Apr 30, 2024
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Austin is an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy. During the 2020 presidential campaign, he advised candidates Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg on agricultural policy before ultimately serving as Co-Chair of the Biden campaign’s Agriculture Antitrust Policy Committee. He is a Fellow of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, an initiative that brings together faculty, students, and scholars to collaborate on research related to competition policy and antitrust enforcement. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Common Good Iowa and the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. In 2022, The Advocate named him a "Champion of Pride.”
He recently published his debut book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, which profiles a series of powerful magnates to illustrate the concentration of power in the American food system. The book has received universal acclaim. Publishers Weekly gave it a Starred Review and the host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots commended the book, remarking that “I have come away with a completely different idea of agriculture that I cannot unsee." The book has received praise from across the political spectrum, including a rave review from The American Conservative.
Austin also has a strong track record of organizing conferences and other forums to push the conversation forward on agriculture policy. He recently worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to organize a conference and publish a compendium at Yale Law School entitled “Reforming America’s Food Retail Markets,” which explored competition issues in the nation’s food retail industry. He previously spearheaded other conferences at the Yale Law School, including “Big Ag & Antitrust: Competition Policy for a Sustainable and Humane Food System.” He also created & organized the "Heartland Forum" in Storm Lake, Iowa, the first candidate forum during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary process, which focused on the impacts of economic concentration in rural America.
Austin is a 7th generation Iowan. His mother Kathy managed a beauty salon in his hometown of Cedar Rapids before opening her own bakery. His father Scott delivered and merchandised beer for a local, family-owned beer distributor. Austin’s passion for agriculture comes from spending weekends working with his Grandpa Frerick.
He has held a job since the age of 12, when he started working at the Cedar Rapids Gazette as a paperboy. He attended Grinnell College on merit scholarships and Pell Grants. While in college, Austin wrote two theses on corporate power in Iowa’s slaughterhouse communities. After being the first in his family to graduate from college, Austin attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school on a full academic scholarship. He has since held positions at the Congressional Research Service and at the U.S. Department of Treasury, Office of Tax Analysis, where he published research on executive compensation, pharmaceutical corporate charity abuses, and the growth of concentration in the American economy.
“In this
eye-opening debut study, Frerick, an agricultural policy fellow at
Yale University, reveals the ill-gained stranglehold that a handful
of companies have on America’s food economy…It’s a disquieting
critique of private monopolization of public
necessities.” --Publishers Weekly, starred
Barons is the story of
seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences
for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks
Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy
herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school
children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens
of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. What was the
key to his success? Hard work and exceptional business savvy?
Maybe. But more than anything else, Mike benefitted from
deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has
consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the
way, hollowed out the nation’s rural towns and local
businesses.
Along with Mike McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German
family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a
decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up
countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small
grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch
Industries, with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will
learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially
when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of
Brazil.
These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of
the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American
food. The tycoons profiled in these pages are hardly unique: many
other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies
for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods,
livelihoods, and our democracy itself. Barons paints a stark portrait of the
consequences of corporate consolidation, but it also shows we can
choose a different path. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food
industry is possible—if we take back power from the barons who have
robbed us of it.
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