Episode #224
Austin Frerick: Grocery Store Monopolies

Austin Frerick shares how grocery store monopolies are reshaping the American food landscape — and not for the better. Drawing on his research and his new book Barons, Austin explains how retail consolidation concentrates power in the hands of a few companies while driving down prices for farmers and limiting access to healthy food. He offers insight into how corporate control intersects with SNAP benefits, school lunches, USDA policy, and the erosion of regional food infrastructure. Through it all, Austin makes the case for rebuilding a food system that centers people, not profits.

Our Austin Frerick interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Austin Frerick at Dartmouth College, April 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Project Podcast. I’m really pleased to be talking with Austin Frerick. Austin, I just think your book is so significant: “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.” It talks about a lot of things the Real Organic Project talks about, but it has this deep perspective on what is happening. I’ve struggled for quite a while with what is happening. Zephyr Teachout really helped me understand it, but so did you. So, “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry” is about what?

Austin Frerick 0:33
I profile seven robber barons, but I realized they’re just narrative devices to tell you these structural stories. I like thinking at 10,000 feet, and I want to understand systems. I worked on this book for five years, and I realized that is abstract writing. By using the narrative device – the robber baron theme – I’m telling you those stories.

Austin Frerick 0:55
My Dairy Barons chapter is not my nerdiest chapter. It reads like a magazine article, though, but it’s about checkoffs – I’m obsessed with checkoffs. You’re reading about a punchy story of this dairy baron, how they built this empire of a fancy bougie milk, but hidden in there, I’m teaching you a concept.

Dave Chapman 1:15
Unlike J.D. Rockefeller I, it’s not that this one dairy baron is controlling a quarter of America; it’s this pattern of this incredible concentration of wealth in the food system replicates.

Austin Frerick 1:33
Yes, exactly. Here’s the thing: there are 10 dairy farmers I could have profiled. Part of it, to be frank with you, is I want to change up the stories. I didn’t want to tell the same rich story over and over. So, my hog harons, I view them as my trashy Florida new money.

Austin Frerick 1:49
Cargill is my grand baron, and that’s my aristocratic old Connecticut money. So, the stories are changing. As a reader, I want to hook you. That’s my goal. I was like, “How do I give this book to my parents who didn’t go to college, who can get it, understand it, and find the stories interesting?”

Austin Frerick 2:06
Part of it too, that I realized is – and this is a weird analogy to make – is, I was really influenced by Mel Brooks when he talked about “The Producers” – that movie, because part of it is he wanted to make Hitler into a clown. He wanted to take away their power. By making someone into a clown and laughing at them, you take away their power. By using this robber baron theme, making them in cartoons, I want to empower people.

Austin Frerick 2:06
Right now, especially now, given recent things in America, people are shutting down. They don’t feel like they can make a change. By making these characters into cartoons, I’m also showing people we’ve been here before, so they can feel like, “Oh, this is so ridiculous – that a dairy farmer lives at the Ritz-Carlton, Puerto Rico – that I can do something about it.

Dave Chapman 2:54
One of the things you did when you selected your barons is they were all barons in the food system. Why did you choose the food system?

Austin Frerick 3:04
Food is everything. Food is who we are. That’s a good question. It’s, I think, a few things. One thing is just because I’m an Iowan – Iowa is to the food system what Hollywood is to films. I grew up in it: my dad was a truck driver, and my mom ran a bakery. I also just love gardening. I think that food for me is – it’s both. I see the worst of America right now, but also I see the best of what it could be.

Austin Frerick 3:37
That’s the weird thing about both, especially when the book seems kind of dark like this. Most of the people I met writing this book are good people. You realize most people are just trying to provide for the families and make a living, but the greed of a few is holding people back.

Austin Frerick 3:38
So, as you see all this darkness, you see what the system could be too. My Hog Barons chapter is about how Iowa broke – regulatory capture. Iowa should be the Tuscany of North America, but right now: second highest cancer rates, water crisis, and obesity crisis.

Austin Frerick 3:59
It kind of started as paradise.

Austin Frerick 4:19
I had the paradise of Iowa. I grew up in the paradise of Iowa, and it fell apart. I’m the first one in my family to go to college and I’ve had such a life – I had the American dream. I had some lucky things break my way, but I also know maybe it felt boring. The cards wouldn’t play out. My parents bought a new house at 25. At the time, my mom was cutting hair, and my dad was delivering keg beer. You can’t do that…

Dave Chapman 4:49
It was doable then.

Austin Frerick 4:50
It was doable then. We went on family vacations once a year. Iowa was this middle-class thing, and neoliberalism just broke it.

Austin Frerick 5:00
How did it break it?

Austin Frerick 5:02
Neoliberalism, to me, is just a fancy way of saying laissez-faire. Race to the bottom, deregulation.

Dave Chapman 5:11
Milton Friedman would be the patron saint of that.

Austin Frerick 5:14
Yes. Here’s the thing with Milton Friedman types: they’re always a dime a dozen. There’s always going to be hacks for the oligarchs. His literature sounds good, but it’s just stupid when you think about it. The goal of any corporate executive is monopoly. No executive wants competitive markets. Your goal is to get monopoly because that’s where you can put a little cream on top.

Austin Frerick 5:40
Every day you wake up, if you have competitive markets, it’s hard, so you want to capture your market. Your goal is essentially to buy off a politician, buy out a competitor, and do what you have to do to essentially dominate your market.

Dave Chapman 5:50
As opposed to innovate your way…

Austin Frerick 5:51
Innovate your way to the top. Milton Friedman says all this rhetoric, and it’s so divorced from reality. It’s like he hasn’t read a history book. Once you have economic power, you use it to capture the political system and to reinforce your economic power. You’ll just see these systems compound.

Dave Chapman 5:54
Friedman would consider himself to be a capitalist and believe that he was preaching this gospel of capitalism. In the introduction to your book by Eric Schlosser – it was an amazing introduction – and he’s quoting Adam Smith, whom everyone else would consider to be the prophet of capitalism. Adam Smith sounds like Karl Marx. He’s saying, “The enemy of capitalism is monopoly, and no matter what we do, we must stop that from happening or it will destroy the capitalist system.”

Austin Frerick 6:47
Totally. The way I think about that Adam Smith point too is it’s almost like a garden. Capitalism is like a garden. If you don’t prune a garden, an invasive species takes over and destroys everything. That’s what’s happened. I think that’s what the American economy is right now. We’re just in another second Gilded Age, the laissez-faire thing. My hope for this moment is that laissez-faire era ushered in a reform movement because people always go too far, and they always crash and burn.

Austin Frerick 7:19
Literally just talking to my spouse earlier today: you can see the stock market, and it’s just, you drive American that is not the stock market. Most communities are not booming; most people haven’t boomed these last few years. I think we’re living in, like, a 1920s parallel where, in the popular American imagination, people think of it as the flapper era, but rural America in the 1920s was in a state of depression already – the farm markets were glutted.

Austin Frerick 7:45
I think you see parallels here where, like, higher-income Americans with assets are enjoying urban decadence right now. They can travel anywhere; their assets have inflated. The people without assets – the other half of America – are struggling.

Dave Chapman 7:59
A couple of things, just so we understand because we have a lot of farmers listening to this. They aren’t thinking about laissez-faire and Adam Smith. Tell me about what laissez-faire means to you. That means total deregulation?

Austin Frerick 8:16
Total deregulation, but I would say more regulatory capture too. This is always what I tell my libertarian people, and you always see it the most in the meat industry: they’ll use their economic power to then essentially push regulations on little people – to the average person – locking in their dominance. That makes it harder. So, you’re not playing on a level playing field. That’s the biggest thing I’ve noticed.

Dave Chapman 8:39
Can you give me an example of a regulation that would get pushed that would hurt the little person? I can think of some, but I’m curious…

Austin Frerick 8:46
I’m trying to think of manure management, industrial and microculture. But I don’t know the nuances of what pasture farmers deal with manure management. Let me think… Do you know which one?

Dave Chapman 9:04
Well, I can give one, which is that right now, organic certification has become quite expensive and very rigorous. It requires a lot of professional bookkeeping to be able to qualify. If I’m Driscoll’s, it’s no problem. I have a staff to do this, and relatively, it’s a much smaller percentage of my gross sales to get certified.

