Description

Sonja Trom Eayrs was a featured author in LSP’s November 4, 2025 event Big Ag, Big Problems: A Panel on Rural Consolidation.

From Trom Eayrs’ website:

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.

Dodge County is being called a “powerful manifesto” (Foreword Reviews), a “must-read for anyone wanting a behind-the-curtain understanding of why rural farm communities are struggling” (Joe Maxwell of Farm Action), and a “smart, militant update to Wes Jackson’s and Wendell Berry’s writings on smallholder farming” (Kirkus Reviews).