Tag: farms

Three Mexican Citizens charged with trafficking agricultural workers into servitude on farms in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida

Three Mexican citizens have been indicted on federal charges for allegedly running a human trafficking ring that lured agricultural workers from Mexico into forced labor on farms across Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.

A 35-count indictment, unsealed Friday, alleges that Martha Zeferino Jose, 42; her son, Jeremy Zeferino Jose, 23; and her partner, Jose Rodriguez Munoz, used a farm labor contracting company to exploit the H-2A visa program for financial gain, according to the Department of Justice, or DOJ.

Federal prosecutors say the group recruited workers with promises of legitimate employment through their company, Las Princesas Corporation. Instead, the defendants allegedly charged the workers illegal recruitment fees, saddling them with debt before they even arrived in the U.S.

“These individuals have been indicted for luring vulnerable workers with promises of legitimate employment, only to then confiscate their identity documents and force them to labor in inhumane conditions,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said.

According to court documents, once the workers arrived, the defendants seized their passports and visas to prevent them from leaving. The workers were then allegedly forced to labor for long hours without adequate breaks or access to water while being housed in “crowded, unsanitary” residences that lacked heat, air conditioning, and hot water.

The indictment further alleges the following:

  • Climate of Fear: The defendants allegedly prohibited workers from leaving their residences alone or speaking to outsiders, threatening them with deportation if they complained.
  • Visa Fraud: Martha Zeferino Jose allegedly submitted fraudulent applications to the government, falsely certifying that she would comply with labor laws she intended to ignore.
  • Obstruction of Justice: When the Department of Labor began an investigation, the defendants allegedly returned confiscated documents just before investigators arrived and ordered workers to lie to federal agents.

U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle for the Eastern District of North Carolina vowed to “find and eradicate any illegal immigration” and abuse of the system within the district.

The defendants face multiple charges, including conspiracy to commit forced labor and alien harboring for financial gain. If convicted, they face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count of forced labor.

Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Department of Labor Office of the Inspector General investigated the case.

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O’Keefe Media Group Goes Undercover: Cattle Ranchers and Insiders Expose How Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef Secretly Control America’s Beef Market

The O’Keefe Media Group went undercover at CattleCon in Nashville, Tennessee, and exposed how Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef secretly control America’s beef market.

In November, President Trump said cattle prices were falling while beef prices kept rising and launched an investigation into price manipulation.

Trump directed the DOJ to investigate the meat packing companies who are driving up the prices through illicit collusion, price fixing and price manipulation.

The O’Keefe Media Group went undercover at CattleCon and ranchers spilled the beans on how the “Big Four” control the beef industry.

“Our team spoke directly with ranchers and industry partners, documenting firsthand how the “Big Four” dominate the market and impact pricing,” James O’Keefe said.

“Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef control most of the U.S. beef industry, raising serious questions about who really sets the price. So when you see higher prices at the grocery store, it’s worth asking why,” O’Keefe said.

“This may explain why your steak keeps costing more,” he said.

“They [Big Four] are buying like all the companies in the United States… so they don’t have competition,” one insider said.

“They [Big Four] can knock you out of this industry in two seconds,” another said.

“They [Big Four] closed all the markets — all the markets are theirs in Brazil and now in the U.S.”

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Here’s Why the US Is Losing Farms at an Alarming Rate

The United States lost about 15,000 farms last year as part of a disturbing trend that is reshaping the nation’s agricultural landscape.

The Agriculture Department’s latest Land in Farms report showed that the total number of farms in the U.S. fell to about 1.86 million in 2025, down from roughly 1.88 million in 2024. No state reported a net increase in farm operations.

Since 2018, the U.S. has lost over 150,000 farms, representing an eight percent decline that has affected states like Texas and Minnesota.

Smaller operations represent most of the losses. Farms with only $1,000 to $9,999 in yearly sales saw the steepest decline. Only farms that make over $1 million in sales grew.

There are a plethora of factors contributing to this trend. Rising costs, weaker prices, and structural change in the farm economy have figured into the decline, according to RFD-TV. Farmers are spending more for equipment, fuel, and fertilizer. Meanwhile commodity prices have dropped, creating what several economists describe as a crop-sector recession.

Farm bankruptcies and forced sales have increased, along with land prices and interests. This is making it harder for younger and smaller operations to start new farms or to expand existing ones.

If this trend continues, it could mean that U.S. agriculture appears more productive on paper, but less diverse and more vulnerable to changes in the industry. As larger farms continue to grow and smaller ones vanish, production will be concentrated in fewer hands and regions. This will increase the impact of extreme weather, disease outbreaks, or government policy changes on the industry.

