The Biden administration made historic progress to protect producers from meat company abuse. Amid the first meat industry attempt to roll that back, no one knows where Trump’s USDA will stand.
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The Biden administration made historic progress to protect producers from meat company abuse. Amid the first meat industry attempt to roll that back, no one knows where Trump’s USDA will stand.
May 19, 2025
A woman works on a Montana ranch. (Photo credit: Stephen Simpson, Getty Images)
Back in the 1990s, when Craig Watts was still raising chickens for Perdue, the fourth largest poultry company in the U.S., his contract included a provision that prohibited him from sharing the document with any third party. If he encountered a problem with the company, for example, he couldn’t solicit legal help to understand what options the contract provided to him.
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It’s one small example of the many ways that the country’s powerful meat companies have exerted control over the farmers that raise the animals they sell. In the chicken industry, farmers looking for economic opportunities have long been locked into contracts that require them to pay for expensive facilities, compete with other farmers for pay even though the quality of chicks and feed is dependent on the companies, and make costly upgrades whenever companies say so. And as the meat industry has become more consolidated over the last few decades, the companies have continued to gain power over farmers.
In February 2024, after decades of advocacy, the USDA finalized the first of three rules related to the Packers and Stockyards Act, a century-old law that was intended to protect farmers from abuse by meat companies.
However, that contract privacy provision is also an example of something that has recently changed in favor of farmers.
“We had to get that done away with so I could show [the contract] to my accountant, so I could show it to a lawyer, so I could show it to my wife,” Watts, who became a famous poultry industry whistleblower after leaving the business, said. “Technically, I couldn’t even show it to her.”
In February 2024, after decades of advocacy that Watts played a key role in, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) under President Biden finalized the first of three rules related to the Packers and Stockyards Act, a century-old law that was intended to protect farmers from abuse by meat companies. In addition to requiring that chicken companies disclose much more information with farmers in terms of the income they can expect, the first rule protected the farmer’s right to discuss the terms of the contract with family members and legal and financial advisors.
The other two rules, now also finalized, created enforceable definitions of discrimination, retaliation, and deception and put limits on how much of a farmer’s pay could be based on the competitive ranking system that companies use.
All three rules were historic, because the Packers and Stockyards Act had no enforceable regulations until the Biden administration. Watts, who now works with the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project to help struggling chicken farmers, was “elated” by the progress, but said it’s too early to tell whether the rules will make a big difference; some provisions haven’t even gone into effect yet.
Even so, meat industry trade groups are already working to stop or overturn these rules.
In October, several groups—including the National Chicken Council and the North American Meat Institute, which represents the country’s largest meat companies—sued the USDA to overturn the second rule, called “Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity.” In the initial complaint, the groups claim the rule is unlawful and that it will harm meatpackers by forcing expensive “compliance and recordkeeping obligations” on them and that companies “may be forced to modify contracting practices merely to avoid the possibility of litigation.”
Now, a critical moment in the legal fight has arrived.
Four groups that represent farmer interests—the Alabama Poultry Growers Association, R-CALF, Latino Farmers and Ranchers International, and the Western Organization of Resource Councils—have asked the court to allow them to intervene in the case to defend the rule. They’re doing so at a time when they’re unsure if the USDA itself will choose to fight back, since during Trump’s first administration the USDA worked to weaken and eliminate Packers and Stockyards protections. To date, there has been no indication from the current leadership as to how they’ll approach the issue.
“Some of these groups have been working on improving these rules since the 1990s. It’s literally been decades, and finally, actual rules were finalized that have meaningful protections, and it’s just too precious a fight,” said Tyler Lobdell, an attorney with Food & Water Watch who is representing the farmer groups in their effort to intervene. “It simply makes sense that they’re at the table.”
Adding to the weight of the case is the fact that the industry’s argument challenges a fundamental piece of Packers and Stockyards enforcement across the board—whether every farmer that brings a case against a company should have to prove that not only were they harmed, but that the company’s actions caused broader “harm to competition.” In other words, while the lawsuit only targets one of the rules, the outcome of the case could impact the others as well.
