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Groups speak out against corporate influence in agriculture

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Thursday, March 6, 2025   

Advocates for small independent farmers are sounding the alarm about the effects of corporate agriculture on farmers and local communities. Four mega-corporations now control the majority of livestock production in the U.S. American companies Tyson and Cargill, Brazilian-owned JBS, and Chinese-owned WH Group Limited.

Justin Perkins, publisher of Barn Raiser, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering rural America, said their influence is far reaching.

"These corporate monopolies are structured across all across the agriculture industry, and this has made the livelihood of small- and even medium-sized farmers nearly untenable," he explained.

The big agricultural firms argue that they have made the food system more efficient and profitable, while keeping consumer prices low. But advocates argue that waste from huge hog, cattle and dairy farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, pollute communities' air and water.

Sonja Trom Eayrs, along with her family, has been farming in Minnesota for generations - and fighting CAFOS for decades, wrote a book called Dodge County, Incorporated. In it, she describes the corporate system as a pyramid with big ag at the top, with integrators in the middle who own the supply chain and provide feed and veterinary services to farmers called contract growers at the base.

"The multinationals reorganized the marketplace, created a closed system where all the profits flow to the top of this pyramid, and they can control the pricing that flows all the way down to the contract farmer and that contract grower down at the bottom," she explains.

Joe Maxwell, cofounder of the nonprofit Farm Action, said this vertical integration has created regional monopolies among meat packers - and has driven tens of thousands of independent hog farmers out of business over the past few decades.

"These meat packers, they own the system. They own the baby pig. They own the feed. They price gouge the consumer at the grocery store," Maxwell said. "They pollute the land, to destroy the natural resources. They are extracting the wealth from rural America."

Maxwell encouraged people to take a stand with their local, state and federal elected representatives - in order to counter the influence of lobbyists for big agriculture.


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