Several environmental and animal advocacy groups are suing the Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency for allegedly delaying and over-redacting its responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The groups say the agency has systematically withheld information about its loan programs and, as a result, has concealed how much of the agency’s funds are directed toward large-scale, confinement animal agriculture.
In the complaint, filed Feb. 12 in the Northern District Court of California, the groups detail several instances in which they charge the FSA delayed or over-redacted its response to FOIA requests related to the agency’s farm loan programs. The FSA administers direct and guaranteed farm loans that can be used to purchase land, inputs, livestock, and other farm needs.
The advocacy groups, led by the nonprofit law firm Public Justice, say that the FOIA requests are essential to informing the public about how FSA loan money is allocated.
“In order for the public to get what it wants out of its government, it has to know what its government is doing,” says Kellan Smith, an attorney with Public Justice and the plaintiffs’ lead counsel on the case. “It’s alarming when the agency has such a clear pattern.”
The FSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Under FOIA, government entities can refuse records requests under specific conditions, such as if the information requested is classified for national security reasons or contains trade secrets. Yet the plaintiffs in this suit, which include the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Food Safety, and Food & Water Watch, say the FSA has applied these exemptions too broadly in responding to their records requests.
“FSA has improperly withheld thousands of pages of responsive records, depriving Plaintiffs of their statutory right to obtain records containing crucial information about federal farm loans for nearly a decade without penalty,” reads the complaint.
Smith says the requested records would give advocates and the public a clearer picture of how much FSA loan money is being allocated to industrial-scale animal farms and how much goes to smaller-scale operations.
“If you’re a farm that’s in an integrated system and you’re getting a loan, that’s worthwhile to know, because it might be millions of dollars going to support a giant integrator like Tyson [Foods] or JBS,” he says. “This is an industry that should really be able to survive on its own without these loan guarantees.”
Farm loans have also been under scrutiny at the Small Business Administration, which has lent millions of dollars to poultry operations. In 2018, a report from the SBA Office of the Inspector General deemed some poultry farmers who had received SBA loans ineligible for the loans because poultry companies “exercised such comprehensive control over the growers” that the farmers did not functionally operate as small businesses.
Smith says the questions about loans made to livestock facilities by the SBA and the FSA are interconnected. He admits that any information garnered from FOIA requests to FSA will be just a “fraction of the pie of federal money that’s going to this industry.” But, he says, “it’s a start to mapping it out.”