Apr 29, 2026
On April 29, The Capitol Forum held a conference call with agricultural policy expert and researcher Austin Frerick to discuss key developments in agricultural markets and antitrust policy, including structural reform proposals and recent consolidation trends in food distribution.The full transcript, which has been modified slightly for accuracy, can be found below.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Hello, everyone, and welcome. I’m Teddy Downey, Executive Editor here at The Capitol Forum. Today, I’m very pleased to be joined by Austin Frerick, an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy and the author of “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.” Austin’s work focuses on market concentration across the food system and the implications for competition, policy, and economic outcomes. Austin, thanks so much for doing this today.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah, thanks again for having me on, Teddy.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Really quickly, if you have questions for us, I think there’s a whole questions thing here. There is. I can’t see it right now, but I will figure it out. Or you can use the chat. I don’t see the questions. But anyway, we’ll figure it out. Oh, Q&A. Q&A. Okay, got it. So, put it in the Q&A box, put it in the chat. We’ll get to it later in the call.
I wanted to start with a couple of markets that I think we’ve been paying a lot of attention to, Austin, and then get into meat in a second. But two of the markets that we’ve been looking at are fertilizer and seeds. And just wanted to get your sense of what are the problems in these markets? Obviously, we have the Iran war exacerbating the supply chain around fertilizer. What do you see going on in those markets? What are the antitrust problems? And do you see any interest at the state and federal level of doing something about the problems in those markets?
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah. So, let me start with the end first. I’m actually seeing a lot of chatter on the Hill right now about a possible structural separation bill on the seed industry. My dream here is like a Glass-Steagall type thing. Basically, to boil it down, the seeds and chemicals are bundled—or I should say, like the herbicide—where the seeds are engineered to essentially resist the chemicals that kill everything else. And it’s kind of like cable. You know, like cable used to be tied to your TV?
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah.
AUSTIN FRERICK: It’s doing like a hard Glass-Steagall separation between the two. You’re seeing chatter on that. It’s kind of modeled after this meat bill that just dropped by Schumer’s office last month. Here’s the thing. We’ve known these markets, fertilizer and seeds. It’s kind of like Groundhog’s Day for the last, I would say, 10, 15 years of like, every two or three years, they exploit some crisis to jack up the price. You see a lot of kicking and screaming, but these trends continue. And I think the overlay of all this is the collapse of media in a lot of these communities in the middle of the country. So, the extent of the crisis has been really underreported.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And what is the impact on the citizenry in agricultural states when you have these monopolies? Because I know my instinct is to ask you about farmers, but who are the voters here? And why are they sensitive to these prices going up and these markets being monopolized?
AUSTIN FRERICK: So, I’m from Iowa. And a lot of people still think of Iowa as “The Field of Dreams.” That Iowa died in my lifetime. The family farm, especially in like meat and dairy production, essentially being gutted during neoliberalism. You’ve seen massive financialization of this space.
And so, I think just you can’t – you’ve got to overlap that thinking to all this. And so, for that reason, I view most of these farming communities now as extraction colonies, where the land is producing the most it’s ever produced, but none of that wealth is staying there. And so, you’re seeing the politics of anger really filled that void. I mean, so much of the political swing in the last 10, 20 years is rooted in this massive shift you’ve seen, especially in the industrial Midwest, in both the towns of 10,000 that got really screwed over by the offshoring manufacturing, but also the collapse of the family farm.
And like one little example, just to compare the two, is compare rural Iowa to rural Wisconsin. The hog family farm died in the 90s. That’s when Wall Street capital flooded that market, industrialized that, drove the family farm into bankruptcy.
And then you compare it to dairy essentially died, I would say in the last ten years, in Wisconsin. And you kind of see like it takes about 20 years to kind of see it in the data because it takes like—these assets are decaying. Small towns slowly die when no one’s putting new capital into them.
People are staying—what happens is usually the jobs dry up. They start driving longer for their jobs. And the housing markets stagnate, that kind of dynamic. But I think that’s something to really keep in mind here is the extent of extraction colony in rural America, but also the degree of Stockholm syndrome, where I was very critical of the Biden administration on meat. I don’t think they did anything. I think it was mostly hot air. Parties of both sides have talked a big game here, but the fact is it’s all gotten worse.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And I guess maybe a good starting point is like what are the jobs that people care about? Obviously, we’ll get to meat in a second where people care about the price they’re paying for meat. But if you’re not a farmer, what’s the political sensitivity around a seed, the monopolization around seeds, monopolization around fertilizer and that type of thing, if you’re not owning the land and monetizing it yourself?
AUSTIN FRERICK: So, I’m going to like dissect this. So, let’s start with the premise that the farm bill actually makes food expensive because the farm bill is designed to overproduce a few things. So, we subsidize corn, but we don’t subsidize carrots. And so, now—this just happened a few years ago, where the largest use of corn in America is ethanol. You’re taking the best farmland in this country and you’re wasting it in your car. You are subsidizing the crap out of ethanol. So, you’re increasing the cost of food because you’re not growing food.
On top of it, the growth of the corn belt, the growth of this ethanol boom, is really causing a cancer crisis in the Midwest. I mean, Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in America. It’s one of only two states growing. So, you have that thing going on with the farm bill.
Also, keep in mind, it’s pushing farmers to do this because if you grow carrots, you don’t get anything. You’re going to go broke. So, it pushes you to grow corn.
And I would also almost compare it to a retirement portfolio. You want to diversify your assets. So, it used to be, you grow your own grains, feed your own animals, kind of have these like different things going on in case one market crashes.
What the system does now is it pushes people to do one or two things. You grow corn. You sell it to Cargill. Cargill then sells it back to people as industrial animal feed. And then you sell it back to Cargill. So, it makes you incredibly dependent and fragile.
