Farm kid. Baron buster.
A lot happened since the former. A lot would have to happen still before the latter happened. For Austin Frerick, the first step is awareness. It has always been about food.
“My family used to be farmers on both sides,” Frerick told American Farmland from his home office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“We no longer are. But they're still involved in the food system. My dad's an ethanol truck driver, and my mom used to run a bakery.”
But these days are not those days. Frerick said “barons,” as he describes them, have taken over too much of agriculture. And their monopolistic practices make it too difficult for many smaller farmers, like his family, to make a living.
Frerick is working in his second decade following agricultural, tax, and antitrust policy.
Austin Frerick bio
Yale University – Thurman Arnold Project Fellow
Common Good Iowa – Board of Directors Vice President
Open Markets Institute – Director of Special Projects
U.S. Department of the Treasury – Office of Tax Analysis Economist
Congressional Research Service – Research Assistant
U.S. Congress – Candidate
Iowa State Senate – Candidate
Agriculture, of course, is not alone among industries that have seen consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, bankruptcies, and retirements that leave fewer competitors or contributors (depending on your position).
Retail, media, airlines, oil, and telephone companies have also seen fewer -- but bigger -- players in their respective industries.
“It's almost anti-democratic to have these,” Frerick said of monopolistic practices, “You know…barons are basically controlling our system to our detriment.”
Barons.
“I didn’t want to be over the top rhetoric,” Frerick said of his use of the word, baron. “I view a baron as someone who makes and shapes a market.”
The word is the central theme of Frerick’s book, “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.”
The book concept began as a conversation at a bar in Des Moines, Iowa, which led to an unquenchable thirst to learn more about how food production worked…the key players, policies, and practices. Five years of research went into the book.
Frerick said the research led him to identify seven barons in food production:
1. Hog Barons
2. Grain Barons
3. Coffee Barons
4. Dairy Barons
5. Berry Barons
6. Slaughter Barons
7. Grocery Barons
Each baron category is a separate chapter that follows how -- in Frerick’s analysis -- a person, couple, or family used aggressive expansion to eventually dominate that sector of food production.
Too much concentration and power held by several producers can put an industry at risk, Frerick believes. He called the spread of bird flu on dairy farms an example, a “perfect storm.”
“These dairy operators are essentially capital asset managers. It’s so consolidated. For family farmers, there are only one or two buyers of your milk. If you don’t go along with the playbook, your market access is cut off, and you go bankrupt,” Frerick told Vanity Fair.
Frerick wants to make sure that his opposition to “barons” controlling too much of the country’s food supply doesn’t imply anything negative against family farmers.
Again, his family’s livelihood had once been connected to the farm. And he is a seventh-generation Iowan, whose ancestors were surrounded by farms.
He illustrates his points not just by pointing out the tens of thousands of farmers who left the industry but also by simplicity for consumers: taste.
Frerick challenges people to eat a strawberry or tomato from the garden or local farmers’ market. Then, compare that to the taste of one of those fruits taken out of a plastic container shipped from another corner of the United States or a different country.
Frerick is convinced that consumers’ taste buds will guide them to the better choice: the local option. He hopes school districts will make every effort to purchase produce from regional growers to provide kids with nutritious options but also to help sustain local family farmers.
“What has happened to the farmland in Iowa in my lifetime?” Frerick asked as he thought of how the countryside has changed in his home state and neighboring Wisconsin, where he attended graduate school. “Beautiful rolling hills…and used to see (farm) animals.”
“Now you don’t. You smell them. But you don’t see them,” he said as he lamented the expansion of animal confinement sheds.
He summed up his mission to track the changes and convince others to take action to bring back the potential for family farmers. “How did we get to this point?”
RELATED: “So much of the food and agriculture news we read is just geared towards the 1%,” Frerirck told Forbes in an interview in March. “Here's a new $300 restaurant. Here's a new buzzword of the moment. And I just didn't feel like a lot of stuff was really grappling with what you see every day at the grocery store. But then also, part of it is, what the heck happened to Iowa?”
