RFK Jr. The Defender - Farm Credit Scandal with Dustin Kittle

Dustin Kittle was raised on a cattle and poultry farm in Geraldine, Alabama. He served as a state Future Farmers of America officer in high school, and he attended Cumberland Law School. He began practicing litigation focused on agricultural and environmental law. He has represented small farmers and rural Americans in successful cases against Fortune 500 companies, including Ford, Verizon, Wireless, and Windstream Communications. In 2020, he worked with the U.S. Department of Justice in proposing amendments to the CARES Act to provide relief for farmers and ranchers. He is the owner of Snow Creek Ranch and Snow Creek Law, a law firm in Santa Fe, Tennessee. He s devoted his life to small farmers, and has very interesting information about corruption at the USDA and the shift of land in this country of our agricultural land base to foreign ownership. The USDA, was created back in the 1930s to save small farmers from the banks which were victimizing them and making them bankrupt. Today, its job is just the opposite. Its job is to represent big agriculture and subjugate and destroy small farmers in America. Listen to this episode to learn more about his story and how he has fought against corporate agriculture and corporate interests in order to protect small farmers across the country from corporate greed and corruption. I hope you enjoy this episode and that you find some value in this episode. I know I did! Thank you for listening and supporting the show! -Jon Kennedy and Dustin Kittle - Jon and Dustin and Jonny Thanks Jonny, Jonny and Dustin, for coming on the show today! - Jonny & Jonny's work at Snow Creek, Law Firm, Snow Creek and his support the podcast, and for supporting us in this podcast. - Jonny is a lot of work, and we're looking forward to hearing from you in 2020 - Jon Jonnny, the law firm, and Jon is going to help us do more of this in the future, too! -Jonny is looking out for us in 2020 and Jon Jonny will be back in 2020, and I'm looking out at the next year, so don't forget to send us out with some of the best places in the next episode of the place where we're going to be listening to the place that we're getting the best of what we're listening at the place you're listening to us in the place we're watching in the podcast and we'll do it all the best, so we're all getting the most of it!

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.

00:00:02.000 My guest today is Dustin Kittle.

00:00:04.000 Dustin was raised on a cattle and poultry farm in Geraldine, Alabama.

00:00:09.000 He served as a state Future Farmers of America officer in high school and he attended Cumberland Law School.

00:00:20.000 And began practicing litigation focused on agricultural and environmental law.

00:00:28.000 He has represented small farmers and rural Americans in successful cases against a lot of Fortune 500 companies, including Ford, Verizon, Wireless,

00:00:44.000 And Windstream Communications, in 2020, he worked with the U.S. Department of Justice in proposing amendments to the CARES Act to provide relief for farmers and ranchers.

00:00:59.000 He is the owner of Snow Creek Ranch, and he also, Snow Creek Law, which is a law firm in Santa Fe, Tennessee, He's devoted his life to small farmers and has very interesting information about corruption at the USDA and the shift of land in this country of our agricultural

00:01:29.000 land base to foreign ownership and the USDA and It was created back in the 1930s to save small farmers and to protect farmers from the banks which were victimizing them and making them bankrupt.

00:01:52.000 Today, its job is just the opposite.

00:01:56.000 Its job is representing big agriculture.

00:02:02.000 And subjugating and destroying small farmers in America.

00:02:06.000 Tell us a little bit about your story, Dustin.

00:02:10.000 Yeah, first of all, thanks a lot for having me, Mr.

00:02:12.000 Kennedy.

00:02:13.000 Definitely appreciate it.

00:02:14.000 Appreciate the independent stance that you've taken on these agricultural issues.

00:02:19.000 Like you mentioned, I grew up on a cattle and poultry farm.

00:02:23.000 My parents did not go to college.

00:02:25.000 Their dream was to live and work on the farm.

00:02:29.000 We were farming back in the 1980s when in poultry and you still do with the tournament system.

00:02:36.000 And so I learned a lot about poultry and cattle as far as the markets, the unpredictability, and the fact that the farmer themselves, particularly at the family farm level, They have no real control as far as the outcome.

00:02:55.000 They are always at someone else's mercy.

00:02:58.000 And as you mentioned, I opened my own law firm in 2010, have focused on agricultural law, and really have done that as kind of a way to honor my parents' commitment as far as in farming.

00:03:13.000 It was not always easy for them, and I saw the Corporate agriculture that was closing in on family farms and I felt like that going to law school, becoming a lawyer was a way that I could make a difference in it and going up against some of these Fortune 500 companies.

00:03:31.000 The unfortunate reality is that most family farms are in the position to where they can't go out and hire a hired gun lawyer.

