Category: Media Coverage

Capital Press By Carol Ryan Dumas Nearly $427 million was collected for the dairy checkoff program in 2016. Dairy farmers are assessed 15 cents per hundredweight of milk they produce and importers are assessed 7.5 cents per hundredweight of milk (or the equivalent) they import. DON JENKINS/CAPITAL PRESS Mandatory annual reports accounting for money received and spent in connection with the federal dairy checkoff have not been filed with Congress. The Organization for Competitive Markets and the National Read More …

Des Moines Register By Johnathan Hettinger, Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting A law requiring foreign investors to report transactions of farmland to the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been on the books for almost 40 years. But as the amount of foreign-controlled farmland doubled in millions of acres between 2004 and 2014, the USDA has lapsed in enforcing the law, a review of USDA documents has found. The Agriculture Foreign Investment Disclosure Act was passed in 1978 to combat fears Read More …

POLITICO Missing USDA dairy checkoff reports renew calls for transparency By Catherine Boudreau 09/14/2017 05:01 AM EDT The Agriculture Department hasn’t published legally required annual financial reports on a $400 million dairy research and promotional fund for the past four years, lending ammunition to farmers and other groups pushing for more transparency in checkoff programs. A USDA spokeswoman told POLITICO the reports on the dairy checkoff are in the final clearance stage and should be posted within the Read More …

Drovers By Greg Henderson, Editorial Director Vowing to fight what it calls the “economic power that a few multi-national corporations have over family farmers and rural America,” the non-profit Family Farm Action was launched today during the Organization for Competitive Markets conference in Kansas City, Mo. Family Farm Action is described as “a new political organization” that will “fight for America’s family farmers and rural communities,” the group announced in a press release. Specifically, the new non-profit seeks to “protect Read More …

Brownfield Ag News By Meghan Grebner 7/14/17 The Organization for Competitive Markets wants the Trump Administration to renegotiate the trade deal that resumes US beef exports to China. Executive director Joe Maxwell says the current deal puts US farmers and ranchers at a disadvantage. “Currently it is clear from our side of the deal we’re going to allow Mexico and Canada to bring beef into the United States to be further processed and then shipped under our label,” Read More …

Published May 25, 2017 Category: Inside Stories By Kerry Hoffschneider In 1977, the first beef checkoff vote was held, and Dave Wright’s grandfather, Earl Wright, loaded his grandkids up and headed out to make his opinion heard. “We told Grandpa we were not old enough to vote. He told us, ‘You each own a calf, and you can vote.’ He wanted us to vote ‘NO,’ and I remember looking at him and saying, ‘But Grandpa, maybe I want to Read More …