Dave Chapman 9:06
If I’m a small farmer, like one or two acres, and I’m grossing $150,000 to $200,000, my certification fee is $2,000. That’s a pretty noticeable check of my gross. That’s something that’s clearly unfair to smaller producers. They’re carrying the burden of the program, but the impact of it is that they’re being pushed out – organic certification is losing its small farmers, which is a tragedy.

Austin Frerick 10:02
Then the big ones are exploiting the image of the small farmers. That’s the dark undercurrent of it all. The other one that comes to my mind is meat inspection. It’s pretty intensive on the smaller family farms, but the big boys now, the Trump administration, want to let them inspect their own meat. It’s an additional regulatory cost that you have that they don’t have.

Austin Frerick 10:27
That’s why anyone who thinks that the market will solve this – you’re delusional. Especially with meat. JBS is the closest thing we have in America to a criminal organization. Given the state of everything, that’s saying a lot. But they bribe their way to monopoly-level status. These brothers are ruthless.

Dave Chapman 10:46
For people who haven’t read the book yet, these are huge meat cartels based in Brazil.

Austin Frerick 10:52
The largest meat company the world has ever seen. Number one in chicken and beef, number two in pork, and number one in leather.

Dave Chapman 10:58
If you’re eating a hamburger in America, what percentage of those hamburgers went through their hands? Do you have any idea?

Austin Frerick 11:05
I don’t know. Here’s the thing – not even just America; it’s pretty much like anywhere in the world. What makes this even more complex is they’re international now. For example, in beef, they have assets in all the major beef production regions in the world. They have operations in Australia, Brazil, and America. The biggest fights in recent years in beef have been over the label “Made in USA.”

Austin Frerick 11:35
First of all, that tells you how incompetent USDA is. That’s not rocket science to figure out, “Is the beef made in the USA or not?” But years went by for this label to mean something, where, literally, JBS could take rainforest beef, bring it into America, re-wrap it, and say, “Made in USA,” because it was re-wrapped.

Dave Chapman 11:53
Yeah, wrapped in the USA.

Austin Frerick 11:56
All they do now because of these currency things in the globe is they could play currency rates off and ship [inauadible 0:12:01] meat. It’s like a lot of grass-fed meat in America now is coming from New Zealand because of the currency stuff.

Dave Chapman 12:09
We’ll use them as an example. The challenge is, “Wait a minute. Aren’t we able to get inexpensive meat because they’re so efficient?” Is it true? Has the cost of food gone down because of their involvement?

Austin Frerick 12:25
I’m glad you asked that question, because the first slide I show when I talk anymore is what the average American spends on food compared to other countries. There’s going to be a nerd moment. It’s a really good example of how a dataset can tell you two different things. When they talk, what Big Ag and that company would say is: for a percent of income, Americans spend the lowest amount on food ever for any country in the world. It’s like six or eight percent. That’s factually true.

Austin Frerick 12:55
Here’s the thing: you shouldn’t use that because that’s a percent of income. Most of the income growth in America over these last few decades have only been experienced at the top. For the bottom of half of Americans, their incomes haven’t grown. But when you look at what people spend to register, Americans spend more money than other Western democracies on food. We’re about dollar for dollar for Italy. What a dollar gets you in Italy is very different than in America.

Austin Frerick 13:20
I argue we’re paying more for junk because we’re also – like, the food that’s cheap or affordable – it’s a highly processed food, because that’s where all the subsidies are going. Because we’re subsidizing for roll-ups, we’re not subsidizing produce. Also, we’re being gouged for the junk we’re getting in our meat market. They will justify employing children in slaughterhouses, saying it makes food cheap – and it’s not even cheap. We’re employing children in slaughterhouses, and we’re being gouged for it too, at the same time.

Dave Chapman 13:46
The reason that it’s not cheap is that the company is actually making a lot of money.

Austin Frerick 13:52
Beef is a really good example. Our [inaudsaible 0:13:54] organization has this fantastic graph, I love to show people where… There’s that phrase, “A picture says a thousand words.” This is, like the graph, the nerdy version of it. It overlaps what ranchers get for their cattle and what you pay for beef at the store. Basically, up until 2015 in America, they were equal, and then it just diverged.

Austin Frerick 13:52
The biggest gap happened in the summer of COVID, in 2020. It was massively wide. To me, that gap is monopoly – monopoly capture, monopoly profits. It’s tightened a little bit since then. My understanding is basically the cattle herd in America is collapsing because of the climate crisis.

Dave Chapman 14:34
I’m sorry, the cow herd?

Austin Frerick 14:35
The cattle herd.

Austin Frerick 14:36
The cattle herd is collapsing because of the climate crisis because of the drought in the West.

Austin Frerick 14:40
We’re in 1950s cattle levels right now because of the drought in the West.

Dave Chapman 14:46
We’re not eating less meat, so more of it’s coming from somewhere else.

Austin Frerick 14:49
Bingo. Then they’re gouging. To me, the best example of the gouging in the meat market is – it’s a fun fact – McDonald’s buys the most beef in the world. Usually in businesses, you treat your largest customer the best. McDonald’s filed lawsuits against the beef packers this past fall for price gouging. It tells you something when McDonald’s even feels like it’s being shortchanged here.

Dave Chapman 15:18
The reason that that can even happen in the first place is because they’re monopolies, and it’s not a competitive marketplace, actually? Do I have that right?

Austin Frerick 15:29
Yes.

Dave Chapman 15:29
Explain it.

Austin Frerick 15:32
I think this has been underappreciated. What makes it even more scarier is it used to act like a monopoly cartel – pick your word here – but it used to be able to get together in a hotel the next dinner stay and collude. Those days are gone because of these data brokers. So, a lot of these meat companies give their data over to a third-party vendor. Agri Stats, Inc. is the famous one.

Austin Frerick 15:55
For example, in chicken, I sit there and tell them, “Next week I have a hundred hatchlings.” All the other chicken companies tell them, “This is what we’re going to do.” Then you can forecast the industry, and you can collude without being in the same hotel room. So it gives you that feel of ignorance – that you’re not colluding – but you are.

Austin Frerick 16:11
This is quasi-legal. The Biden administration was making moves to shut it down, but this allows for that data collusion. Here’s the thing – it’s happening across the American economy. The thing people might have heard of most famously is in apartment complexes. A lot of apartment landlords are sharing their data so they can actually collude and raise rents in cities.

Dave Chapman 16:34
There aren’t that many companies selling meat. There are a lot of companies, but they’re all owned by a few. Am I right?

Austin Frerick 16:41
Yep. There’s an illusion of choice. I love to show the slide of all the brands JBS owns. It’s like eight pages, and each slide has about 15 brands. When I click through it, first of all, people’s jaw drop. Also, if you notice, the word “JBS” is not in a single brand name. You just don’t know.

Austin Frerick 16:41
For so long, we put it on the consumer to know, “Oh, if you want a better system, go to the store and buy a different product. Buy whatever brand – I don’t want to say anyone’s. Here’s the thing – that you’re not changing the system; you’re bifurcating the system. But then what happened over the last few decades is the large monopolist buy the fancy brand. It just becomes a premium product for the Whole Foods consumer.

Dave Chapman 17:31
It’s been my observation in the food system – I’ve been a farmer for 40-some years – and it looks like there’s getting to be more and more choice and diversity in the market. So many brands to choose from; so many different labels. But my experience is that there are actually less and less choices. The best choice isn’t there at all anymore. When I was young, the kind of food I grow wasn’t on any supermarket shelf.

Dave Chapman 18:04
There was a period… I don’t know when the peak was, somewhere around 2016 or something. There was a time when the major chains were buying local or small organic dairies that were thriving because they were getting paid a price. They could do it on that scale, and now that’s all crashed, and they’re going out of business like crazy. The major chains won’t buy local. It’s against their policy. They’re no longer the same chains. They’re owned by a few multinationals.

Austin Frerick 18:36
I think it’s Whole Foods. We’ll come back to that in a second. My dad used to be in the beer business. He was a beer salesman growing up. Actually, my grandpa was too. My grandpa did the grocery stores. My dad did the gas stations in town. My dad always did a lot of merchandising. I always remember he’d picked me up; we’d go merchandise for something. He explained this concept to me of different incomes wanting to think they’re getting a different brand.

