Episode #278
Austin Frerick: Food Barons – Live At Churchtown

Austin Frerick brings his food barons argument to the Churchtown stage with a sharp, wide-ranging look at how monopoly power took hold across the American food system. Drawing from his book Barons, he connects corporate concentration to Cargill, crop insurance, ethanol, price fixing, foreign ownership, shrinking farm diversity, and the steady extraction of wealth from rural communities, while also offering a more hopeful vision of what antitrust reform and a different farm policy could make possible.

Austin Frerick’s stage talk has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Austin Frerick speaks at the Saving Real Organic conference at Churchtown Dairy, September, 2025

Austin Frerick 0:01
I always have the depressing job of telling you everything that’s wrong, and we’ve brought some people who will hopefully help us come up with solutions on antitrust. Austin Frerick is one of those people who has been studying the consolidation in the food system and is going to help us find some answers.

Linley Dixon 0:18
If you haven’t read his book, “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” it’s excellent. Everybody, pick up a copy of “Barons,” and welcome Austin Frerick.

Austin Frerick 0:38
Before I get started, two quick notes. First of all, thank you, Linley and Dave. They’ve been huge champions of my book. This is my first book, and having people like this… Dave was handing out my book like hot cakes to people, and that really helped me.

Austin Frerick 1:01
Also, Abby, this is a beautiful barn. I keep looking up, and I can’t get over it. I’ve been in a lot of barns in my life, and they’re just nothing like this.

Austin Frerick 1:03
Before I get going, I want to show you guys this statement. I’m kind of changing things up today. Usually, I end with this slide, but I want to start with this slide because, right now, I just get the sense that regardless of your politics in America, everyone’s just kind of grim. Also, no one’s articulating a positive vision. This is my positive vision for the food system.

Austin Frerick 1:24
Part of this positive vision is this: never forget, the system we have now is radical. It is radical that one man in Iowa raises 5 million hogs. So much of what we’re talking about today is traditional. I show you that map of Iowa. I’m from Cedar Rapids, and that map of Italy is – I want Iowa to be the Tuscany of North America.

Austin Frerick 1:50
Right now, people need that hope. They need that vision to get through this dark moment, to get over this robber baron era. Part of my goal with my book, which I called Barons, is that I want to harken back to that old Gilded Age. I just think we’re in another similar moment, and it was that last Gilded Age that ushered in a reform era. I think we’re on the cusp of a similar moment.

Austin Frerick 2:08
Also, let me just add what I love about this. You know that story of blind people touching an elephant, and they each describe something different? That’s kind of how I view the food system. Everyone in America sees it’s not working, but for different reasons.

Austin Frerick 2:26
I just presented this book at the largest vegan festival in America. I presented it in Deadwood, South Dakota, to cattle ranchers. I’ve been on Glenn Beck’s TV network. I’m a big believer that things get done in America when weird bedfellows get together, and you just have to embrace it.

Austin Frerick 0:00
The way my book is structured is I have eight robber barons, and I just added Sysco to my paperback because that’s the thing I kept hearing from anyone in the restaurant industry. But each baron is really a narrative device to tell a structural story.

Austin Frerick 2:59
Let’s take JAB Holding Company. You’ve probably never heard of them. They’re my secret German coffee baron. This secret German family now sells more coffee than Starbucks. They rolled up the coffee industry.

Austin Frerick 3:11
Fairlife – Fairlife is my nerdiest chapter. Have you heard of it? It’s fancy, bougie milk. Coca-Cola owns it. I don’t even know if you call it milk because it’s super ultra-pasteurized. But that chapter is about checkoffs. I think checkoffs control the conversation in agriculture.

Austin Frerick 3:29
That’s what I’m doing with the book – showing you these different things and telling you through these punchy narratives. But before I get going, I’m going to show you a few of these slides. For the longest time, Big Ag justified its BS because it said it “made the food system cheap.”