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The Most Socialist System in America Is the One Feeding Us—and It’s Failing

merica loves to debate socialism. We argue about universal healthcare, guaranteed income, student loan forgiveness, and government dependency. We pride ourselves on our rugged independence and belief in free markets. We warn that socialism destroys innovation, freedom, and personal responsibility. But here’s the uncomfortable truth most Americans never stop to consider: the most centrally planned, government-dependent, subsidy-driven system in the United States isn’t medicine, housing, or energy—it’s food.

Our food system is not a free market. It is not capitalism in any recognizable form. It is a government-engineered economy propped up by taxpayer dollars at every stage, directed by regulation, shaped by corporate interests, and leaving both consumers and farmers dependent, unhealthy, and without real alternatives.

Each year, more than $40 billion of taxpayer money is used to subsidize commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, and cotton. Crop insurance—also paid for largely by the public—is essentially another subsidy, and without it, most large commodity farms wouldn’t survive. But the subsidies don’t stop at growing. Once harvested, those subsidized crops become corn syrup, seed oils, stabilizers, livestock feed, artificial ingredients, ultraprocessed food additives, and ethanol—fuel grown on prime farmland and heavily subsidized again under the banner of environmental benefit.

Then the same Farm Bill that subsidizes growing and processing also subsidizes purchasing those foods through SNAP benefits. And when the predictable metabolic outcomes emerge—obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, autoimmune disorders—the government subsidizes the healthcare required to manage the consequences. So the loop looks like this: we subsidize growing the ingredients. We subsidize the industry turning those ingredients into processed food. We subsidize the public buying those products. And then we subsidize the medical care required to treat the disease that food causes. That isn’t a food economy. It is a taxpayer-funded dependency system.

People like to imagine that subsidies make farming cushy. Nothing could be further from reality. Even with subsidies, 85 percent of US farmers work a second job just to stay on their land and feed their families. They are subsidizing the food system with unpaid labor simply to keep feeding the country. I once watched a dairy farmer who had just won the lottery. When asked what he planned to do with the money, he shrugged and said, “I’ll keep farming until it runs out.”

He wasn’t joking—he was describing reality. Ask a farmer where they see themselves in five years and many go silent. Some get emotional. Some laugh because it’s safer than crying. I know that feeling: the pit in your stomach, the exhaustion, the prayer for a path forward.

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We’re Losing the Human Touch in Food

Food, which generally originates with a farmer, gardener, or orchardist, is fast losing its hands-on persona and increasingly gaining a mechanical, chemical platform.

Over the last decade, the United States has lost about 28,000 farms annually. While some of the loss is due to urbanization, most of the land remains farmland, either managed by other farmers or simply abandoned. While there are 1.3 million farmers over age 65, only 300,000 are 35 or younger. In 2022, the average American farmer was 58—years older than the average age in other vibrant economic sectors.

The American business landscape is largely anti-people. The current rush to artificial intelligence reflects how eagerly most businesses seek to eliminate people. The farming sector illustrates this trend better than most.

Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of disposable personal income spent on food dropped from 17 percent to 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, health care spending rose from about 9 percent in 1980, to 18 percent today. Could the two possibly be related? One more data point: In the last 80 years, the farmgate share of the retail food dollar fell from around 40 percent to just 15.9 percent in 2023.

Farming is out of sight and out of mind for most people. Food appears on grocery store shelves. It’s treated as a pit stop between life’s more important activities. Fortunately, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is beginning to shine a spotlight on food, including revised and more truthful dietary guidelines.

For decades, American agriculture policy and practice have replaced farm labor with machines, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. This raises the question: Is food a living thing, or simply an inanimate pile of protoplasmic matter to be manipulated like wheel bearings or bottle caps?

As technological sophistication pulls our culture away from its biologically vibrant roots, it jeopardizes our functional microbiomes. Yes, that’s a packed sentence. You might need to reread it—slowly. The point is, our internal systems are more aligned with the ancient world than with Star Trek. Do we really want machines, chemicals, and drugs to be the medium in which our food is grown?

Wes Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has long advocated for a healthy “eyes-to-acres” ratio. He suggests that when fewer people interact with the land and the growing of food, both land stewardship and food integrity suffer.

Per-person agricultural output—the number of people one farmer feeds—has increased dramatically over the past century. Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the reaper in the 1830s launched the agricultural industrial revolution, enabling farmers to produce far more than ever before. Replacing the scythe with the reaper was revolutionary.

While technology brought many agricultural efficiencies, without ecological ethics, it may have gone too far. The introduction of subtherapeutic antibiotics in chicken waterers enabled the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). With feed augers, water pumps, and massive barns, individual farmer output soared. And along came super bugs, C. diff, MRSA, avian influenza, polluted water, and fecal-stench air in surrounding neighborhoods.

