Austin Frerick’s e book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry” is on sale. This excerpt is printed with permission.
Chapter 1: The Hog Barons
Julie Duhn remembers her first time kayaking principally for its aftermath. When Duhn retired from her workplace job, she determined to start out experimenting with the game at Pine Lake State Park, close to her house in Eldorado, Iowa. The gathering of campgrounds and trails rings two small lakes that trickle into the Iowa River and is surrounded by rolling farmland. It was a sizzling afternoon in mid-August, only a few weeks after her first outing, when Duhn’s arms started to itch, then develop crimson and uncooked. She consulted a health care provider, who, after studying about her kayaking journey, blamed the rash on the lake water.
Certainly, the Iowa Division of Pure Assets has thought of Pine Lake unsafe for human contact since 2012. It retains an indication posted on the seaside to discourage guests from wading in. The issue is an overgrowth of algae, which feed on the phosphorus that regularly flows into the lake from close by farm fields unfold with fertilizer and manure. A state report concluded that one clear contributor is the waste produced by the ten,000 hogs within the lake’s watershed.
Iowa has lengthy been recognized for hog farming and was as soon as dotted with idyllic barns to accommodate the animals. However in the present day, a lot of the state’s hogs spend their lives in huge steel sheds often known as “confinements”: warehouses that permit operators to breed hundreds of pigs in a single constructing. The sheds are lengthy and skinny, with enormous exhaust followers on both finish, and every group of buildings contains a number of silos for storing feed, in addition to a dumpster to eliminate the roughly 10% of hogs that don’t survive until slaughtering time. After being weaned in these industrial services, the pigs are transferred to a ending operation to fatten up after which to the slaughterhouse. These two journeys in a packed semitrailer are the one occasions the pigs will see daylight.
Jeff Hansen and his spouse, Deb, constructed an empire out of those confinement sheds. The Hansens’ firm, Iowa Choose Farms, employs greater than 7,400 individuals, together with contractors, and brings about 5 million pigs to market yearly. Because the homeowners of Iowa’s largest hog operation, the Hansens have constructed tons of of confinement sheds in additional than 50 of Iowa’s 99 counties.
The sheds have provoked controversy in Iowa ever since operators such because the Hansens started to construct them throughout the Nineteen Nineties. Many rural communities, together with individuals resembling Julie Duhn, have campaigned fiercely towards them, citing damage to health, livelihoods, property values, the atmosphere, and the farm economic system.X5 Though their efforts have yielded small victories, they’ve misplaced the warfare.
The state’s hog business, led by the Hansens, has cultivated shut relationships with state politicians on either side of the aisle to roll again rules. At the same time as California has handed animal welfare legal guidelines and North Carolina has tightened its allowing program for confinement operations, the hog business in Iowa goes virtually unchecked. As we speak, Iowa raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, about as many because the second-, third-, and fourth-ranking states combined.
Since Iowa Choose was based in 1992, the state’s pig population has increased by greater than 50% whereas the variety of hog farms has declined by over 80%. Over the previous 30 years, 26,000 Iowa farms stop the long-standing custom of elevating pigs. As confinements changed farms, rural communities have continued to hole out.
Pigs in Iowa now outnumber human residents by a ratio of greater than seven to at least one, they usually produce a quantity of manure equivalent to the waste of nearly 84 million people, greater than the populations of California, Texas, and Illinois mixed. One professional estimated that every confinement facility produces “the identical quantity of waste as a metropolis of 90,000 to 150,000 individuals,” unfold over solely 640 acres with no sewage system.
The atmosphere merely can’t deal with a lot pig shit. In idea, this manure, when unfold on close by crop fields, is a helpful fertilizer. However residents and scientists alike level to proof that this “Mt. Everest of waste,” as one University of Iowa water researcher described it, is incessantly mismanaged. It filters via soil to underground pipes that discharge instantly into rivers, and when manure is overapplied, rain and snowmelt can rapidly channel it into waterways.
In consequence, as confinement operations have come to dominate pork manufacturing, they’ve degraded Iowa’s water high quality. Watersheds which can be dense with livestock have a higher nutrient overload. Most summers, the state closes two-thirds of its state park beaches to swimming for every week or extra, citing the well being threat of poisons or micro organism.
Nearer to the confinements, many rural residents say they’ve been plagued — and others pushed out — by the stench, the flies, and the well being hazards that accompany the services. “We all know what hog manure smells like, however this is sort of a sewer,” one retired farmer who lived subsequent to an industrial hog facility informed the Washington Put up.
