CORY BOOKER
U.S. senator (New Jersey) and member of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
“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 Dodge County, Incorporated, 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.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
featured review
"A smart, militant update to Wes Jackson’s and Wendell Berry’s writings on smallholder farming, her book demands immediate reforms... an indignant, righteously wrathful defense of the family farm in the face of corporate voracity."
SARAH VOGEL
author of The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm
“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. Dodge County, Incorporated 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.”
BOOKLIST
starred review
"As a litigator whose own family tried pushing back against the dozen CAFOs within a three-mile radius of their land, Eayrs illuminates the ironclad ties between Big Ag and local and federal government that make any reforms almost impossible. It’s a terribly disturbing account that nevertheless offers a glimmer of hope in the small farmers nationwide who are promoting soil health in polycultural planting, no-till practices, cover-crop implementation, and—who knew?—pastured animals."
CHRISTOPHER LEONARD
New York Times best-selling author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business
“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.”
JOE MAXWELL
co-founder of Farm Action
“Written with passion, meticulously researched, and vibrantly told, Sonja Trom Eayrs’s Dodge County, Incorporated gives a riveting insider’s account of how major food corporations infiltrated rural communities, hollowing out their economic vitality and leaving behind environmental ruin...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.”
KITTY BLOCK
president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States
“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."
CORBAN ADDISON
author of Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
“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.”
AUSTIN FRERICK
author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry
“A riveting tour of one family’s journey fighting the barons that control our food system.”
WAYNE PACELLE
president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy and New York Times best-selling author
..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.... 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.
JOHN IKERD
professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia
“Sonja Trom Eayrs’s Dodge County, Incorporated is a rare firsthand, blow-by-blow account of the battles of a farm family and their neighbors defending themselves against the environmental and public health threats of large-scale, corporate-controlled concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs... Trom Eayrs’s book is particularly compelling because hers is a story of a conventional farming family that, when surrounded by CAFOs, decided to take legal action and discovered the corporate takeover of their county.”
ALAN GUEBERT
columnist and author of The Land of Milk and Honey
“Sonja Trom Eayrs is a CAFO-fighting whirlwind; she has the heart of a farmer’s daughter, the mind of an experienced attorney, and the will of someone who knows in their bones they are right. And she is right. Her Dodge County, Incorporated exposes Big Ag’s do-anything, community-destroying fight to impose its cruel industrial meat and poultry systems on America. Her vivid writing, detailed reporting, and deep honesty brighten every page of this important untold story.”
FOREWORD REVIEWS
featured review
"The devastation wrought upon US farming communities is tracked in Sonja Trom Eayrs’s courageous book Dodge County, Inc... the book braids such local stories into its intrepid reportage, resulting in a portrait of a country in crisis... Dodge County, Inc. is a powerful manifesto against the excesses of factory farming."
ART CULLEN
editor and publisher of the Storm Lake Times Pilot , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and author of the book Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper
"Children used to wait by the mailbox for the school bus along the back roads of southern Minnesota, Sonja Trom Eayrs among them. They wait no longer, squeezed out by decades of corporate consolidation. The family farm was supplanted by hog confinements. Trom Eayrs came home to find that the independent yeoman is gone... She believes you can construct home again. It makes you wonder."
CHRIS JONES
author of The Swine Republic
"The heartache caused by industrial agriculture’s plunder of the rural American Midwest has rarely been captured more movingly than in the lines and pages of Dodge County, Incorporated. Orwell famously said, 'those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.' Dodge County, Incorporated is an effort to wrest control of the present from the forces of Big Ag and place it in the hands of the rural Americans so they can gain control of the destiny of our country’s heartland."
BOB MARTIN
former director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production and retired Senior Advisor to the Johns Hopkings Center for a Livable Future
"Dodge County, Incorporated... is a story expertly told by Sonja Trom Eayrs of the intimidation, ostracism and even threats her family faced as it sought to protect traditional farming and to minimize damage to the environment and local communities caused by the spread of industrial animal agriculture. It is a must read for anyone who cares about the future of agriculture in the United States."