00:03:39.000 They're doing all they can to keep their farms going and they need an attorney that understands the agricultural issues involved Well, talk about this shift that's happening.

00:04:03.000 Absolutely.

00:04:06.000 It's really the story on it, I would say, goes back.

00:04:09.000 I'll go all the way back to 2002.

00:04:13.000 In 2002, you started having business deals that were made at that point in time between politicians and people in corporate agriculture or corporate energy.

00:04:26.000 And by 2009, when Barack Obama comes into office and brings in Tom Bilsack, former governor of the state of Iowa, he brings alongside with him a couple of individuals, one of which was the undersecretary, Dallas Tonsager.

00:04:42.000 He was from South Dakota.

00:04:44.000 Their plan focuses from that point forward On energy, as far as renewable fuels, and then also rural utilities.

00:04:54.000 And really, when you look back at that, that is when I first started getting involved.

00:05:00.000 I had litigated against many private companies, but in going against the government, it's an entirely different beast.

00:05:06.000 They're the ones that are interpreting laws that they have written, and they have certain immunities, as you know, and they make it very difficult for you to defeat them.

00:05:16.000 But in 2014, I found out as part of a USDA program, which was called Connect America, they had doled out billions of dollars to these rural utility companies to supposedly fix our broadband internet.

00:05:30.000 But it really, there were no parameters.

00:05:33.000 There was no oversight.

00:05:34.000 At the time that the money was passed out, there were not even any guidelines.

00:05:38.000 And that money went out through the USDA. And during that, I represented what ended up being about 10,000 rural customers who were not getting the internet speeds that they were promised by their providers.

00:05:54.000 And what we were able to do in ultimately winning over 90% of those cases in arbitration was we were able to show that they had told the USDA they couldn't provide high-speed internet at certain addresses.

00:06:08.000 But those addresses would have my clients there, and they would be billing my clients for high-speed internet for all those years.

00:06:15.000 So we were able to pursue refunds, but that was my first taste that we have got some serious corruption going on in Washington, D.C., and particularly at the USDA level.

00:06:28.000 My fight would continue back with them in 2021.

00:06:33.000 I litigated against Windstreet Communications on the rural utilities issue, Until the point that Windstream went into bankruptcy.

00:06:41.000 And one interesting point there is that while Windstream was in bankruptcy, they continued to get government funding.

00:06:48.000 And I was just looking at this the other day because really I had not even thought about Windstream that much since they had bankrupted.

00:06:55.000 They converted from being a Fortune 500 company to privatizing after bankruptcy.

00:07:01.000 They were allowed to come out of bankruptcy with an FCC exemption because they are owned over 25% by foreign entities.

00:07:10.000 Which they should not have been allowed to do.

00:07:12.000 They're continuing to receive funding, federal funding, and they are owned at a 60-something percent ownership rate by foreign interest.

00:07:20.000 So that just shows with the USDA program the lack of due diligence, the lack of oversight.

00:07:27.000 In 2021, we come back and we have an issue with farm credit.

00:07:32.000 And Farm Credit, for people that don't know, I wasn't completely familiar with them, but they control 46% of the nation's agricultural debt.

00:07:41.000 So they're a giant.

00:07:42.000 And if you look back historically, the Farm Credit Administration was created in 1933.

00:07:49.000 At that time, we were at our nation's peak as far as we had 6.8 million farms.

00:07:55.000 And over their 90 years since then of managing and what is supposed to be the mission of protecting family farms, we've lost five million family farms.

00:08:05.000 We're down to 1.8 million family farms And what I discovered in 2021 was they are manipulating the system.

00:08:14.000 Just like with the USDA, there was no oversight.

00:08:18.000 You had farmers whose loans were being placed in distress like mine was.

00:08:23.000 And my situation was retaliation because I was representing a group of farmer borrowers.

00:08:30.000 Just so people know, normally you would expect a loan to be placed into distress if the farmer missed a payment.

00:08:45.000 What they were doing was, these were farmers who were making all their payments, And they simply wanted to steal their farms.

00:08:56.000 So they declared them in distress, even though there was no distress.

00:09:03.000 And that actually put them in distress because now they had to hire lawyers.

00:09:09.000 And they were able to essentially steal the farm from the farmer.

00:09:16.000 Absolutely.

00:09:17.000 And the government went out and hired private law firms.

00:09:21.000 And I'm not talking about, you know, a five to ten person firm that's some kind of boutique shop.

00:09:28.000 They hired some of the biggest law firms in the nation and internationally to go in and negotiate with these farmers.

00:09:36.000 And so you might have a default provision in your mortgage that says, if someone whose name is on that deed passes away, we can default on them.

