How Big Meat silences its critics

Vox

07-02-2025

BLOOMING PRAIRIE, Minnesota — In 2014, Lowell Trom hit a breaking point.
For two decades, he had watched as his small farming community in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, was taken over by hog factory farms. The first one was built in 1993. Five years later, another one went up. By 2014, there were 10, housing around 24,000 pigs within a three-mile radius of the 760-acre property where he grew corn and soybeans.
Many were raising hogs for Holden Farms, a midsized pork company, according to his daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs.
The millions of gallons of waste that the pigs generated each year stank horribly and polluted the air and water, turning an otherwise pleasant town into a pigsty. The trucks that brought in feed for the hogs or loaded them up for trips to the slaughterhouse tore up the town's narrow roads.
So when Dodge County approved a permit for another hog factory farm in 2014, 'My dad said, 'Enough is enough,'' Trom Eayrs told me. That year, Lowell sued the Dodge County Board of Commissioners and two people affiliated with the proposed farm, arguing that the county had issued the permit despite lacking critical information, like how it would handle all the manure.
'As soon as they started that lawsuit, that's when the harassment started' from members of the local hog community, Trom Eayrs said. 'The intimidation and the midnight calls to my dad … garbage in our road ditches and bullet holes in the stop sign' near their home, she remembered, and 'lots of other tactics that were done to try and harass us and get us to shut up.' (Trom Eayrs doesn't allege county officials had engaged in these tactics.)
Lowell Trom prevailed in that first lawsuit, which vacated the hog farm's permit. In response, the county watered down the permit application requirements and approved the factory farm once again. Trom sued again, challenging the issuance of the second permit, which failed. A similar third lawsuit against a neighboring township and a hog farm operator, in which Trom argued the township had improperly approved a permit, also failed. There are now 12 hog factory farms within three miles of the Trom family property. Lowell died in 2019.
Holden Farms didn't respond to a request for comment.
The Trom's family story, along with the story of how factory farms have reshaped US agriculture, are recounted in Trom Eayrs's compelling new book, Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America . Trom Eayrs also documented similar stories of harassment experienced by fellow Midwesterners — all farmers themselves — who've protested factory farms coming into their towns: a bullet into a toddler's bedroom window; arson; dead animals left on someone's car, in their mailbox, and their front porch; and plenty of death threats.
One family in Illinois found a severed pig's head in their front yard after they complained about factory farm odors.
Such harassment and intimidation isn't confined to Middle America. Over 1,000 miles away in Eastern North Carolina, where nearly all farm owners are white and affected residents are disproportionately low-income people of color, those who criticize factory farms have reported owners and employees following them in their cars, driving back and forth in front of their homes, threatening physical violence, and nearly running people over who were testing potentially polluted water by the roadside.
Elsie Herring, who over time became the face of the movement against North Carolina's farm pollution, got it especially bad. In the mid-1990s, the hog factory farm next door to her mother's house began to spray manure on nearby cropland as fertilizer. But some of the manure would land on her mother's property — even onto the exterior of the house. Herring complained to local, state, and federal authorities, which she said led to aggression from the hog farm owner.
One day, Herring wrote in a 2019 testimony to Congress, the farm owner's son entered her home uninvited and shook the chair her 98-year-old mother was sitting in, and yelled that he could do whatever he wanted to Herring and get away with it. On two occasions, the farm owner's son showed up to her home with a gun.
'I live under a threat of intimidation and harassment that feels constant,' Herring, who died from cancer in 2021, told Congress.
The lawyers, scientists, politicians, and environmental advocates who work with communities to fight factory farm pollution have sometimes also found themselves the victims of harassment and intimidation, including death threats, aggressive political campaigns to block electoral candidates promising to reform factory farms, and even academic censorship and interference.
'The industry is always looking for pressure points,' Trom Eayrs said. 'They will do anything to stay in power.'
What Eayrs, Herring, and others have experienced cuts against the image that the modern livestock industry has constructed of itself through deceptive marketing and a slick public relations machine. That image is one in which factory farms aren't sites of mass pollution but rather small, family-owned businesses where farmers — the so-called original environmental stewards — are just trying to feed the world and eke out an honest living.
Factory farms, also called 'concentrated animal feeding operations' (CAFOs), enable meat companies to pump out enormous amounts of animal products at a low price point, and with a lower carbon footprint on a per-pound basis compared to traditional farming, according to the industry. But they operate with little local, state, or federal environmental regulation, leaving those who live near them to suffer from toxic air quality, polluted drinking water, and the constant stench of animal waste. Many in factory farm communities feel that regulators and policymakers have failed them and that they need to take matters into their own hands by speaking out at local meetings, organizing petitions, or filing lawsuits — all of which can put a target on their back.
