Tag: farms

Lobbyist for China-Owned Smithfield Foods Failed to Disclose CCP Ties on Farm Bill Filings

Greenberg Traurig lobbyist Christopher DeLacy spent quarter after quarter telling Congress that no foreign entity had an interest in Smithfield Foods’ Washington work, including Farm Bill reauthorization and “issues related to foreign ownership of agricultural land,” while the company is 86.9 percent owned by China-based WH Group, 万洲国际, whose leadership includes CCP-tied figures and chairman Wan Long, a former PLA soldier.

Independent journalist Laura Loomer exposed the failure to disclose CCP ties in a report on Loomered.

The Center for Responsible Food Business filed a complaint over the foreign ties with the House Clerk and Senate Secretary last month. The form had indicated no foreign ties repeatedly since 2023.

Just over two weeks after the complaint was filed, the firm amended its second-quarter 2026 Lobbying Disclosure Act report, which covered $120,000 in lobbying of the House, Senate, and Treasury.

Smithfield is the largest pork producer on U.S. soil and holds tens of thousands of acres of American farmland.

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How Big Ag Seized Control Over Media, Research, Policy and the Marketplace

Industrial agriculture is increasingly adopting the same public relations, lobbying and information tactics long used by Big Oil, investigative journalist Amy Westervelt said on the “Real Organic Podcast.” Those strategies help corporations influence research, media and policy, making it easier to “shape the information that voters are getting,” she said.

Journalist Amy Westervelt has spent years documenting how the oil industry used public relations, think tanks and university partnerships to shape public opinion and influence public policy.

But in a recent interview on the “Real Organic Podcast,” Westervelt said she increasingly sees many of those same tactics in industrial agriculture.

“I am finding so many parallels in the agriculture space,” said Westervelt, host of the investigative podcast “Drilled” and author of the forthcoming book, “Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War.”

She said large agricultural companies, like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, have established research centers that help generate academic support for policies that benefit industry.

“It’s like they need a certain amount of … credible information from academics to be able to make the policy argument for certain things,” she said.

Throughout the interview, Westervelt suggested these efforts are part of a broader corporate strategy designed not simply to influence markets, but to shape public debate before policy decisions are ever made.

‘Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy’

Westervelt traced the origins of modern corporate public relations to the early 20th century, arguing that growing public scrutiny prompted businesses to rethink how they protected their interests.

“Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy” as new laws, investigative reporting and broader voting rights threatened business interests, she said. That’s when you see “the birth of corporate PR.”

Rather than simply selling products, corporations sought to mold public opinion before voters could demand greater oversight, according to Westervelt.

“These companies need a way to shape the information that voters are getting in a way that will make them more likely to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the corporations that have a lot at stake,” she said.

Over time, industries refined those tactics, using increasingly sophisticated methods “to try to shape the context that they’re operating in and to deal with … ‘creeping democracy,’” Westervelt said.

Media ‘not doing its job’ of holding powerful corporations to account

Think tanks have become one of industry’s most effective policy tools, according to Westervelt.

“They train the people who work there to go on TV shows and radio shows to get these particular talking points out,” she said.

Unlike registered lobbyists, many think tanks operate with little transparency, she added.

“These organizations have loads of money. They have a lot of influence, and they’re not really regulated in any way,” Westervelt said. “They’re pretty good at hiding who funds them.”

She said corporate influence doesn’t stop with think tanks. It also extends into universities, where industry funding can help shape the research that later informs public policy.

While much of her reporting has focused on fossil fuel companies, Westervelt said she increasingly sees similar patterns in industrial agriculture. She described the practice as a form of “pre-lobbying,” in which corporations cultivate the evidence needed to support future policy arguments.

As one example, Westervelt described speaking with a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after an oil company funded carbon capture research.

Researchers were invited to submit project proposals, but one scientist wanted to study “the potential health impacts” of carbon capture pipelines, including “what might happen if it leaks,” she said.

According to Westervelt, the principal investigator instead encouraged him to “look for a more positive project.”

