Tamarack River Ghost by Jerry Apps

enrolled in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, so a fair number of the students Randy faced wished they could be about any place other than listening to his lectures and attempts at humor, which seldom evoked more than an occasional chuckle.
    Oakfield noticed that a stranger had slipped into one of the back seats and surmised it must be the newspaper reporter Dr. Evans had mentioned. He had decided he wouldn’t make any adjustments to his lecture simplybecause a member of the press was in attendance, and besides, he had agreed to meet with him after the lecture.
    Randy grew up on a livestock farm in Indiana. Until he landed this job at UW–Madison, he had been in school constantly, from the day he enrolled in kindergarten. He went to college at Purdue, where he majored in animal science and earned a graduate research assistantship in agricultural economics at Cornell. He liked numbers and was attracted to the study of economic theories. He’d found the field challenging. He’d become interested in food systems, especially the production end. This interest led him to the study of vertical integration in farming.
    With his new PhD in hand, Randy was extremely pleased to land an assistant professor position at UW–Madison—such jobs had become scarce at the big agricultural universities, which all faced budget cuts and various kinds of entrenchment. He’d expected to do at least a year and maybe as many as three years of post-doctorate work before competing for a tenure-track faculty position.
    Randy looked like the stereotypical scholar—he was tall and thin and wore thick glasses, rumpled khaki trousers, and a nondescript shirt with a necktie loose around his neck. And although it was October, he still wore sandals. Though just in his early thirties, he had already gained considerable respect in the field of agricultural economics. His published article in the National Agribusiness Journal had won first place in its competition for young scholars.
    He snapped on the computer projector and pushed a button on his laptop. Words in big red letters appeared on the screen behind him.
    Vertical Integration: When all production stages for a commodity are under one owner
    “I assume you’ve all read the assignment, and that you had no trouble finding the material on the Internet.” A few heads nodded in agreement, but most just sat staring at him and the screen, their notebooks and pencils at the ready. Several of them wanted only a passing grade, for which theyhad to pass the six-and twelve-week and final exams. And to pass these, they needed to pay attention to the professor’s comments. Having taken the six-week test, they knew everything on the exam came from the lectures.
    “In the last twenty to twenty-five years we have seen a tremendous increase in vertical integration in agriculture in this country,” Randy continued. His voice was not especially easy to listen to, because he spoke with little inflection. But he didn’t lack for enthusiasm for his topic, which soon became evident to the minority of students in the room who had turned their initial apathy to interest.
    “Much of our meat—whether beef, pork, or chicken—is produced by but a handful of big firms that own everything: the feed that the animals consume, the animals and their facilities, and the slaughtering plants that prepare the meat for our tables. These firms own an entire food production system from top to bottom, which is why we call it vertical integration.” Randy paused and poked a button on his laptop, causing a new visual to appear on the screen: a historic family farmstead with house, barn, and outbuildings with cattle grazing in a nearby field.
    “This photo represents the family farm that was so important to the history of this country. These farmers owned their land and their animals. They decided what and how much they would produce. They both depended on and supported their local communities, including the local feed