Book excerpt: 'Barons' examines US food system, including pork production

Austin Frerick's book "Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry" is on sale. This excerpt is printed with permission.

Chapter 1: The Hog Barons

Julie Duhn remembers her first time kayaking mostly for its aftermath. When Duhn retired from her office job, she decided to start experimenting with the sport at Pine Lake State Park, near her home in Eldora, Iowa. The collection of campgrounds and trails rings two small lakes that trickle into the Iowa River and is surrounded by rolling farmland. It was a hot afternoon in mid-August, just a few weeks after her first outing, when Duhn’s arms began to itch, then grow red and raw. She consulted a doctor, who, after learning about her kayaking trip, blamed the rash on the lake water.

Indeed, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources has considered Pine Lake unsafe for human contact since 2012. It keeps a sign posted on the beach to discourage visitors from wading in. The problem is an overgrowth of algae, which feed on the phosphorus that continually flows into the lake from nearby farm fields spread with fertilizer and manure. A state report concluded that one clear contributor is the waste produced by the 10,000 hogs in the lake’s watershed.

Iowa has long been known for hog farming and was once dotted with idyllic barns to house the animals. But today, most of the state’s hogs spend their lives in massive metal sheds known as “confinements”: warehouses that allow operators to breed thousands of pigs in one building. The sheds are long and thin, with huge exhaust fans on either end, and each group of buildings includes several silos for storing feed, as well as a dumpster to dispose of the roughly 10% of hogs that don’t survive until slaughtering time. After being weaned in these industrial facilities, the pigs are transferred to a finishing operation to fatten up and then to the slaughterhouse. These two trips in a packed semitrailer are the only times the pigs will see daylight.

Jeff Hansen and his wife, Deb, built an empire out of these confinement sheds. The Hansens’ company, Iowa Select Farms, employs more than 7,400 people, including contractors, and brings about 5 million pigs to market annually. As the owners of Iowa’s largest hog operation, the Hansens have constructed hundreds of confinement sheds in more than 50 of Iowa’s 99 counties.

The sheds have provoked controversy in Iowa ever since operators such as the Hansens began to build them during the 1990s. Many rural communities, including people such as Julie Duhn, have campaigned fiercely against them, citing damage to health, livelihoods, property values, the environment, and the farm economy.X5 Although their efforts have yielded small victories, they have lost the war.

The state’s hog industry, led by the Hansens, has cultivated close relationships with state politicians on both sides of the aisle to roll back regulations. Even as California has passed animal welfare laws and North Carolina has tightened its permitting program for confinement operations, the hog industry in Iowa goes almost unchecked. Today, Iowa raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, about as many as the second-, third-, and fourth-ranking states combined.

Since Iowa Select was founded in 1992, the state’s pig population has increased by more than 50% while the number of hog farms has declined by over 80%. Over the past 30 years, 26,000 Iowa farms quit the long-standing tradition of raising pigs. As confinements replaced farms, rural communities have continued to hollow out.

Pigs in Iowa now outnumber human residents by a ratio of more than seven to one, and they produce a volume of manure equivalent to the waste of nearly 84 million people, more than the populations of California, Texas, and Illinois combined. One expert estimated that each confinement facility produces “the same amount of waste as a city of 90,000 to 150,000 people,” spread over only 640 acres with no sewage system.

The environment simply cannot handle so much pig shit. In theory, this manure, when spread on nearby crop fields, is a useful fertilizer. But residents and scientists alike point to evidence that this “Mt. Everest of waste,” as one University of Iowa water researcher described it, is frequently mismanaged. It filters through soil to underground pipes that discharge directly into rivers, and when manure is overapplied, rain and snowmelt can quickly channel it into waterways.

As a result, as confinement operations have come to dominate pork production, they’ve degraded Iowa’s water quality. Watersheds that are dense with livestock have a higher nutrient overload. Most summers, the state closes two-thirds of its state park beaches to swimming for a week or more, citing the health risk of toxins or bacteria.

Closer to the confinements, many rural residents say they’ve been plagued — and others pushed out — by the stench, the flies, and the health hazards that accompany the facilities. “We know what hog manure smells like, but this is like a sewer,” one retired farmer who lived next to an industrial hog facility told the Washington Post.