Austin Frerick 18:58
To me, all these different brands are actually reflecting the bigger inequality of America, where that yuppie consumer really wants to think they’re getting different peanut butter than the Dollar General consumer. It’s almost like, as inequality intensifies in America, the brand options intensify. They used to be known as the premium product; now there’s the ultra-premium product. Then there’s a layer on top of that now.

Austin Frerick 19:19
To your point on that 2016 magical moment, I really think it was Whole Foods. My understanding is, pre-Amazon purchase, they let the managers really have a lot of say. They sell something cool at the farmers market; they put them in the store and try them out, which is what you want. That’s where innovation comes from, and that’s how people can grow a business.

Austin Frerick 19:33
Here’s the thing – the similar thing happened in Cisco, that food distribution company. They centralize procurement, where they lose that. They take away authority from the managers. For me, personally, it makes grocery shopping fun – that innovation. I had a really good new yogurt at the Middlebury Co-Op this morning.

Dave Chapman 20:06
Yeah. We got a good yogurt in Vermont.

Austin Frerick 20:08
Fantastic. I’m a yogurt junkie, so if I see any new yogurt, I always buy it. Amazon centralized procurement also. Then it’s really hard for those local producers to get shelf access. Amazon doesn’t want you to do one store. They want you to do a hundred overnight. It’s just like you can’t scale that fast.

Austin Frerick 20:27
For me, the two chapters people reach out to me the most, my Grocery Baron chapter is one of them. It’s a lot of Walmart suppliers. I just had someone tell me – I got to be careful what they say – if they wanted to get on the shelf at Walmart, they had to do 400 stores at once. To even decide if Walmart wanted to carry it, Walmart wanted a box of each flavor for free for each store – just to see how it did.

Dave Chapman 18:52
For each store.

Austin Frerick 21:00
For each store – for 400 stores. Here’s the thing – if you’re starting a business, it’s hard to say no to that because that’s such an opportunity to grow your business, but what a gamble. It’s so unfair. This is the world’s richest family and the largest supplier in this country. But it used to be, just a few years ago, you could just do one store and slowly build a business. Now it’s that.

Dave Chapman 21:29
I agree with you very much about the change to Whole Foods, but I don’t think it was Amazon that started it. I think it was Walmart.

Austin Frerick 21:36
Oh, really?

Dave Chapman 21:37
That’s why they sold to Amazon, because they were struggling to compete with Walmart. Walmart took over everything. I’ve never sold to Walmart. I literally don’t know anyone who’s ever sold to Walmart, but everyone I know has been really impacted, because everything changes based on this. The reason Walmart is so successful is that they sell the cheapest food.

Dave Chapman 22:00
It’s lovely to see the Waltons, who are wonderfully saying, “We support regenerative agriculture; what’s wrong with people? They need to step up and make more responsible choices when they shop.” But the reason that they’re able to give all that money to the so-called ‘regenerative agriculture’ is because they made all the money selling the cheapest food in the world.

Austin Frerick 22:22
It’s a delusion, all of it. It’s really scary that a lot of regenerative brands are secretly owned by one of the Walmart grandsons, and no one wants to talk about that. Also, the food groups on the left are financed by the Walton family. My personal opinion: Walmart wants to heighten the food insecurity crisis in America because it wants to maintain food assistance funding levels.

Dave Chapman 22:46
Say that again. “They want to…”

Austin Frerick 22:49
They want to heighten the food insecurity crisis in America. People are hungry, people are hungry, people are hungry because they want to maintain the really high SNAP.

Austin Frerick 22:58
SNAP program where they spend it at Walmart?

Austin Frerick 23:02
Yes. Keep in mind, a lot of Walmart workers are on SNAP. It’s just a backdoor subsidy. But there’s no conversation over, “Why can’t people afford the food when they work full-time?” There’s no conversation over power, and for a lot of groups… I’m a board director for a few nonprofits. I understand – it’s hard to fundraise. When you get a check from the Waltons – it’s not said – but you know what’s going on.

Austin Frerick 23:28
They want you to talk about certain things, and if you talk another way, who knows if you get renewed, and then you have to fire staff? Just to add on to your point about Walmart, I love this phrase someone once told me: “Big boys beget big boys.” The creation of Walmart creates other barons. It creates the Driscoll’s berry barons.

Dave Chapman 23:47
Right. Because who’s going to supply them?

Austin Frerick 23:49
Yep. Walmart wants one company to do 4,000 stores for berries year-round. Whoever can fill that will be their supplier. Then on top of it, I really do think the most powerful person in the American food system is a Walmart buyer. Walmart’s market share is one in three groceries.

Austin Frerick 23:50
One out of three?

Austin Frerick 24:10
One out of three groceries. Their market share is the same as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth combined. No one else is in their league. That person has so much power. When you’re negotiating with Walmart, you’re not negotiating. It’s supply and command.

Austin Frerick 24:28
I almost wrote that chapter this way, as “The closest thing America has ever had to a Soviet Union-style Politburo,” because there’s so much concentration of power and it’s so unequal. It’s delusional to think that you can negotiate with Walmart. You don’t give terms to Walmart.

Dave Chapman 24:53
Did I read from you, or did I hear from somebody else that Walmart actually doesn’t sell their groceries at a profit? They use that as the leader to bring everyone into the store. Is that true?

Austin Frerick 25:05
That’s what you hear a lot in the grocery industry. This is the weird thing to say about some of these barons. There is a brilliance to them. I found Sam Walton to be fascinating. He comes from nothing, started his first business, and was kicked out. His landlord saw him being successful and kicked him out of his store so his son-in-law could have it. Then he started over again.

Austin Frerick 25:30
He built his business, and he lived that life. But it was on vacation when he saw this French company called Carrefour. They have these things called hypermarkets in Europe for both grocery stores and soft goods. That’s what the Walmart supercenter is. Actually, the Walmart supercenter we know today is a small version of the original thing called Hypermarket USA.

Austin Frerick 25:54
But anyways, what Sam Walton realized is you grocery shop a lot. He can essentially just get you in the store; he doesn’t need to make money when you buy groceries; if he sells to you at cost, that’s great. He makes money when you walk over and buy Christmas decorations and a DVD. That’s his goal.

Austin Frerick 26:11
That’s what you see Walmart do is they’re slowly adding on things in the store to capture every dollar of your paycheck. There’s basically banks in Walmart now – they’re called Walmart Money Centers. They have the pharmacies, they have tires, they’re trying out vet clinics, and they’re trying to healthcare clinics.

Austin Frerick 26:28
Here’s the thing: when Walmart comes to town, you don’t buy more milk; you just shift your consumption. So, it’s just gobbling that pie from other people. I think of Walmart as killing downtown first, then it killed the mall. I think in the next recession, a lot of these big box stores are going to close – those Party Cities, USAs, and Christmas trees – they’re just not going to make sense anymore.

Dave Chapman 26:48
So somebody who I’m close to – it was my son – said, “Yeah, Dad, if you don’t have money, you want to go to Walmart because it’s affordable, and everywhere else you’re spending more money for the same stuff.” What’s your answer to that?

Austin Frerick 27:07
Yes and no. That’s a hard one to answer, because with their dominance, they can lock in the lowest price, or they’ll play games where… I have to be careful here, because generally, monopolists use a term called “Most Favored Nations,” where if you supply to a company, they’ll make you sign an agreement stating that the price you offer us can’t be lower anywhere else. You are guaranteeing that you have the lowest price.

Austin Frerick 27:35
First of all, that should be banned. The thing with Walmart is, because I said, was that stat earlier on food: you’re not getting cheap food, and you’re paying for it indirectly. You’re paying more for, like, government assistance to the workers that are working full-time for Walmart and then can’t buy so they’re on food assistance, Medicaid, Section Eight, housing vouchers, and all that other stuff.

Dave Chapman 28:02
Which your tax dollars are paying for anyway.

Austin Frerick 28:06
At some point you also ask yourself, “What society do you want to live in?” Walmart is making vertical plays right now into beef and dairy. My understanding is that people judge their grocery store based on the meat and dairy case. Walmart felt like, during COVID, especially, it was being shortchanged by my other barons, so it’s making vertical plays into those spaces.

Dave Chapman 28:27
So they’re buying up big dairies or they’re starting new ones, and they’re creating CAFOs, confinement operations, for meat and dairy.

Austin Frerick 28:38
For dairy, my understanding is about plants, but they don’t actually own the confinements. But the question is, “What society do I live in?” Do you want family farmers doing dairy, or do you just want another clog on the Walton family machine? Are we all just going to be serfs?

