In this recording of Farm Aid’s monthly Breaking Bread series for March 2025, you’ll hear from Sonja Trom Eayrs. She’s the author of Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America and is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, and attorney. She is involved in several rural advocacy organizations, including the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Farm Action, Land Stewardship Project, and Dodge County Concerned Citizens. Trom Eayrs also serves as the business manager for the Trom family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota.
Learn More About the Book
Dodge County, Incorporated is an engrossing legal drama that recounts the Eayrs family’s three rounds of litigation against public officials in Dodge County, Minnesota, in efforts to prevent a factory farm from going up across the road from the Eayrs’ intergenerational family farm. With the factual rigor of an attorney and the passion of a farmer’s daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs weaves together her family’s struggles with the larger realities of corporate livestock production in the United States: the pollution, the waste, the metamorphosis of thriving, verdant countrysides into bleak commercial zones. Dodge County is the story of Sonja’s hometown, echoing with a story playing out in rural farm communities across the United States. Throughout, Trom Eayrs underscores the importance of fighting against the deliberate corporatization of rural America and the resulting political consequences, including hyper-partisanship and deepened political divides.
About the Breaking Bread Series
The Highlander Center defines “popular education” as an opportunity to learn from each other’s shared lived experiences to build collective knowledge. Breaking Bread: Lunch and Listen will feature stories that uplifts the shared history of food and farming; organizing and resistance that’s got us to where we are now. We pair that history with work that folks are doing presently, that will inform the future we want for each other as it relates to farming and agriculture, food, culture and rural communities. This storytelling and making our narratives public is a key and critical part of community organizing. Please join us!