The Hansens probably can’t see — or odor — any hog buildings from their 7,000-square-foot mansion, which is nestled inside a gated community in suburban Des Moines. Their view is dominated by the golf course on the unique Glen Oaks Nation Membership, which abuts their yard. In 2020, the Hansens’ firm jet recorded over 200 fights, together with a number of journeys to Naples, Florida, the place till not too long ago they owned a number of properties on the coast.
When Individuals take into consideration farmers, they in all probability don’t have jet-setting millionaires resembling Jeff and Deb Hansen in thoughts. However companies like theirs are more and more the norm in farm nation: huge, regional-scale corporations owned by only one or a number of households who use their political connections to overpower each native democracy and native companies.
Iowa Choose turned a behemoth as the results of a long time of deregulation that allowed energy to pay attention in our meals system. And it’s not simply smelly. It’s a tragic story of the company seize of my house state.
Steel Shed Farmer
Jeff and Deb Hansen grew up in Iowa Falls as typical farm youngsters. They graduated from the native highschool in 1976 and shortly married. Each went straight to work: Jeff helped on his father’s farm whereas Deb labored in a neighborhood farm insurance coverage workplace.
During the Hansens’ childhoods, Iowa’s wealthy soils supported a constellation of diversified single-family operations. Farmers grew corn and soybeans, however many additionally raised a flock of chickens, milked a small dairy herd, or grazed beef on pasture. As with many long-term funding portfolios, variety was a farm household’s lifeline.
Many household farmers thought of pigs to be a cornerstone of their farms. Farmers raised quite a lot of breeds in barns and in pens. Though many farmers stored hogs in each stage of the life cycle, others specialised in “farrowing” — breeding sows and elevating the litters — or shopping for “feeder” pigs, fattening them to maturity, after which auctioning them on the sale barns unfold in a grid throughout the Iowa countryside. These aggressive markets ensured a good value for farmers.
It was probably at simply such a sale barn that newlywed Jeff Hansen purchased his first three sows, which he stored in a transformed barn on his father’s property. Because the herd grew, the couple discovered the work grueling, notably Deb, who had stop her workplace job to handle the pigs. To lighten her load, the Hansens bought labor-saving tools resembling “elevated farrowing crates with metal slats, a feed pan and automated waterers,” according to National Hog Farmer, a trade magazine. Shortly greedy the potential of mechanized livestock tools, Jeff Hansen based his personal enterprise to construct confinement programs.
Animal warehouses had already remodeled the poultry business within the South throughout the Fifties and Sixties, and the model soon spread to different sectors and areas. They had been first extensively used with hogs within the late 1980s in North Carolina, the place a state legislator deregulated the business for his private profit. Dairy followed shortly thereafter, beginning in California.
A constant theme on this warehouse animal mannequin is that one state strikes first, triggering others to observe swimsuit. After confinements had been deregulated in North Carolina, Iowa adopted intently behind, determined to not lose its standing because the nation’s prime pork producer. Because the race to the underside sped up, the US Division of Agriculture did not cease it.
Large meatpackers, which buy and slaughter pigs and bundle pork, had been enthusiastic in regards to the shift to this mannequin. The meatpackers desire to purchase from confinement operations via manufacturing contracts as a result of they provide a gentle stream of pigs in predictable sizes which can be prepared for slaughter on a exact schedule. The mannequin is vastly extra worthwhile than shopping for from a patchwork of impartial growers, who promote pigs of assorted breeds and sizes at native auctions. As we speak, two-thirds of Iowa hogs are grown on contract with massive meatpackers. Consequently, the sale barns that dotted the Iowa countryside slowly closed, and so did the aggressive marketplace for promoting hogs.
In the meantime, commerce agreements that reduce tariffs and sidelined import restrictions in locations resembling Asia and Mexico swung open the doorways of a world marketplace for livestock merchandise, notably eggs and pork. Wall Avenue took discover; outdoors buyers performed a crucial position in financing the growth of confinement operations in Iowa.
Hardin County, the place the Hansens had been raised, was the proper place to reap the benefits of this hog increase. Though almost 90% of Iowa’s land space is dedicated to agriculture, its north-central area, smoothed by glaciers, has the fattest, richest cropland, which suggests it could actually accommodate copious quantities of manure and produce enormous portions of low-cost feed. The area additionally has plentiful groundwater (hogs are thirsty).
“At that time, there have been two issues I knew for certain,” Jeff Hansen informed Nationwide Hog Farmer. “Iowa was finest suited to construct an built-in pork manufacturing system and, second, I knew I may work out how one can do it.” The Hansens carved out a distinct segment by constructing the confinement sheds that may take over Iowa’s hog business. By the early Nineteen Nineties, they had been bringing in $90 million per 12 months assembling these confinements, often known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs for brief.