Most operators of large CAFOs, to be sure, don't harass and intimidate these critics. But that so many people who speak out against factory farm pollution find themselves in crosshairs — figuratively but sometimes quite literally — shows how far the industry is willing to go to maintain its stranglehold on the American food system, and to sacrifice the health of the communities on which they depend for a quick buck.
Over the last century, the number of farms has shrunk precipitously while the number of animals per farm has shot up. Large and even 'mega'-sized factory farms — the kind that degraded Trom's and Herring's quality of life — have taken over, producing the vast majority of today's meat, milk, and eggs.
Typically, the people who operate these factory farms raise animals as contractors, also known as contract growers, for a regional company, like the Minnesota-based pork and turkey producer Holden Farms. Then a massive multinational meatpacker, like JBS, Tyson Foods, or Smithfield Foods, slaughters the animals and sells their meat.
Contract growers assume a lot of risk to build and operate their barns. They take out loans worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars; they're responsible for managing the animals' enormous volumes of manure; and they have no control over the quality of the feed or of the animals delivered to them. They don't even own the animals that they raise, which are the property of the larger, more powerful meat companies.
Some of these farmers do just fine for themselves, while others financially struggle, unable to claw out of the hole of debt they're put in. Their contracts with meat companies are notoriously hard to to make public, but Trom Eayrs found one as part of discovery in a 2013 lawsuit against Holden Farms by one of its contractors.
The contract grower had to take out a $730,000 loan to build a 3,000-hog operation in Dodge County, Minnesota. In return, Holden Farms would pay the contractor $9,000 per month. Between the mortgage on the loan, labor, utilities, taxes, and insurance, the contractor would just about break even, according to an estimate by Trom Eayrs in her book.
'If I wasn't in it so deep, I'd never do it again,' a hog contract grower in Illinois — unaffiliated with Holden Farms — told the Chicago Tribune in 2016.
These exploitative financial relationships have contributed to the hollowing out of rural economies, as farm income has become increasingly concentrated among the largest operations, the regional companies that own the animals, and the massive meatpackers. Now, in a given rural community, a network of factory farms and the slaughterhouse where they send their animals might be one of a handful of major employers — or the only one.
This is the fifth in a series of stories on how factory farming has shaped, and continues to impact, the US. Find the rest of the series and future installments here, and visit Vox's Future Perfect section for more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.
It's not hard to imagine how this economic desperation, baked into the business model of factory farming, could drive some involved in the industry to engage in harassment and intimidation against their critics.
Those who oppose factory farms are often told that if they stop a slaughterhouse or factory farm from coming into town, they're killing jobs — and also potential income for businesses that the meat companies might work with, like trucking or fertilizer companies. Criticizing the system can also get one labeled anti-farmer or anti-agriculture, even if the critic is a farmer themselves.
That tension between protecting a community's air and water from factory farms and welcoming the economic development they promise — even if most of the profit goes to a select few — can tear at the social fabric of rural life.
'You got some people that are making the money from the CAFOs, and then you've got neighbors around them that are suffering from health issues or odors, or they polluted their well or something, and so I think it kind of violates this rural ethic … I think that's what tears the communities apart,' John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, told me. That rural ethic, he explained, dictates that it's fine if someone is making money so long as it's not at their neighbors' expense.
But pointing out the violation of this principle that factory farms represent can lead not just to harassment and intimidation, but also to a subtler repercussion: social ostracism.
Edith Haenel of Northwood, Iowa, has long been outspoken against factory farms in Worth County, and said a lot of people don't like her for her advocacy. But she has little choice but to act: 'I have epilepsy, and so the hydrogen sulfide and ammonia [from livestock manure] are two things that can trigger seizures,' she told me. And the pervasive odor of animal manure is 'invasive,' Haenel said.
Some people have quietly thanked her for her advocacy but are scared to speak out themselves. They're afraid that 'they'll lose friends, they'll lose money, opportunities,' she said. 'Small business people really have to watch it,' she added, because even if they're opposed to factory farms, they could lose customers if they let people know where they stand.
Jim Berge, who's lived in Worth County all his life and has campaigned against factory farms with Haenel, said the animosity has become personal. They 'make fun of my life, make fun of me. … They don't challenge me anymore on my thoughts and theories, they just challenge me personally,' he said.
Forty-five miles north, fights over factory farms have divided Trom Eayrs' town of Blooming Prairie: '[My father] was essentially persona non grata in his own church, and people wouldn't speak to him. You could see and sense this divisiveness,' Trom Eayrs told me. 'There are wounds in this neighborhood that, frankly, will never heal. ... A wave of the hand is now met with a wave of the middle finger.'