Austin Frerick 3:46
Here’s the thing – when you pull the data, that’s not factually true anymore. Indulge me for a nerd moment: they’re correct when they say, as a percent of income, Americans spend the least amount of money. But here’s the thing – we live in a have-and-have-not moment. The bottom half of Americans haven’t experienced that wage growth. So, when you look at per-capita expenditure, we actually spend more money on food than most of our peers.

Austin Frerick 4:12
Here’s the good thing about the USDA: they have really good data. They always frame things in a pro-industry way. Once you actually pull the data sets, you can find a very different story than what USDA is telling you. Here’s the thing, though – we shouldn’t be shocked. I think the food markets are the most concentrated sector in America.

Austin Frerick 4:33
Even when we talk about food, we use national figures. Four companies have X percent of beef. Food is local. You’re not taking your milk from New Mexico and selling it in Maine. My buddy Pat Hardin wrote a paper two years ago in New England. He documented that one company has an 85% market share in fluid milk. I don’t need a PhD in economics to know you’re not paying a fair price when milk markets are that concentrated.

Austin Frerick 4:58
Then Bloomberg did a story a few years ago, right before Thanksgiving, where every protein in America – including tuna and salmon – was under investigation for price-fixing. And then two weeks later, turkey was too.

Austin Frerick 5:09
Because here’s the thing – when markets are this concentrated, it’s really easy to act like a cartel. What’s getting scary now is it used to be you’d meet up at a hotel by the interstate. Now, these companies share their data. You might have heard of Agri Stats.

Austin Frerick 5:25
This weird chart you see shows all the different protein companies in the world and the proteins they sell, and how they share their information. Let’s take chicken. What Tyson and all of them do is they tell this company how many little baby chickens they have in the pipeline. Then this company de-identifies it, puts it together, and gives it back to the chicken companies so they can model out what the market will be – so they can essentially reduce supply.

Austin Frerick 5:40
Here’s the thing – this is happening across the economy. You might have heard of it in apartment markets in big cities. Apartment landlords are doing this, and it’s driving up prices. This is my favorite nerdy example of that phrase, “a picture says a thousand words.” The blue line you see shows what Americans pay for beef in the grocery store.

Austin Frerick 6:13
In red, that’s what ranchers are paid. You see in 2015 a divergence. That gap right there – that’s pure monopoly. If you notice, the gap is the widest during early COVID. Imagine you’re seeing farmers being shortchanged like that. But imagine what it’s doing to real communities.

Austin Frerick 6:33
To me, the best example of this is – fun fact – McDonald’s buys the most beef in the world. Usually, in most industries, you treat your largest customer the best. McDonald’s even filed lawsuits against the packers for price gouging this fall. Things are bad when McDonald’s says it’s bad.

Austin Frerick 6:51
Also, the thing to keep in mind is I really think the most corrupt academic discipline in America is agricultural economics. I say this because I realized while writing my book that every industry has a go-to hack.

Austin Frerick 7:05
Here’s the thing – in response to the Great Recession, we realized the banking industry paid for all this literature to justify bank deregulation. So, what we did is we required the academic journals to list their disclosures. If you’re going to say “deregulate the banks,” you have to say Bank of America paid for it.

Austin Frerick 7:23
What this young lawyer, fellow Iowan Kate Conlow, documented was that the editors are not enforcing their own policies. She highlighted a certain academic who brags about all the corporate money he takes on his website, edits a journal, doesn’t disclose it, and he’s the one that goes on NPR and says, “You’re not being gouged at the store.” This really corrupts the conversation.

Austin Frerick 7:47
Also, I should say this system just makes bad-tasting food. Its inputs matter, especially meat and dairy. The New York Times rated butters last year, and they rated Kerrygold the number one butter. Here’s the thing, though – most Americans eat butter from New Mexico.

Austin Frerick 8:02
The scary fact is New Mexico does three times more dairy than Vermont now because you have these massive industrial feedlots. The cows are in the desert, they eat a bunch of corn all day, and they make a really bad product. All Kerrygold is just old-fashioned dairy. It’s cows on pasture.