Seemingly small decisions like these can gradually shape which questions get asked — and which never reach the public, she said.

“There’s so many little things like that happening all the time that are keeping … really important ideas just out of the … public square,” she said.

Westervelt said those information gaps are reinforced by powerful technology platforms and a media landscape that often fails to challenge corporate influence.

“You do have now tech companies working really in lock step with these big corporations, helping them to drown out everybody else,” she said. “Letting them juice the algorithm, spend a fortune on … advertising, and really drown out kind of anyone that doesn’t agree with them.”

Meanwhile, she added, “the media is not doing its job kind of holding the powerful to account. That’s just not a thing that is rewarded by newsrooms at this time.”

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‘The Bacteria Are Winning’: How Factory Farms Cause Human Sickness

Intensive farming, where animals are kept in close quarters, creates environments that encourage the evolution of harmful bacteria and other pathogens so that they gain traits making it easier to infect people and more difficult to cure, a new study suggests.

Hygiene and welfare standards are often low on industrial farms, also called factory farms, and the rising widespread use of antimicrobials has led to concerns that overuse in animal farming is playing a key role in driving antimicrobial-resistant infections in people.

To gain insights into how intensive animal farming influences the evolution of harmful bacteria, a new study investigated how modern densely populated chicken farms have shaped the evolution of strains of Campylobacter jejuni bacteria, which are the leading cause of gut illness and diarrhea from bacterial food poisoning in people, typically after eating contaminated chicken.

Chickens are of particular interest because populations have shot up sevenfold since the 1960s due to agricultural growth and increasing demand for poultry. Today, roughly 31 billion chickens inhabit the globe. Together, poultry accounts for around 70% of all bird biomass on Earth.

The results showed that C. jejuni evolved rapidly in chickens, developing genetic strains resistant to antimicrobials and more likely to adapt to other species, which makes it easier for them to infect people.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Sheffield in the United Kingdom analyzed the genetic information of 2,747 C. jejuni samples from wild birds and chickens.

They found that since 1900, the transmission between chickens and wild birds has increased by more than 100-fold.

Farming intensification has changed how pathogens interact between populations of wild birds and domesticated chickens, says Oakem Kyne, a lead researcher on the study at the University of Oxford.

There is a much wider variety of chicken-adapted C. jejuni strains now than before they were domesticated, with a large jump since 1900 when modern poultry farming intensified, says Kyne.

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Democrat Agriculture Secretary Nominee Says Farming ‘Isn’t That Hard,’ Farmers Work ‘Only a Few Weeks’ a Year

Democrat Chris Jones, who is running for Iowa secretary of agriculture, was rebuked by Iowa Republicans after saying farmers are “wealthy,” grain farming is “not that hard,” and farmers are “only working a few weeks out of the year.”

The remarks were highlighted Tuesday by Iowa Field Report, which posted video from a 2021 interview Jones gave at the Iowa Ideas Conference, hosted by the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

“And a lot of this grain farming now, it’s not that hard. They’re only working a few weeks out of the year,” Jones said.

“These farmers might be industrious and they might be ingenious and you know all these other adjectives you want to say about it, but the truth is, you know, a lot of them are millionaires,” Jones continued. “They’re really wealthy guys. They’re making three times as much as the average Iowan, and a lot of this grain farming now-it’s not that hard. They’re only working a few weeks out of the year.”

Iowa Field Report said that earlier in the same interview, Jones claimed Iowa farmers are all “wealthy, older white guys.”

Incumbent Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig, whom Jones is seeking to unseat, denounced the remarks.

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New Forever Chemicals Coming to US Farms

If the goal is truly to Make America Healthy Again, then the latest decision from the Environmental Protection Agency raises serious questions. According to the article you sent, the EPA has approved two new fluorinated pesticides, diflufenican and epyrifenacil, for use on some of America’s most important crops, including corn, soybeans, and wheat. Neither chemical has previously been approved for use in American agriculture.

