
In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System
March 26, 2024 | Source: Civil Eats | by Twilight Greenaway
With his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, Austin Frerick set out to unravel the tangled history of today’s agriculture industry, while simultaneously pursuing the answer to a very personal question: What happened to the vibrant, diverse Iowa he once called home?
“The state is blessed with some of the world’s best soil: ‘black gold,’ which, coupled with consistently good rainfall, makes for ideal farming conditions,” writes Frerick, a fellow at Yale University’s Thurman Arnold Project, a research effort focused on competition policy and antitrust enforcement. “I wanted to understand how this blessing has, over the past 40 years, turned into a curse.” How, he wonders, has the countryside become “so industrial that it no longer feels like countryside at all?”
But Barons, which took Frerick five years to write, is not a memoir. It’s a detailed look at seven families that have risen to power within the food industry and, more importantly, the story of the system that has allowed them to concentrate power, reap enormous profits, and shape our political landscape. He digs into the policies that allowed white farmers to displace farmers of color in the 20th century and contrasts the “New Deal Farm Bill”—his term for the bill as it was originally intended—with today’s “Wall Street Farm Bill.”