In response to questions from Civil Eats about the lawsuit but also the agency’s broader approach to the rules, a USDA spokesperson said, “We will not comment on matters relating to litigation.”
A Meat Institute spokesperson declined Civil Eats’ request for interviews on behalf of both the Meat Institute and the National Chicken Council, saying “the lawsuit [to overturn the second rule] speaks for itself.”
R-CALF, which represents independent cattle producers, is one of the groups that has spent decades pushing for rules that would enable the USDA to properly enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act. Bill Bullard, R-CALF’s CEO, told Civil Eats they want to intervene in the case to defend the Inclusive Competition Rule because of its particular importance in the highly concentrated beef industry, where four companies now control 85 percent of the market.
“We think that it is essential in order to reduce the abuse of market power,” he said. “There’s a huge disparity in bargaining power between the producers and the meatpackers.” Producers—the farmers and ranchers who are responsible for raising the animals that meatpackers slaughter and bring to market—are also often susceptible to unfair practices, he said.
The rule in question explicitly defines the kind of unfair practices the Packers and Stockyards Act prohibits on three fronts: discrimination, retaliation, and deception. For example, it states that the prohibition on discrimination means a company cannot treat a grower differently based on race, religion, or sex. It says companies cannot retaliate against farmers for participating in associations or for speaking up about their rights under the law. Under “deception,” it prohibits companies from “employing false or misleading statements or omissions of material information” when entering into contracts, ending contracts, or refusing to contract with a farmer.
Among ranchers selling cattle, Bullard said, fear of retaliation is real. Because if a producer complains about a packer and that packer decides to retaliate, alternative buyers are few and far between.
“Pushing back on this rule sounds so ridiculous, because what they’re saying is, ‘We don’t want this rule because for our model to work and our industry to survive, we must be allowed to discriminate. We must be allowed to retaliate,” Watts said. “You know it’s bad when you have to prohibit retaliatory practices in a regulation, but here we are.”
In the lawsuit, which the Meat Institute spokesperson asked Civil Eats to quote from in lieu of interviews, the lawyers write that meat companies “maintain robust controls to prevent such discriminatory practices, root out such discrimination where it exists, and ensure that it finds no home in their industries.”
The provisions related to deception are of interest to Thong Nguyen, a mild-mannered farmer who goes by Jak. In 2015, his wife spotted a farm with 10 chicken houses for sale on YouTube, where slick videos commonly attract farmers with promises like “A true money-maker for years to come!” Nguyen went into debt to buy the approximately $2 million property in Summers, Arkansas, and soon after began raising chickens for Simmons Foods, a major chicken processor in the region.
“The contract poultry system will never work for the farmer until contracts are done in a way that there is good-faith bargaining, and even then the companies will always still have the upper hand.”
Nguyen realized quickly how little control he had over the entire endeavor, he said. If he didn’t immediately do something a Simmons field tech requested, his next flock of birds might be delayed. “Every time when we thought we have some savings, they would come in to tell us to make updates,” he said. “Either we do it, or we lose the contract.”
Nguyen ran into worse trouble in 2022 when his brother lost his contract raising chickens for a different regional company and went bankrupt. Because Nguyen had put his farm up as collateral for his brother’s property, he took on his brother’s debt as well. In the meantime, his wife’s chronic kidney disease was getting worse.
“I told the manager [at Simmons] in hopes that they would help me out. I told them about my wife’s condition,” he said. “The only way for me to get out is to sell the farm so I can pay off my farm debt and my brother’s as well and hopefully start somewhere new.”
To sell the farm, Nguyen needed Simmons’ cooperation if he wanted to get a fair price for the property. Even though Nguyen financed and built the chicken houses, about three-quarters of an industrial chicken farm’s property value is tied to having an active chicken contract, according to an industry insider who has been working with and for both chicken companies and growers for more than 20 years and has intimate knowledge of farm real estate. (Civil Eats granted the source anonymity because talking to the press could significantly damage their business interests.)
Nguyen’s family members at home on the farm. (Photo courtesy of Jak Nguyen)
So, if a grower like Nguyen wants to sell a farm, he needs the company to provide a letter of intent confirming they will contract with the new owner to grow chickens. In Nguyen’s case, Simmons was also requiring upgrades that any buyer would have to agree to make in order to secure that contract.