Environmental groups argue these compounds qualify as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” under internationally recognized scientific definitions because they can persist in the environment and eventually degrade into trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), an extremely persistent fluorinated compound found in groundwater around the world. The EPA disputes that characterization, maintaining the products do not meet its regulatory definition of PFAS and that they can be used safely according to their labels.

Diflufenican has already become controversial in Europe. Denmark banned its use in part because of concerns that it contributes to TFA contamination of groundwater, while German monitoring has detected TFA in a large percentage of tested wells. Epyrifenacil has reportedly never received approval for agricultural use within the European Union. Whether those regulatory decisions ultimately prove right or wrong, they demonstrate that this is hardly an uncontested scientific issue. Governments around the world are reaching different conclusions about the same chemicals, yet American consumers are expected to assume there is nothing to debate.

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War With Iran: A Double-Edged Sword for the US Economy and Agriculture

The sharp swings in oil prices following the latest round of attacks and negotiations over safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate that wars do not always reveal themselves first on the battlefield. Sometimes, their earliest signs appear on gas-station price boards, in transportation bills, and on the balance sheets of farmers standing thousands of miles from the front lines. Now that the confrontation between the United States and Iran has moved beyond pressure and deterrence and turned into direct military conflict, the issue is no longer limited to security calculations. It is about the real costs of war – costs increasingly borne by American farmers, truck drivers, and consumers.

The economic effects of this war are being transmitted through channels that are highly sensitive for Washington politically: energy markets, inflation, supply chains, and, above all, agriculture. A war that Trump justifies in the language of national security and displays of strength could, in practice, become a self-inflicted shock to the U.S. economy. That is the central contradiction: the most direct pressure is falling on the very social and economic constituency Trump has repeatedly claimed to defend – the American farm belt.

The Energy Shock, From Hormuz to American Farms

The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption passes, now lies at the center of the conflict. Repeated surges and declines in oil prices show that even news of a temporary pause – or the possibility of renewed escalation – can shake the energy market. Higher fuel prices feed directly into transportation, production, and consumer-goods costs, adding to inflationary pressure. This also leaves monetary policymakers caught between controlling inflation and preventing a further slowdown in economic growth.

Market instability and direct military expenditures are rising as well. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that the true cost of military conflict often extends far beyond initial estimates. Brown University’s Costs of War Project has placed the cost of the post-9/11 wars at approximately $8 trillion. A war with Iran, particularly if it becomes prolonged or expands geographically, could generate new and uncertain financial commitments. Yet one of its deepest and least visible consequences may be felt not on Wall Street, but on American farms.

Modern American agriculture is intensely dependent on energy. Diesel powers farm machinery; natural gas is a primary input in the production of nitrogen fertilizers; and gasoline and transportation fuels move crops from farms to markets. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has repeatedly shown that higher energy prices increase production costs and reduce farm income, ultimately affecting food prices.

The pressure is even more severe in the fertilizer market. The production of ammonia and urea is directly dependent on natural gas, while disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has constrained global supplies of raw materials and fertilizer. During the first weeks of the war, urea prices nearly doubled, leaving American farmers to confront fuel-price increases and supply shortages at the same time. Under such conditions, corn production, which requires more nitrogen fertilizer, becomes especially vulnerable. Farmers may be forced to choose among reducing planted acreage, switching crops, or accepting substantially higher costs.

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There Are No Ag ‘Jobs Americans Won’t Do’ If They Earn A Living Wage

henever Republicans talk about immigration enforcement, amnesty supporters chant the same tired line: What about picking crops? What about meat processing? Those are necessary jobs that Americans simply refuse to do.

That argument was used to justify dozens of House Republicans’ latest mass amnesty effort. Their proposal would give illegal alien agriculture workers a pathway to legal status through the H-2A program, even though they have broken multiple laws by being in the United States illegally and getting a job without a work permit. Their employer has also violated the law by hiring these illegals.