00:09:46.000 Now obviously that doesn't make sense, but if that was in the language, what they would then do is have these private hired young loggers come in, negotiate with the farmers who most of the time could not hire a logger, And they would ultimately tell them, you don't want to go through this process of having to be foreclosed on.

00:10:05.000 You could lose a dollar.

00:10:07.000 Here's what we would do on it.

00:10:09.000 We'll take a deed in lieu of foreclosure.

00:10:11.000 And to make things even more egregious, when they were doing that, A lot of these law firms were then having the farmers sign a release of claims as well as confidentiality.

00:10:23.000 And I would argue that it's because they absolutely knew that what they were doing was inappropriate.

00:10:30.000 But they were protecting themselves in two ways.

00:10:32.000 Number one, if that farmer ever found out it was inappropriate, they couldn't sue anybody.

00:10:37.000 But number two, with these confidentiality agreements, and they've had Farm Credit employees sign confidentiality agreements, it cuts out the whistleblowers.

00:10:46.000 You're scared to death to talk because then they could turn around and they could sue you.

00:10:51.000 And so we represent right now 200 farmers and those farmers, some of the ones that have been forced to sign confidentiality agreements, even though they can speak to me as their lawyer, They're scared to death because they don't want to have to go back against farm credit and they're scared to speak up and even tell their story.

00:11:11.000 And so it was part of a manipulated plan to put pressure on the farmers to take that land.

00:11:18.000 You look at it and what there has been has been a complete shift in the model of how farm credit does business.

00:11:26.000 And what they will attribute it to is they're trying to make the system sound.

00:11:30.000 Well, the system either is going to survive or it's going to fail.

00:11:34.000 Its mission was to save the family farm.

00:11:39.000 We can't decide all of a sudden in 2009 we're going to change that mission to we're going to save agriculture as a whole.

00:11:46.000 And when I say agriculture as a whole, now they're doling out loans to JBS. They're doling out loans to Tyson.

00:11:54.000 And this is farm credit.

00:11:56.000 And we're not talking about $100,000 lines of credit.

00:11:59.000 We're talking about billion-dollar loans to those companies.

00:12:02.000 These are companies that have...

00:12:06.000 Their business model is putting small farmers out of business.

00:12:11.000 Tyson's Food, Smithfield, Purdue...

00:12:16.000 We put a million chicken farmers out of business in this country and industrialized chicken farmers by changing the model so that you have 100,000 birds raised in battery cages.

00:12:35.000 And dosed with sub-therapeutic antibiotics that caused them to lay their guts out over a short miserable life and they made themselves – Tyson, Perdue, Bo Pilgrim made themselves billionaires by putting I think 1.2 million chicken farmers out of business.

00:12:56.000 Smithfield came and did the same thing with hogs. 0.99

00:13:00.000 Smithfield dropped the price of hogs from $0.60 a pound to $0.02 a pound.

00:13:12.000 By raising them in these, you know, in these Murphy sheds in an industrial setting.

00:13:19.000 And they put out, and it cost a farmer at that point, 30 cents a pound to raise the hog to kill Wade.

00:13:29.000 So I put out of business virtually all the independent hog farmers in the country and replaced them with big corporations. 1.00

00:13:41.000 That was now controlled probably 30 or 40 percent of hog production nationwide.

00:13:48.000 And that company then sold itself to the Chinese.

00:13:52.000 Smithfield is now a Chinese company and controls a lot of the American landscape and it controls our food production.

00:14:02.000 And these enterprises, which are Stealing family farms from the farmer using our federal dollars are now colluding with the USDA to force all farmers to default on their loans.

00:14:25.000 And what it has created is to where the farmer themselves, they're a commodity.

00:14:31.000 They can take that family farm, they can move one farmer out, Roll another one in, give them a new loan with farm credit, they'll upgrade their equipment with Tyson, for example, if you're a poultry farm, and they continue with that dance.

00:14:47.000 There have been so many of my clients who had long-term low interest, historically low interest loans, that were in great positions, and they have been forced off the farm.

00:15:01.000 One other mechanism that they work together to do is in loan assignment agreements.

00:15:07.000 And I listened to your interview with Mr.

00:15:09.000 Boyd several weeks ago and he was speaking of poultry loan assignments.

00:15:15.000 And to give you an example, I know you're familiar with the state of Alabama.

00:15:19.000 I believe you lived there for a couple of years.

00:15:21.000 Alabama Farm Credit is really at the heart of a lot of these issues.

00:15:26.000 They were out front in some of the things that they were doing, and that is a very strong...

00:15:33.000 A foothold in the commercial poultry businesses in the state of Alabama.

00:15:38.000 And what they were able to do is they will take a percentage of that poultry growers check that is coming from a Tyson, for example, that goes directly to the farm credit institution for them to hold is what they call extra security.