Austin Frerick 8:21
Let me just talk about one baron today – Cargill. Cargill is my grain baron. But here’s the thing with Cargill. Cargill is, I would say, the second most powerful company in the food system, but we know so little about it. I compare Cargill as the best modern-day example of Standard Oil. They move one in four grains globally.

Austin Frerick 8:43
Take this from one of their brochures. This is literally what they wrote: “We are the flour in your bread, the wheat in your noodle, the salt on your fries. We are the corn in your tortillas, the chocolate in your dessert, the sweetener in your soft drink. We are the oil in your salad dressing, the beef, pork, or chicken you ate for dinner, the cotton in your clothing, the backing on your carpet, and the fertilizer in your field.”

Austin Frerick 9:06
First of all, that’s good prose. You’ve got to give them credit – but that’s power. This whole chapter to me is about the farm bill because the original farm bill is rooted in Goldilocks – how do you produce enough for the markets, but not overproduce, so you’re trying to establish some kind of balance?

Austin Frerick 9:28
Here’s the thing – Cargill hated it because they wanted to overproduce grains as much as possible. They thought FDR was Marxist. But first of all, it turns out well-regulated markets are good for business. Cargill went from a regional player to a national player during that era.

Austin Frerick 9:44
But what I document is you see a systematic assault on the farm bill since then to essentially break the Goldilocks framework and move to an overproduction model where now the farm bill picks favorites. You get tons of subsidies if you grow corn; you get nothing if you grow carrots. It’s all designed for Cargill.

Austin Frerick 10:01
I call it the Wall Street Farm Bill. To me, the 1996 one is when it just goes really off the rails. To put Cargill’s size in context, add the tax revenue of every state you see in green together – that is how much revenue Cargill does in a year. Keep in mind, they’re bigger than the Koch brothers, and the family owns about 90% of the company. It’s the largest private company in America.

Austin Frerick 10:25
I think the best example of the corporate capture of the Farm Bill is crop insurance. I know a lot of you in this room know this, but most Americans, when they hear crop insurance, think thunderstorms and stuff. What I realized is it took me about two years to understand crop insurance. It’s designed to hide the subsidy.

Austin Frerick 10:44
They realized giving checks to industrial farmers looks optically bad, so they did it indirectly through insurance, where 60% of the premium is paid by taxpayers. It’s just insurance for low prices, and there’s no cap on it.

Austin Frerick 11:00
Fun fact, Bill Gates owns some of the largest farmland in America, so he can get as much low-price crop insurance as he wants. Keep in mind, what this does is push people to grow corn and soy. I’m from Iowa. If you don’t do corn and soy, it’s really hard to make the economics work.

Austin Frerick 11:20
I think the best example of the USDA’s failure in this framework is this stat: for every dollar you spend to store what a farmer gets, after those New Deal reforms, more than 50 cents on the dollar went back to farmers. We’re now at the lowest ever recorded in American history. It’s around 11 cents. For the nerds out there, the colors are different lines because methodology changed.

Austin Frerick 11:42
But imagine what rural America would be if 40 cents on the dollar went back to them. Keep in mind, I have a very Iowa view of things. I view rural America now as an extraction colony. These communities are producing more than ever, and none of the wealth is staying there.

Austin Frerick 11:57
The other thing here is this great book by Julie Guthman at the University of California, Santa Cruz. You need money now to be healthy in America. We frame obesity as personal when it’s really structural.

Austin Frerick 12:14
Here’s something else I realized, from a conversation with a banker in Iowa. I asked Liz Garst, “Why are all the silos I grew up with in Iowa gone or collapsing?” She explained, “What this Farm Bill does is think of a family farm like a diverse retirement portfolio. You have different things going on, so if one market craters, you have other incomes. What this system does is push people into one or two things, and they become very fragile.”

Austin Frerick 12:39
It used to be that a farmer would grow grain to feed their own animals. Now, you grow corn, sell it to Cargill, who makes feed, gives it to the confinement owner, who then gives it back to Cargill. What this chart from the Wall Street Journal shows is that family farms used to have a lot more things going on.