The bill — which covers everything from harvesting crops, to raising livestock, to processing agricultural products — is a workaround to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from standing in the way of low-cost labor for agriculture operations.

“With the border now secure, it is time to address these shortcomings and provide fair and legal pathways for all of agriculture to obtain workers when they are unable to find U.S. citizens willing to perform these noble but arduous tasks,” a letter from bill author Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, states.

This trope has been pushed for a long time. President George W. Bush parroted it in 2006, stating, “There are people in our country doing work that Americans will not do, and those people ought to be given a chance to have a tamper-proof card that enables them to work in our country legally.”

Democrats do it too, always taking the opportunity to signal some kind of American fragility for not wanting to do “backbreaking” work. They also want to import as many illegals into the country as possible, by any means necessary.

The reality is that these companies, and the lobbies that support them like the Farm Bureau, are only interested in a consistent flow of foreign illegal labor because this allows them to pay subsistence wages. They know, in other words, that Americans expect more from employers because they want to be able to have a family and raise children in their own country, and subsistence wages kill that possibility.

“At the same time as compensation deteriorated dramatically, the share of meatpackers who are immigrants has increased enormously… [A]ny suggestion that native-born Americans are not interested in this type of work cannot be taken seriously given the huge decline in average hourly wages for these jobs,” a journalist and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) researcher wrote in a 2009 report. “[T]here is no question that the jobs paid a great deal more a generation ago when the vast majority of workers were native-born. There is also no question that as the foreign born share of this workforce has increased, wages have fallen significantly. The desirability of any job is heavily dependent on compensation.”

For illegal aliens, low wages are sufficient. They often live on the farms where they work, and a large portion of their earnings go back to their home countries as remittances (which are barely taxed), and go a lot further because of the lower cost of living. They also are willing to put many more people in a rental property than Americans will, in worse living conditions.

Some “American” farms are actually owned by foreign companies, or are forced to contract with them because of the pseudo-monopoly that exists in much of the agriculture industry.

The Trump administration has highlighted that the “big four” beef production companies currently control 85 percent of the market, noting that two of them are foreign. They act as a “cartel” and “mounting evidence shows this monopoly power has slashed payments to ranchers, reduced herd sizes, driven up consumer prices, and threatened America’s food supply chain.”

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Jenks: GOP H-2A Amnesty Bill Would Create ‘Serf Class’ in Rural America

Fifty GOP representatives are pushing an amnesty bill that will replace many Americans and rip the economic guts from their rural districts, says Rosemary Jenks, founder of the Immigration Accountability Project.

“This is about replacing entire segments of American [agriculture] with foreign serf labor,” she told Breitbart News as she described the draft bill.

The bill “would take a lot of jobs from the districts,” said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project. The rural districts “would look like a country that’s not America … like a country from where the massive waves of migrants came,” he said. 

The bill is titled “Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026.” The author is Rep. Glen Thompson (R-PA), and he has 50 co-sponsors, including four Democrats. The bill has support from a broad range of agriculture industry groups. 

The bill would amnesty the existing population of illegal migrants by letting them transfer into a year-round expansion of the uncapped, seasonal H-2A visa-worker program.

The bill would flood cheap H-2A migrants into many additional jobs — and so force young Americans out of the rural districts, said Jenks. “Americans living in those areas … are going to have to leave — they’re not going to have any choice,” said Jenks. 

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De facto amnesty: Nearly 50 House Republicans push bill letting illegal-alien farm workers off the hook

A group of nearly 50 House Republicans is pushing legislation that would grant de facto amnesty to illegal alien farm workers who were unlawfully present in the United States as of May 31, 2026.

A de facto amnesty means people who broke the law are effectively allowed to stay or avoid punishment, even though the government has not officially declared an amnesty.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, introduced H.R. 9535, the “Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026,” on June 30.

There are 53 total cosponsors: 49 Republicans and 4 Democrats, and it is currently sitting in the House Judiciary Committee.