00:15:55.000 Now they've already got the farm secured and on some of these on about 28% of the loans they've already got the government to back those loans so there's no real security beyond that needed but they will figure that those assignments all the way up to even 65% of what the poultry growers get in and those assignments are required so If you've got it on a 65-35, the poultry farmer is getting 35%.

00:16:23.000 65% is going to Alabama farm credit.

00:16:26.000 Who's holding that money to make your next payment?

00:16:29.000 Here's what ultimately has happened, though.

00:16:32.000 They are figuring the assignment's incredibly high.

00:16:35.000 The money is continuing to accumulate.

00:16:39.000 Farm credit as a whole cannot hold bank deposits.

00:16:42.000 They are holding that money in uninsured accounts.

00:16:45.000 And what happened in the state of Alabama, and this is a tragedy that Should be on the front page of every newspaper there are over a thousand poultry borrowers at Alabama Farm Credit who have funds being held and we think the number will end up being somewhere between 60 and 100 million dollars but those funds are just gone.

00:17:06.000 They have told the farmers that the funds have been taken out of those accounts and will be applied to the end of their loan and Really, what happened, we believe, is that that farm credit institution got close to failing.

00:17:21.000 They had those dollars already spent, so to speak.

00:17:26.000 Apparently, when they had to stop taking the deposits, their other option would have been to give that money being held in those accounts back to the farmers and they couldn't come up with it.

00:17:38.000 It essentially created an artificial bank run when they stopped holding deposits and they took the farmer borrower's money.

00:17:47.000 And to give you an example, I represent a guy named Carl Brooks from DeKalb County, Alabama.

00:17:53.000 They have admitted they have $60,000 of Carl Brooks money that they took out of that funds held account.

00:18:01.000 He's still having to make his payment.

00:18:03.000 He's having to work a second job right now while they've got $60,000 that they're telling him we're going to apply this to the back end of the loan.

00:18:11.000 And I say that to say that is an extreme example of the fact that there is zero oversight all the way to the top at foreign credit.

00:18:21.000 The foreign credit administration has not ruled in favor of a borrower that we can find since 1987 and you know in my situation I appealed to the Farm Credit Administration let them know we've not missed a single loan payment and here they are they're trying to literally foreclose on us and they told me that they needed more time to look into it I had recorded calls I had letters everything and I ended up being the longest investigation in U.S.

00:18:51.000 Farm Credit Administration history, 657 days, for them to ultimately tell me they violated the law seven different ways of federal law.

00:19:01.000 However, I was no longer a borrower in the U.S. farm credit system.

00:19:05.000 I'd been forced to sell my house and pay all my loans off, and so there was nothing they could do for me.

00:19:10.000 And that's what they're doing for all of these farmers.

00:19:12.000 Most of the farmers wouldn't have had the option I did to where I sold my personal house, paid my loans off, Had I not had that option, I would have had no recourse whatsoever.

00:19:23.000 Because the U.S. Farm Credit Act has no private right of action, which is, I mean, you think about how rare that is.

00:19:31.000 Imagine if, for example, laws related to clean water, if you depend on, well, is the EPA going to step in?

00:19:40.000 And you had no private right of action to be able to hold people accountable.

00:19:44.000 And they've completely taken that away and put all the authority in the Farm Credit Administration that is complicit in this.

00:19:52.000 They're seeing it as a money-making opportunity.

00:19:55.000 They're running it as a private bank, but getting the benefits of government protection.

00:20:00.000 Who's making money on this?

00:20:02.000 Is it Tom Vilsack?

00:20:06.000 Let me give you an example.

00:20:10.000 Tom Vilsack, as I mentioned, in 2009, he comes in and he puts Dallas Tom Sager in charge as the Under Secretary.

00:20:17.000 Here's a few key facts.

00:20:19.000 In 2007, while he was serving on the Farm Credit Board, the three-member Farm Credit Board, Tom Sager started Rural Americans for Obama while he was in that position.

00:20:30.000 He campaigned.

00:20:31.000 He was on Obama's transition team.

00:20:33.000 He gets put in the USDA. Before Obama goes out of office, he reappoints him a second time into the Farm Credit Administration, which by the Congressional Research Service says that that was improper.

00:20:47.000 Two weeks after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton, he names Tom Sager as the chairman for the next four years.

00:20:55.000 But you back up all the way to 2002.

00:20:58.000 Tom Sager made a deal with Tom Hitchcock.

00:21:01.000 Tom Hitchcock would become the CEO of Redfield Energy.

00:21:05.000 Redfield Energy would ultimately be the company that was the first ones to come up with this carbon capture in an ethanol plant.

00:21:13.000 And they did it in 2015.