However after steadily increasing their confinement-building enterprise, the Hansens determined they may additionally earn cash by elevating their very own hogs. In 1992, Jeff Hansen integrated a brand new firm, Iowa Choose Farms, signed a contract with a meatpacker, and launched operations with a herd of 10,000 sows. Throughout its first 4 years, Iowa Choose greater than quintupled its herd to 62,000 sows, sufficient to price among the many prime 10 largest pork producers within the nation. By 1999, with 96,000 sows, it was promoting 1.7 million pigs per 12 months. As we speak, Iowa Choose Farms is the fourth-largest hog producer within the nation.
Soiled Water
As Iowa Choose constructed its empire, the impacts of its warehouses on the atmosphere and surrounding communities rapidly turned obvious.
On a really fundamental stage, the stench produced by confinements might be overwhelming. Throughout the sheds, highly effective exhaust followers are essential to continually suck out toxic gases rising from the manure lagoons. If the followers are shut off, the hogs die inside hours. That is precisely what occurred throughout the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted slaughterhouse operations and Iowa Choose wanted to rapidly kill tons of of hundreds of animals.
In Iowa, confinements are sometimes as shut as 1 / 4 mile from properties, faculties, and companies. In interviews and in years of stories protection, Iowans living near confinements have complained about air high quality too poor for his or her youngsters to play outdoors; about clouds of flies drawn to the enormous manure pits and lagoons; in regards to the exploding inhabitants of rats infesting properties, drawn by the huge shares of animal feed; and about vultures that snatch carcasses from animal warehouse dumpsters after which drop pig components in backyards.
Scientists have additionally documented unfavourable well being results amongst individuals who dwell close to confinements. One study of North Carolina residents who lived inside a number of miles of clustered confinements discovered that that they had a decrease life expectancy and better charges of toddler deaths, bronchial asthma, kidney illness, tuberculosis, and blood poisoning than those that lived farther away. Harmful ranges of ammonia, which causes burning within the eyes and respiratory tract in addition to power lung illness, have been measured in the air close to huge hog websites in Iowa for the reason that early 2000s. Communities close to hog operations additionally report larger charges of complications, sore throats, runny noses, coughs, and diarrhea than comparable areas with out hog confinements. A 2012 study found larger charges of neurobehavioral and pulmonary impairment in individuals dwelling inside 1.9 miles of a large hog facility and manure lagoon in Ohio than in a management group in Tennessee.
As of 2023, the US Environmental Safety Company nonetheless hadn’t even estimated airborne emissions from confinements with a purpose to regulate them under the Clean Air Act, regardless of quite a few cases of employees falling into manure pits and dying from the fumes. Confinement purposes generally promise to plant tree barriers to reduce air pollution, however the timber take a number of years to mature sufficient to be efficient, if they’re ever planted in any respect.
The confinements have additionally induced financial devastation in surrounding communities. It’s no secret that rural American economies have struggled for many years with excessive poverty charges and anemic job progress. Confinement operators argue that the roles they bring about are helpful to rural areas. Iowa Choose would possibly level to a 2017 study that it commissioned from Dermot Hayes, an Iowa State College economist with an extended document of supporting agribusiness (and of enterprise transactions with Jeff and Deb Hansen). Within the examine, Hayes credited the corporate with “reversing financial decline” in rural communities the place it constructed big sow barns.
But economists resembling Hayes typically fail to reveal their company funding and assist. Kate Conlow, an lawyer and former journalist, has documented how extensive this problem is amongst economists working in agriculture. Though many universities have disclosure insurance policies, Conlow famous that they’re infrequently enforced. This failure warps the general public debate.
In the meantime, a special economist at Iowa State discovered that the general economic system in these communities continues to degrade regardless of all the roles that Iowa Choose claims to offer. Reasonably than stemming the decline, “they’re truly one of many key mechanisms for driving individuals out of rural areas, regardless of the claims on the contrary.”
Even placing apart their financial affect, jobs at confinements are robust. Workers at sow farms monitor meals, water, and air flow; castrate, euthanize, artificially inseminate, and carry out being pregnant checks on the animals; take away useless hogs; power-wash services to take away manure; and wean litters. One former Iowa Select driver told the Guardian in 2019 that he earned $23,000 per 12 months working 12-hour days with no additional time pay. As Julie Duhn put it, “Is a job with Iowa Choose what you need in your youngsters?” Given how troublesome and poorly paid these jobs are, it’s no shock that Iowa Choose has employed undocumented employees.