I would compare it to like, remember a few years ago when that hurricane hit Puerto Rico and knocked out America’s IV solution supply chain? It’s very similar. And it makes it really expensive, by the way. I mean, these farm bills, we’re paying a lot of money for food and we’re getting low quality food. At the same time, too, “The New York Times” reported a few months ago, farmers in the Delta, they’re plowing under rice. I mean, there’s such a mismatch of the markets here.
But you asked a question about jobs I really want to hone in on. Because keep in mind, part of the beauty of a family farm, it’s kind of like a local restaurant. You don’t do it to get rich. You do it because you love it. You have pride. You have dignity. Think of Wisconsin, you had all these dairy family farms where a family and 100, 150 cows and you used to be your own boss.
What’s now happened is now you have these industrial operations where, in my book, “My Dairy Baron”, they’re a part of 35,000 cows. They employed over 100 and some people. And they claim residency at the Ritz Carlton in Puerto Rico, that’s likely to evade capital income taxes. That’s a different story. But now they’re essentially capital asset managers. So, it used to be family farmers in these rural communities who now are low wage workers for these entities.
And so, it’s like, on top of it, if you ever drive a lot of these communities now, they’re just sad, broken places. Driving to Iowa now is like driving the New Jersey turnpike. It’s industrial, it’s dead. Next to most of these metal sheds where the animals live now, you just see dumpsters full of dead pigs. Ten percent of animals die inside of these facilities. There’s a cruelness. It’s really, really hard to explain to elite urban centers how sad these worlds have become. There’s a justification to the anger people feel in this.
And on top of it, to all of Americans, especially in regards to meat and dairy, this system makes bad tasting food. I always like to point out Kerrygold to people. People love Kerrygold butter. It’s Irish butter. Number two butter now in America, likely to be number one soon. And the only difference between Irish butter and American butter is the production model. Cows in Ireland are on grass whereas most American butter is coming from Bakersfield, California, where there are these industrial farms on feedlots. And a lot of cows are fed leftover by-products of ethanol. So, because of the fiber in the corn, that’s why it’s hard to spread. Because they’re eating dead stuff. That’s why it’s white, not green.
And so, it’s just like all these different things are like, you’re being gouged at the price. You’re living in these destructive rural communities. And it doesn’t taste good. You know what I mean? I actually think food is the best example of enshitfication right now in America, because of all this, how broken this is. And then these stories aren’t popping through because of the collapse of media in rural America.
TEDDY DOWNEY: No, no. No, it’s super helpful. Because what you’re saying is the political opportunity is not really to fix something where you can just go back to the way it was before. Fundamentally, at some level, this is so broken that you need to—this is why you’re not talking about antitrust enforcement in an antitrust lawsuit on seeds or fertilizer. You’re talking about meat—a structural reform legislatively at the federal level to restructure the market for meat, restructure the market for these other inputs, potentially.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yes. I’m working on my next book right now. I’m doing a lot of research into how we broke up meat a century ago. And a lot of it was President Wilson. It’s very similar to this moment, actually. There was food inflation because of World War I. President Wilson, being a politician, was like I’ve got to do something about it.
He asked the FTC to look into it. They looked into it. Not only did they confirm everything, it was way worse than they thought. Here’s a little example. A lot of meat companies were buying a portion of big city hotels just to force the procurement of their meat.
TEDDY DOWNEY: They were buying the customer.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yes. Or ownership stake into the customer.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. Honestly, it sounds like NVIDIA, to be honest. But keep going. Yeah.
AUSTIN FRERICK: I mean, because these companies are so big now and there’s such black boxes, especially Cargill. Cargill is the largest private company in America and we know so little about them. But anyways, Wilson’s FTC mapped out everything in the meat industry and they did a consent decree in response.
Because there was basically a fear of legislation on the Hill. So, they essentially blackmailed Big Meat into a consent decree to create all these structural barriers. The problem with the consent decree, though, was it didn’t apply to new entrants. So, what happened was that new market entrants came along and slowly dethroned the giants.
But I say all this because the breakup of meat is really kind of what ushered in that last big era of trust busting. Because meat, first of all, is macho. It’s very Teddy Roosevelt. Most Americans eat meat. And it’s something like—what I’ve been told by grocery people—most people pick their grocery store based on the quality of the meat and dairy case. Especially older Americans, who go to it a lot, really monitor these prices.
I mean, even to show you how bad things are getting now is like, I don’t think most people know, Walmart’s making aggressive vertical plays right now into both beef and dairy. Because Walmart was basically, to be blunt, sick of being screwed by big meat and big dairy. So, it wanted a cost insight. So, that’s why it’s building out a massive beef operation in Wichita It has like three dairy plants, to my knowledge, right now in America. But it’s where we are.
TEDDY DOWNEY: It’s not necessarily to have their own supply. It’s to be able to understand the cost structure so they can negotiate better in addition to having some of their own supply.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yes. I think the most powerful person in the American food system is the Walmart buyer. They’re the closest thing this country has ever had to a Soviet Union Politburo. It’s supply and command, and Walmart will always have the upper hand. And they felt like they didn’t have that power position in that one area. So, that’s why they did that.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Fascinating, fascinating. You’ve written a lot about this meat breakup bill. You mentioned Schumer introduced it. I was shocked by that, personally. Why do you think Schumer finally got interested in ag competition? Why meat as a politically sensitive issue? And what have you been seeing in terms of feedback and response to the bill being introduced?
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah, I would just add on that I can honestly say that Schumer bill is the best meat legislation probably ever introduced in the U.S. Congress. And it’s not an Elizabeth Warren bill. It’s a Chuck Schumer bill with Dick Durbin co-signing. You know what I mean? You have, I think, out of the gate, they had 16 Senators sign onto it, which is just incredible.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And can you walk through what’s in the bill? You already mentioned a little bit. But walk us through some of the highlights first.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah. So, they took one idea from “Barons” of doing structural separations on the protein. So, once you get over a certain size, if you butcher chickens, you can’t do beef. Because that’s the thing now is most of these meat companies are in essentially every line of protein.
