{"product_id":"dodge-county-incorporated-big-ag-and-the-undoing-of-rural-america-paperback-softback-9781496234995","title":"Dodge County, Incorporated; Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America (Paperback \/ softback) 9781496234995","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eDodge County, Incorporated\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eBig Ag and the Undoing of Rural America\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eSonja Trom Eayrs (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9781496234995\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 1 November 2024\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e344 pages, 17 photographs, 1 table, 4 charts, index\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.474 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\"Rooted in the intimate experiences of Sonja Trom Eayrs's farming family, \u003ci\u003eDodge County, Inc.\u003c\/i\u003e is a powerful manifesto against the excesses of factory farming.\"-Willem Marx, \u003ci\u003eForeword Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e\"This fascinating exposÉ has the potential to impact our environment, and everyone who farms or eats, buys or sells groceries.\"-Jean Lukesh, \u003ci\u003eRoundup Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“Sonja Trom Eayrs has written a fast-paced legal thriller, filled with a few good guys and too many villains. I wish it was fiction, but it isn’t. \u003ci\u003eDodge County, Incorporated\u003c\/i\u003e exposes the connection between lax regulation of a dangerous type of farming and the disastrous consequences to human health and the environment. . . . Buy it; read it; this is an important book for urban and rural people.”-Sarah Vogel, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“Written with passion, meticulously researched, and vibrantly told, Sonja Trom Eayrs’s \u003ci\u003eDodge County, Incorporated\u003c\/i\u003e gives a riveting insider’s account of how major food corporations infiltrated rural communities, hollowing out their economic vitality and leaving behind environmental ruin. The story of the Trom family farm and its intergenerational legacy draws us in, showing how individual lives have been harmed by the food monopolies. This is a must-read for anyone wanting a behind-the-curtain understanding of why rural farm communities are struggling-and a blueprint for reclaiming rights and equitable opportunities for family farmers.”-Joe Maxwell, cofounder of Farm Action\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“Family farms have historically been a source of wealth and power in rural America. But greed and greater corporate consolidation in agriculture have hollowed out rural communities and forced family farms out of business. Sonja Trom Eayrs rings the alarm in \u003ci\u003eDodge County, Incorporated\u003c\/i\u003e, speaking poignantly from her personal experience about how the American dream in southern Minnesota has been taken away from so many. It also reminds us that the people have the power to fight back and reclaim our broken food system for farmers, rural communities, and all Americans.”-Cory Booker, U.S. senator (New Jersey) and member of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“Sonja Trom Eayrs draws a straight line between the stranglehold of Big Ag and the cruelty, stink, rampant waste, and degradation of water and land that plagues America’s heartland and threatens the livelihood of America’s independent family farmers.”-Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“This book is an absolutely urgent warning sent from America’s heartland. Sonja Trom Eayrs has spent years fighting the corporate takeover of the rural community where she grew up, and the story she tells here is riveting. This is a real-life David and Goliath story that matters to everyone who eats and everyone who cares about the future of farming and small-town America. While the pollution, animal cruelty, and exploitation of Big Ag can be dismaying, the fighting spirit of Trom Eayrs and her neighbors is truly inspiring.”-Christopher Leonard, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e best-selling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“For more than a generation, the relentless-and reckless-profiteering of Big Ag corporations has decimated the rural economy, hollowed out tightly knit communities, and turned once-proud independent farmers into modern incarnations of the sharecropper and the serf. . . . Sonja Trom Eayrs brings this Kafkaesque upheaval to life in a narrative as personal as it is essential. Hers is the story of one farm family’s stand against a multi-billion-dollar global juggernaut, a searing indictment of Big Ag’s rapacity and greed, and an inspiring vision-still a ways off but attainable-of a food system and a rural landscape redeemed from the oppressor’s hand.”