00:21:15.000 That's when they first started looking at it.

00:21:17.000 Which is the biggest boondoggle today.

00:21:23.000 It's discrediting the entire environmental movement because it's showing, I mean, it's this terrible, terrible example that the The climate crisis is being used by the richest corporations in America to subsidize their bad behavior and make hundreds of billions of dollars through carbon capture,

00:21:50.000 which does absolutely zero for the environment and actually subsidizes bad behavior.

00:22:00.000 Right?

00:22:00.000 And that gets categorized as a farm subsidy.

00:22:05.000 And if you go back and look at those releases in 2015, when they first discovered this technology, there was not a mention about anything being about environment.

00:22:14.000 What they said is if we use this machine and we crush this down, we can get 8% more yield.

00:22:20.000 And that's why we need to do it.

00:22:22.000 Within three years, the reason they needed to do it was environmental.

00:22:26.000 And they had come up with this idea to go with the pipeline.

00:22:30.000 Redfield, which again, you're talking about the CEO, was the business partner during this period of time with the guy that had served as the undersecretary of the USDA, and he was the board chairman of Farm Credit.

00:22:44.000 He ends up passing away in 2019, Tom Sager does, but not before in 2018.

00:22:51.000 All of a sudden, the new rave of what they're trying to do is, we're going to take this out and we're going to take it on a pipeline and we're going to bury it.

00:23:00.000 And so Redfield Energy partners with Summit and you can pull up the information now.

00:23:06.000 So you have And you look back at all the funding that those entities received.

00:23:12.000 But how is that not collision?

00:23:14.000 We had a guy on the inside of Farm Credit and the USDA that had a direct business interest in this carbon capture and in this summit pipeline.

00:23:25.000 They both had consulting businesses.

00:23:27.000 They both had an energy business.

00:23:30.000 And that is too much of a coincidence to have not been a completely manipulated scheme.

00:23:36.000 And You look at what the environmentalists say about the pipeline, they say it's going to have a negative impact.

00:23:43.000 The Sierra Club opposed it.

00:23:47.000 There's three actual pipelines, and it's about 3,000 miles of pipe.

00:23:54.000 And it's taking carbon, condensed carbon, from a couple of dozen methane plants.

00:24:04.000 The methane plants are already, you know, sort of a dubious project.

00:24:09.000 But it's taking the excess carbon from those plants and actually It's very energy intensive to convert the carbon into this liquid form.

00:24:22.000 So you're actually using more energy to take that carbon out of the methane plants and then you put it in a pipeline and what they say is we're going to bury this carbon in deep injection wells where it will never leak.

00:24:38.000 Well, every time they buried it in those wells, it has leaked and it ended up Killing a lot of people in Mississippi and disabling a lot of people in Mississippi.

00:24:51.000 And permanent brain damage in some people because when it leaks out of the pipe, it robs the air of oxygen.

00:25:02.000 And actually the emergency vehicles that came in to respond could not operate because there was no oxygen getting to their engines.

00:25:12.000 And there were a number of people who were very badly injured.

00:25:16.000 But they're building 3,000 miles of these pipelines, which all of them are susceptible to leaking.

00:25:23.000 They're condemning the farms, the farmland, thousands of acres of farmland to build that pipeline in the richest breadbasket of America.

00:25:32.000 And they're sending them, the destination, the terminus of the pipeline are the Bakken crude oil fields.

00:25:41.000 And it's clear that what they're going to do with it is to use it to drive it, to extend the lifetime of those oil fields by injecting it into wells and pushing out more oil.

00:25:51.000 So it's actually going to create more carbon.

00:25:54.000 One of the third pipeline, the destination is oil fields, again, declining oil fields in southern Illinois.

00:26:02.000 The owners of it are Bruce Ratzetter, who's given hundreds of thousands of dollars to political figures in Iowa, including the governor, and BlackRock, which owns the biggest and BlackRock, which owns the biggest of the three pipelines.

00:26:23.000 You've got the biggest players in America.

00:26:25.000 I think that the total amount of subsidies is about $179 billion to the richest people in the country.

00:26:38.000 To do something that is environmentally absolutely catastrophic and it's under the pretense – it's all under President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

00:26:50.000 It's the biggest project and it's an inflation reduction act which is supposed to reduce climate.

00:26:55.000 Crisis and it will do nothing.

00:26:57.000 It will probably aggravate the climate crisis.

00:26:59.000 It will aggravate, let me put this, emissions of carbon into the environment.

00:27:04.000 It is just a classic bulldog.

00:27:10.000 The amount of water that it takes as well.

00:27:12.000 You pull these water permits.

00:27:14.000 And, you know, a big part of this is, you look, Iowa is knee deep in this deal with the pipeline.

