As you read last week on Hoosier Ag Today, US Representative Victoria Spartz, a Republican representing Indiana’s 5th congressional district, opened verbal fire on checkoff programs around the country. In an interview with Hoosier Ag Today’s Sabrina Halvorson, she discussed how she paid checkoff fees for the 50,000 bushels of wheat she recently sold.
Given that there is no federal wheat checkoff nor an Indiana wheat checkoff, we asked her office for clarification on the fees. The statement from her office reads, “It’s great that Indiana chose not to participate in wheat checkoffs, but it still has involuntary soybean checkoffs the Congresswoman paid plenty of, which is irrelevant. What is relevant is that these personal sexist attacks will not deter the Congresswoman from demanding transparency and accountability for farmers from cash rich executives clueless about farming.”
Indiana Soybean Alliance CEO Courtney Kingery, who grew up on a farm in White County, responded.
“As a soybean farmer, as Congresswoman Spartz said, I welcome her questions and I welcome her interest in checkoff. The soybean checkoff within Indiana works on behalf of the 20,000 soybean farmers here within the state. And as a female executive and a female CEO of the soybean checkoff, I am honored to work for and support those 20,000 soybean farmers.”
Brian Shuter, a farmer in Spartz’ district and the executive vice president for the Indiana Beef Cattle Association, says, “Unfortunately, the congresswoman is a little confused about how things work. The checkoffs that we work with, we do a really good job of making sure that we’re transparent with what we do. We’re governed by boards of producers. The producers are volunteers who come and work trying to promote and help all farmers make more value from their products.”
Kingery adds that every 5 years, USDA gives soybean farmers an opportunity to ask for a referendum on the federal soybean checkoff.
“So, every five years, soybean farmers have a chance to call for a referendum. The last one was in 2019, and less than 1% of soybean farmers in the United States called for that referendum.”
Congresswoman Spartz issued the following statement Thursday evening:
“It is deeply concerning that these farmer-financed unaccountable boards resort to sexist personal attacks to prevent transparency into their slush funds. Despite their supposed non-lobbying status, they have been engaging in a smear campaign and backdoor lobbying against me,” said Rep. Spartz. “As a farmer myself, I understand the importance of promoting our commodities at home and abroad as well as more opportunities for smaller farmers. However, I see more and more corporate cronyism in agriculture with highly paid executives promoting just a few monopolies mostly owned by Brazil and China in some ag sectors, which are using child labor provided by Mexican cartels. We must demand transparency for roughly $1B in mandatory fees taken annually from farmers by the federal government and given to executives like USDA Secretary Vilsack who was paid about $1M per year between his Obama and Biden jobs by one of these boards. Glad to see that my colleagues listened and decided not to move this ag appropriation bill this week before Farm Bill reauthorization in violation of regular order.”
Hoosier Ag Today reached out to Spartz’ office by phone to ask what comments the congresswoman deemed to be “personal sexist attacks”. No clarification was provided.
Hear the full HAT interview with Kingery and Shuter below.