Furthermore, this manufacturing mannequin depends on liberal use of antibiotics. Overuse of those medication is contributing to antibiotic resistance, not simply in pigs but in addition amongst people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, america now has a demise each quarter-hour from an antibiotic-resistant an infection. In response, public well being officers have been ringing the alarm bell and calling for much less use of those medication in hogs.
However in Iowa, the obvious affect of the confinements has been on the state’s water. In a confinement facility, hog manure drops via a slatted flooring and collects in a deep pool under. In some cases, that pool runs via a pipe to a manure pond or lagoon that holds the overflow. This waste can discover its method into the watershed, including to the air pollution brought on by fertilizer runoff. Gordon Garrison, a farmer in northwestern Iowa, told the Guardian that nitrate ranges within the water on his property almost doubled after a company constructed a shed housing as much as 8,800 pigs in a neighboring discipline.
Bob Havens, now in his 70s, discovered to swim in Pine Lake and constructed his home close to the lake 20 years in the past. Now, he stated, within the summertime, “the lake turns into this slimy inexperienced sludge” and billows of froth course via native culverts. Each are indicators of a harmful nutrient imbalance. In consequence, Havens lamented, “you [can’t] even canoe via it, not to mention fish.” Havens sees the air pollution as a matter of fairness. “A whole lot of people in Hardin County can’t afford a three-week trip within the Bahamas,” however they used to have Pine Lake for wonderful swimming, fishing, and boating. Now, he stated ruefully, “they simply can’t do it.”
The issue is dangerous sufficient throughout regular occasions, notably with older services, however it could actually develop into a disaster within the wake of the types of pure disasters which can be turning into extra widespread because the planet heats up. After latest catastrophic flooding in western Iowa, for instance, some livestock lagoons spilled over into nearby creeks, a course of that may trigger environmental devastation and threaten human well being and well-being. North Carolina confronted the same concern when greater than 50 livestock lagoons overflowed within the wake of Hurricane Florence, according to NPR reporting at the time. A latest report noted a large expansion of industrial animal facilities in Iowa’s hundred-year floodplains even within the face of those dangers.
These two intertwined components — overapplication of artificial fertilizers, principally to develop industrial animal feed, and pig waste from company farms — have created a water disaster in Iowa. To make water protected for human consumption, the Des Moines Water Works pays as much as $10,000 per day to treat it. This downside isn’t restricted to Iowa. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that Individuals pay virtually $1.7 billion per 12 months, primarily via larger water payments, to cope with this air pollution. The price might be overwhelming for communities, notably smaller ones with decrease budgets and poorer populations.
However even cities resembling Des Moines can barely sustain. The Raccoon River runs previous cropland and company hog operations in northern Iowa and meanders east to Des Moines, the place it gives 500,000 individuals in and round Iowa’s largest metropolis with consuming water. In fact, it probably carries a lot of the air pollution with it, together with from the manure produced by the Hansens’ hog operations. In 2015, Des Moines experienced 177 days of excessive nitrate ranges. In response, it sought to spend $80 million on a brand new nitrate removing facility to handle its growing needs.
Neutering the Backlash
As confinement buildings and their manure ponds unfold throughout the Iowa countryside throughout the Nineteen Nineties, a passionate rural backlash emerged, sparking a protracted battle over the way forward for farming in Iowa. Protesters packed gymnasiums and crowded hallways within the statehouse. Coalitions of household farmers threatened by this new mannequin, environmentalists, and neighboring residents and communities held rallies — one demonstration drew 1,000 supporters in a small city with a inhabitants of solely 2,700 — and lobbied legislators to enact a state moratorium on new confinement development.
The pushback towards confinements got here from all instructions. Proper-wing commentator Pat Buchanan even made opposition to confinements a key a part of his 1996 presidential marketing campaign in Iowa. “Farmers speak about it in every single place I’m going,” he informed the Los Angeles Instances after the Iowa caucuses. “Each time I carry it up, the viewers explodes.” Buchanan’s stunning close-second end within the Republican Iowa caucuses — to Kansas Sen. Bob Dole — elevated him from protest candidate to legitimate contender.
Though most massive company animal warehouse networks function in a number of states, the Hansens staked their complete operation on Iowa. However you’d be hard-pressed to say they had been welcomed. The fierce debate over confinements made the entrance web page of the Des Moines Register 12 months after 12 months within the mid-Nineteen Nineties. Nationwide newspapers incessantly lined the story. Even the Hansens’ house county proposed a moratorium on new confinements.