The Hansens likely can’t see — or smell — any hog buildings from their 7,000-square-foot mansion, which is nestled inside a gated community in suburban Des Moines. Their view is dominated by the golf course at the exclusive Glen Oaks Country Club, which abuts their backyard. In 2020, the Hansens’ company jet recorded over 200 fights, including several trips to Naples, Florida, where until recently they owned multiple homes on the coast.

When Americans think about farmers, they probably don’t have jet-setting millionaires such as Jeff and Deb Hansen in mind. But businesses like theirs are increasingly the norm in farm country: huge, regional-scale corporations owned by just one or a few families who use their political connections to overpower both local democracy and local businesses.

Iowa Select became a behemoth as the result of decades of deregulation that allowed power to concentrate in our food system. And it’s not just smelly. It’s a sad story of the corporate capture of my home state.

Metal Shed Farmer

Jeff and Deb Hansen grew up in Iowa Falls as typical farm kids. They graduated from the local high school in 1976 and soon married. Both went straight to work: Jeff helped on his father’s farm while Deb worked in a local farm insurance office.

During the Hansens’ childhoods, Iowa’s rich soils supported a constellation of diversified single-family operations. Farmers grew corn and soybeans, but many also raised a flock of chickens, milked a small dairy herd, or grazed beef on pasture. As with many long-term investment portfolios, diversity was a farm family’s lifeline.

Many family farmers considered pigs to be a cornerstone of their farms. Farmers raised a variety of breeds in barns and in pens. Although many farmers kept hogs in every stage of the life cycle, others specialized in “farrowing” — breeding sows and raising the litters — or buying “feeder” pigs, fattening them to maturity, and then auctioning them at the sale barns spread in a grid across the Iowa countryside. These competitive markets ensured a fair price for farmers.

It was likely at just such a sale barn that newlywed Jeff Hansen bought his first three sows, which he kept in a converted barn on his father’s property. As the herd grew, the couple found the work grueling, particularly Deb, who had quit her office job to manage the pigs. To lighten her load, the Hansens purchased labor-saving equipment such as “elevated farrowing crates with steel slats, a feed pan and automatic waterers,” according to National Hog Farmer, a trade magazine. Quickly grasping the potential of mechanized livestock equipment, Jeff Hansen founded his own business to build confinement systems.

Animal warehouses had already transformed the poultry industry in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, and the model soon spread to other sectors and regions. They were first extensively used with hogs in the late 1980s in North Carolina, where a state legislator deregulated the industry for his personal benefit. Dairy followed shortly thereafter, starting in California.

A consistent theme in this warehouse animal model is that one state moves first, triggering others to follow suit. After confinements were deregulated in North Carolina, Iowa followed closely behind, desperate not to lose its status as the nation’s top pork producer. As the race to the bottom sped up, the US Department of Agriculture failed to stop it.

Big meatpackers, which purchase and slaughter pigs and package pork, were enthusiastic about the shift to this model. The meatpackers prefer to buy from confinement operations through production contracts because they offer a steady stream of pigs in predictable sizes that are ready for slaughter on a precise schedule. The model is vastly more profitable than buying from a patchwork of independent growers, who sell pigs of various breeds and sizes at local auctions. Today, two-thirds of Iowa hogs are grown on contract with big meatpackers. Consequently, the sale barns that dotted the Iowa countryside slowly closed, and so did the competitive market for selling hogs.

Meanwhile, trade agreements that cut tariffs and sidelined import restrictions in places such as Asia and Mexico swung open the doors of a world market for livestock products, particularly eggs and pork. Wall Street took notice; outside investors played a critical role in financing the expansion of confinement operations in Iowa.

Hardin County, where the Hansens were raised, was the perfect place to take advantage of this hog boom. Although nearly 90% of Iowa’s land area is devoted to agriculture, its north-central region, smoothed by glaciers, has the fattest, richest cropland, which means it can accommodate copious amounts of manure and produce huge quantities of cheap feed. The region also has abundant groundwater (hogs are thirsty).

