Advocates for family farms in Mississippi are sounding alarms about the increasing dominance of large corporations in the state's agricultural sector, noting negative impacts on local farmers and consumers.
Four mega-corporations now control the majority of livestock production in the United States: American companies Tyson and Cargill, Brazilian-owned JBS and Chinese-owned WH Group Ltd.
"These corporate monopolies are stretched all across the agriculture industry," said Justin Perkins, publisher of Barn Raiser, a nonprofit newsroom that covers rural America, "and this has made the livelihood of small- and even medium-sized farmers nearly untenable."
Mississippi, home to a significant poultry and livestock industry, has seen similar trends of corporate consolidation impacting independent farmers.
The big companies argue that they've made the food system more efficient and profitable, while keeping consumer prices low. But critics argue that waste from the huge hog, cattle and dairy farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, pollute communities' air and water.
Sonja Trom Eayrs and her family have been farming in Minnesota for generations and fighting CAFOS for decades. In her book, "Dodge County, Incorporated," she describes the corporate system as a pyramid - with big ag at the top, and "integrators" in the middle who own the supply chain and provide feed and veterinary services to farmers, called contract growers, at the base.
"The multinationals reorganized the marketplace, created a closed system where all the profits flow to the top of this pyramid," she said, "and they can control the pricing that flows all the way down to the contract farmer and that contract grower, down at the bottom."
Joe Maxwell cofounded the nonprofit Farm Action, and said this vertical integration has created regional monopolies among meatpackers - which has driven tens of thousands of independent hog farmers out of business in the past few decades.
Click here to see more...