Austin Frerick 28:38
Also, what your comment misses – I want to be very careful here because I don’t want to put it on people right now; the system change is – for example, my parents know what I do for a living, but my mom still gives me CAFO bacon.

Dave Chapman 28:59
It’s because she loves you.

Austin Frerick 29:19
I love reading grocery ads in Iowa because there’s so much industrial food made in Iowa. They dump it on Iowa, so that way people outside of Iowa don’t get used to the prices. So, if there’s an egg glut, eggs on I will be $0.69 a dozen. They’re just trying to get by. Especially right now with inflation and all this stuff – healthcare costs – people are like…right now the industrial food gets all the subsidy; the other food doesn’t. So, it’s artificially cheaper than the other stuff. People are going towards it.

Dave Chapman 29:53
It’s government subsidy for production and processing.

Austin Frerick 29:56
Yes. And labor. My guess is, a lot of your members have to follow certain American rules on the labor environment. If I do my produce production in Baja Mexico, I’m probably not following those standards. So, my costs are a lot lower. The consumer doesn’t know that when they see that, so you’re not competing on a level playing field here.

Dave Chapman 30:21
Yeah, I think 60% of our berries that are sold in America are coming from Mexico and the South.

Austin Frerick 30:26
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 30:29
Forty percent of the vegetables?

Austin Frerick 30:31
It’s 40% of the vegetables and 60% of the fruits that are imported. Anything that’s labor-intensive in America has moved offshore. California went nuts because that’s capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. So, it just went south of the border.

Austin Frerick 30:46
What I would tell your son is: it’s not making good food. Like that berry is engineered for durability, not taste. That’s actually one of the things I didn’t expect with this book, Dave – how many people, especially older Americans, are like, “This system is bad-tasting food.” Especially for meat and dairy. Inputs really matter in dairy. A cow who eats pasture is going to make much better breast milk than a cow eating corn in the New Mexico desert.

Austin Frerick 31:14
I think an under-appreciated thing is people are turning away from a lot of these products because they don’t taste good. I hated melon growing up because I was used to that kind of awful, tasteless melon. Then I had a good melon two years ago, and I was like, “Oh, wow. This could be good.” Even carrots. The funny and weird thing about writing this book is people tell me about all the barons I missed. There’s a Carrot Baron – Grimmway carrots. They’re based in Indianapolis.

Dave Chapman 31:41
Grimmway is based in Indianapolis?

Austin Frerick 31:43
It’s owned by private equity. It’s in…

Dave Chapman 31:44
Because they got sold to Taylor or whatever, yeah.

Austin Frerick 31:50
I’m just used to them – they don’t taste like anything. I had good carrots, and I was like, “Oh, these are actually really good.” That’s what’s happening: a lot of people moving away from these products are going to highly processed food because that highly processed food is engineered to be addictive or engineered to be good.

Austin Frerick 32:06
Fairlife is my dairy baron. That milk was engineered for 10-15 years – tested. I like it. I’m not going to lie. They did a lot of that testing. Whereas this industrial milk, people’s bodies aren’t responding well to it. They don’t like the taste of it, so they’re turning away from the product. So, you’re hurting the industry by the race to the bottom.

Dave Chapman 32:28
I write a Sunday letter, and I wrote one and mentioned Jeff Dunn, who was the president of Coca-Cola, North America. His wife said, “You have to stop doing this. It’s evil. You have to stop doing this. You’re making poison.” He did. The guy was in love. He thought about it, and so he went and joined a carrot company, Bolthouse. I said, “Well, I don’t think Bolthouse is great, but I think it’s a lot better than Coca-Cola.”

Dave Chapman 33:06
I got a letter from a guy who is a former professor of agroecology from UC Santa Cruz and now a farmer, and it was a great letter. He said, “Bolthouse isn’t better than Coca-Cola. Bolthouse and Grimmway are 80% of the carrots sold in America – those two companies – and they’re not good. They don’t taste good, they don’t have the nutrition and health that a carrot could have, and yet they keep winning in the marketplace.”

Austin Frerick 33:37
They do because… Oh, man, I have so many thoughts. That’s such a good point. Let me back up and first say, this concentrated system is actually incredibly fragile, and in the long term, it’s actually really expensive. Look at COVID when it hit the hog industry. You couldn’t slaughter all these hogs. You had to spend millions of dollars to kill a bunch.

Austin Frerick 33:57
Rewind the clock. Thirty years in America, you just let the pig run around the yard longer until the things are back up and running. When we look at the bird flu right now – the bird flu, what’s happening in America – is going to be the new norm. When you have this many genetically similar animals in metal sheds, you’re just going to get disease outbreaks, and that’s expensive. Imagine what it is for those workers who just deal with animal death all day.

Austin Frerick 34:23
Going back to those two having such dominant positions, because they’re so large, they can play their game. In the grocery store, they can own the shelf space and buy out their competitors. There’s a whole game of slotting fees in the grocery store, where you buy shelf space, and you prevent market entrance.

Austin Frerick 34:39
That was actually something I was telling you today – how mad I was about not only were they doing nothing about the meatpacking industry, they weren’t actually addressing the monopolies, but they were financing all these new entrants. There’s no example in American history where you de-concentrate a market by financing new entrants, but they were doing nothing to help them get shelf access.

Austin Frerick 34:43
Going back to the Walmart example – most of these grocers make their money now renting out their shelf space. They call them “malls without walls.” Your high level is everything. Even if you go online – you go to Amazon or Walmart – you’ll see “sponsored by.” That’s the same thing.

Austin Frerick 35:19
What’s getting scary, too, is Walmart just bought a TV company called Vizio. Have you ever seen Vizio, their flat-screen TVs? They bought them because of ads when you stream. Walmart doesn’t do slotting fees, like straight-up pay-to-play, but you talk to anyone in the grocery industry – they know. If you buy ads on Walmart TV, you’re probably going to get good product placement. It’s the same thing.

Austin Frerick 35:43
It’s like, even if you have a good carrot juice, first of all, how you going to get on the shelf if Walmart wants you to get the free case? Are you going to buy ads? There’s such a hurdle to even get in. It’s hard to get to the consumer. It’s not like they’re offering the best product or the cheapest; they’re using their market dominance to lock in their dominance.

Dave Chapman 36:05
That was something that I understood by listening to Zephyr Teachout. As I understood the point, it was that, when you have a monopoly player, they’re no longer trying to innovate and improve what they make and offer it cheaper and better and come up with these new things that delight people; they’re trying to figure out, “How do I cut out all the competition? How do I own the shelf? How do I own the store? How do I own so that I’m the only one they can deal with? That’s a very different form of competition.

Austin Frerick 36:46
First of all, imagine just being a farmer, or you’re trying to create a business. You don’t have time to think that way. No one’s thinking that way. That’s when you’re massive at that point – you can pay consultants to come up with monopoly strategies. Because it’s never just one thing that locks in their dominance.

Austin Frerick 37:03
It’s the constellation of these tools that really lock in their dominance. That’s been an underappreciated thing. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s slowly by slowly they push these little things, and they play in the margins. They play, “Who’s paying attention to slotting fees” – these little things.

Austin Frerick 37:23
Even when Walmart bought the TV maker, that really flew under the radar, because it’s not that big – I think it was like a billion-dollar acquisition – which, given Walmart’s size, is nothing. Given the current antitrust laws in America, it’s really hard to stop something so teeny-tiny, because it’s not like Walmart is buying Target – a direct competitor. Once you understand how they work, you’re like, “Oh, this is a monopoly play.” Or, “This is an ad revenue play.”

Austin Frerick 37:53
The big thing now in the grocery industry, for the big boys, is ad revenues. It used to be, if you had a company and you advertised your juice, you bought an ad in the paper, you bought an ad in a magazine. There was, like, some middle third party, then the person would see the ad and go to the store and buy it. The middle thing is gone.

Austin Frerick 38:12
Now you buy ads on Target or Walmart. The TVs you see in the store with shelves in the space, where you’re placed on the website, it’s the same thing now.

Dave Chapman 38:22
It’s all internal advertising through the store.

Austin Frerick 38:25
It’s massive growth for these monopolists.