The Hansens and different business leaders probably knew that this opposition posed an existential risk to their booming companies. Rules and restrictions towards growth had been already being put in place in North Carolina, the state that had first deregulated the business and kicked off the hog increase. Though Iowa’s low-cost corn remained enticing, its lax regulatory requirements had been — and stay — the Hog Barons’ important requirement for achievement.
It’s simple to see why communities throughout the state revolted — and lots of proceed to revolt — towards the confinements. In actual fact, a recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents favored a moratorium on new company hog services. However regardless of the favored resistance to animal warehouses, legislators confronted stress from enterprise leaders to ask in much more of them. Agricultural economists sympathetic to giant operators such because the Hansens argued that if the state had been friendlier to hog operations, the expansion potential could be monumental.
In the summertime of 1993, a report referred to as “Venture 21” was introduced to the Des Moines enterprise leaders who had commissioned it. The 111-page paper, authored by a Virginia-based consulting agency, chided Iowa’s politicians and enterprise leaders for “complacency” with the state’s relative financial well being and its low price of unemployment. The report concluded that Iowa wanted to do extra to spice up progress, which meant that the household farm wanted to die. “Though it’s politically well-liked to defend and defend the idea of household farms,” the report proclaimed, “laws limiting company funding is financial folly.”
The sentiment touched a nerve. “We’re actually uninterested in this sort of nonsense,” a number one organizer for an anti-confinement group referred to as Prairiefire informed the Des Moines Register in response to the plan. “And if they need a battle within the Legislature, we’ll present them a battle they’d by no means imagined.” One Iowa farmer requested, “Why are they making an attempt to advertise one thing that may each harm the atmosphere and promote our younger individuals into lives of indentured servitude?”
Compelled to deal with the heated controversy, confinement operations marshaled their political energy to fend off regulation. In 1994, the newly shaped Iowa Pork Alliance enlisted Robert Ray, a Republican former governor, to remind Iowans of hogs’ financial significance in statewide tv adverts. Iowa Choose Farms, for its half, emphasised repeatedly within the press that any efforts to stifle the expansion of hog confinements would ship manufacturing and jobs out of state. Iowa Choose and its workers additionally donated $41,000 to the marketing campaign of Terry Branstad, the state’s Republican governor on the time, and employed his former chief of employees, Doug Gross, as a lobbyist. Branstad even appeared in an Iowa Choose tv promotion that 12 months.
The comfy relationship appeared to repay. In 1995, Branstad signed a regulation that may show to be pivotal for the Hansens, neutering native democracy to clear the way in which for his business’s improvement. The regulation, often known as H.F. 519, provided token protections to neighbors of confinements: new buildings needed to be sited a minimum of 1 / 4 mile from residences, and homeowners needed to write plans — which needed to be permitted by the state — for disposing of their manure.
However the regulation additionally handed animal warehouse operators an enormous victory by stripping counties of their long-standing authority to disclaim development permits to confinement operators. Jeff Hansen described the regulation as a “honest compromise” and judged it adequate to maintain the Hansens’ enterprise within the state. “We’re going to continue to grow in Iowa,” he informed the Des Moines Register.
The problem later turned a distinguished matter within the 2002 governor’s race between Doug Gross, the Iowa Choose lobbyist, and Democrat Tom Vilsack. Whereas campaigning, Vilsack — who would later function secretary of agriculture for Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden — derided Gross as a champion of company hog tons. However as state senator, Vilsack had voted for H.F. 519.
Vilsack ended up successful the race. His second time period, from 2002 via 2006, coincided with the biggest confinement-building increase in Iowa’s historical past.
From “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry” by Austin Frerick ©2024 by Austin Frerick. Reprinted by permission of Island Press. All rights reserved.
Concerning the creator
Austin Frerick is an professional on agricultural and antitrust coverage. He labored on the Open Markets Institute, the U.S. Division of Treasury, and the Congressional Analysis Service earlier than turning into a Fellow at Yale College. He’s a seventh-generation Iowan and first-generation school graduate, with levels from Grinnell Faculty and the College of Wisconsin-Madison.
Concerning the e book
From the writer: “Barons” is the story of seven company titans, their rise to energy, and the implications for everybody else. The tales are examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that in the present day outline American meals. The tycoons are hardly distinctive: many different firms have manipulated our lax legal guidelines and failed insurance policies for their very own profit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. “Barons” paints a stark portrait of the implications of company consolidation, nevertheless it additionally exhibits we will select a special path. A good, wholesome, and affluent meals business is feasible — if we take again energy from the barons who’ve robbed us of it.