“At that point, there were two things I knew for sure,” Jeff Hansen told National Hog Farmer. “Iowa was best suited to build an integrated pork production system and, second, I knew I could figure out how to do it.” The Hansens carved out a niche by building the confinement sheds that would take over Iowa’s hog industry. By the early 1990s, they were bringing in $90 million per year assembling these confinements, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs for short.

But after steadily expanding their confinement-building business, the Hansens decided they could also make money by raising their own hogs. In 1992, Jeff Hansen incorporated a new company, Iowa Select Farms, signed a contract with a meatpacker, and launched operations with a herd of 10,000 sows. During its first four years, Iowa Select more than quintupled its herd to 62,000 sows, enough to rate among the top 10 largest pork producers in the country. By 1999, with 96,000 sows, it was selling 1.7 million pigs per year. Today, Iowa Select Farms is the fourth-largest hog producer in the country.

Dirty Water

As Iowa Select built its empire, the impacts of its warehouses on the environment and surrounding communities quickly became apparent.

On a very basic level, the stench produced by confinements can be overwhelming. Within the sheds, powerful exhaust fans are necessary to constantly suck out poisonous gases rising from the manure lagoons. If the fans are shut off, the hogs die within hours. This is exactly what happened during the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted slaughterhouse operations and Iowa Select needed to quickly kill hundreds of thousands of animals.

In Iowa, confinements are often as close as a quarter mile from homes, schools, and businesses. In interviews and in years of news coverage, Iowans living near confinements have complained about air quality too poor for their kids to play outside; about clouds of flies attracted to the giant manure pits and lagoons; about the exploding population of rats infesting homes, drawn by the vast stocks of animal feed; and about vultures that snatch carcasses from animal warehouse dumpsters and then drop pig parts in backyards.

Scientists have also documented negative health effects among people who live near confinements. One study of North Carolina residents who lived within a few miles of clustered confinements found that they had a lower life expectancy and higher rates of infant deaths, asthma, kidney disease, tuberculosis, and blood poisoning than those who lived farther away. Dangerous levels of ammonia, which causes burning in the eyes and respiratory tract as well as chronic lung disease, have been measured in the air near massive hog sites in Iowa since the early 2000s. Communities near hog operations also report higher rates of headaches, sore throats, runny noses, coughs, and diarrhea than comparable areas without hog confinements. A 2012 study found higher rates of neurobehavioral and pulmonary impairment in people living within 1.9 miles of a massive hog facility and manure lagoon in Ohio than in a control group in Tennessee.

As of 2023, the US Environmental Protection Agency still hadn’t even estimated airborne emissions from confinements in order to regulate them under the Clean Air Act, despite numerous instances of workers falling into manure pits and dying from the fumes. Confinement applications sometimes promise to plant tree barriers to reduce air pollution, but the trees take several years to mature enough to be effective, if they are ever planted at all.

The confinements have also caused economic devastation in surrounding communities. It’s no secret that rural American economies have struggled for decades with high poverty rates and anemic job growth. Confinement operators argue that the jobs they bring are beneficial to rural areas. Iowa Select might point to a 2017 study that it commissioned from Dermot Hayes, an Iowa State University economist with a long record of supporting agribusiness (and of business transactions with Jeff and Deb Hansen). In the study, Hayes credited the company with “reversing economic decline” in rural communities where it built giant sow barns.

Yet economists such as Hayes often fail to disclose their corporate funding and support. Kate Conlow, an attorney and former journalist, has documented how extensive this problem is among economists working in agriculture. Although many universities have disclosure policies, Conlow noted that they are hardly ever enforced. This failure warps the public debate.

Meanwhile, a different economist at Iowa State found that the overall economy in these communities continues to degrade in spite of all the jobs that Iowa Select claims to provide. Rather than stemming the decline, “they’re actually one of the key mechanisms for driving people out of rural areas, despite the claims to the contrary.”

Even putting aside their economic impact, jobs at confinements are tough. Employees at sow farms monitor food, water, and ventilation; castrate, euthanize, artificially inseminate, and perform pregnancy checks on the animals; remove dead hogs; power-wash facilities to remove manure; and wean litters. One former Iowa Select driver told the Guardian in 2019 that he earned $23,000 per year working 12-hour days with no overtime pay. As Julie Duhn put it, “Is a job with Iowa Select what you want for your kids?” Given how difficult and poorly paid these jobs are, it’s no surprise that Iowa Select has employed undocumented workers.