Dave Chapman 38:29
Can I ask something that you mentioned, and I hadn’t heard it? I’ve had the suspicion; there’s a program called Transition to Organic (TOP) that the USDA created, and it remains to be seen whether it will exist after Brooke Rollins starts flexing her muscles as Secretary of the USDA.

Dave Chapman 38:51
As you say, the whole thing was about, “How can we get conventional, chemical farmers to transition to become organic farmers?” I’m torn between cheering it on and saying, “Something’s wrong here.” Because if you convert somebody to become organic and they can’t make a living – it’s impossible for them to make a living – there’s no model for that, the whole system is rigged, you haven’t really changed much.

Dave Chapman 39:19
That’s really the inflection point: how do we make it that they can make a living, and then they’ll come? We actually don’t need to pay for anything – they’ll figure it out.

Austin Frerick 39:28
That’s where I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on is just… Let me step back and say, one of the biggest silver linings I’ve had doing this whole book thing is just seeing how bipartisan it is – that the system’s not working. Everyone’s seen it for different reasons. It’s like that famous story of all these blind people touching an elephant and they’re describing different parts, but the same elephant – that’s the food system.

Austin Frerick 39:52
You probably guess my politics, but …the American Conservative part of my book said every quote, every conservative should read my book. I’d been on MAHA’s podcast, and Steve Bannon requested a copy. There are weird things going on right here.

Austin Frerick 40:07
But you’re right – this old system is going to phase out. I think it’s actually going to keep getting more expensive, eventually crash and burn because it’s not sustainable. You’re playing with fire. Also, ethanol is going to die – no one wants to talk about that.

Austin Frerick 40:23
But how do we build up the new system? How do we not only stabilize people doing it right, so they’re not running uphill or riding themselves in the ground? How do we entice more people into this? Showing that it is viable.

Austin Frerick 40:38
For me, it’s using schools to drive the supply system change. Because, first of all, it’s good politics – we’ve seen that already. There’s no reason why… We’re in Vermont right now. Every schoolchild in Vermont should have Vermont milk – pasture-based. Then just thinking of stabilizing these because it’s… And part of this is, I’ve been doing some reading on the New Deal.

Austin Frerick 41:04
The New Deal didn’t just happen. It started at the states. Actually, a lot of it came out of New York State and Wisconsin. I love that, because… DC is the last to know. You have to have these proof of concepts – start locally, brag about it, build up the program – so then when you have a moment of change, you know what to do, and you have something that’s a proven concept.

Austin Frerick 41:26
Here’s the thing: people are doing this out there. You’re seeing people trying to get the schools to do the right food. There’s a cool program in northern Wisconsin called the Tribal Elders Box, where, historically in America, we dump surplus food on Native American tribes. But now they have set up a program where they’re buying from Native American farmers to get food to Native American people and to teach them culture that’s been lost. You just don’t do that overnight.

Dave Chapman 41:50
Those programs are being cut off right now.

Austin Frerick 41:55
They’re being cut off right now, and they’re the hardest to do when they’re small because the first mover is always the hardest. The more and more you do it, the easier it gets.

Austin Frerick 41:55
I gave this talk yesterday in Middlebury, and I told them, “Middlebury needs to be a leader here.” Part of it is I went to Grinnell in Iowa, a small college, and behind Grinnell was one of the most famous organic farms in the state of Iowa: Grinnell Heritage Farms. My understanding was college promised to buy a lot of local food from them – they didn’t. They were being served Baja California produce.

Austin Frerick 42:30
First of all, just think of it from a pure climate perspective: one is across the street, one is not. Also, there’s a whole concept of taste and dignity of the work. But the college, with a multi-billion-dollar endowment, thanks to Warren Buffett, didn’t do that, and so that farm went bankrupt. It sent a shock wave in that community of, like, “If they can’t make it, how can we?” Because they got a lot of good press.

Austin Frerick 42:52
These colleges need to be shamed. Those colleges are nonprofits. Nonprofit comes with responsibility because you’re not paying taxes. So, you should be a leader here. You should be the ones figuring this out; you’re going to pay more.

Austin Frerick 43:08
Because right now, the local food doesn’t get the subsidy as frozen square pizza that comes from the Amazon rainforest. Just accept that is the cross you have to bear, but you’re in a privileged position in society. You lead it, then other places can follow you.

Dave Chapman 43:27
With colleges being an obvious place to lead that change, do you think that that will come from having persuaded the university – the board of directors – or from persuading the students who go up and demand…?

Austin Frerick 43:40
Students need to be persuaded to do something. This is such a weird thing to say; those students don’t realize… Going back to the beer example, they’re buying an ultra-premium product. They are the customer. Especially the full-pay kids – those colleges will respond to what those full-pay kids want, because that’s what they’re all chasing. I’m a Pell Grant kid – they lost money on me.

Austin Frerick 44:03
But they’re going to respond to students’ pressure. The time to write nice letters is over; you got to play ball. If they make a commitment and don’t fulfill it, you need to hold them account – you need to shame them. This might be my Catholicism showing…

Austin Frerick 44:03
It’s okay. You believe in constructive shaming. I’m going to interview… Do you know Jennifer Jacquet?

Austin Frerick 44:15
No.

Dave Chapman 44:15
She’s an academic, and she really believes in constructive shaming.

Dave Chapman 44:21
I don’t even use the word “constructive.”

Austin Frerick 44:37
She doesn’t either. That’s my edition.

Austin Frerick 44:42
Especially at this moment in America, this is power politics. Do not bring a machete to a mission gunfight. Brooke Rollins is just a hack for oligarchs. That’s what her whole career has been, and I assume that’s what she will be. This will only get worse. Her first move was speeding up the kill lines on the hogs – one the most dangerous jobs in America, making it more dangerous. That is who she is, and that’s what we should expect.

Austin Frerick 45:09
We’ve tried doing the nice thing; it didn’t work – the system has gotten worse. For me, I learned so much about the success that the Big Tech antitrust people have had because they came here to play ball. Zephyr Teachout has been a really good leader on that – of going to the media, telling people, and shaming people. When people are corrupt, call them out. Also fighting for positions of power.

Austin Frerick 45:31
That’s my biggest thing: who should have a seat at the table? Who should be the Secretary of Agriculture? Who should be Under Secretary of Agriculture? That’s what really matters: who’s going to be at these decisions of power? I’m feisty, if you can’t tell, but that’s like…

Dave Chapman 45:51
No. Feisty is good. But I’m fascinated. You were talking about the kind of amazing bipartisan potential of our movement. I think I heard…was it Steve Bannon who was really supporting the idea that Lina Khan should stay in?

Austin Frerick 46:10
Yes. I saw that in person. I was in the room – I was at an antitrust conference in DC – and you’re just like… Who knows what to make of that man? I will say, I’m a big believer: things happen in America when weird bedfellows get together. I think on these issues especially, there’s a lot of hollow rhetoric from one side. Hold their feet to the fire.

Austin Frerick 46:34
Look at the Great Plains – that’s all Republican senators. They are all for meat. What are they doing for the ranch? The cow ranch for America is dying right in front of them. They’re doing absolutely nothing.

Dave Chapman 46:45
I saw a hearing that was hosted by Ron Johnson and Bobby Kennedy on “Make America Healthy Again.” It was called something else, “Healthy Food Roundtable.” It had all of these social influencers get up and speak – the Food Babe and all these people. I agreed with what everybody said.

Dave Chapman 47:11
Ron Johnson was talking about his personal conversion, thanks to talking to Bobby Kennedy, and he finally realized he had to stop eating all this ultra-processed junk food and eat good food. One senator who was there and spoke was Mike Crapo, and I think Idaho, a senator.

Dave Chapman 47:34
He was one of the people who signed the letter to Kennedy about, “Don’t let MAHA be hijacked by environmentalists.” Which is a funny thing to say to somebody who was an environmental activist his whole career. But it’s a real thing. We see that it’s coming from all over. There is the possibility of a bipartisan coalition, but it’s not going to be easy because a lot of members of that bipartisan coalition are funded by and are steadfast supporters of the very worst of big food.

Austin Frerick 48:15
Yes. The industry wins when people don’t pay attention, and people are paying attention right now. Who knows the pureness of people’s motives? But I’m a big believer in a Big Ten approach. There’s this phrase in Italian called “the politics of the artichoke.” You take off your enemy one-on-one, like the way you eat an artichoke. I love thinking in politics that way. To me, go after the worst actor, and the worst actor in the food system is JBS – that slaughtering company.

