Monopoly Money: On the Iowa Hog Barons Behind Your Bacon

In this episode of Unconfined, author Austin Frerick discusses the barons who dominate US food production, including an Iowa farm couple who spun enormous, manure-spewing hog operations into a vast fortune.   

Meet the Barons Behind Our Food

By Tom Philpott                                                                                                                                                                     Subscribe to Host Notes

For years, researchers and farm advocates have recited statistics illustrating the capture of the US food supply by a handful of corporations. I can almost list them off the top of my head. Just four giant companies slaughter and pack 54 percent of chickens. For pork (67 percent) and beef (85 percent), the four-firm concentration rate is even higher. And it's not just industrial farm animal production that bears the weight of this hyper-consolidation. Bread, salty snacks, and even beer are similarly top-heavy in terms of corporate ownership.  

Abundant research shows that these cartel-like economic arrangements translate to lower wages for workers and more hardship for farmers; while contributing to a generally low-quality diet for consumers. Yet it's notoriously difficult to get people to care about the topic. The phrase corporate consolidation "just sounds wonky," an editor once told me. And the word monopsony—the power mega-corporations exert on their suppliers, which includes workers and farmers—generates about as much excitement as a call from a telemarketer.  

On this episode of Unconfined, we talk to the writer who cracked the code for how to make the topic accessible and even fun to talk about: Austin Frerick, author of the 2024 book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry. Simply put, Frerick names names and tells the stories behind the faceless corporate forces that dominate US food. His book generated loads of chatter upon its publication last year—far more than any similarly themed book that I can remember.  

Frerick has impeccable credentials as a policy wonk. After a stint working in the US Treasury Department under President Barack Obama, he has had fellowships at Drake and Yale universities. But he also grew up in rural Iowa in a working-class family, and watched the transformation of its landscape as the rapidly consolidating meat industry drove livestock from pastures to the massive metal sheds known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. In both Barons and in our interview, he combines factual rigor with a natural storyteller's gift for the vivid detail that brings a complex topic to life. Tune in!     

Note 

Early on in the conversation, Frerick and I discuss a 2012 article on contract poultry farming by Lina Khan, who would go on to serve as chair of the Federal Trade Commission under President Joe Biden. You can find this seminal Washington Monthly piece, titled "Obama's Game of Chicken," here.