Austin Frerick 12:57
This is the hill I’ll die on. I think one of the most modern-day destructive things to happen to the family farm is ethanol. I think ethanol really broke the Midwest. The single largest use of corn in America is ethanol. There’s a water crisis in Iowa right now. Des Moines has been under a water advisory this summer.

Austin Frerick 13:15
Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in America. Iowa has an obesity crisis. Iowa is the canary in the coal mine for the food system. Iowa used to be a purple state, and now it’s had the biggest political swing in modern American history. We saw what happens.

Austin Frerick 13:32
Anyone who says ethanol is good for the climate in 2025 thinks the world is flat. First of all, I said that at Iowa State last year, and I didn’t get chased off campus. Not only that, everyone knows it. My dad’s an ethanol truck driver. Ted Cruz won the caucuses in 2016 opposing ethanol. Democrats are so afraid to touch this. There’s no vested interest in ethanol anymore.

Austin Frerick 13:58
But then you have people like Tom Vilsack saying, “Let’s put ethanol in airplanes,” because, by the way, his son works for an ethanol pipeline company.

Austin Frerick 14:08
Then finally, I end this chapter with this: I originally thought of Cargill like Standard Oil. I think a better comparison is the modern-day 19th-century British Empire. The sun never sets on their empire. Cargill is still in Russia because you don’t know who they are. They don’t feel the pressure to leave.

Austin Frerick 14:25
I think the scariest example is a report Oxfam did 10 years ago. Colombia had a massive civil war. A quarter million people died, and part of what they did to fix their society was limit how much land you could own. Not only did Cargill exceed it; they exceeded it by about 30 times. That’s what’s so scary – when you have so much power concentrated in so few hands with very little oversight.

Austin Frerick 14:54
This is that coffee baron I mentioned. Keep in mind, the family never sold a bean of coffee in America until 2012. They then threw all their money at this market and bought all these brands you see right here: Peet’s Coffee, Keurig, and Stumptown. In finance, they call this a roll-up. What the family did was see a competitive market and then get the dominant market position.

Austin Frerick 15:16
The person being shortchanged the most here is the coffee farmer, because what used to be 20 buyers of beans is now one secret German family. They dominate quickly. They actually just did this with vet clinics. This sounds awful to say, but they realized people are economically irrational about their pets, so they bought over 1,500 vet clinics.

Austin Frerick 15:40
Luckily, I think one of the best political appointees by President Biden was Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, and her team put a stop to this. I can complain about Vilsack all day, but I think Lina Khan is the opposite end of that – she’s what happens when you get really good people in positions of power.

Austin Frerick 15:58
Also, I want to make this point about that chapter, and I think it’s forgotten history but so important for this moment: Monopolist finance equals fascist. After World War II, Congress commissioned a report: How did this happen? One of their big findings was that Hitler’s largest donor was a chemical company called IG Farben.

Austin Frerick 16:10
There’s a great book on this called The House of Kartell. I recommend reading it. They said that IG Farben gave him his largest donation, and the congressional report said that donation made the dreams of Mein Kampf come true.

Austin Frerick 16:27
After World War II, we broke up those monopolies. We broke up IG Farben into seven companies. You might have heard of one of them today – it’s called Bayer-Monsanto. And Driscoll’s – I’ve got to touch on Driscoll’s in this room. Here’s the thing with Driscoll’s, conversation for later: they’re doing the chicken model of production. They sell one in three berries, but they don’t grow a single berry. They contract out production.

Austin Frerick 16:50
The scariest thing, and part of what this chapter does, is show that anything labor-intensive in the food system is moving offshore, because the system pushes everyone to do row crops. So now 40% of the vegetables and 60% of the fruit come from outside of America.

Austin Frerick 17:05
First, that’s usually awful-tasting product because those items are engineered for durability. Second, it really undermines people doing it right. There was a great LA Times series 10 years ago about how, when these systems move offshore, transparency collapses. You see worker abuse and environmental abuse. We have children now picking berries for children in America. You cannot compete on price against these production models.

