO’s by promoting more meat consumption and “greenwashing” factory farm practices. Money goes to the educational system, starting with grade school pamphlets talking about happy CAFO pigs to supporting only CAFO-friendly ag research at universities and in some cases, silencing those who study the negative effects of high-density operations.

Her chapter on the environmental consequences of having so many hogs in a limited place is a primer on degradation of water and air pollution. In Iowa, the pig capital of the U.S., manure output is equivalent to that of Bangladesh, a country of 165 million people. “Agricultural exceptionalism” in federal law allows states and counties to pollute with abandon. The result in Dodge County is depleted groundwater, with the remaining water exceeding nitrate phosphorus and E. coli standards. She describes worker deaths from hydrogen sulfide in manure pits and cites statistics on illnesses from ammonia in the air.

Her reason for writing this book is to honor her father’s fight but also to rally those who continue to resist the onslaught of corporate animal factories. She cites two communities in North Dakota, Buffalo and Devils Lake, as places where the folks who have lived there for generations have thus far been able to stave off unwanted hog projects. But she warns in her book and again at her talk in November that North Dakota could be the next Iowa.