Farmer Paul Adams said he'd read about big farms that were somehow getting certified as organic -- flooding the market with organic milk, driving prices down and small farms out of business.
Their exchange was captured on video:
Paul couldn't remember the big organic dairy farm he had read about, but told me it was Natural Prairie Dairy Farms, one of a handful of big Texas farms that now produce more milk than all of Wisconsin's small dairy farms combined.
The De Jongs have also given Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller $18,750 in donations over the years...
...in addition to $52,500 from the Texas Association of Dairymen.
De Jong and other leaders of his dairy cooperative have been leaders of the Texas Association of Dairymen for years.
Miller's spokesperson declined to comment on the donations.
The De Jongs told me they never asked him for anything.
The year after Miller took office, he appointed De Jong as the sole representative of organic dairy on his agency's organic industrial agriculture advisory board.
The reason Miller's agency inspects and certifies organic dairy farms is not to help the environment or protect consumers, it's to help Texas organic dairy farms take market share from organic dairies in other states.
We know this, because they say so.
The USDA pointed to organic reforms Perdue is now pursuing but had no comment on Perdue's past donations from big agriculture.
But as for Paul Adams, he sold off his cattle a few months after speaking with Perdue. The sale of the farm itself will close a week after Election Day.
The daughter set to inherit it is looking for work as a bookkeeper.
And one PS...
Paul's ancestor who founded the farm was a Civil War veteran, who served under Gen. Sherman during the infamous March to the Sea that decimated Georgia.
Before heading USDA, Perdue was governor of Georgia.
He never responded to Paul's request.
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As Ti-Hua reports, Oklahoma's tribes would be powerless to prevent wholesale dumping on tribal lands or protect them from a vast array of toxic materials and pollutants.
The EPA never appears to have made the public aware that this decision-making process was under way.
As Ti-Hua first reported, the state's tribes were first told on Aug. 25--with a response deadline of Sept. 21, less than one month: tyt.com/stories/4vZLCH…
BOMBSHELL: The EPA set a deadline of MONDAY for Oklahoma tribes to respond to Gov. Kevin Stitt's request for the EPA to give HIM control over environmental regulations on tribal lands.
Ti-Hua previously reported that Stitt had quietly made the request to the EPA after the Supreme Court gave the tribes sovereignty over eastern Oklahoma.
Now, we have Stitt's letter ... and it goes farther than anyone knew.
A former EPA official told us that Stitt's request included language that would let the state permit fracking...
...and the dumping of mercury, PCBs and other hazardous waste on tribal lands...
Publicly, Stitt and Sen. Jim Inhofe responded to the landmark ruling by pledging to work with Native American leaders to figure out the legal/regulatory implications of the Supreme Court’s seismic power shift.
Here are their press releases from July 20:
But on Aug. 3, Stitt privately told a farming industry group that he had asked Trump’s EPA to hand environmental authority over to the STATE...
I shared some of our findings with @CAIRNational and @hijrahva, which did not relay any individual acts of bias, but said they were aware of systemic problems -- many of which predate the coronavirus.
CAIR's Robert McCaw said TYT's analysis, "certainly does raise a number of questions.”
“Without a complete picture on the PPP loan program’s data, it’s hard to know whether these numbers are a cause of concern for mosques and Islamic community centers.”
Trump megadonor Ron Cameron owns a chicken company that employs 800 union members at a Delaware plant.
Many are immigrants. Two-thirds needed Spanish or Haitian Creole translation.
Cameron won a vote--taking place right now--to kill the union.
Then the Right to Work Committee got involved, asking the three members of the National Labor Relations Board--all Trump appointees--to kill or at least narrow what's known as the contract bar doctrine.
Here's how the contract bar doctrine protects unions...