Democrat Cosponsors (4)

  • Donald G. Davis (NC-1)
  • Vicente Gonzalez (TX-34)
  • Maggie Goodlander (NH-2)
  • Josh Riley (NY-19)

Republican Cosponsors (49)

  • Rick W. Allen (GA-12)
  • Don Bacon (NE-2)
  • James R. Baird (IN-4)
  • Cliff Bentz (OR-2)
  • Mike Bost (IL-12)
  • Monica De La Cruz (TX-15)
  • Troy Downing (MT-2)
  • Chuck Edwards (NC-11)
  • Gabe Evans (CO-8)
  • Julie Fedorchak (ND-At Large)
  • Randy Feenstra (IA-4)
  • Brad Finstad (MN-1)
  • Michelle Fischbach (MN-7)
  • Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (TN-3)
  • Mike Flood (NE-1)
  • Brett Guthrie (KY-2)
  • Bill Huizenga (MI-4)
  • Brian Jack (GA-3)
  • Mike Kelly (PA-16)
  • Trent Kelly (MS-1)
  • David Kustoff (TN-8)
  • Darin LaHood (IL-16)
  • Nicholas A. Langworthy (NY-23)
  • Laurel M. Lee (FL-15)
  • Celeste Maloy (UT-2)
  • Michael T. McCaul (TX-10)
  • Mark B. Messmer (IN-8)
  • Daniel Meuser (PA-9)
  • Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-1)
  • John R. Moolenaar (MI-2)
  • Tim Moore (NC-14)
  • Dan Newhouse (WA-4)
  • Mike D. Rogers (AL-3)
  • David Rouzer (NC-7)
  • Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27)
  • Austin Scott (GA-8)
  • Pete Sessions (TX-17)
  • Michael K. Simpson (ID-2)
  • Lloyd Smucker (PA-11)
  • David J. Taylor (OH-2)
  • Claudia Tenney (NY-24)
  • David G. Valadao (CA-22)
  • Jefferson Van Drew (NJ-2)
  • Derrick Van Orden (WI-3)
  • Joe Wilson (SC-2)
  • Robert J. Wittman (VA-1)
  • Ryan K. Zinke (MT-1)

The most controversial section would allow illegal aliens already living in the United States to obtain H-2A agricultural worker status by waiving multiple grounds of inadmissibility and deportability.

Specifically, the bill provides waivers for certain immigration violations committed before an alien receives H-2A status, provided they otherwise qualify.

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US-Israeli Bombing Has Harmed Iran’s Wildlife, Farms, and Water Supply

ust a few days before Tehran and Washington signed a now-defunct ceasefire agreement, local media in Iran reported that 25 goitered gazelles were killed in U.S. airstrikes on Kharg Island in the northern Persian Gulf. The small coral island is a key terminal for Iran’s oil exports and its unique wildlife includes white-headed seagulls, hawksbill sea turtles, and ospreys. It also hosts the ruins of a Dutch fort built in 1753. On multiple occasions, U.S. President Donald Trump has brandished the possibility of invading the island of 8,000 people.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran opened with the most intensive bombing campaign in modern history. Some 23,800 airstrikes were carried out in a span of 39 days, and one of its most consequential impacts was the environmental damage inflicted on Iran’s ecosystems. A June 17 memorandum of understanding halted the hostilities, but Trump notified Congress last week that he was resuming military action. Bombings are becoming a new norm, damaging Iran’s land, air, and water.

From toxic acid rain blanketing the Tehran metro area after Israel bombed the Iranian capital’s oil depots on March 7, to the emission of a substantial volume of greenhouse gases in the early phases of the campaign, the war has caused serious environmental degradation in a country reeling from a range of climate-related crises, water stress, and air quality issues. While international media have failed to consistently cover the negative environmental impacts of the war, environmental nonprofits, academic institutions, and climate advocates have documented extensive damage, only a portion of which has been understood to date.

According to a study by the Climate and Community Institute, 5 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases were emitted due to the attacks on Iran in first 14 days of the war, which the nonprofit estimated exceeded Iceland’s carbon pollution over an entire year.

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