Austin Frerick 17:32
Finally, what do we do? So much of the goal in my book is to understand how we got to this moment in order to fix it. Because there’s this story told over and over – that this was all about efficiency. It wasn’t. This is just a story of regulatory capture.

Austin Frerick 17:42
But where do we go from here? I actually think this is the most important thing we could do, and this is my silver lining. Ethanol is going to die. Cars are moving to hybrids and electric vehicles. Remember Wile E. Coyote from Looney Tunes? It’s like watching him run off a cliff.

Austin Frerick 18:01
My big thing is, I want to take that land used for ethanol production and put animals back on the land. It makes a better-tasting product, it restores middle-class family farms, and you know what? Robots can’t do cows on pasture.

Austin Frerick 18:21
Number two, bright-line rules. Never forget, it’s such a simple thing. The goal of any corporate executive is monopoly, so you have a tension. How do you stop that? Iowa has this law on the books. We don’t enforce it, but it’s called the Packer Ban. It says, if you’re a slaughterhouse, once you’re so big, you can’t own animals.

Austin Frerick 18:43
If you enforced this rule in Iowa, you’d break up most meat companies. We should do this nationally, because the largest owner of hogs in America is Smithfield, and it’s Chinese-owned. They own one in four, one in five hogs. Start thinking that way.

Austin Frerick 18:57
Another thing, we used to have a rule going back to Teddy Roosevelt that slaughterhouses couldn’t be in retail. If we enforced that rule, we would stop Walmart. I don’t know if you know, Walmart’s making aggressive plays right now into dairy and beef, because Walmart was sick of being shortchanged by these barons.

Austin Frerick 19:15
Walmart was sick of USDA failing, so Walmart took things into its own hands, and I do not want to count on Walmart to save us. Also, we should think about once companies get so big, they shouldn’t be allowed to buy companies. The dirty secret of Sysco is, I calculated Sysco bought over 216 companies. They don’t compete; they buy.

Austin Frerick 19:36
Next one is, going back to this hope, as we phase out this old system, how do we build up the new? I want to do that through institutional buyers. There’s this cool program in Wisconsin right now where, historically, we dumped our surplus food on Native American tribes. What they’re doing is buying food from Native American farmers and giving it to Native American people.

Austin Frerick 20:00
First of all, people want stories like that right now. They want these proof of concepts, because it’s hard to tinker with this, but you’ve slowly seen them ramp up. My goal is, how do we take these things being done locally and then scale them in the next reform movement we have?

Austin Frerick 20:10
I learned this from Marion Nestle’s newsletter this week. I highly encourage people to subscribe. But California just did a ban on ultra-processed foods. You’re seeing a lot of cool things going on locally. Four is to rethink the Farm Bill.

Austin Frerick 20:27
I’m just done with the Farm Bill. It locks in this current system because right now, it’s picking favorites. I want to move to a Farm Bill that rewards farm practices, not crops. I’d rather collapse all three programs into something called a stewardship payment and let farmers decide what’s best for their land. Pick these different conservation programs. But right now, we lose in this current system. This current system is for Oreos, chips, and pop.

Austin Frerick 20:54
Fifth, and this is one I’ve been kind of workshopping, is that historically in America, if you wanted to own a TV station or radio, you had to be American. This whole system fell apart because of a guy named Rupert Murdoch. But I think we should think this way with the food system. What’s really weird about the meat industry especially, is most meat companies now in America are foreign-owned. They’re state-backed monopolies from China or Brazil.

Austin Frerick 21:23
Number six is to rethink USDA. Here’s one little example. So, I talked about how great Lina Khan was at the Federal Trade Commission. She was able to essentially look into all these monopolies in different markets. Here’s the thing, she couldn’t do meat packing. USDA has a carve-out for it.