Moreover, this production model depends on liberal use of antibiotics. Overuse of these drugs is contributing to antibiotic resistance, not just in pigs but also among humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States now has a death every 15 minutes from an antibiotic-resistant infection. In response, public health officials have been ringing the alarm bell and calling for less use of these drugs in hogs.

But in Iowa, the most obvious impact of the confinements has been on the state’s water. In a confinement facility, hog manure drops through a slatted floor and collects in a deep pool below. In some instances, that pool runs through a pipe to a manure pond or lagoon that holds the overflow. This waste can find its way into the watershed, adding to the pollution caused by fertilizer runoff. Gordon Garrison, a farmer in northwestern Iowa, told the Guardian that nitrate levels in the water on his property nearly doubled after a corporation built a shed housing up to 8,800 pigs in a neighboring field.

Bob Havens, now in his 70s, learned to swim in Pine Lake and built his house near the lake 20 years ago. Now, he said, in the summertime, “the lake turns into this slimy green sludge” and billows of foam course through local culverts. Both are signs of a dangerous nutrient imbalance. As a result, Havens lamented, “you [can’t] even canoe through it, let alone fish.” Havens sees the pollution as a matter of equity. “A lot of folks in Hardin County can’t afford a three-week vacation in the Bahamas,” but they used to have Pine Lake for excellent swimming, fishing, and boating. Now, he said ruefully, “they just can’t do it.”

The problem is bad enough during normal times, particularly with older facilities, but it can become a crisis in the wake of the sorts of natural disasters that are becoming more common as the planet heats up. After recent catastrophic flooding in western Iowa, for example, some livestock lagoons spilled over into nearby creeks, a process that can cause environmental devastation and threaten human health and well-being. North Carolina faced a similar issue when more than 50 livestock lagoons overflowed in the wake of Hurricane Florence, according to NPR reporting at the time. A recent report noted a large expansion of industrial animal facilities in Iowa’s hundred-year floodplains even in the face of these risks.

These two intertwined factors — overapplication of synthetic fertilizers, mostly to grow industrial animal feed, and pig waste from corporate farms — have created a water crisis in Iowa. To make water safe for human consumption, the Des Moines Water Works pays as much as $10,000 per day to treat it. This problem isn’t limited to Iowa. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that Americans pay almost $1.7 billion per year, mainly through higher water bills, to deal with this pollution. The cost can be overwhelming for communities, particularly smaller ones with lower budgets and poorer populations.

But even cities such as Des Moines can barely keep up. The Raccoon River runs past cropland and corporate hog operations in northern Iowa and meanders east to Des Moines, where it provides 500,000 people in and around Iowa’s largest city with drinking water. Of course, it likely carries much of the pollution with it, including from the manure produced by the Hansens’ hog operations. In 2015, Des Moines experienced 177 days of high nitrate levels. In response, it sought to spend $80 million on a new nitrate removal facility to handle its growing needs.

Neutering the Backlash

As confinement buildings and their manure ponds spread across the Iowa countryside during the 1990s, a passionate rural backlash emerged, sparking a prolonged battle over the future of farming in Iowa. Protesters packed gymnasiums and crowded hallways in the statehouse. Coalitions of family farmers threatened by this new model, environmentalists, and neighboring residents and communities held rallies — one demonstration drew 1,000 supporters in a small town with a population of only 2,700 — and lobbied legislators to enact a state moratorium on new confinement construction.

The pushback against confinements came from all directions. Right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan even made opposition to confinements a key part of his 1996 presidential campaign in Iowa. “Farmers talk about it everywhere I go,” he told the Los Angeles Times after the Iowa caucuses. “Whenever I bring it up, the audience explodes.” Buchanan’s surprising close-second finish in the Republican Iowa caucuses — to Kansas Sen. Bob Dole — elevated him from protest candidate to legitimate contender.

