Groups claiming to represent farmers–but funded by and working with animal rights activists–are attacking modern farming and trying to put farmers out of business.
Who’s Attacking Farmers?
Environmental and animal rights extremists are hoping to end modern animal agriculture and radically change food production in the United States. Their allies? Two groups that claim to advocate for farmers: Farm Action and the Organization for Competitive Markets.
Farm Action
Founded by two former employees of the anti-meat Humane Society of the United States. While it has called itself a “a coalition of family-farmers and advocates,” half of the staff of Farm Action is not actually farmers. Numerous employees have backgrounds in leftwing politics. Farm Action is funded by leftwing activists.
Organization For Competitive Markets (OCM)
The so-called Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) also has worked with anti-agriculture activists for a decade, including the anti-meat animal rights group Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
These groups do not speak for modern farmers. Real farmers don’t ally with extremists to attack other farmers. Read a detailed background on these groups below.
What’s Their Agenda?
Farm Action and OCM attack animal agriculture and advocate for “woke” policies, including:
National Ban on Large-Scale Animal Farms
Spending Taxpayer Money on Vegan Food and Radically Transforming Agriculture
Supporting Bans on Sale of Farm Products
Who Funds These Phony Farm Groups?
Farm Action and its lobbying arm are funded by wealthy leftwing activists in California.
In 2021, 70% of Farm Action’s revenue came from only two sources: Leftwing foundations. It received $100,000 from the Schmidt Family Foundation, which funds anti-meat environmental groups and anti-ag journalists. It also received $300,000 from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which runs donor-advised funds for philanthropists who live near San Francisco.
Farm Action received $50,000 in 2020 from the Quinn Foundation, which is run by a board member for the Humane Society of the United States–the largest anti-meat organization in the country.
Farm Action’s political arm received $153,000 in 2017 from the Open Philanthropy Project to lobby on the 2018 Farm Bill. This San Francisco-based organization has given more than $100 million to animal rights extremists who have the goal of ending animal agriculture.
Farm Action’s political arm received $85,000 in 2020 and 2021 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund–a “dark money” group that funds many leftwing causes. In 2020, Sixteen Thirty Fund spent over $100 million to help elect Joe Biden and other liberal politicians.
The Organization of Competitive Markets also has activist funders. In 2018-19, OCM took $127,500 from the Schmidt Foundation. And it also took $50,000 from Humane America Animal Foundation, which funds anti-meat groups, and $25,000 from the Kirkpatrick Foundation, an organization that attacks the pork industry in Oklahoma and funds animal rights extremists.
The Details
Read more below about who is behind these groups and what they lobby for.
Staff Backgrounds
Farm Action
The staff of Farm Action has ties to animal liberation extremists and leftwing politics.
Joe Maxwell, Farm Action co-founder. Maxwell is a lawyer and former politician. Before founding Farm Action, Maxwell worked as a vice president at the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights group that wants to end modern livestock farming. Despite using his family’s small hog farm (300 sows) to burnish his credentials, Maxwell has said, “the fact is the United States eats too much meat.”
While Maxwell leans on his farming background, he registered the Farm Action website from a suburban house in a Missouri cul-de-sac, where he apparently lives.
Angela Huffman, Farm Action co-founder. Huffman previously worked with Maxwell at the Humane Society of the United States.
Jessica Cusworth, communications coordinator. Cusworth previously interned for the Humane Society of the United States.
Christian Lovell, senior director of programs. Lovell previously worked for far-left Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).
Sarah Carden, senior policy advocate. Carden worked on two Democratic presidential campaigns.
Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM)
The so-called Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) also has worked with anti-agriculture activists for a decade. Beginning in 2012, OCM has worked with the Humane Society of the United States, the nation’s most aggressive anti-animal agriculture group. HSUS provided legal assistance to OCM.
“Every cowboy out there owes a deep debt of gratitude to the Humane Society of the United States,” said Fred Stokes, OCM’s executive director at the time.
The relationship between the two groups has continued, with HSUS CEO Kitty Block saying in 2018 that her group is often “on the same page” with OCM.