Austin Frerick 21:41
Vilsack, being Vilsack, this joke might not work, but in Iowa, I call Vilsack like – you know the musical “The Music Man”? He’s like Harold Hill. Vilsack will tell you what you want to hear, but his words mean nothing. The fact is, under the Biden administration, the meat markets got more concentrated. Every major meat company bought something, including Walmart getting into the beef space.

Austin Frerick 21:57
Let’s take that authority away from USDA, because it’s clear that they’re incompetent at executing it, and put it at the Federal Trade Commission. But it’s about thinking this way – how do we rethink these agencies?

Austin Frerick 22:12
Number seven, especially in this room, journalists are your best friends. See something, say something. Especially in rural America, most journalists are making nothing and moving a mile a minute. Here’s one little example. I was having dinner with someone a year ago. She was telling me Iowa has this great program where the state pays hunters – where if you donate your buck to a local meat locker, the state pays the meat locker to process it and gives it out to the food banks. What a great program.

Austin Frerick 22:41
Here’s the thing she was telling me: no one was testing for lead in the bullets. I told this reporter, another Iowan, Nina, who did a big investigation where only the state of Minnesota now tests for lead in the bullets. But now we know.

Austin Frerick 22:54
Another, this kind of more crude example is, you know that movie “Fargo”? You know the woodchipper scene at the end? Some confinement person in Western Iowa is doing that with their industrial hogs. About 10% of pigs die inside a metal shed, and they’re just throwing the pig parts on the field. This older lady in Iowa was driving and saw it.

Austin Frerick 23:10
She called the DNR. The DNR didn’t do anything in Iowa because they’re so broken. But you know what she did? She called the local TV station. Guess what? That story blew up, and something was done.

Austin Frerick 23:24
In moments like this, you have to take things into your own hands right now. Even if you see a story and you don’t like the way a journalist quoted someone or framed something, don’t get mad on Twitter. Send a nice email. “Hey, let me tell you about the Real Organic Project. Let me tell you about this farmer you should interview instead.” That really does matter. Reporters know if you’re emailing them in a genuine way.

Austin Frerick 23:43
Number eight, and this is my big goal too, is when you elect a president or a governor, you’re electing a ton of appointees who are in these positions of power. You could try to tell a Driscoll’s person to do the right thing if they’re a USDA official, or you can take someone in this room and put that person in a position of power. It’s a very different conversation.

Austin Frerick 24:03
Another thing too, and this is what I enjoy, is writing and researching this stuff. What should these systems look like? Take dairy. Honestly, dairy is one of the most complicated programs for me to understand. The joke in the dairy industry I’ve heard is only five people understand the milk order system, and four of them are dead. It’s a bad joke.

Austin Frerick 24:27
But that whole law is rooted in the time before we had refrigeration. Why are we trying to make a law from before refrigeration work in 2026? What should these systems look like? What should these regulatory systems look like?

Austin Frerick 24:42
Finally, you’re all here today. Join an organization. You cannot do this alone. That’s why being a member is so important. You help pay for staff that monitor these things. Get in the weeds. Here’s this photo of Julie Dunn. My book opens with her. This is Iowa CCI. I joke, Iowa CCI is a bunch of pissed-off old ladies in rural Iowa fighting confinement, but they get things done.

Austin Frerick 25:06
Julie Dunn is a retired secretary in Eldora, Iowa, and that’s what she does in retirement. She told me she’s doing this for her granddaughter because she remembers what Iowa used to be. We didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not going to get there overnight, but it’s about doing something as a collective to get something done.

Austin Frerick 25:23
Also, it’s fun. There’s something fun when you take on a giant, and you know what? You get a shot in. On that note, I just want to go back to this point. Even though it’s really easy to be dark right now, you have to focus on the positive. The food here has been phenomenal. Most of us have been to hotels in America – the food’s awful. Focusing on that positiveness is how we get through this moment.

Austin Frerick 25:46
On that note, I want to thank you guys so much. I’m happy to sign books over here. I should say, it makes a great gift too. On that, thank you so much.