Throughout process, Nguyen felt Simmons was putting up roadblocks and delaying the sale. He believes the company was dragging it out until his contract ended.
“They’ve been giving us false promises. After everything happened, from the start to the end, it seemed like they don’t want me to sell my farm,” he said. “The last time I called and talked with the manager, he told me that he would not let anybody buy my farm or let me renew my farm. They don’t want anything to do with my farm anymore.”
Simmons did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment on these claims.
When Simmons decided it wouldn’t provide a new contract to a buyer, the value of Nguyen’s property dropped from close to $2 million to less than $500,000, so selling the property won’t come close to covering his debt.
“There’s a huge disparity in bargaining power between the producers and the meatpackers.”
It’s impossible to know whether having stronger rules against discrimination, deception, and retaliation could change Nguyen’s situation or others like his. But the industry insider said a big reason many situations play out this way is that in the end, companies like Simmons have “little to lose.” If rules on the books made them liable to USDA investigation or lawsuits, that could change.
As Bullard put it, “This rule protects the producer’s ability to address some problems they may have with a packer. Without it, they would have no recourse.”
Nguyen is incensed that the industry is trying to get the rule thrown out. “That’s just going to make things worse for the farmer,” he said. “The farmer should have more protection than the integrator because they are the one that’s putting their all into it . . . sweat, tears, money. They’ve been out in the cold, the heat, the rain. It’s hard work. It’s no joke. And we’re doing this to support our families.”
In the lawsuit, industry lawyers write that the rule would create “a wide-ranging antidiscrimination enforcement power” at the USDA.
That’s illegal, according to their argument, which boils down to this: Because the Packers and Stockyards Act’s primary purpose is “to assure fair competition and fair trade practices in livestock marketing and in the meatpacking industry,” any violation of the act has to threaten not just an individual producer’s livelihood, but competition in the industry.
In other words, the USDA can’t regulate discrimination under the law unless that discrimination somehow makes the whole system less competitive for all growers.
Some courts have upheld that interpretation over the years. However, the USDA, under both Republicans and Democrats, has always maintained the opposite: Individual harm is enough to activate Packers and Stockyards protections. As the farmer groups seeking to intervene in the case wait to see how the agency’s new leadership will handle the lawsuit, a big question is whether that will still be the case.
“If Secretary Rollins changes the agency’s position on harm to competition, it will be a shocking move.”
“If Secretary Rollins changes the agency’s position on harm to competition, it will be a shocking move,” Lobdell, the attorney for the farmer groups, said. “What it would amount to is a massive handout to the largest corporate interests in our agriculture and food system, directly in opposition to the interests of farmers and ranchers.”
For now, everyone’s waiting to find out how the USDA will proceed, and whether the court will grant the farmer groups’ motion to intervene.
In the original complaint, the meatpackers say they will suffer “concrete and imminent harm” if the law remains in place. “The Final Rule . . . requires a wholesale reevaluation of contractual relationships and communications between regulated entities and producers,” they write.
That kind of wholesale reevaluation is exactly what many farmers want. “The contract poultry system will never work for the farmer . . . never, until contracts are done in a way that there is good-faith bargaining, and even then the companies will always still have the upper hand,” Watts said. The most they can hope for, he said, is that the new rules will “be a deterrent to curb some of the most onerous practices companies use against the farmers they contract with and make income at least a little more predictable.”
For Nguyen—and so many others with strikingly similar experiences—it’s too late for that. He’s working through bankruptcy paperwork and driving for Uber to pay his bills while he figures out his next steps. At one point, he had family around to help care for his wife, but they’ve all moved to find work. Looking out at the 10 empty chicken houses with no way to pay off the debt or sell them for what they’re worth, he cries a lot. Thankfully, his wife and his two daughters, especially a “very cheerful” eight-year-old, he said, keep him going.
He thinks maybe, if he tells his story, it will help make the case that more regulation of the industry is needed. That farmers need more protection, not less. “If we give up, no one’s going to be standing up,” he said. “We want to pave the way for other farmers to fight back.”
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