And so, you’re doing that. It’s forcing the divestiture of the American assets of JBS, which is like, I don’t know how they are still allowed to operate in America. They pled guilty to bribery, to buying a bunch of American companies to become the largest meat packer the world’s ever seen. And nothing’s been done about them now. And the fact is they got bigger under the Biden administration.
And the undercurrent of my book, too, is I think people realize how much I don’t like Tom Vilsack. I think the collapse of Democrats in rural America is really tied into him because he oversaw the death of the hog family farmer as Governor of Iowa, and then the death of the dairy family farmer as Secretary of Agriculture under Obama and Biden. And so, the bill does that and it tees up a divestiture of assets of Smithfield—of WH group of Shanghai Smithfield.
And then it does a few other little things like create certain market thresholds. But it’s aggressive. It’s a really good structural separation bill. I think what’s driving this is a combination of a few things, like classic example of just having good staff. Trusting that staffer to design, put together a good bill. I think it’s also the fear of AOC. I think that’s like the most obvious reason here.
And the third one is it’s just grocery prices. I can’t stress enough how much that matters. I mean, old people are the ones that vote. I’m just really leaning into this, and especially when there’s a gender dynamic in American politics right now, meat is such a great way to outflank Republicans. I spoke at a big cattle conference last summer in Deadwood, South Dakota, and I said it’s embarrassing that a vegan Senator from New Jersey is better on all these issues than all the Senators are the great clients.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Let’s stay on pricing and other issues in this world. And then maybe we can get back to the political outlook in a little bit. There’s this big merger, Sysco and Restaurant Depot. How do you see that affecting food markets, quality, price?
I obviously don’t think there’s any expectation there will be any federal enforcement of the antitrust laws for the next few years on a big merger, just given that you could just hire Mike Davis or whatnot to get it through. Who might complain about this deal and do you think the states might have a reason to look into it?
AUSTIN FRERICK: Oh, man. I mean, let’s be really blunt where we are. This deal could be stopped if Restaurant Depot hires or pays the right people. I mean, that’s the state of our antitrust enforcement now. It’s pay to play. I just go back to the Sprint/T-Mobile merger, where the same merger was proposed, but didn’t get approved. And then what they do again is they just bought hotel rooms at Trump’s Hotel, and it got approved. I don’t care what some economists say, we’re in a pay-to-play era.
With Sysco, I added a chapter on them to my paperback when it came out last year. And it was just because I’ve done a lot of speaking gigs and I’ve been in a lot of nursing homes and a lot of hospitals, and it’s all the same food, and it’s all awful. And my mom had a bakery, and I also remember Sysco, and I was just curious about it. And it’s one of those things where you type into Google Scholar Sysco, you’re not going to get any literature, but it’s something everyone knows. Everyone’s seen those trucks.
So, I wrote that. And part of that rollout is I gave that chapter to More Perfect Union to do a video on it. That video hit a nerve. It’s the most viewed video More Perfect Union’s ever had on TikTok. And it’s like 5 million views on YouTube.
The response was shocking, especially given that most people don’t know what a middleman is.because they’re really just FedEx for foods. It doesn’t really make anything. It just moves product. But I think it captures the enshitifcation of food for so many people. Everyone’s had that Sysco meal. That’s what I go back to. That wedding that served that very awful tasting, bad tasting, food.
And the thing with Sysco, too, to keep in mind is they don’t—I kind of tell this story in the chapter—they don’t want to deal with local food. Big boys like to run with big boys. They want one dairy company to do all their warehouses.
And Sysco is a creation—it was founded through mergers. It was founded by nine mergers. Sysco doesn’t compete. It acquires. By my calculations, it has made over 216 acquisitions. Classic rollup strategy where nothing got blocked because they were small ball. The only time they got stopped was the failed U.S. Food acquisition.
For this Restaurant Depot purchase, what matters for most people is that you have to assume it’s going to make your favorite restaurant or local food truck worse. I mean, what’s been the saving grace for your favorite local place, especially food trucks, is that they go to Restaurant Depot because it’s cheaper as they’re not paying the delivery fee of a Sysco.
And recently, Sysco has moved away from mom and pa. They have a whole subdivision that does a lot of chain restaurants called Sigma. You can go there and it does like Olive Garden. It brags about all its corporate clients. But Sysco has kind of moved away. It’s just buying business. Essentially, you want to get back into an area moved away from. But one ray of hope where a lot of people feel like chains have gone downhill is your local restaurant. This really undermines them. It means a lower quality product and you’re likely going to pay more. That’s what this means for most people.
TEDDY DOWNEY: So, when you’re thinking about it, obviously, there’s an affordability agenda. At the state level, do you think it’s obvious enough that you have state AGs looking into this? They’re going to notice that food prices would go up and they would take action? You mentioned the path forward at the federal level is U.S. Foods. Someone who doesn’t like the deal just paying Mike Davis instead of Cisco paying Mike Davis?
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yep. That or my favorite little thing from the U.S. Foods failed merger was the FTC conducted market shares for Metropolitans between the pending merger. And I remember it was both Vegas and San Diego, I believe. And the documents are in my footnotes. They would have over an 80 percent market share for—they call it broadliners. That’s what Sysco and U.S. Foods are.
And that’s the thing. I love that example. Number one is when we talk about food, we can’t use national figures. You don’t take a hog from Iowa and you don’t butcher it down in Florida. Food’s local. What matters in food distribution is what’s the local market share for these companies. And we just don’t know.
