Northey slammed as ‘lapdog’ of egg industry

Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey

Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey has drawn scrutiny — and a new moniker: “lapdog” — for his department’s possible role in allowing the distribution of Salmonella-tainted eggs from Iowa-based Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms.

Federal officials believe they have traced the contamination of more than half a billion eggs to a feed mill that has connections to DeCoster Farms, a family company well-known for its brushes with regulators that is also connected to the two egg farms. Inspection of feed mills falls under the authority of the Iowa Department of Agriculture. And while state law allows farmers that produce feed for their own livestock to skip most state monitoring, it does not allow a mill that provides feed to other farms to waive the process.

Dustin Vande Hoef, spokesman for the department, told the Associated Press that an inspector will visit the mill, which is one of the state’s largest, next week to comb through its records, presumably to determine if the department was lax in its oversight.

It’s a situation that has Tom Philpott, food editor for Grist, boiling.

Philpott pulled a video from Northey’s YouTube channel to show the secretary’s apparent comfort level with having an extremely large egg farm and feed mill operating in the state and feeding millions throughout the nation. He writes:

… Northey earnestly praises his state’s egg industry for its vast size. “In fact, we have one farm that produces all the eggs for all the McDonalds east of the Mississippi, including Hawaii and Guam,” he gushes, adding something about egg McMuffins and breakfast burritos.

In other words, the watchdog is a lapdog; the referee doubles as cheerleader.

Perhaps given the massive recall, Secretary Northey will now see fit to have a look at DeCoster’s dodgy feed mill; maybe he’ll dig deep to root out other public-health crises that are waiting to be born amid the state’s gigantic livestock factories…

Northey, however, is not likely the only state politician who will take flack for the 2010 egg debacle.

Since 1999 Jack DeCoster, owner of DeCoster Farms, and members of his immediate family have made more than $500,000 in political contributions — all of it to Democrats, and much of it to the benefit of Iowa Democrats.

Contribution chart updated at 6:45 p.m. to reflect additional donations made to the Democratic Governors Association.

Although the Republican National Committee reported receiving $50,000 from A.J. “Jack” DeCoster in October 2002, a filing two months later showed that same amount as being refunded.

Affiliation with DeCoster, especially for elected officials or would-be elected officials, has been a liability in Iowa as far back as the 2002 gubernatorial race, when Republican Steve Sukup attempted to make political hay out of a (denied) rumor that fellow Republican Doug Gross served as an attorney for the DeCosters. Three years later, in 2005, when DeCoster ran into legal issues surrounding his involvement in an Ohio egg farm, it was disclosed in court documents that his attorney of record was Iowa Democratic stalwart Jerry Crawford.

Perhaps the most intriguing item on the contribution list, however, is the 2005 donation by Peter DeCoster, a son of Jack, to Attorney General Tom Miller’s reelection campaign. Just five years prior to that donation, Miller’s office labeled DeCoster as the state’s first “habitual violator” of state environmental laws.

According to Miller, who spoke to The Iowa Independent by phone about the contribution, the classification applied to the DeCoster family in 2000 had been removed nearly a year prior to the political donation by Peter DeCoster. Iowa law provides that companies can be held within the restrictions of the classification for only five years.

“What we saw is that the ‘habitual violator’ classification worked,” Miller said. “It opened up lines of communication between several state agencies and the DeCoster family. We were all on the same page and were able to correct problems that previously existed.”

The classification was given to the DeCosters in connection with their hog production and resulted not only in increased penalties being paid to the state, but the construction of manure storage structures at six sites, which, in turn, protected the Iowa waterways.