00:27:21.000 And of course, Bill Sachs, the former governor there, South Dakota is not far behind them in all of this.

00:27:28.000 And again, you have the number two and number three man during Obama's administration, both coming from South Dakota.

00:27:35.000 But if you pull the water permits, you will see it.

00:27:39.000 They have taken out permits to cool the pipeline and there will be an impact, very similar to what's going on right now in the state of Idaho.

00:27:49.000 And there's questions about whether or not these cobalt mines, which are very, that's a very similar related issue, are what has made these farmers have to shut off the water supply.

00:28:04.000 As we're going right here into the prime of crop season.

00:28:07.000 They can't get an explanation for it and If you look at the permits that have been pulled by these cobalt companies, it's pretty surprising the amount of water that it takes.

00:28:20.000 It's not a natural process.

00:28:22.000 It actually will create a vacuum that will drain the water. 0.74

00:28:26.000 And you're talking, just so people know about these cobalt mines, these are cobalt mines that are in Idaho.

00:28:37.000 And they received money from the $60 billion that we just sent to Ukraine.

00:28:43.000 And that bill, there was a hidden provision to the mining companies to mine cobalt in Idaho.

00:28:53.000 And we just learned that there were 200 congresspeople who then went and invested in these mining companies.

00:29:05.000 And after voting to invest our federal dollars into those companies, having something to do with the Ukraine war, which we don't really understand.

00:29:21.000 But it's classic insider trading, but it's all legal because it's Congress.

00:29:27.000 But what you're saying is that Those mines are taking water from the farmers who need it in Idaho and that those farmers are not going to have the water to do food production.

00:29:42.000 That's right.

00:29:43.000 I mean, you talk about the ultimate in sabotage between the family farm versus corporate agriculture.

00:29:50.000 That cobalt mine, the one that's kind of at the center of it, and I will tell you, I pulled the permits.

00:29:56.000 There are different aquifers that are at stake here, but there are a lot of cobalt mines that are in Idaho, and I think ultimately what we will end up finding is that a lot of this is related to the water issues.

00:30:09.000 But the cobalt mine, the main one that's in question that just received the Department of Defense funding, it failed last year.

00:30:16.000 It should have went out of business.

00:30:18.000 They spent all of this money, took all of these investments, had a ribbon cutting with the governor there, Brad Little, who has not come to the aid of the farmers on this water issue.

00:30:28.000 And then all of a sudden, cobalt prices fell down to the point to where it was more expensive to mine that cobalt than what they could sell it for.

00:30:36.000 And they let that business sit there while they pleaded for federal funding that they ultimately received under the auspices that this is a national security matter because of the fact that most of the cobalt is going to be coming from outside the U.S. My understanding, I guess, Idaho is one of the only locations.

00:30:57.000 But if you look back again, we talk about environmental issues because they sell this as being a part of the environmental plan.

00:31:06.000 But if you go back to the 1940s even, they were mining cobalt in Idaho.

00:31:13.000 We're just now getting to the point that everyone has forgotten that they actually disturbed the environment then and had environmental issues with those cobalt mines that were catastrophic to the water supply.

00:31:24.000 So it's not just an issue of draining the water supply.

00:31:28.000 It's also an issue of contaminating it.

00:31:31.000 And, you know, no one in Idaho has brought that up, the history that they have contaminated it.

00:31:37.000 Not this company.

00:31:38.000 This company, by the way, it's not even an American company.

00:31:41.000 It's an Australian company that has come in and done this.

00:31:44.000 And so, again, it's all part of a process of shifting over the subsidies to corporate agriculture, the people that don't need it.

00:31:55.000 If anybody doesn't need a farm credit loan, it's Tyson Foods.

00:32:00.000 And, you know, right now, to show you how far out of balance we are with our whole policy, there are more dollars worth of loans that go out through the government for agriculture in $25 million and above Loans than all the ones that are below $25 million.

00:32:18.000 And that's hard to even conceive.

00:32:21.000 I mean, again, we're talking about programs that were set up directly to benefit the farmer.

00:32:26.000 And there is just this quiet sabotage that's going on.

00:32:31.000 The farmers don't have a voice in Washington, D.C. Represents, in my opinion, a completely different interest than what family farms are.

00:32:43.000 We have 1.8 million family farms.

00:32:45.000 The Farm Bureau has 6 million members.

00:32:48.000 How can they pretend to speak on behalf of the entire farming industry when corporate ag and family farms have literally competing interests?

00:32:58.000 And so we've got to find a way to get a voice for these family farms because It involves more than just tractors and plows.

00:33:08.000 It involves our food supply.

00:33:10.000 It involves the water supply.