That would be really curious is in these certain concentrated markets, how bad is it? And first of all, this isn’t hard to do, this type of market share analysis. But that’s what a lot of AGs could do, especially if you’re in the California AG’s office, look at the San Diego market, look at the Nevada market.
Generally speaking, from my experiences, those two are unique markets. Usually, rural areas are where Sysco tends to dominate more. That’s kind of the dark side of this moment is you get some of the best food in New York City where you have the most competitive broadliner market. Whereas, the communities that make the food are actually getting some of the worst food. But it’d be really interesting to carve it up. I just go back to, remember that Stacy Mitchell report on Walmart’s market share?
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah.
AUSTIN FRERICK: When you actually start looking at Metropolitans where you look at, I think, Wichita, Walmart had like a 60 percent market share. When you start carving up these things regionally, that’s where you see really scary numbers.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And in terms of, they’re not direct competitors, like you said. They’re sort of—or how do you think about where Restaurant Depot is? Like you said, they’re doing something similar, but they’re in a place where they’re moving away from it. Do they have any horizontal overlap or in terms of, how do you think about it?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I mean, people call Restaurant Depot “Cash and Carry” whereas Sysco is a broadliner. This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. And you see this in that chapter—because I used to work at Treasury—is market definition needs to be moved away from economists.
I would love – so, I come from the tax world where if Treasury does tax revenue estimates, you have CBO do tax revenue estimates, and then UPenn has its own independent one. You want a bunch of nerds arguing over this stuff. So, that way, in case one gets captured, you still have two other numbers that kind of would refute that.
I would love to see something like this. Like, there’s no reason why, for example, every time you buy something at the grocery store, that data is sold. It’s really easy. And especially if you know who does a store brand, you can quickly figure out these market shares. There’s no reason why a state, federal government, or an academic institution can’t be doing those market share numbers.
Because like what Sysco will do is, especially in that failed U.S. Foods merger, it’s going to try to enlarge the market definition as much as possible. It’s going to sit there and say Costco is its competitor. Where like, anyone that’s owned a restaurant knows, you don’t get most of your stuff from Costco. You only go to Costco when you’re short on cups, and you get one case real quick before your next truck comes. Like, that is stupid. But right now, these conversations are so walled off when, like this, they should really be out in the open. And like, we should be producing these numbers annually so we can essentially monitor markets.
Like one little example in the agriculture space that’s always gotten my attention is USDA publishes the average price of a gallon of milk for every major metropolitan in America for every month. And when you look at that data, you see Chicago and Kansas City, they pay about a dollar more for a gallon of milk than any other metropolitan in America.
And you just know there’s bad behavior going on there, especially in Kansas City. Because Kansas City is home to Dairy Farmers of America, which is the largest milk co-op in America. And so, it’s just, we don’t have a lot of good data here. I can’t say this enough.
TEDDY DOWNEY: In terms of just a commonsense way to think about the market definition, like how do you, what’s your mind, a more common sense way to think about the competitive interaction between a restaurant depot and a Sysco?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I would say they’re in the same market, especially for the local restaurant.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. It’s like you can either have it delivered or you can pay less and go pick it up.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah. Or like, especially like a lot of in storage too. Like if you run a food truck, you don’t have the space to have two massive things of cups. And especially like the most people on the edge, who you should care about most in my personal opinion, this really does impact them. And also, like what a fascinating concept of, instead of doing like pseudoscience in Excel, let’s just go ask people that work in this space what they think is the market.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I mean, that’s historically what they’re supposed to do. But maybe gotten away from that over the years. Yeah.
AUSTIN FRERICK: I think my hot take of this era is it’s just this whole neoliberal, antitrust just got lazy. It’s real easy to look at Excel all day and think you can understand these markets. But at the end of the day, a lot of this is just moral questions that democracy has to wrestle with. How many hogs a person should own is not an answer Excel can answer for you.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Right, right, right. And you’re going to get a different definition if you pay an economist than if you go ask the food truck owner.
AUSTIN FRERICK: And I would just add, you can’t forget the corporate capture of the land grants in this country. Like go back to the fact that Iowa had second highest cancer rate in America. Iowa State is one of the flagship agricultural universities of the world and yet you are not seeing any conversation about this from their academics. The only scholarship you see is how to put ethanol in airplanes and how to put more pigs into a metal shed. Because that’s how you get tenure. And also, if you start going against corporate interest, you get chased out.
So, the academics, your power at these schools now is based on how much money you bring in. And, this is incredibly lucrative. That cannot be understated enough for these people. And these people, a lot of them dominate academic journals.
My favorite, I go back to another Iowan, Kate Conlow wrote a paper in the Arizona State Law Journal a few years ago, where after the great recession, we implemented disclosure policies for a lot of economic journals. And she highlights Ag Econ, which I think is the most corrupt academic discipline in America. A lot of the academics brag on their website about how much corporate money they take. They then are the editors of journals and they don’t enforce their own disclosure policies. And then they’re the ones that go on NPR and say you’re not being gouged at the store. It’s rampant. And that’s something I realized writing “Barons” is that every commodity has its go-to hack academic. Like, there’s the big hog academic at Iowa State literally does business transactions with my hog barons.
TEDDY DOWNEY: That seems suboptimal.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah. It’s not idea. And in the court of public opinion, it’s really hard to go up against a tenured hog chair at Iowa State.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, it seems like it shouldn’t be too hard. But if there’s no one else doing any learning on this, that’s what makes it hard, right? Like there’s no independent media. There’s no independent venues for dialogue and discussion. And so, you end up having the captured interest and the money being able to push out their ideas more.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yep. But that’s why I go to the flip side. That’s why I think this base is so ripe for reform. Someone’s going to tap into the Teddy Roosevelt-ness of fixing the meat industry. It’s just like, you have most meat companies now are foreign owned. And they’re not even foreign owned. They’re state back monopolies. And so, like at some point someone who wants to be President will realize this is a winning issue. That I’m convinced in my bones.
