Hannah Voss spent eleven years on the book that Belt Publishing put out on 2026-05-06. The County and the Furrow: Land, Tenancy, and the Quiet Transfer of Iowa is 248 pages, plus 41 pages of appendices and a 19-page index. It costs twenty-four dollars in trade paperback. Belt printed 3,200 copies for the first run.
Voss, who is forty-one, grew up on a 320-acre corn-and-soybean farm in Howard County, Iowa, that her family sold to a Cedar Rapids dental practice's investment partnership in 2013. The sale is mentioned twice in the book, once in the preface and once on page 187. It is not the book's subject. It is, however, the reason the book exists.
The book's subject is the transfer of farmland in three Iowa counties — Howard, Mitchell, and Chickasaw, in the state's northeast corner — between 1980 and 2024. Voss has read every recorded land transaction in those three counties over forty-four years. The total is 14,602 transactions, of which she analyzes 4,118 in detail.
This is the kind of research that academic presses publish, and that academic readers cite once and never re-read. Voss has tried, with mixed success, to write it for a wider audience. She is a journalist by training, with a master's from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2010 and seven years at the Cedar Rapids Gazette before she started the book.
The first hundred pages are mostly successful. Voss opens at the Howard County Recorder's Office in Cresco on a March morning in 2014, the day she began the research. The clerk, a woman named Darlene Mostek who had held the job since 1989, gave Voss a corner desk and a stack of green ledgers from the 1980s.
Voss spent the next four months reading those ledgers. She introduces the basic story slowly. In 1980, 92 percent of the farmland in Howard County was owned by Iowa residents, mostly the families who farmed it. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 71 percent. The book is about where the other 21 percent went.
The short answer is: to investment partnerships, agricultural REITs, two pension funds, a Canadian-headquartered insurance company, and a small but growing group of Chinese-American buyers operating through Delaware LLCs. The long answer occupies the book's middle four chapters.
Voss is careful with the long answer. She does not, as a less disciplined writer might, present the transfer as a villainous campaign. She presents it as a series of individual transactions, each of which made sense to the seller at the time. The aggregate effect, she argues, is something no individual seller chose.
The clearest chapter is the fourth, on the 1986 farm credit crisis. Voss draws on the records of the Federal Land Bank of Omaha, which foreclosed on 1,847 Iowa farms between 1984 and 1987. She tracks 312 of those farms through to their current ownership. Of the 312, only forty-one are still owned by farming families. The rest have passed through, on average, 2.7 owners.
The data, when laid out this way, is hard to argue with. Voss does not over-argue it. She presents the tables, names the buyers where she can, and lets the reader draw the conclusion.
The book's weakest chapter is the seventh, on the role of crop insurance subsidies in driving the consolidation. The chapter is sound on the economics but loses its grip on the human scale. Voss returns, in chapter eight, to a single Mitchell County farm — the Vrba family's place near Stacyville — and the book recovers.
The Vrba chapter is the book's best. Three generations of the family speak, including the eighty-eight-year-old Frank Vrba, who farmed the place from 1962 to 2009, and his granddaughter Anneli, who is twenty-six and runs a market garden on five rented acres on the same land. The family no longer owns it. A partnership headquartered in Sioux Falls bought it in 2018.
Voss spends thirty-one pages on the Vrba farm. She walks the field edges with Frank and notes the willow line that marks the 1957 drainage tile. She sits in Anneli's kitchen and reads the lease that the Sioux Falls partnership has offered for the coming season. The lease is reproduced, in full, in appendix C.
This is the book at its best: specific, slow, willing to let a single document speak.
Belt Publishing, which is run by Anne Trubek out of Cleveland, has done the book a service by giving it the kind of editorial attention small presses are supposed to. The copy editor, Mary M. McDermott, is credited on the title page, which is a courtesy more publishers should extend. The maps, drawn by the Iowa City cartographer Erin Aldrich, are clear and the typography is plain.
The cover is a photograph of a corn stubble field at the western edge of Chickasaw County, taken in November 2024 by Voss herself. It is not a beautiful photograph. It is the right photograph for the book.
The book has flaws beyond the seventh chapter. The prose can be flat. Voss is a competent stylist but not a memorable one. There are sentences that read like the journalism school they came out of, and the reader who wants the literary virtues of a Wendell Berry essay will not find them here.
What the reader will find is the data, presented honestly, and a small number of human portraits that earn their place. That is enough.
The book is also useful as a corrective. The standard narrative about American farmland has, since the 2008 financial crisis, been about Wall Street. Voss's data suggests that the actual story is more diffuse. The biggest single buyer in her three counties is not a Wall Street fund. It is a family-owned partnership headquartered in West Des Moines that has been buying steadily since 1993.
Voss names the partnership. She has gone to Iowa civil court records to do so. The legal review at Belt must have been careful, because there are no anonymous corporate constructions in the book. Everyone who owns the land is named.
This is the book's lasting contribution. A reader can take the appendices and check Voss's work. The transaction list, on pages 251 through 274, is the longest published record of agricultural land transfer in any midwestern county.
The County and the Furrow will not be reviewed in the major papers. It will be reviewed, briefly, in the Des Moines Register and the Iowa Farmer Today, and it will sell, slowly, to county extension offices and to a small number of farm-policy academics. That is a smaller audience than the book deserves.
Anyone who wants to know how American farmland actually changes hands should read it. The next book on the subject will rest on Voss's footnotes.