OCM’s board of directors includes Marty Irby, an animal rights lobbyist. Irby worked for HSUS’s political affiliate and then for Animal Wellness Action, founded by former HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle after he resigned following accusations of sexual harassment. (To learn more about Irby’s involvement with animal rights extremists, visit WhoIsMartyIrby.com.)
OCM executive director Mike Eby has close ties to Democratic politics and has donated money to Bernie Sanders.
Political Agenda
BANNING LARGE-SCALE ANIMAL FARMS
National Ban by 2040
Farm Action supports the so-called Farm Systems Reform Act, which would impose a national ban on large-scale animal feeding operations. All new operations would be banned, and existing farms would be banned by 2040. The legislation is sponsored by Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a vegan who works closely with animal rights activists.
Smearing Farmers
In a lawsuit filed in Indiana challenging the state’s “right to farm” law, Farm Action filed an amicus brief alongside activist groups Food & Water Watch and Public Justice. The brief argues that large-scale pork farms are “a recent creation that presents extreme risks” and that large-scale farms “do not ‘conserve’ or ‘protect’ agricultural land, and harm rural communities.”
Food & Water Watch is opposed to GMO crop biotechnology and has called for “a halt to all sales of genetically engineered foods.” Public Justice, meanwhile, is a group of leftwing lawyers whose food practice is run by a former attorney for the Humane Society of the United States.
PROHIBITING THE SALE OF FARM-RAISED GOODS
OCM is opposing federal legislation, called the EATS Act, that would protect interstate commerce from state bans on farm products.
In 2018, California passed Proposition 12, a radical measure that bans the sale of eggs and pork raised using standard animal husbandry practices. The measure was funded by the Humane Society of the United States and other animal liberation extremists who are using it as a stepping stone to more restrictions on the sale of animal protein.
OCM is siding once again with animal rights activists, and in June 2023 launched a deceptive campaign to oppose the EATS Act. Farm Action also opposes the EATS Act.
OPPOSING FREE TRADE
Despite claiming to be for “competitive markets,” OCM wants to restrict competition by closing off markets–and not just between states. In a May 2020 letter to then US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, OCM wrote that not only should the US ban cattle imports, “The U.S. must also ban beef imports.”
SUBSIDIES TO PROMOTE FAKE MEAT
In June 2023, Farm Action co-signed a letter with animal rights extremists asking for more vegan meals served in federal agencies.
The letter called for “Leveraging federal food purchasing to promote racial equity [and] mitigate climate change.” Specifics include tapping the USDA “to expand the availability of values-aligned food products, like organic and plant-based options, to school districts.” The “values” are those promoted by the special interest groups signing the letter, who include Mercy for Animals, The Humane League, and PCRM–organizations that all promote vegan diets.
Pushing dei, reparations
Farm Action has pushed woke DEI policies, “Black Lives Matter,” and even reparations.
Farm Action calls for an “anti-racist food and farm policy” including:
- Requiring the USDA to “provide no interest loans to beginning BIPOC farmers and BIPOC-led cooperatives.”
- Pushing to “authorize funding to support the creation of racial equity, diversity, and inclusion priorities in 4-H and other federal agricultural discovery programs”
- Advocating to “enact the Justice for Black Farmers Act to begin to tackle systemic racism and discrimination in the agrifood system”
Farm Action even posted an endorsement of “Black Lives Matter,” saying they “stand in solidarity with the protests…”
anti-trump
While Farm Action is trying to influence the second Trump Administration, the group previously trashed Trump–not to mention Farm Action co-founder Angela Huffman donated to Kamala’s 2024 presidential campaign.
- Days before the 2020 election, Farm Action wrote: “the Trump administration has continued the crusade against smaller American farms — but what else would you expect from an administration that has said ‘In America, the big get bigger and the small go out’?”
- Farm Action hosted a petition under the moniker “Trump Farm Fails.”
- Farm Action attacked Trump shortly before the 2020 election for keeping meat processing plants open during COVID.
- Farm Action co-founder Joe Maxwell told a leftwing magazine, “The Trump administration put us back to 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, when there weren’t any controls.”
- Farm Action promoted an article accusing Trump of creating “chaos and financial distress for farmers.”