And the other thing too, for the longest time, industry justified this destruction because it made cheap food. And that is not factually true anymore. Per person in America, we spend more money on food than most of our Western democratic peers. They’re about dollar for dollar with Italy. Anyone that’s been to Italy knows what a dollar gets you there is very different than a dollar here. I think that’s how you put together this weird coalition of—it’s like a cliche for Yuppies to say I went to Europe. It was cheaper and I lost weight.
You tap into the rural rage. You tap into these different segments, especially MAHA. Like MAHA is big—I think people are now starting to grasp how big it is. I think a MAHA is like Dallas housewives mixed with Joe Rogan bros. And Joe Rogan has really changed the diets of young men in ways I don’t think people appreciate it. Like the obsession of protein. And like they don’t feel like society provides anymore. So, they have to get jacked in order to provide and survive.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. Well, we could spend a lot of time on MAHA, but I want to move onto a couple other things first. We have a question here. What would be some key aspects of your ideal Farm Bill? Just think about the Farm Bill, thinking about reform, thinking about Congress potentially changing hands. What do you think you should have in a Farm Bill? And do you see any chance that there could be changes if there’s a change of control in Congress? Or is it sort of too captured?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I don’t think people realize the Farm Bill is dying right in front of us. I mean, Republicans control everything and they cannot pass a status quo Farm Bill. We’re living on the 2018 Farm Bill. I think a lot of that’s because the MAHA or Joe Rogan thing. It’s been underappreciated why they can’t ram through this bill.
So, my next book is intellectually going to be: what does a post-neoliberal food system look like? Because “Barons” are basically narrative devices that tell structural stories of how neoliberalism broke everything in the food system. I kind of think of it as like when you give a dog a pill of medicine, you put it in cheese. That’s what “Barons” is. And it’s something I learned from Barry Lynn—I used to work for him – you’ve got to have a good punchy narrative.
But this next book is a solutions book. Because I also realize everyone kind of knows it’s broken, but no one knows what to do, especially in food. And for the Farm Bill, I realized it’s—take crop insurance. These systems are too broken now. Like what people think—it’s not insurance, what people think it is. It’s not for like a thunderstorm. It’s literally low-price insurance, where like 60 to 70 percent of premiums are paid for by taxpayers, but it only applies to certain crops and not others. And there’s also no cap to it.
So, fun fact. Bill Gates owns some of the most farmland in America. He can get as much low wage price insurance to grow corn as he wants. So, that’s why you’re getting things like ethanol. Ethanol is an artificial demand to soak up surplus.
What I want to do is combine the three types of parts of the Farm Bill: commodity, conservation, and crop insurance. Call it stewardship payments. And instead of subsidizing certain crops, let’s subsidize farm practices. If you grow cover crops, you get some money. If you do pasture agriculture, you get some money. You do buffer strips, whatever. Think of it as a toolkit, let farmers decide what’s best for their land.
But I do not like the system of picking favorites. And I don’t like supply management that a lot of people in my world want to go back to. Supply management is rooted in the government picking optimal production outputs. And then basically anything over that, they either destroy or dump in developing countries. I just think that’s stupid. You just wreck other countries. And also, you get things like cheese caves.
I’d rather just let farmers decide what’s best for their land. But that’s where I want to move to for the Farm Bill. And that’s what excites me here is there’s just not a lot of vision here. Everyone’s still trying to make a broken thing work.
The best example here to me is the dairy system. Our dairy program is rooted in 1920s America. That’s before we had refrigeration. We don’t need a program. Why are we trying to make a program, pre-refrigeration, work in dairy? At some point, you have to realize these markets change. We need to rethink this stuff.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. And also, as they get concentrated, more and more concentrated, all the incentives that you’ve had get perverse and manipulated. And so, you sort of have to look at what you have now and restructure it, distribute power and things like that.
AUSTIN FRERICK: I view that as cyclical, though. I just think laissez-faire eras naturally happen. It’s such a simple thing. The goal of any corporate executive is monopoly. You don’t want competitive markets. You want to essentially engage in political capture so you can reinforce your economic bottom line.
These things get out of whack. They go too far. They break. And they usher in a reform era. The food markets in America are so broken. The soybean markets are not coming back. China industrialized soy in South America because they need soy for its pork production. Cars are moving to batteries and hybrids. That’s just a fact of life.
But it’s like watching Wile E. Coyote run off a cliff. That’s why they’re trying to put ethanol in airplanes. But all of this is just breaking down. But no one has a plan here. It keeps getting more expensive because we just keep throwing more money at it.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Got a couple other questions here. Let’s get to these questions from the audience. We’ve got a question. I’ve been learning about the current push to deregulate line speeds at poultry and pork processing plants. Limits on line speeds have been persistently relaxed over years, raising a lot of concerns over worker safety and welfare. Do you have any insight on the bigger picture? What meatpackers are pushing for at this moment with this change and how it’s likely to play out?
AUSTIN FRERICK: The best example is the largest donor to Trump’s inauguration was JBS, the slaughtering baron in my book. After that donation, a few weeks later, they sped up the kill lines. The faster you kill animals, the more profitable those kill lines are. You’re also making one of the most dangerous jobs in America more dangerous. I told Schumer’s team that the tweaks I would make to their meat legislation were to add something about reducing the kill line speeds.
And then also cattle farmers, air tags, those little Apple things, they want to mandate that for cattle, and the cattle ranchers hate that stuff. Just ban that. At some point, you have to put together a unique coalition to get something done. And by having a little something for workers, a little something for ranchers, something for all Americans at the grocery shop, I think that’s how you do this stuff.
