Listening to @PodSaveAmerica fellate corporate agriculture tool Vilsack this morning is infuriating. Have y’all ever even spoken to an actual farmer?

In 2001, as Governor of Iowa, Vilsack was named “Biotech Governor of the Year”. Through biotechnology and lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws, the seed and chemical industries have become highly concentrated and now are largely owned by foreign multi-national corporations.

In 2009, statewide farm orgs sent 25,000 signatures to Vilsack demanding that USDA stop providing taxpayer-backed guaranteed loans to support the building of more corporate factory farms while the fed government was simultaneously spending millions of taxpayer dollars buying meat

off the open market to offset massive corporate overproduction and low prices. These orgs asked USDA to instead direct those public dollars to independent family farm livestock producers who were facing devastatingly low prices due to this corporate overproduction.

During a meeting with Vilsack in D.C., he was adamant that USDA was not going to stop federally backing loans for corporate CAFOs.

One of @BarackObama’s campaign promises was to enforce anti-trust laws—and 1000’s of farmers believed him and participated in the process just to have Vilsack decide to do nothing in spite of the critical importance.

Vilsack ultimately blocked attempts to put in place anti-trust enforcement of the livestock industry (the GIPSA Rule) that would have decreased the corporate control of food production and begin to establish fair markets for independent family farmers.

When Vilsack sacked this rule, family farmers and rural Americans lost hope and trust in him.

In 2014, Secretary Vilsack worked with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to try to implement a mandatory second beef checkoff, a mandatory tax paid for by cattle farmers that would have been a slush fund for corporate ag interests at the expense of family farmers.

While under Vilsack’s leadership since 2017, the U.S. Dairy Export Council shored up the interests of large-scale dairy processors while nearly 10,000 family dairy farmers were put out of business.

Unless Vilsack has drastically shifted his priorities, this is just more of the same.