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Why are we paying Canadian dairy farmers who are producing more?

Every once in a while, someone inside a tightly protected system decides to say the quiet part out loud. That is what Joel Fox, a dairy farmer from the Trenton, Ontario area, did recently in the Ontario Farmer newspaper. In a candid open letter, Fox questioned why established dairy farmers like himself continue to receive increasingly large government payouts — even though the sector is not shrinking, but expanding. His piece, titled “We continue to privatize gains, socialize losses,” did not come from an economist or a critic of supply management. It came from someone who benefits from it. And yet his message was unmistakable: the numbers no longer add up.

Fox’s letter marks something we have not seen in years — a rare moment of internal dissent from a system that usually speaks with one voice. It is the first meaningful crack since the viral milk-dumping video by Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen, who filmed himself being forced to dump thousands of litres of perfectly good milk because of quota rules. Huigen’s video exposed contradictions inside supply management, but the system quickly closed ranks. Until now. Fox has reopened a conversation that has been dormant for far too long.

In his letter, Fox admitted he would cash his latest $14,000 Dairy Direct Payment Program (DDPP) cheque, despite believing the program wastes taxpayer money. The DDPP was created to offset supposed losses from trade agreements like CETA, CPTPP, and CUSMA. These deals were expected to reduce Canada’s dairy market. But those “losses” are theoretical — based on models and assumptions about future erosion in market share. Meanwhile, domestic dairy demand has strengthened.

Which raises the obvious question: why are we compensating dairy farmers for producing less when they are, in fact, producing more?

This month, dairy farmers received another 1% quota increase, on top of several increases totalling 4% to 5% in recent years. Quota — the right to produce milk — only increases when more supply is needed. If trade deals had truly devastated the sector, quota would be falling, not rising. Instead, Canada’s population has grown by nearly six million since 2015, processors have expanded, and consumption remains stable. The market is expanding.

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Canada spent nearly $1M killing ostriches, but full cost remains hidden

The federal government has now admitted that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the RCMP spent over $900,000 on the agency’s mission to slaughter more than 300 healthy ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farms in Edgewood, B.C.

The numbers were revealed through an order paper question filed by Conservative MP Scott Anderson after months of stonewalling from Ottawa.

Despite Anderson pointedly requesting a complete accounting of all federal dollars spent, the amount the CFIA and RCMP did disclose is merely a glimpse into what was likely millions of tax dollars spent on lengthy court battles to avoid testing the birds to prove their health, and a nearly 50-day occupation of the farm with RCMP deployed at full force.

Nevertheless, for the farmers whose livelihoods and the healthy prehistoric creatures that were wiped out in the kill mission, the totals that have been revealed only add salt to the wounds.

The CFIA alone admits to $444,000, including $9,000 on feed that the farmers would have been happy to provide had they not been barred from caring for their birds weeks before the “cull.”

More than $72,000 was spent on portable toilets and hand-wash stations, and over $32,000 on unspecified “specialized equipment.”

It also paid $100,000 for private security at three of its offices.

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Young farmer’s crusade to protect vanishing farmland pits her against solar developers in New York

Renewable energy developers say local opposition is one of the biggest impediments to building wind and solar projects in the U.S. Besides the impact of large-scale industrial projects littering the view of the countryside, opponents are also concerned about the impact on their land values and the destruction of precious limited farmland. 

In 2023, Alexandra Fusalo bought 6.74 acres of land near Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, and she set out to create a pollinator farm. That’s a type of farm that produces a productive habitat for pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, with diverse native plants, water sources and nesting areas. She documents her farming efforts in her “House of Green” Substack. 

“My goal this year was to see how many rare, endangered and common pollinators I could attract,” Fusalo told Just the News. She said she counted a couple dozen monarch butterflies on her land on one day in September. 

Her involvement with solar opposition began one day when she was working in her garden and a neighbor told her that he’s often approached by solar developers looking to buy his land. “It kind of sent shivers down my spine. All these pollinators I’ve attracted to my farm, what would happen to them? What would happen to my investment?” she said. 

Vanishing farmland: 24 million acres fewer than we had 2017

The neighbor assured her that he wasn’t going to sell his land to solar developers, but Fasulo said the developers are aggressive and many farmers do end up selling. Between 2017 and 2024, the U.S. saw a decline of 24 million acres of farmland, a trend that worries Fasulo.

The average age of farmers is rising, and few young people aren’t pursuing careers in agriculture, making it attractive to sell off unused farmland to developers. 