-Corban Addison, author of \u003ci\u003eWastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“A riveting tour of one family’s journey fighting the barons that control our food system.”-Austin Frerick, author of \u003ci\u003eBarons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e“\u003ci\u003eDodge County, Incorporated\u003c\/i\u003e is the wrenching saga of how the rise of industrialized hog farming upended the work and the quality of life of a multigenerational Norwegian farm family in rural Minnesota. But as Sonja Trom Eayrs relates to us in her gripping account, the Trom family is just one of many rural families thrust into crisis in recent decades by dangerous changes in agriculture. These mega-farms do indeed produce more pork, much of it bound for Mexico and Japan and China, but they leave a trail of victims in America’s backyards. Communities hollow out, with the holdouts unable to fill the pews, not able to keep the hardware stores open, and too scattered to help raise a barn. This book is a firsthand account of an unfolding crisis and a wake-up call to policymakers that the industrialized model of agriculture is a cancer in rural America.”-Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy and New York Times best-selling author\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the 2025 Minnesota Book Award\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In 2014 Sonja Trom Eayrs’s parents filed the first of three lawsuits against Dodge County officials and their neighbors, one of the few avenues available to them to challenge installation of a corporate factory farm near their intergenerational family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota. For years they’d witnessed the now widely known devastation wrought by industrial hog operations-inhumane treatment of animals and people, pollution, the threat of cancer clusters, and more. They’d had enough. They also deeply understood an effect of Big Ag rarely discussed in mainstream media-the hollowing-out of their lifelong farming community and economy in service of the corporate bottom line.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In a compelling firsthand account of one family’s efforts to stand against corporate takeover, \u003ci\u003eDodge County, Incorporated\u003c\/i\u003e tells a story of corporate malfeasance. Starting with the late 1800s, when her Norwegian great-grandfather immigrated to Dodge County, Trom Eayrs tracks the changes to farming over the years that ultimately gave rise to the disembodied corporate control of today’s food system. Trom Eayrs argues that far from being an essential or inextricable part of American life, corporatism can and should be fought and curbed, not only for the sake of land, labor, and water but for democracy itself.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eList of Illustrations\u003cbr\u003e List of Tables\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Author’\u003cbr\u003es Note\u003cbr\u003e List of Abbreviations\u003cbr\u003e Introduction: A Readiness for Responsibility\u003cbr\u003e Part 1. The Takeover\u003cbr\u003e 1. Moving to the Country\u003cbr\u003e 2. Fertile Soil\u003cbr\u003e 3. The Big Pig Pyramid\u003cbr\u003e 4. The Meeting at Lansing Corners\u003cbr\u003e 5. Get Big or Get Out\u003cbr\u003e 6. The Battle in Ripley Township\u003cbr\u003e Part 2. The Lawsuit\u003cbr\u003e 7. The Economics of the Great Pig Explosion\u003cbr\u003e 8. In the Tank for Big Ag\u003cbr\u003e 9. Getting to Know Your Neighbors\u003cbr\u003e 10. Industry Watchdogs\u003cbr\u003e 11. Risk of Pollution\u003cbr\u003e Part 3. The Resistance\u003cbr\u003e 12. Don’\u003cbr\u003et Drink the Water (or the Kool-Aid)\u003cbr\u003e 13. The Corporate Bully\u003cbr\u003e 14. In the Trenches\u003cbr\u003e 15. The Three-Day Stink Out\u003cbr\u003e Part 4. The Reclamation\u003cbr\u003e 16. Corporate Indoctrination\u003cbr\u003e 17. The Pork Board\u003cbr\u003e 18. Feed the World\u003cbr\u003e 19. On the Front Lines\u003cbr\u003e 20. Expanding the Corporate Empire\u003cbr\u003e 21. A New Vision for Farm Country\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Index\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"Bison Books","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52702521065752,"sku":"9781496234995","price":18.69,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/dodge-county-incorporated-big-ag-and-the-undoing-of-rural-america-paperback-softback-9781496234995","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}