"A breakneck procedural that is beautifully written and masterfully crafted, Erin Young's The Fields is a dynamite debut-crime fiction at its very finest. Some things don't stay buried. It starts with a body-a young woman found dead in an Iowa cornfield, on one of the few family farms still managing to compete with the giants of Big Agriculture. When Sergeant Riley Fisher, newly promoted to head of investigations for the Black Hawk County Sheriff's...

"A riveting true story of industrial espionage in which a Chinese-born scientist is convicted of trying to steal U.S. trade secrets, by a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. In September 2011, sheriff's deputies in Iowa encountered three neatly dressed Asian men at a cornfield that had been leased by Monsanto to grow corn from patented hybrids. What began as a routine inquiry into potential trespassing blossomed into a federal court case...

"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...

"One woman's tenacious journey to escape poverty and create a billion-dollar farming business--without ever leaving the land she loved. The youngest of her parents' combined twenty-one children, Sarah Frey grew up on a struggling farm in Southern Illinois, often having to grow, catch, or hunt her own dinner. She spent much of her early childhood dreaming of running away to Hollywood, Chicago--or really anywhere with central heating. At fifteen, she...

"The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1789, to subjugate Indigenous tribes, George Washington ordered his troops to "ruintheir crops on the ground and prevent them planting more." Destroying the sources of food is just one way that the United States has used nourishment as a political tool. To prevent enslaved people...