Some in the factory farm industry, and those connected to it, also engage in bad-faith politicking and alleged academic censorship against some of its critics.
In the 1990s, Cindy Watson — a Republican who represented a district of Eastern North Carolina in the state's General Assembly — one day visited Elsie Herring at her home to learn about CAFO pollution. The farmer next door called Watson a 'ni***r lover.'
After introducing bills to regulate the industry, Watson received a death threat over voicemail. In 1998, she lost her primary. That year, a North Carolina pork industry coalition group had spent $2.9 million against its critics in the statehouse, including around $10,000 per week against Watson at one point during the campaign.
In 2018, a small Iowa farmer named Nick Schutt ran for Hardin County Board of Supervisors with a platform that included opposition to factory farms. One day, at the recycling plant where he worked, a number of his coworkers held a postcard mailed to them with his mugshot on it. 'THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD,' the caption read.
Schutt had indeed spent time in jail two years earlier — but for just a few hours, after he and 29 others nonviolently protested the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa. He paid a small fine and went on with his life. The postcard, however, didn't include any of that context, seemingly with the intent to cast Schutt as a hardened criminal. Schutt lost his race.
The postcard had been sent out by a shadowy group called Iowa Citizens for Truth. One of two people named on the group's 2016 IRS tax form is Steve Weiss, the same name of the founder and former chief financial officer of Iowa Select Farms — the state's largest pork producer and the fourth largest in the US. Weiss is now the CEO of NutriQuest, a livestock consultancy in Iowa.
Weiss didn't respond to a request for comment. A receptionist at the NutriQuest office told me they weren't interested and hung up.
IRS documents from 2017 and 2019 appear to link two attorneys — one current and one former — from the law firm BrownWinick, which has long represented Iowa Select Farms, with Iowa Citizens for Truth. In the 2011 state legislative session, one of the attorneys also lobbied on behalf of Iowa Select Farms.
If you campaign on an anti-factory farm ticket, the industry is going to 'make it so difficult for you to run,' Schutt told me. 'Even if we did have a fair chance to run — the Republicans in Hardin County outnumber the Democrats — there's no reason for them to do an unfair contest.'
BrownWinick didn't respond to a request for comment.
Some academics have said they faced retaliation for going up against Big Meat, including at land-grant universities, which historically have worked closely with the meat industry to build the factory farming system and further develop it.
Randy Coon, a farmer and former agricultural economist at North Dakota State University, was involved with a group that opposed the construction of a large hog operation near his home in Buffalo, North Dakota. In early 2016, he spoke at a public hearing about the issue, and about a year later, the university was working on a project funded by farm commodity interest groups. 'Some of them complained because I was going to be on it and so I got taken off of it,' Coon said. Then in early 2018, the chair of the agriculture department had a talk with him. 'I was pretty much told that I was anti-agriculture and I shouldn't be working in the College of Ag, and that I couldn't work on any ag-related projects,' he said. 'The handwriting was on the wall. They didn't say, 'You're fired,' but, you know, 'We don't want you.'' He finished up a project and resigned a month later.
North Dakota State University officials didn't respond to a request for comment.
Chris Jones, a former research engineer and water quality expert at the University of Iowa, had long written critically about the state's agricultural industry in a popular, university-hosted blog.
Days after it was published, according to a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jones's boss said he received a call from Keith Saunders, the chief government relations officer at the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the University of Iowa. According to Jones's boss, the officer said that Zumbach and another Republican state senator complained about the blog, saying that the university's water quality experts were asking lawmakers for money while also allowing Jones to publish critical blog posts about agricultural pollution. There was no direct threat, but the message was clear.
Saunders didn't respond to the Chronicle of Higher Education's request for comment. 'No threat to funding was ever made because of the content of a blog,' Zumbach told the Chronicle. The other lawmaker, state Sen. Tom Shipley — who had once worked as a legislative liaison for the Iowa Cattlemen's Association — confirmed the meeting with Saunders about Jones's blog to the Chronicle but didn't say what was discussed.
About a week later, tired of the controversy and worried his work would threaten his department's funding, Jones announced his retirement. Over the following month, the state legislature voted to move $500,000 from a water quality program that Jones oversaw to a water program managed by the state's department of agriculture, which has close ties to the industry.
Jones said that the whole ordeal further revealed the industry's fragility — without heavy subsidization, deregulation, and dependence on taxpayers to either tolerate its pollution or pay to clean it up, it wouldn't stand on its own.
'To maintain that house of cards, they've got to keep everybody in line,' he told me. 'Some peon like me, if I'm a threat to them, Jesus, that's saying something — how precarious that house of cards is. So they're going to defend it from every angle, because they know that it's vulnerable.'
Sam Delgado contributed reporting for this story.
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