Although most big corporate animal warehouse networks operate in multiple states, the Hansens staked their entire operation on Iowa. But you’d be hard-pressed to say they were welcomed. The fierce debate over confinements made the front page of the Des Moines Register year after year in the mid-1990s. National newspapers frequently covered the story. Even the Hansens’ home county proposed a moratorium on new confinements.

The Hansens and other industry leaders likely knew that this opposition posed an existential threat to their booming businesses. Regulations and restrictions against expansion were already being put in place in North Carolina, the state that had first deregulated the industry and kicked off the hog boom. Although Iowa’s cheap corn remained attractive, its lax regulatory standards were — and remain — the Hog Barons’ essential requirement for success.

It’s easy to see why communities across the state revolted — and many continue to revolt — against the confinements. In fact, a recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents favored a moratorium on new corporate hog facilities. But despite the popular resistance to animal warehouses, legislators faced pressure from business leaders to invite in even more of them. Agricultural economists sympathetic to large operators such as the Hansens argued that if the state were friendlier to hog operations, the growth potential would be enormous.

In the summer of 1993, a report called “Project 21” was presented to the Des Moines business leaders who had commissioned it. The 111-page paper, authored by a Virginia-based consulting firm, chided Iowa’s politicians and business leaders for “complacency” with the state’s relative economic health and its low rate of unemployment. The report concluded that Iowa needed to do more to boost growth, which meant that the family farm needed to die. “Although it is politically popular to defend and protect the concept of family farms,” the report proclaimed, “legislation limiting corporate investment is economic folly.”

The sentiment touched a nerve. “We’re really tired of this type of nonsense,” a leading organizer for an anti-confinement group called Prairiefire told the Des Moines Register in response to the plan. “And if they want a fight in the Legislature, we’ll show them a fight they’d never imagined.” One Iowa farmer asked, “Why are they trying to promote something that will both hurt the environment and sell our young people into lives of indentured servitude?”

Forced to address the heated controversy, confinement operations marshaled their political power to fend off regulation. In 1994, the newly formed Iowa Pork Alliance enlisted Robert Ray, a Republican former governor, to remind Iowans of hogs’ economic importance in statewide television ads. Iowa Select Farms, for its part, emphasized repeatedly in the press that any efforts to stifle the growth of hog confinements would send production and jobs out of state. Iowa Select and its employees also donated $41,000 to the campaign of Terry Branstad, the state’s Republican governor at the time, and hired his former chief of staff, Doug Gross, as a lobbyist. Branstad even appeared in an Iowa Select television promotion that year.

The cozy relationship seemed to pay off. In 1995, Branstad signed a law that would prove to be pivotal for the Hansens, neutering local democracy to clear the way for his industry’s development. The law, known as H.F. 519, offered token protections to neighbors of confinements: new buildings had to be sited at least a quarter mile from residences, and owners had to write plans — which had to be approved by the state — for disposing of their manure.

But the law also handed animal warehouse operators a huge victory by stripping counties of their long-standing authority to deny construction permits to confinement operators. Jeff Hansen described the law as a “fair compromise” and judged it sufficient to keep the Hansens’ business in the state. “We’re going to keep growing in Iowa,” he told the Des Moines Register.

The issue later became a prominent topic in the 2002 governor’s race between Doug Gross, the Iowa Select lobbyist, and Democrat Tom Vilsack. While campaigning, Vilsack — who would later serve as secretary of agriculture for Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden — derided Gross as a champion of corporate hog lots. But as state senator, Vilsack had voted for H.F. 519.

Vilsack ended up winning the race. His second term, from 2002 through 2006, coincided with the largest confinement-building boom in Iowa’s history.

From "Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry" by Austin Frerick ©2024 by Austin Frerick. Reprinted by permission of Island Press. All rights reserved.

About the author

Austin Frerick is an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy. He worked at the Open Markets Institute, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the Congressional Research Service before becoming a Fellow at Yale University. He is a seventh-generation Iowan and first-generation college graduate, with degrees from Grinnell College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About the book

From the publisher: "Barons" is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. The stories are examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. "Barons" paints a stark portrait of the consequences of corporate consolidation, but it also shows we can choose a different path. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible — if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Book excerpt: 'Barons' examines food system, including pork production