Farmland is being sold for other types of development than renewable energy. But renewable energy takes up large amounts of land, and unlike other types of energy, rural land is an attractive location to site wind and solar projects. 

Fusalo said on various social media platforms that young farmers will become rarer if farmland continues disappearing. To help protect farmland, she established the nonprofit American Land Rescue Fund, which pays for “environmental attorneys who take on industrial and governmental projects that threaten rural communities, ecological integrity, and agricultural sustainability.”

She posted a video about what her neighbor had told her, and soon after that, she went to Schuylerville, a small village near her farm, to speak to the Saratoga Town Board about a law placing more restrictions on solar development.  

At this meeting, a representative of Cypress Creek Renewables came out from Santa Monica, California, to argue that the law was “excessively restrictive,” according to the minutes of the meeting. 

“We’re in the boonies up here. It’s freezing. There’s more trees than humans. It’s not New York City. So I was sitting there thinking, ‘why is there a person from California in our little town board meeting?’” Fasulo said. 

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New Scientific Findings Expose the Hoax Behind Meat Eating Climate Alarm

Sensational new scientific findings have blown holes in the climate hoax opinion that humans need to give up eating meat to save the planet. The effect of methane (CH4), a minor ‘greenhouse’ gas, have been grossly exaggerated to suggest that animal farming poses a significant threat to the global climate. But the invented threat relies on multiplying by around ten the length of time that CH4 stays in the atmosphere – an invention under Global Warming Potential 100 know as GWP100 that is in widespread use in activist circles, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At current emission levels, five Italian scientists predict 54% less warming than under GWP100, while small decreasing emissions, possible with some changes in animal diets, produce only tiny amounts of claimed warming.

Load the vital protein-stuffed steaks on the barbie and celebrate the removal of another key plank in the climate hoax backing the ultimate luxury fantasy of Net Zero. You can go grubbing around the tropics for ‘superfood’ berries and grains, but meat is the core component of the evolved human diet. So much so that one fears the natural Darwinian process will in future start to reduce the numbers of weedy and increasingly feeble-minded individuals trying to get by on only ‘vegan’ sustenance.

Despite its obvious flaw, meat haters have persisted in using GWP100 to throw fuel on the climate crisis fire. But the fakery is exposed by the Italian scientists’ work, which accounts for methane’s short time in the atmosphere and shows large reductions in claimed warming at current levels, and even some cooling with relatively modest reductions.

Nevertheless, the Italian scientists break from the ‘consensus’ pack only up to a point, since they term all the greenhouses gases as climate ‘pollutants’ rather than trace atmospheric gases essential for all life on Earth. A rising methane emission pathway is presented showing little change from the proposed warming under GWP100, but the scenario depends on agricultural emissions rising an improbable three times faster than recent growth would suggest. Methane emissions may rise in future, but, if the need is felt, they can be controlled by a number of natural means. The cow produces protein rich natural food for humans by eating inedible grasses and vegetation that leads to enteric fermentation in its stomach. Reductions in the resulting gases between 10–30% have been achieved by non-chemical means such as rotating diet optimisation, selective breeding with animals with lower emissions and changes in husbandry techniques.

In essence, the new science paper shows that GWP100 gets it hopelessly wrong when it is used to promote the climate crisis hoax. Anti-meat eating has long been a fad of extreme environmentalism but, under cover of the command-and-control Net Zero project, it has been introduced into the mainstream. The new science findings suggest that wiping out methane emissions from livestock farming is unnecessary. If CH4 is your thing and you fear the addition of tiny amounts of cow burps and farts into the atmosphere, you need do little more than keep meat consumption at its current level. However, that might not be that relevant anyway since most methane emissions arise from a variety of sources and are subject to large natural variations.

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Bovaer has been suspended in Norway and Sweden

3-Nitrooxypropanol (“3-NOP”), marketed as Bovaer, is, so it is claimed, a feed additive used to reduce methane emissions in ruminants.  UK residents will recall the suspicious product from an Arla trial of feeding it to dairy cows that began in November 2024.

Peter Imanuelsen gives an update on developments in Sweden.  It seems the Bovaer project has come to an end in Sweden, he says.

The largest dairy supplier in Norway has suspended the use of Bovaer after multiple reports from Denmark of collapsing cows.  Now, it seems like the Bovaer project has come to an end in neighbouring Sweden. 

The dairy producer Gäsene has now ended their Bovaer project, the last remaining dairy producer that still used Bovaer in the country. Earlier, the dairy producer Norrmejerier discontinued their ”climate milk.” So now there is no known dairy producers giving their cows Bovaer in Sweden anymore. This is very telling…

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