00:33:11.000 And we've got to find a way that the consumer can come to the farmer's defense in this.

00:33:18.000 And I think they will.

00:33:19.000 And I think going through COVID probably helps that.

00:33:22.000 We're a little bit more conscious of those kinds of issues.

00:33:25.000 But we need a national voice that is taking up for the family farms.

00:33:30.000 We need to get back to growing quality food as opposed to quantities of food, and it's doable.

00:33:36.000 We just need an entire reshape of the mindset to it all, and really just to go back to what the original mission of these programs was.

00:33:47.000 And to do that, there's going to have to be a house cleaning at Farm Credit in the USDA. Yeah, well, I'm going to do that as president.

00:33:55.000 I'm going to put USDA and farm credit back on the side of small farmers.

00:34:02.000 And you're right.

00:34:03.000 It's our food supply.

00:34:04.000 We've, you know, we no longer produce anything the USDA touches is not food.

00:34:10.000 It's commodities.

00:34:11.000 It's commodities.

00:34:12.000 That's what they are producing.

00:34:14.000 And they're conspiring with these giant agricultural producers like Smithfield, Tyson's, Purdue, Pilgrim, and to create commodities with very, very low-quality products that are poisoning our people.

00:34:35.000 And we need good food, high-quality food.

00:34:40.000 We need small farmers producing it.

00:34:43.000 Thomas Jefferson said, American democracy is It was rooted in the control of our landscapes by tens of thousands of yeoman farmers, each with a stake in our democracy and our system of government and our economy.

00:35:04.000 We're now making a war on the small farmers of this country.

00:35:10.000 Before we close out, Dustin, let's talk about the foreign influence here.

00:35:20.000 How do we know how much of our agricultural landscapes are now controlled by foreign governments and specifically the Chinese?

00:35:29.000 Right.

00:35:30.000 So there is no good way to know the exact answer on that.

00:35:34.000 What we do know is it's an alarming enough number that the government themselves are even sounding the alarms.

00:35:40.000 Farm Services put out a report over the last couple of years sounding the alarm saying that foreign land holdings between 2017 and 2022 almost doubled.

00:35:52.000 We had a situation of where in 2017 there was 28 million acres That were owned by foreign interest as far as American farmland and now that number is getting closer to 50 million acres.

00:36:05.000 And so the other part to that though is they admit in that report they are having to rely on voluntary reporting.

00:36:14.000 The only way to go around and figure this out exactly would be to go to every courthouse in America.

00:36:21.000 And I'll add two points on that.

00:36:24.000 One of the ways that I knew we had a problem is when I was in the middle of the investigation with the Farm Credit Administration where I was asking them for help.

00:36:32.000 In the Farm Credit Act, you can request a list of your fellow stockholders.

00:36:37.000 And being concerned as far as what was going to potentially happen, I requested that list.

00:36:42.000 When I received it, I was shocked by the number of foreign interests that were on that list.

00:36:47.000 And at that time, I wouldn't have even thought that U.S. Farm Credit, a government-sponsored enterprise, could do business dealings and could do loans with foreign interests.

00:36:57.000 I found out that they had been doing it really since 1997 when they adjusted some loopholes to it.

00:37:04.000 But the real window we've got hit hard was between 2017 until now.

00:37:11.000 And I'll tell you real quickly, Dallas Tonsater that I mentioned, going back to the USDA guy that's connected with those energy programs, he passes away in 2019.

00:37:22.000 President Trump appoints an outsider to the board, a gentleman named Rodney Brown, but for two years, Rodney Brown could not get a Senate confirmation hearing.

00:37:32.000 Farm Bureau and the Farm Credit Council itself both wrote letters to the Senate Ag Committee saying that they didn't want him.

00:37:40.000 He was not a farmer.

00:37:41.000 He was somebody that was coming in as a compliance and private banking expert.

00:37:45.000 And for two years, he never got a hearing.

00:37:48.000 This is my disappointment with President Trump over that, is the fact that I hear what President Trump is saying in that we've got to drain that swamp.

00:37:57.000 And I appreciate the fact he nominated somebody that could have done that in Rodney Brown.

00:38:02.000 But how do we go two years without having a full foreign credit board and having a political blockade and ultimately President Trump's nomination passed to President Biden?

00:38:15.000 And in closing, I would say that's why ultimately the first lawsuit I had ever filed in my name in my entire life after practicing law all these years was against the President of the United States.

00:38:27.000 I filed suit against President Biden because during the entirety of my investigation, even now, The law states there are to be three members on that Farm Credit Board and there is only one serving in a legitimate term right now.

00:38:43.000 And so we filed seeking a writ of mandamus for President Biden to make the other two appointments because there's a lot of people out there that need help from this Farm Credit Board.