Even the ideas of doing structural separations in the seed industry, to me, that’s a really good way to go after the MAHA people. It’s like put a Roundup ban in that legislation.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, let’s talk about MAHA. We’ve got a question here on MAHA. You mentioned coalitions and usual coalitions like with MAHA. Are you seeing growing coalitions across racial lines? There’s clearly a collapse in grocery stores and communities of color, shrinking black growers, farmers and ICE antagonism toward migrant workers. You see folks building those coalitions and speaking across communities.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah, I mean, to me, the biggest obstacle here is actually those coalitions are forming. The biggest obstacle to reform are upper class suburbanites. Because America works for them. They go to Costco. Their kids go to the flagship university. They kind of like a Mayor Pete type because they don’t really want any structural change, not understanding why we are at this moment.
That’s been a big goal of mine is to show them the system we have now is actually incredibly radical. What we’re talking about, these coalitions are actually very traditional. Like part of my next book is I’m using—like so much of the New Deal actually came from Wisconsin. Like this stuff always starts locally. DC is also the last to know. So, part of my next book is looking at what’s good regulatory systems in other countries or what are good programs at state and local level that we can then scale.
And so, like part of the reason I’m telling everyone the Kerrygold thing is everyone kind of loves Kerrygold. They know it. It’s like a good sales pitch. But also, it’s essentially a way to put animals back on the land. Like it is radical that we took most animals off the land in this country and shoved them in the metal sheds. But I just really want to flip that rhetoric.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Well, I want to stay on this for one second. You mentioned it’s like your suburban voter is just not aware of what’s going on in the agriculture community.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah.
TEDDY DOWNEY: The sort of oppression that’s going on for workers and things like that. But their food costs are going up. They’re well aware of that.
AUSTIN FRERICK: And that’s why I think this is plum for the picking, because they’re now being gouged. But you have to lean into it. For example, I testified and presented this book in the Minnesota House Agriculture Committee earlier this year. And what I saw was that Democrats are afraid of their own shadow here. I mean, dear God, all they can talk about is year round ethanol and ethanol and airplanes.
Like you have to grab the third rail—because you’re going up against an ecosystem. Like they’re going to attack you. They’re going to say they’re feeding the world. Oh, this is cheap food. And you have to be like, no, the data says other ways. Like people in their gut, they feel like they’re being screwed, and they are right. And you have to lead with examples.
TEDDY DOWNEY: What states are doing something interesting? Obviously, you have the Mamdani grocery store stuff. But really, at the state level, where are you seeing some interesting trends that could have broader implications?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I would say procurement. As we phase out this whole system, you have to stabilize prices. And to me, using institutional procurers, they just buy a lot. Like I’m having really interesting conversations with Texas Republicans of all people. For the longest time, a lot of people trying to change this stuff kept using a carrot approach. Like, here’s some money. Buy local food.
I like to joke that I’m in my stick era now. And what they’re thinking is just mandating that all Texas universities have to buy a certain percentage local. Frst of all, those universities, they have large kitchens. Second, it’s good politics because the legislature is not paying for it and it’s a good way to kind of beat up on UT Austin. But you can change it. You can essentially say, in year three, you have to do this. Year five, you have to do that.
But just think of the optics of all beef, all cows served at UT Austin come from Texas cattle ranchers. Why are you serving rainforest beef? That’s a really good way to get some Joe Rogan people. That’s the Dallas housewives. Like, it’s good optics.
That’s what’s giving me a lot of hope, is the fact that Republicans in Texas are really interested in that. Because Texas also has a really big MAHA. That’s probably where I’ve seen MAHA the strongest is down there. But I think this whole Michael Pollan era just needs to end. Like you don’t change systems with your fork. This is about power.
And that never forget these packers are willing to employ children. They’re willing to bribe politicians. Like this is like power politics. Like, don’t bring a machete to a machine gun fight.
TEDDY DOWNEY: A few more questions here. Have you seen any change of behavior by the barons post Snyder v. United States?
AUSTIN FRERICK: What’s Snyder v. United States?
TEDDY DOWNEY: I don’t know. Maybe this questioner can fill us in on what’s not on Snyder v. United States. I wish I knew let’s come back to that. Maybe they’ll type in some more information.
AUSTIN FRERICK: I would say really quick that Sysco does the same thing as Walmart. When Walmart gets attacked for driving made-in-China, they do a Made in USA campaign. Sysco did the same thing. They rolled out a big campaign recently, like, “Look, our local food.” That’s what these companies do.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, I actually was thinking if you have a bunch of procurement at the universities and they’re like we buy local, I wonder actually how much that affects Sysco. Because ostensibly, they would be—you would be getting it from someone other than them. They’re usually the big player at these schools and things like that, universities.
AUSTIN FRERICK: That’s like the big black box, too. I referenced in my chapter, some Iowa journalists tried to get the Sysco contract public records with the University of Iowa. It went all the way up to the State Supreme Court, and it was ruled to keep it private because it was a trade secret for what the public university is paying for tomatoes and what have you.
TEDDY DOWNEY: We’ve tried to get into procurement time and time again and everything is a trade secret. We tried to do that with the Postal Service. I mean, it’s just like, how is this a trade secret? It’s a public—public good.
AUSTIN FRERICK: So, they do little things too. Like what I hear is they’ll design your menu for free. Because that way it kind of locks you into their system—especially when you’re starting a restaurant, it saves you money, but it screws you long-term. Or like what I’ve seen too is they’ll design a kitchen essentially to be only frozen food. That way it really hard to do scratch cooking once you’re basically only designed to thaw and cook frozen food.
Part of what shaped me here is that I went to a little school in Iowa for college, where Warren Buffett was a trustee. So, it had a big endowment. And the largest organic produce farm in Iowa was across the street. And it went broke a few years ago. And that really shook a lot of people in this space. And like, if this college with this large endowment can’t buy local food across the street, instead buy a bunch of tasteless food from Baja, California picked by children.