Austin Frerick 48:44
Get everyone to unite, because you need to… Right now, I noticed in the food system, especially in rural America, no one believes in the government – they don’t believe in USDA. All they’ve heard their whole life are lies. You need to put a point on the board. You do that by going after the worst actor, showing people it’s possible. You might not agree with everyone, like their things, but if there’s something you can get everyone to agree on, then draw a lot of attention to it.

Dave Chapman 49:12
This is really important, Austin. Do you believe that the USDA is capable of redemption?

Austin Frerick 49:21
Yes. I know, saying something.

Dave Chapman 49:23
I hope it’s true. Tell me, how do you think that we’ll go about that? Because I agree with you. I deal with so many people who have so lost any faith in that. We started the Real Organic Project because we didn’t think it would be possible to reform the USDA unless maybe Bernie Sanders got elected president, and then who knows what happens, but that’s a very long shot. Tell me about how you would reform the USDA.

Austin Frerick 49:54
No one can predict anything anymore. Who would have thought 10 years ago this is the moment we’re in? First of all, I’m a big believer that you should always just execute your own strategy. What is your vision? What are you trying to do? What’s your end goal for the food system? And then work backwards.

Austin Frerick 50:11
I’m going to be forever shaped by President Biden’s appointment of Lina Khan. Lina Khan and I are the same age. She’s the one who actually got me into all this. Ten years ago, I was a treasury tax economist. I wrote a paper on monopolies because we had all this research data on our desk. It was seeing monopolies in the food system that really caught my eye. In Milton Friedman economics, when you farm circles, you get a monopoly. That’s part of the reward for coming up with a patent.

Austin Frerick 50:12
But in the food – in theory – anyone can make chips or pop. But for some reason, I was seeing monopoly. Also, in 2016, I was a Bernie person. I was at Treasury, which is all these prep school kids. I was like, “You don’t get what’s going on in America.” Before Lina went to law school, she was a journalist, and she wrote about chicken monopolies. Lina and I got coffee. She’s the one that showed me, “Hey, there’s this whole lost antitrust thing going back a hundred years.”

Austin Frerick 51:07
Keep in mind, this is a young woman of color, and to think just in a few years, she’d be appointed to the most powerful position in the world for antimonopoly enforcement – not only do that put points on the board, “Stop the Kroger-Albertsons merger.” The Trump administration was reported recently in the Wall Street Journal is going forward with the Facebook trial. They’re going forward with Google being a monopolist.

Austin Frerick 51:31
You don’t change things overnight, but she’s slowly shifting it. On top of it, she goes to any law school in America, and the kids all adore her. They want to be her. For them, she has that stature – the little girl taking on the bull on Wall Street. I saw how quickly that changed.

Austin Frerick 51:49
That, to me, is what gives me hope: the right people in power could change the USDA overnight. Because there’s so much power the USDA could have – it just hasn’t been utilized. Its muscle hasn’t been worked out forever. But you get the right people in there who want to do something great – you could really do some really cool things. That’s what gives me hope.

Austin Frerick 50:11
To me, the success for the Real Organic Project is what you guys get a point. Someone for your organization’s Under Secretary, and then makes the labels mean something. Then you don’t need to exist anymore.

Dave Chapman 52:22
That’s what we would like.

Austin Frerick 52:23
Do you know what I mean?

Dave Chapman 52:24
That’s right. We don’t want to exist.

Austin Frerick 52:28
What I internalized, to me, is that what we’re talking about is so traditional. The system now is radical because they will always paint us as radicals. We need to flip it and be like, “You’re the radical one.” It’s radical that one man does five million hogs in America. Making a label mean something, dear God, we’re not curing cancer here. That’s what gets me so mad is the incompetency and the corruption.

Austin Frerick 52:54
When I read my Slaughter Baron chapter, my anger is at Vilsack because I’m so mad at his incompetency. To make the label “Made in USA” mean something. Then they always come up with excuses. That is – I got to be careful here – is whatever you think of the MAHA stuff, we’re in this moment politically in America partly because of the failure of people like Vilsack.

Austin Frerick 53:19
People have a right not to trust what’s in the food right now. The USDA dragged its feet on really basic things, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t get things done. [inaudible 0:53:31] the time they tried to come out with their meat industry regulations. I just want to call that out because it’s not acceptable. They’re really good at playing people on the left. They’ll come give little talks. They’ll say the right words.

Austin Frerick 53:49
All I care about are, like, “What are your results? Are you delivering, or are you not?” You need to shame them, because these people, like Vilsack, they’re not going to respond. They’re not going to do the right thing. Their history and career trajectory said otherwise. They will respond to shame when you air their dirty laundry.

Dave Chapman 54:04
Let me ask you a question about something that we work on a lot, and it’s so tied up with your book. In fact, the major player in this is Driscoll’s. I got drawn into this as a movement – I know. I was always a movement. I was always an organic activist, but I was just a farmer. I believe deeply in what I was doing – and I got drawn in because the standards were changing, and they were certifying soilless hydroponic production as organic, which was completely against the law and its rules.

Dave Chapman 54:39
How could this be? Doesn’t anyone in the USDA understand what it is that they’re administering? It actually looked like we were going to win for just a little bit. The trade association was like, “Let’s make a deal.” Then we discovered that the biggest hydroponic producer in the world being certified as organic was Driscoll’s. I said, “Oh, we’re never going to win.” I had no idea we were up against Godzilla. I thought there was this one big family company.

Austin Frerick 55:14
You didn’t win that fight, but the war is not over. You came to the table trying to negotiate. You should aim for the positions of power next time at that table. Do you know what I mean? That labeling, the conversation was that the USDA then?

Dave Chapman 55:29
Yes.

Austin Frerick 55:29
What branch?

Dave Chapman 55:32
National Organic Program, which is an Agricultural Marketing Service.

Austin Frerick 55:36
AMS? The Under Secretary for Regulatory Marketing Programs?

Dave Chapman 55:39
Yes.

Austin Frerick 55:39
You should aim for that position next time. You should become the next president. [inaudible 0:55:44] want this person. I assume the conversation will go very differently if it’s someone who understands your framework versus someone who just wants to be a lobbyist.

Dave Chapman 55:55
We actually had that person. It was a woman named Elanor Starmer.

Austin Frerick 55:59
Was this a walnut farmer?

Dave Chapman 56:01
No. Before that. Kathleen Merrigan brought this woman in. Kathleen was indeed a beachhead in the USDA. We don’t agree about a lot of stuff, but we do agree about a lot of stuff. Kathleen brought in some really wonderful young women, and one of them was Elanor. She worked in Vilsack’s office. The AMS came open, and he put her in as acting head.

Dave Chapman 56:23
We had a petition. We sent a letter asking them to create a moratorium on certifying new hydroponic operations until this issue could be resolved. We had a meeting with her at the USDA, three of us, and she brought in the National Organic Program.

Dave Chapman 56:42
She said, “I’m sorry. I agreed with you. I wrote the letter, and the lawyers here said, ‘You can’t do that. We’re just going to get sued.'” I believed her. I don’t think she was just blowing smoke up my pant right here. We had a very friendly, supportive person in that position, but the institutional weight…

Austin Frerick 57:08
Two things. I [inaudible 0:57:10] this is getting. I’ve heard from a lot of people that the legal office of the USDA is actually a barrier. Lina dealt with that a lot at the Federal Trade Commission. You had certain people of the old guard who have a certain framework. Part of it is staffing up these agencies with people that don’t view themselves as packed for industry. They’re getting in legal minds who have a certain framework.

Austin Frerick 57:33
I should also say, USDA has a really hard time hiring. Everyone kind of sees USDA now. Who wants to go work for something that’s essentially helping feed corn syrup to kids? But the right people with the right appointments, I think, would really help inspire a lot of young college grads who want to do this stuff into those positions.

Austin Frerick 57:59
There’s this great book that really shaped my thinking here 10 years ago, called “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.” It’s good about how the legal profession just became chickenshit. They’re too afraid to lose. It’s okay to lose sometimes because you want to show how broken the law is.

Austin Frerick 58:16
If you think it sounds right and morally right, just like, it’s just such an aha thing, file that lawsuit, because sometimes you need to show lawmakers, “Hey, look how broken the law is. We can’t get something as simple as this done.” It’s okay. Then I think that’s part of the lawyers; they’re just so risk averse. I’ve also been dealing with a lot of corporate lawyers lately, and they just don’t get it.