00:38:53.000 He has made one appointment.

00:38:56.000 Believe it or not, it comes from a person that's working under Tom Vilsack in the USDA. So we're not getting any closer to being on the right track there and separating those entities.

00:39:06.000 But our hope is that...

00:39:10.000 We can push things forward on that, get a full board in place, and at least give the farmers an opportunity to have some kind of remedy when they're being wrongfully foreclosed on.

00:39:23.000 But that's what we're fighting for.

00:39:24.000 You know, I spent a lot of time During a period of my career litigating against the big agricultural interests, against industrial farming, industrial meat production, and all of these companies, I think I probably sued Smithfield and Tyson more than Purdue as much as any other lawyer in the country.

00:39:50.000 And we were all over the country litigating against them all over Canada, Alberta.

00:39:55.000 I even went to Poland to fight Smithfield.

00:39:59.000 But the Farm Bureau...

00:40:03.000 It was generally supporting Smithfield in this kind of litigation, and they were supporting the big agricultural interests.

00:40:09.000 Not always.

00:40:10.000 There were some state farm bureaus that were very, very strongly aligned with us, but the National Farm Bureau was on the side of corporate agriculture, and the Farmers Union was our ally.

00:40:26.000 And what do you – how do you see the Farmers Union?

00:40:30.000 Do they have any – I haven't been dealing with them for a decade or more.

00:40:36.000 Do they have power – any power in any of the states now?

00:40:41.000 Yeah, some I would say in the Midwest more so.

00:40:46.000 As far as National Farm Bureau dominates, they spend more money lobbying on agriculture than anyone else.

00:40:53.000 And, you know, you look up and down that Senate and House Ag Committee, them and Farm Credit Council both, and you just think about this, Farm Credit Council is in lobbying.

00:41:04.000 We have an entity that was set up for the farmers, but we have created a lobbying branch That is going in and lobbying against the interests of the farmers.

00:41:15.000 But Farmers Union, they've got, I would say it's similar to Farm Bureau to where they have some strongholds in some states, but as far as across the country, I think we're still missing that really strong independent voice that can just tell it exactly like it is on behalf of the family farms.

00:41:35.000 To do that, you've got to be in a position where you're not compromised and you're not forced to have to carry the mail for these corporate agricultural entities.

00:41:45.000 An entity like Farm Bureau, their job is to make money and that's the duty that they owe.

00:41:53.000 So it's disingenuous for some of these entities to purport to speak on behalf of the farmers But they've really got away with it because they have not been challenged by anybody calling them out for it.

00:42:07.000 But they're not alone in doing that.

00:42:11.000 But corporate agriculture has got them.

00:42:14.000 Corporate agriculture has got our government.

00:42:17.000 And we've got to do something to break that hold.

00:42:20.000 Dustin Kittle, how can people reach you?

00:42:23.000 How can they support you?

00:42:25.000 So I'm on X and we have been getting a great following there.

00:42:31.000 It's just at Dustin Kittle.

00:42:33.000 We started a Save Our Farms campaign that you can find out more there.

00:42:37.000 My lawsuit against President Biden is there as well.

00:42:41.000 And that would be the best way.

00:42:44.000 The reach that we have had on X has been incredible.

00:42:47.000 And I appreciate having that platform for free speech.

00:42:52.000 Appreciate being On your show, the more of a lot that can be put on this.

00:42:56.000 People that are thinking about this with common sense, they understand it.

00:43:01.000 The story resonates across the country beyond farmers.

00:43:04.000 People are seeing this.

00:43:06.000 They feel at the grocery stores.

00:43:08.000 They see what's going on here.

00:43:10.000 And if we don't do something to support the family farms, We are not far away from having vertical integration across every system.

00:43:20.000 And at that point, they can name their price and they can name their quality.

00:43:23.000 And we've got to be able to keep that from happening.

00:43:26.000 Family Farms is really the last bastion of American independence.

00:43:30.000 And so my hope is that there are a lot of people out there that feel strongly about this and can step in and make a difference.

00:43:39.000 It truly is an environmental cause as well.

00:43:44.000 You know, saving this farmland is important.

00:43:47.000 And you look all the way back at why this system was created.

00:43:51.000 It was created to save the farmland.

00:43:53.000 And that is money in the bank when it comes to society being able to flourish for years to come with a sound food supply and also a sound water supply.

00:44:05.000 Dustin Kittle, thank you very much for fighting for our democracy, for the family farmer.

00:44:10.000 Thank you.

00:44:11.000 For our food supply and against the corruption that is turning our government into just a corporate kleptocracy.

RFK Jr. The Defender - June 22, 2024

Farm Credit Scandal with Dustin Kittle

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