The “Big Pig Pyramid” and the Undoing of Rural America: A Conversation with Sonja Trom Eayrs

In this conversation with writer, rural advocate, and attorney Sonja Trom Eayrs, we consider what happens when industrial agriculture comes to town and those in power actually promote it. Trom Eayrs discusses her book Dodge County Inc.: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which weaves together personal memoir, legal drama, and political analysis to tell the story of her family’s fight against the corporate takeover of American agriculture.

Trom Eayrs grew up on a family farm in southern Minnesota. Hog concentrated animal feeding operations (“CAFOs”) proliferated in Dodge County beginning in the 1990s, and her family eventually became involved in litigation to stop it. Today, the Trom family farm is surrounded by twelve swine factory farms, housing an estimated 30,000 hogs in a three-mile radius.

What began as a local fight against corporate farming became a window into a deeper, systemic failure: the way American federalism, at every level from county boards to Congress, has not merely failed to check the expansion of Big Ag but actively enabled and subsidized it.

In this conversation, Trom Eayrs takes us through the collusion between the hog industry and local government in Dodge County, the silencing of state regulators, the long shadow of agricultural exceptionalism, and what she calls Big Ag’s “façade of innocence”: the carefully constructed mythology that shields industrial livestock production from the environmental, labor, and public health accountability applied to virtually every other industry. We also explore how corporate power in rural America has reshaped the social fabric of farming communities, fueled the rural-urban political divide, and created a movement of grassroots organizers fighting on multiple fronts for economic and environmental justice.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trish Fisher: Your book tells the story of your family´s fight against the rise of industrial agriculture in Minnesota. Could you tell us how your family became involved in resisting factory farms?

Sonja Trom Eayrs: My family has been on the frontlines for decades. Our first major fight was against Ripley Dairy, which would have been the largest dairy operation in Minnesota, just a few miles from our farm. We worked with the Land Stewardship Project, and thankfully, neighbors were successful in stopping it. But by 2014, our focus shifted to large hog factory farms.

Today, there are twelve swine factory farms within a three-mile radius of our farm. My father, who was in his mid-eighties at the time, finally said, “Enough is enough.” My parents went on to file three separate lawsuits against Dodge County officials and industry insiders.

TF: In the book, you describe some intense backlash from neighbors and community members after your family opposed these developments. Could you talk a bit about that experience?

STE: The harassment started almost immediately after my parents filed their first lawsuit in 2014. We found garbage in our ditches and driveway, and my elderly father received harassing late-night phone calls asking, “Lowell, have you changed yet?” There were also false calls to the sheriff’s department meant to intimidate me. People planted soiled blue farm booties near our driveway—a reminder that the industry was “large and in charge.” There were even bullet holes sprayed into a stop sign less than half a mile from our farm.

I started connecting with other frontline families across the Midwest and realized these same tactics were being used elsewhere.

TF: One of the most striking parts of the book is your explanation of what you call the “Big Pig Pyramid,” the vertically integrated structure of industrial hog production in the United States. Could you explain how that system works and why antitrust enforcement matters here?

STE: For years, we were surrounded by factory farms but had no idea how the system actually worked. Then I came across a lawsuit between a contract grower and an integrator and obtained the trial transcript. It was like plugging in a Christmas tree: It suddenly illuminated the whole structure.

At the top of the pyramid are four multinational corporations: Hormel, Tyson Foods, JBS, and Smithfield. In the middle are the integrators, who own the supply chain (the hogs). At the bottom are the contract growers—what we used to call farmers. These growers sign contracts agreeing to build large factory farms to industry specifications, complete with massive manure pits, but they never actually own the hogs moving through the system.

This closed system allows corporations at the top to control pricing, production, and market access.

TF: Many of the people connected to this industry live in Dodge County and raise families there. How have you seen the community respond to the environmental and health impacts of so many factory farms?

STE: People are afraid to speak out because their jobs and businesses are threatened. That is how power works in small, rural communities.

I have seen industry representatives contact my former law firm in Minneapolis in an effort to silence me.

Several years ago, we went door-to-door in Westfield Township collecting signatures for local planning and zoning measures that could slow the spread of factory farms. After we submitted the petition, the town clerk publicly read every name aloud, and some of the people who signed later received calls from industry representatives pressuring them to withdraw support. Fear shapes so much of what happens in these communities.

TF: In the book, you write that, “Arguably the most powerful aspect of Big Ag’s lobbying power is its façade of innocence.” I think that phrase captures what scholars describe as “agricultural exceptionalism,” in which agriculture is exempt from many labor and environmental protections. How does industrial agriculture maintain that façade of innocence?

STE: They are masters of corporate propaganda.

One example is the “National Ag in the Classroom” program, heavily supported by groups like the Farm Bureau. Much of the material promotes industrial agriculture rather than sustainable farming.

I often think about a coloring book I picked up at the Minnesota State Fair. It was designed for children and showed hogs confined indoors, but framed it positively, as if confinement exists simply to keep animals clean. These messages shape how people think about agriculture from a very young age.

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Featured image: Swine CAFOs in Westfield Township. Photo by Laurie Schneider, 2023.

Sonja Trom Eayrs, author, attorney, and rural activist, grew up on the Trom family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota. Her family has been on the frontlines for decades fighting corporate agriculture and the takeover of the food supply by a few multinational corporations. Today, the Trom family farm is surrounded by twelve swine factory farms in a three-mile radius. Sonja’s story is captured in her recent book, Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America (University of Nebraska Press, Nov. 2024). Contact.

Trish Fisher is a doctoral student in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her research investigates the politics of agricultural methane in Wisconsin. She holds two master’s degrees in public policy and public health from the University of Michigan. Contact.