But part of the problem is these cafeterias, a lot of them designed as glutinous buffets. Remember the George Bush era of higher ed, where everyone was chasing the rich kids? So, they built all those amenities. Why are you having a buffet? Like buffets died in America. Why are colleges still offering a buffet of crappy food?
Even when you go into these cafeterias, the first thing you tend to see is the fried food, because that’s the cheap food. And so, you’re having like a mental health crisis among kids in college, but you’re feeding them junk—the food only makes it worse.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I remember when public schools were flirting with having McDonald’s and Burger King for lunch. So, I mean, this has been a messed up system for a while. But we’ve got some more questions here. If you have questions, again, you can put them in the chat. This has been great. We’ve gotten so much community interaction here. What changes, if any, do you think we should see to checkoff programs, Austin?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I was determined to write about checkoffs in my book. My whole dairy chapter is built around checkoffs because I think checkoffs control the conversation over America’s food.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And explain to people what the checkoff program is, because it’s pretty astonishing.
AUSTIN FRERICK: It’s a good example of this moment of things with good intentions that went off the rails. It comes out of the Great Depression. Farmers literally checked a box. Florida orange juice farmers, they checked the box. They paid into a little – it’s basically a tax on their production—paid into a pot of money to advertise their good. Drink more Florida orange juice.
There’s like 20 or 30 of these around America. Most of them are small and most of them don’t matter. They’re the things at the state fair that hand you a free egg. The problem really started in the eighties where, as this farm bill changes to overproduction, the goal of checkoffs became how do we get you to consume additional production? Soak up this surplus.
And a few just went off the rails. Dairy is the biggest one. The dairy now checkoff has about a $600 to $800 million pot of money a year. There’s no oversight ,by the way. And that to me is what’s financing the revolving door at USDA is a lot of them go work at USDA. You go to work at a checkoff. And then you go work at the USDA again.
That’s the story of Tom Vilsack. It’s very lucrative. What a lot of these checkoffs did was they ran those advertising campaigns, drink more milk, whatever. They realized that it didn’t really work. Milk consumption still went down.
What they do now is they essentially finance a lot of the junk science because they realized it’s manipulating this literature that moves the needle. A lot of these manure digesters you hear about in agriculture, that’s all bullshit financed by checkoff. Or a lot of the corn on airplanes, it’s checkoff-funded junk science. It’s like the easiest way to get tenure now at a university is to do the bidding of checkoffs.
And the scary thing with checkoffs to me—and especially the pork one—is the vertical integration of this space. Like the largest owner of hogs in America is the WH group of China. They own like one in four, one in five, hogs. They are also the largest butcher of hogs in America. They own Smithfield. So, the largest payer into the pork checkoff is a Chinese multinational. So, when you see the American Pork Foundation, whatever, that’s really the voice of a Chinese multinational.
It’s just incredible. And as news hollowed out, checkoff basically pays for a lot of news in agriculture now. And so, that’s why it’s like company press at this point. And that’s why it took me a while to get into this space and just realize how delusional this whole thing is. It’s like imagine if you lived in West Virginia and the coal company produced the news. I really compare Iowa now to like West Virginia in the 19th century. That’s where things are.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. I mean, you can see how people get in these conspiracy theories when the information about your food is produced by the food companies and it’s hard to find the truth. And you’re skeptical of the food pyramid and government data because, yeah, you’ve got revolving door, you’ve got checkoff, you’ve got all this, almost like government, institutionalized lying.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yes. I would say MAHA is the result of the Democrats’ failure. A lot of MAHA is two truths and a lie. And it’s just like there’s so much junk and so much manipulation on top of it. Even like the last three Democratic presidents, two of them were tied into the chicken industry. Tyson’s made Bill Clinton and Joe Biden comes out of it. Delaware is full of chicken confinements. These things are really powerful.
You even saw—what got me was “The New York Times” did an episode in The Daily this winter about some soybean farmer in Iowa. And she was a checkoff person. She was part of the Iowa Farm Bureau and part of the soybean checkoff thing. You’re like, here’s the thing. They play into the ignorance and naiveness of people on the coast. They groom certain farmers that know the sound bites. Like they don’t – trust me, no one at “The New York Times” really knows what a checkoff is. Maybe one staffer. So, they’re really easy to manipulate.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. One more reason not to get a “New York Times” subscription. We got a couple other questions I want to get to these. This is a really fascinating analysis. It appears that large corporate interests are taking monopoly rents at each level of the food distribution network, some of which is actually provided for by federal law. As an antitrust litigator, where would you recommend developing a creative litigation to attack this system? Great question.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Only on a Capitol Forum call can you ask a question like this.
AUSTIN FRERICK: I’m really convinced of something with school milk. Given how regional school milks are, you just assume there’s bid rigging going on in concentrated markets with large school districts.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Interesting, interesting.
AUSTIN FRERICK: But that’s something like, I don’t know, take Chicago or Kansas City. It used to be “The Chicago Tribune” would kind of keep an eye on that. And those papers have essentially been gutted.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Well, something interesting to me, you mentioned Kansas City. That seems like a good tip. Why is it in this metropolitan area more expensive for the same commodity that should be cheaper? Because you have all the company operations there.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Chicago is next to Wisconsin. It’s not like it’s Miami. You know what I mean? You kind of expect milk to be higher in Miami.
TEDDY DOWNEY: You know what’s interesting? The DOJ’s Chicago office does these agriculture investigations. Might want to look in your own backyard.