Austin Frerick 58:38
The law profession is a weird profession. Either you’re basically a handmaiden, or you’re an aide for oligarchs, or you make nothing; you work in legal aid. The middle class in the legal profession is really hollowed out, especially if the legal profession is consolidated. That’s a certain type of person who is in elite corporate law. That’s a tangent.

Dave Chapman 59:06
No, that’s interesting. You’re saying it’s like everything – everything is consolidating.

Austin Frerick 59:12
Winners take all.

Dave Chapman 59:13
I’m just amazed at how hard it is to challenge that. You have some optimism or hope. Maybe not optimism, but at least hope. Am I right?

Austin Frerick 59:21
Hope, yes. Let’s drill down the ethanol part. Even driving to this conversation today, I was going through the Green Mountains. I was like, “Why am I seeing cornfields? That makes no sense in this climate. It’s so dumb. That should be pasture; that should be…” I’ve seen corn in the dumbest places in America – next to beaches in Delaware and in North Dakota, which is way too far north, where it shouldn’t be, or the water is not there.

Austin Frerick 59:21
It goes back to ethanol. The largest use of corn now in America is ethanol. Ethanol is a farce. It’s not good for the climate. If you think it’s good for the climate, you think the world is flat. That’s going to die fast. Cars are going to move to hybrids and EVs. That’s just a fact.

Austin Frerick 1:00:04
I believe it was Norway last year… Bloomberg reported that every single car sold in Norway last year was a battery. This market’s going to change. It’s going to crater. You’re going to have millions of acres in America come online, and what are we going to do with it? That’s a jump ball. Vilsack once put ethanol on airplanes. Someone said that with a straight face and called that good for the climate. I want to put animals back on pasture, but this is going to be a battle.

Austin Frerick 1:00:29
To your example, you got to view that as a learning lesson: you got so close, and you saw this certain game, and you’re like, “Okay, let’s try a different strategy.” For me, I saw quickly the antitrust world change because of Lina. It’s not only just her appointment; that ecosystem too was protecting her. The Wall Street Journal, I kid you not, it was like every day or every week was attacking her, and they were calling it out.

Austin Frerick 1:00:55
They were also shaming Democrats that weren’t doing the bidding of industry. I think the mindsets of people need to change from understanding – I don’t want to say collaboration to insurgency, but…especially me, you’re going against an industry that plays children and doesn’t care. You have to act differently. Asking them to be better is not going to do anything.

Dave Chapman 1:01:24
One of the things that has come to me in the last 10 years is that the organic movement has to go back to where, for me, it started. It was a movement about who we were. It wasn’t just about how we farmed; it was tied up with thinking different thoughts and trying to do things differently and a different kind of respect for each other and for the land. But it’s not going to be enough to farm well in a totalitarian society, right?

Austin Frerick 1:02:03
Yes.

Dave Chapman 1:02:05
By definition, even if you’re cover cropping, rotating, and doing all these good things, if you’re living in a place where there’s no freedom, respect, and no care, it’s not the revolution I wanted to go to.

Austin Frerick 1:02:22
Yes. What you just articulated is the dream. That’s so important to have – where are you trying to get the ship to? These are going to be very choppy waters, and this thing could break so many different ways, and you just don’t know. But you got to keep working towards your vision because so much can happen so fast.

Austin Frerick 1:02:47
Even when you’re saying that, to me, is that you have an ecological mindset versus what I think is so much now – people are hardwired to have an Excel mindset. It took me a while to understand that, while talking to farmers in Iowa I realized all they can think about is corn yield maximization. That’s what the system right now is designed to do.

Austin Frerick 1:03:09
The Farm Bill is designed for only grains and overproducing grains. So, if you don’t do that, you’ll probably go broke. Right now, your brain is focused on how to get the most corn out of this field, regardless of ecological damages, what you’re doing to the quality, or whatever. I talk a lot about the death of ethanol, yada, yada, yada. Iowa has the second highest cancer rate right now in America.

Dave Chapman 1:03:33
Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in America. This place was Eden when you were a kid. That cancer is a result of agriculture.

Austin Frerick 1:03:44
I don’t want to be sued.

Speaker 1 1:03:45
Okay. [inaudible 1:03:48]

Austin Frerick 1:03:48
In Des Moines, all they talk about is, I [inaudible 1:03:53] too much, for no different than… Wisconsin does more. We fake bake too much, which – look at me now. The most logical answer is this production model. This production model is killing us. You’re starting to see literature, even in urban Iowa, saying no more than 10 parts per million for the nitrates in the water. Scientists now think it should only be five.

Austin Frerick 1:04:23
There’s days in the spring in the largest cities – Iowa City, happens in Des Moines – where it’s up at seven or eight. Even for the densest part of the state, this is getting really scary, let alone what’s going on in these rural communities. Imagine the water nitrate levels for a rural daycare using well water, which doesn’t test or rarely tests.

Austin Frerick 1:04:41
It’s not like it’s consistently high; it’s so clearly tied to…something happens in the spring in Iowa that causes nitrate levels to spike. My hunch would be, we’re not using cover crops, so people… By the way, Koch brothers are massive holders in nitrates because they bought the old farmland assets. There’s this whole marriage between big fossil fuels and big Ag. So, people are over-applying nitrates on their farmland.

Austin Frerick 1:04:50
My hunch is, and it goes right into the creek, and there’s very little buffer strips in Iowa because most of that land’s rented out. Most land in Iowa is owned by non-Iowans now, and people are trying to maximize their corn, so they farm literally up to the creek. Nitrates are just going right into the water that goes right into what you consume. That’s what I would assume is driving this.

Austin Frerick 1:05:29
I’ve learned so much about these legal lawsuits stuff. It just sounds like common sense. It just went too far, and it’s killing us. It’s getting worse in Iowa – the cancer crisis. At some point, this system can’t keep going. It’s not sustainable. The industry knows it, so they’re doing the same thing they did back in the 90s, where Monsanto famously made examples of people. They would sue people for the [inaudible 1:06:02]. They’re going to keep…

Dave Chapman 1:06:04
The chilling effect.

Austin Frerick 1:06:05
The chilling effect.

Dave Chapman 1:06:07
The Apple producers sued CBS for the 60 Minutes episode on Alar for 50 million, and they lost.

Austin Frerick 1:06:18
It kills every other news outlet.

Dave Chapman 1:06:21
Then they sued Oprah for mad cow disease, and everyone goes, “We’ll probably win, probably.” But that’s an awful lot of threat and danger for running the story.

Austin Frerick 1:06:33
Then add on to the state of the news system now in America, where so many of these papers have a fraction of their budget. Even for me, people don’t realize when you sign a book contract now – because the book industry is so consolidated – the liability is on me.

Dave Chapman 1:06:48
If you have a book published as the author, if anything gets said that is liable….?

Austin Frerick 1:06:55
You can see the crap out of me.

Dave Chapman 1:06:56
Out of you, not out of the publisher.

Austin Frerick 1:06:58
Authors have to pay for their own fact-checking. Especially right now, people want to read fantasy – they want to read escapism. The book world – for a non-fiction book – it’s really hard. Every chapter cost me about $1,500 to fact-check. That’s why I have, like, a thousand footnotes. My husband is a lawyer, I was like, “We got to make sure Ts are crossed and Is are dotted. That’s scary.

Austin Frerick 1:07:32
I could take this gamble now because I don’t have a kid, but also, I’m a big believer that you take your gambles when you’re younger. Come sue me, all I have are books. I have my books. But that said, what I always tell people is, going back to that kind of insurgent mindset you should have right now, your best friends are journalists. That’s what I learned from the Big Tech people – see something, say something.

Austin Frerick 1:07:57
These journalists make very little; they’re moving a mile a minute. If you see something that doesn’t smell right, send an email. Or if you see a story and they quote someone that they probably shouldn’t quote, that might be corrupt or they got something wrong, don’t get mad at them online – send them a nice email: “Hey, I saw that you quoted this person. You should really know they’re taking all this industry money. Now talk…”

Austin Frerick 1:08:15
Build those relationships. You want to put as much sunlight on this space as possible. These stories just aren’t being told – that’s what I realized. A lot of the news in the middle of America and agriculture has been hollowed out. It’s a lot of industry-generated news.

