The average farmer in America is no longer someone in gumboots mending fences and riding tractors. Barons is the story of seven corporate titans who now dominate the American food system. Many of them are still family-run companies worth billions. Austin Frerick says there are similar approaches to the industrialised food system that include political donations, cases of animal cruelty, worker abuses, corrupted academic research and the use of trade associations and shell companies to obscure links to their operations. And those companies are also operating in Australia.

Guest: Austin Frerick, fellow of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale, and author, Barons: money, power, and the corruption of America’s food industry, published by Island Press.