Join the La Crescent Public Library for a talk with Sonja Trom Eayrs about her book Dodge County, Inc: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America. The Trom family has farmed in Dodge County, MN for generations, but in the mid-90s, Dodge’s livestock farmers became ensnared in contracts with corporations like Tyson, Hormel, JBS, and Smithfield Foods. This was the beginning of a perilous journey as a generation of small farmers was squeezed out of the market.

Sonja Trom Eayrs is an author, an attorney, the business manager for the Trom family farm, and is involved in several rural advocacy organizations. Through Dodge County, Incorporated, Sonja recounts her family’s litigation against the Dodge County board to prevent a corporate factory farm from going up across the road from the family farm. She weaves her family’s struggle to fight corporate injustices in rural America with the larger story of corporate livestock production in the United States.