Austin Frerick 1:08:33
At the same time, too, The New York Times only seems to care about the fancy vegan restaurant, so it’s just missing these markets. Just send an email to three or four reporters: ” You should really look here.” There was a big story recently – I believe in The Wall Street Journal – about this kind of crooked maple syrup academic.

Austin Frerick 1:08:52
In my head, I was like, “We could do this for every commodity in America.” The person who’s just the go-to hack for the industry just takes corporate money and says a bunch of BS. You got to think that way. It’s also fun. One little example, personally, is, I was in western Iowa working on a new baron this last summer.

Austin Frerick 1:09:14
I was just having dinner with a friend, and she was telling me Iowa has this great program to control the deer population, where hunters can kill a buck and then give it to a local meat locker, and the state subsidizes the processing of the meat to then give to the food bank, to give away free meat. Great program.

Austin Frerick 1:09:29
Here’s the thing: she was telling me no one was checking for shrapnel in the meat, so it could be lead-tainted meat being served at the food pantries. I let a reporter know. Recently, the story was published six months later. It turns out only the state of Minnesota right now has a program mandating the testing, or they scan the meat to see if there’s any lead fragments in the meat.

Austin Frerick 1:09:52
Now we know. That story is out there. This reporter got all that information. Now people can go out there and ask our legislators to do something similar.

Dave Chapman 1:10:00
All right, Austin. We should probably end sometime here. Not that I’m slowing down; this is very interesting. But people always ask, and I’m sure you get it all the time, “Well, what can we do?” If anybody who’s listening to this hasn’t read “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” you should read it.

Austin Frerick 1:10:20
It makes a great gift.

Dave Chapman 1:10:20
It does make a great gift. I’ve given away a number of copies. You sent me four very nice autographed copies. They’re all gone. I say, “You’ve got to read this book.” And they do. It’s so readable but so rich. But when people ask you, as I’m sure you hear all the time, “Well, what can we do?” What are your thoughts about that?

Austin Frerick 1:10:41
First of all, food is how you power your body. What do you want to put in your body? Do you want to put garbage, or do you want to put good stuff? So, if you can, buy the good food, understanding that’s what you’re doing. But I really tell people – I’m hesitant to put anything on. Most of these farmers are barely getting by.

Austin Frerick 1:11:01
I always joke that the only farmer in the free market is a CSA farmer because they get no Farm Bill subsidy, and they’re usually big and so little they’re most giving away their labor. Whereas the biggest welfare people tend to be the largest entities. I should say government assistance.

Austin Frerick 1:11:01
If you just care about the stuff, what I really tell people is to focus on local procurement. That middle barrier – your colleges, your schools. Pair up the local farmer doing it right with the school, and pressure that school to buy locally. Add your voice to that chorus. Help that farmer out. Especially in these moments when things are getting so volatile in DC, focus locally. Focus on the local success story.

Austin Frerick 1:11:47
First of all, it’s a great distraction for right now. You want to feel in this moment that you can make something better, and you can make the most impactful change right now at the most local level, so do that. I can’t say that enough. You got to have proofs of concept. Because these things always ebb and flow. I’m a big believer in that – in American history. When we have a moment to change, what’s our game plan?

Austin Frerick 1:12:13
To have these proofs of concept is so important because now we can sit there and point, “Hey, we should scale this. Here’s the boundary, here are the barriers we hit; how do we fix them? But also, you have people that ran the programs who think they have positions of power. Hey, this person ran a really cool program, they should be in this position at the USDA.” You want to create heroes.

Austin Frerick 1:12:34
Even like that Lina Khan thing – we’re saying Lina Khan a lot. She’s part of a movement. She represents a group of people. Part of that movement really helped create her into a hero. But people need that right now. Don’t forget the little example – going back to meat – probably why I like talking about meat, is we dealt with this before. Even when we talk about it, we talk about Teddy Roosevelt going after the meat; that just didn’t happen overnight.

Austin Frerick 1:13:00
The first antitrust laws in the world came out of Iowa as farmers got mad. It was a slow movement of people that started at the local level. It finally got to the federal government. The laws were passed – the Sherman Act – but it took a few presidents to finally do something.

Austin Frerick 1:13:15
I say all this because we tell history, and we tend to truncate it. Even this Lina Khan, Big Tech things is happening faster in the grand scheme of American history. You have Trump’s people at the Federal Trade Commission essentially keeping a lot of what she did, which is maybe one of the outliers in this administration.

Austin Frerick 1:13:34
Mark Zuckerberg has been running to the White House, giving out millions of dollars in checks to stop it. It was reported in The Wall Street Journal that the Trump Federal Trade Commission told him to ignore Mark and continue on with the Facebook case.

Austin Frerick 1:13:45
All I say is just focus on local. Focus on those local concepts: those local institutions, local schools, and local colleges. Because it’s not going to be easy – especially as the federal government…you’re going to see Brooke cut all this money. It’s only going to get worse.

Austin Frerick 1:14:04
Is there a way to infill that with state money? What can you do locally? These colleges spend so much money on fancy gyms. It’s like, “Really, how will we feed our students” That matters a little bit more than a hundred-million-dollar gym. It’s question over priorities. Do you want to feed chicken fingers to kids?

Dave Chapman 1:14:23
I’m just curious, do you think the colleges can build this into a competitive advantage for recruiting students?

Austin Frerick 1:14:30
Yes, and let them know that. That’s, to me, the sweet spot for trustees – tell them that. If you’re a full-pay kid, that’s one pay of $80,000 a year to go; this kid’s college wants a good strawberry. In the grand scheme of how they spend money at these schools, it’s not a lot of money.

Austin Frerick 1:14:48
I think part of it was that you saw some progress on it, and it just feels like – given the state of the world and everything – there’s just been a regression of it. You have to double down and keep people’s feet to the fire. That’s how change happens. Sometimes it’s a step forward, a step back, but then you learn a lesson. How do you take them two steps forward? It’s not going to be easy.

Austin Frerick 1:15:15
I think, more and more, the food system is showing how broken it is, and in ways that I think when these changes were done 10 years ago, people did not realize. COVID actually showed a lot of people how broken it all is. I also think taste has really collapsed in the food system in the last 10 years. I think that has been one of the most universal things.

Austin Frerick 1:15:33
I hate saying this in Vermont, but Ben and Jerry is not that good anymore. We did a tour the other day, and it’s just not worth the calories. The innovation is gone; love have run into the ground. It’s sad, because most people in Vermont think of that brand, and it’s just…

Austin Frerick 1:15:56
What happened to Ben and Jerry just started the bigger side of the American economy. This innovative brand got swallowed by a big corporate entity – hollowed it out. But who knows? You’re seeing the founders fight for the company again. So maybe they can wrest it away. Maybe they can…

Dave Chapman 1:16:11
I think they just fired the CEO for being political.

Austin Frerick 1:16:16
The Wall Street Journal reported that the founders are trying to put together money to buy it back from Unilever. Who knows? It’s such a volatile moment. This thing could break in so many ways. Focus on the hope – I can’t say that enough. That’s what I love about doing this locally – focusing on local schools.

Austin Frerick 1:16:39
People always want the opposite of what they have. These things only get darker and meaner. People want to see other people be nice to each other. They want to see good… Alice Waters is really good at this – she’ll sit you down, give you good food, and then ask for something.

Austin Frerick 1:17:01
Because who isn’t happy after a good meal? You eat a Taco Bell. No one feels good after Taco Bell. But you have a really good meal… That’s something I noticed at my wedding. My big thing at our wedding – got married – we had a small-town, gay, Jewish Iowa wedding. My big thing was pasture meat.

Austin Frerick 1:17:14
My mom’s one of the twelve – Irish Catholic. The amount of Iowans had told me how good my pork was. I was just like, “You’re used to industrial pork. This is just old-fashioned pork.” We just had cottage cheese, pork, squash, and a few other dishes. This wasn’t complex cooking. It was just a simple thing, but it tasted so good.

Austin Frerick 1:17:35
It’s just going back to that traditionalism that I think is not threatening to people. You’re not being scary. Does that make sense? I don’t want to scare people. I want people to be scared of what we have and focus on the hope. The industry will always attack people like us as being the crazies – the radicals.

Dave Chapman 1:18:01
Okay. Austin Frerick, thank you so much.

Austin Frerick 1:18:04
Thank you for having me, Dave.