AUSTIN FRERICK: A lot of my conversations that I have with people is a lot of those investigations start from a news story or an academic paper. And those pipelines have broken.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Interesting. Well, we got some feedback that one of our egg stories made its way to the Chicago investigators. Haven’t done anything, haven’t seen anything. Division is in somewhat of a disarray. So, I guess we can’t be too surprised.
AUSTIN FRERICK: To the litigators on the call, though, too, I mean, the JBS of it all, like how does someone plead guilty to bribery to acquire companies and are allowed to keep their empire? That one I never got why state AGs never went after—that should be unwound. You shouldn’t be able to engage in criminal activity and then pay a fine and keep your business empire.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Do you think beef is the most interesting to watch? Let’s say in November, Democrats win. You’ve got majorities in the House. You could have a majority in the Senate. You’ve got bigger Democratic wins at the state level. Why do you think beef from a political standpoint is the most—it sounds like you think it’s the most vulnerable. But I’m curious, from a political standpoint, why do you think that?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I’m a big believer—there’s a phrase in Italian called politics of the artichoke, where you pick your enemy off one at a time. Beef to me is the best one to pick off because it unites everyone. And I think America is in a beef moment. The largest sit-down restaurant in America isn’t Olive Garden. It’s not Applebee’s. It’s Texas Roadhouse. After a hard week of work, especially on a Friday night, if you want to understand what this country is, go to a Texas Roadhouse. Beef is what Americans view as a treat. You also have Morgan Whalen being one of the big pop stars of this moment. You have Yellowstone being one of the biggest shows of this era. I think in these reactionary moments, there’s something—it’s a cowboy imagery of America.
For Democrats, especially viewed as such a weak urban party, this is such a great way to reclaim that or challenge it. You might not win rural Iowa, but instead of getting 20 percent. You can get 35 percent.
That’s where my anger got mad at Tom Vilsack. We know what to do here. We did it a century ago. We’re not talking AI. We’re talking hogs. All they did during the Biden administration was take a billion dollars of taxpayer money and throw it at new startups. That has never deconcentrated an industry. And I really do think Tom Vilsack’s failure contributed to Vice President Harris’s loss.
Also, for certain swing seats, the Montana race, the Nebraska Senate race, leaning hard to this issue to me is key. I would put Senator Booker in front of all these groups. With Klobuchar running for governor now, Senator Booker is next in line to chair the Senate Agriculture Committee. I think that actually is going to be a game-changer because he’s one of the best on these issues. I would just pound the pavement on this bill. Just talk meat. Especially JBS. Everyone knows meat is broken. How many stories of child labor or COVID worker abuse can you hear?
TEDDY DOWNEY: People have read “The Jungle.” At least they know about it.
AUSTIN FRERICK. That’s why this issue is such a winning issue. These communities now, these cattle guys, they’re all Republican now. It’s a really good way to outflank. They’re being thrown underneath the bus.
One of my mentors in this space is Bill Bollard. I know he’s been quoted a few times by you guys. He runs RCALF. He said this line—and I keep thinking about it—on Fox a few weeks ago, where America is losing its beef sovereignty. He’s not wrong. What happened to textiles in the 90s in America where it went offshore, that’s what’s happening to beef now in America. The American cattle herd is at its lowest level since the 1950s.
Basically, Trump is filling that demand with all this Brazilian, Argentinian beef. American cattle producers cannot compete on price because the production model has been alleged to use slavery and is done in the rainforest and really destructive practices. What a great winning issue. Imagine Senator Booker in South Dakota with a bunch of cattle hats around him. Lean into that.
TEDDY DOWNEY: It does seem like there is a lot of opportunity, just given the despair, given the market failures, given that these are international monopolies dominating workers in the U.S., you would think it would be a good opportunity. We’ve got a bunch of questions. I’ve got to pick one of these.
AUSTIN FRERICK: I want to say real quick. Think of Iowa. Iowa’s 25 million hogs. They shit three times more than the estimated 75 million people. Our pork consumption is flat. It’s mostly for export, mainly for China. We’re destroying Iowa to feed China. That is what’s going on here. Simple aggressive rhetoric here is really powerful.
TEDDY DOWNEY: All right. I’m going to go with the most antitrusty question I’ve got. I’ve got a bunch of different questions. We’ll send them to Austin after the call just so that he can hopefully get back to our guests.
But last question. Extreme data collection is increasingly an antitrust issue in various industries. How does it affect seeds or ag more broadly? What’s the competitive implication of the kinds of data Bayer and Corteva are able to collect from farmers about their crops, fields and production?
We were talking before the call about automation and machines. Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of data involved there. How do you think about data collection in ag markets and where the antitrust issues are?
AUSTIN FRERICK: I think this is the biggest black box in agriculture. I go back to Chris Leonard, who wrote a book called “Kochland” a few years ago. The Koch Brothers are the second-largest private company in America. Cargill is the largest. Both are in agriculture and in the financial markets.
The big thing here is, what does this mean for informational advantages in these markets? Is there manipulation going on? We don’t know. You just know these tractors are going to be driverless in commodity production. They’re taking up a ton of data. It’s something I talk to a lot of people about, but no one can really game this out. It’s the biggest unknown thing here because there’s this obsession with data. And I think because these spaces are rural, and a lot of times people on the coast write them off as not that complicated, it’s been understudied. I think this is where most academics, journalists, or anyone, this is to me, we just know there’s a lot of dark things going on when the two largest private companies in America are in this space, but we know so little.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Austin, an incredible conversation. Your book is amazing. I’m super excited about your new book. When that comes out, let us know. We’ll do a book event, have you through D.C. I’m sure you’re going to have plenty of invites for that. But thank you so much for doing this.
AUSTIN FRERICK: Yeah. Thanks again for having me on. Thanks again, everyone, for joining.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Got great interaction. Look forward to doing one again soon. Thanks again, Austin. And thanks to everyone for joining us on the call today.
