Fraud, Farm Bill get spotlight time at NALC’s Mid-South conference
June 15, 2026
By Mary Hightower
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
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MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Farm Bill feuding, land sale fraud, and whether the country needs to consider a different path for farm safety nets were among the insights offered at the 13th annual Mid-South Agricultural and Environmental Law Conference.
Held June 4-5 at the University of Memphis’ Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, the conference featured the “Next Generation of Ag & Food Law: Roundtable for Students” and a full day of professional development and insights on ag labor, finance, artificial intelligence and ongoing legal battles over water and pesticides.
Here's what was covered:
Farm Bill
Hunt Shipman, principal and director of Cornerstone Government Affairs was asked if there would ever be a Farm Bill.
“We have broken, what we call in our office the three-legged stool of conservation, commodities and nutrition. Putting them back together is like trying to get the Hatfields and McCoys to have dinner together,” he said.
Playing in the background, “there is narrative [that asks] that whether the farm safety net is broken because of all these ad hoc programs,” Shipman said. “We may have created a bigger long-term problem for farmers.
“Do we need a different model for programs than what we have today? I don’t think we have time in this Congress” to fix it for this Farm Bill, he said.
He said it might be a topic to work on before the next Farm Bill.
As for gridlock in Washington, Shipman offered some optimism.
“We saw glimmers of that this week with the Senate stopping the weaponization fund,” he said. “You’ve seen it with stopping the FISA bill last night.”
With the House moving 10 appropriations bills through floor committees and the Senate moving bills individual through committee this year, Shipman said. “this is closer to order than we’ve seen in a decade.”
However, “mid-term election year could be the thing that throws it into chaos,” he said.
Deregulation
Dudley Hoskins, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, offered insights into the work being done by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Agricultural Marketing Service. It’s a wide range that includes training the “beagle brigade” that sniffs out prohibited items at airports, to ensuring new diseases don’t affect the food supply and working to halt the ones that do.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises Inc. v. Raimondo, a case that focused on what was known as the Chevron doctrine. Under that 1984 rule, federal courts defer to federal agencies’ expertise when a statute is ambiguous. The 2024 ruling scuttled that doctrine.
“As we look at a post-Loper world, there’s additional pressure and tension as we look at a deregulatory agenda,” Hoskins said, centering on “how we articulate what our authorities are."
“It has been a very time-consuming and involving process and we rely heavily on our partners at the office of the general counsel,” he said. “As we work through our dereg agenda, we ask that people and industry partners please weigh in on those in the public commenting process. It’s important as we recalibrate and that they work for our producer partners and are legally viable and defensible.”
“This is another place where the National Ag Law Center plays a critical role for our commodity and industry groups that want to weigh in on different regulatory priorities,” Hoskins said.
Trade deficit
Andrew Muhammad, professor and Blasingame Chair of Excellence in Agricultural Policy at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, department of agricultural and resource economics, was asked about the United States’ trade deficit.
“In some way, form or fashion, we borrow too much — as consumers, and we borrow too much as a government, and that must be offset by deficits in terms of the actual goods and services,” Muhammad said.
“Where we mess up, is the focus solely on trade deficit in goods, as if that could actually be fixed in isolation,” he said. “So long as we actually overspend as a government and so long as we overspend as households, we will never fix the trade deficit problem because it’s an offset of an asset surplus part of this overall trade when we talk about goods, services and assets.”
“It’s not so much about the size of the trade deficit, but all the offsetting things that we do about trade,” he said.
Screwworm
Hoskins, who said he had wanted to be part of the conference for years, could only attend by Zoom because the response to finding New World screwworm in Texas was keeping him in Washington.
“Right now, we’re in phase one of our domestic detection response,” Hoskins said. “We’ve been working through this through an interagency, whole government approach. We’ve been doing every asset we have to control, mitigate and ultimately eradicate the screwworm.”
In addition to the Texas Animal Health Commission, Hoskins said partners in the response include Customs and Border Patrol, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers.
In addition to “eyes on the ground, vigilance, awareness and education,” he said USDA is working to increase production of sterile male flies.
“That’s been our best tool to date,” Hoskins said.
Screwworm females mate only once, so mating with a sterile male will mean no additional screwworm flies. A USDA facility in Panama is producing about 100 million sterile flies per week and USDA is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to build new facility at Moore Air Base in McAllen, Texas, which is expected to produce about 300 million sterile flies per week once it is operational.
USDA is also working with Mexico to build a facility there to produce another 100 million sterile male flies per week.
Hoskins fielded questions about closure of livestock ports near the Mexican border. He acknowledged that the closure has been “incredibly stressful for those entire communities and including, and especially for, our cattle industry in those states.”
Hoskins said before the port closure, the U.S. imported about 1.2 million live cattle a year from Mexico.
“If you just turn that off overnight, there is a ripple effect that sends shockwaves through that system,” he said. Hoskins said USDA was working with its equivalent in Mexico to “help cultivate that risk assessment on the ground, figure out how we can calibrate that to what is acceptable risk while also not facilitating the movement of the fly in Mexico further.”
Until that’s done, “we are looking at a risk that we can’t accept at this moment,” he said. “Today, we are leaps and bounds better than we were a year ago. But that risk is real and we’re trying every day to get back to regular order and regular commerce. We’re just not there today.”
How can I defraud thee? Let me count the ways
Josh Bailey, general counsel for Farm Credit of Western Arkansas, said rural and agriculture land deals are ripe target for fraud because of absentee owners, high transaction values, and complex title histories as well as remote and digital transactions. Similar fraud can also occur with farm equipment transactions.
The ability to transfer money any time of the day thanks to FedNow has also made fraud easier, said Bailey said.
The ACH, or automated clearing house, system, “the old system, the ‘wire,’ only operates
during normal business hours, typically with a 2 p.m. cutoff,” Bailey said.
FedNow offers real-time payments. “It’s instant. It’s immediate 24/7 365 settlement. It’s incredibly convenient,” Bailey said.
Bailey offered an example of how this convenience could become a nightmare. A bad actor, having hacked an email account, learns of an upcoming wire transfer set for Monday at 6 a.m.
That person intercepts the wire and can “move it through five or six accounts or more through the real-time system,” he said. “Banks wake up at 8 a.m. and everything is instantly blessed. The whole transaction is done within 10 minutes of opening of business.
“And it’s done without the ability to recall the funds.” Bailey said.
AI can also make fraud easy. Bailey said he’s seen research that AI-generated documents “are three times more likely to fool people than documents generated by people.
“That terrifies me,” he said.
Bailey did say that some “companies are looking at bringing blockchain in or titles and closing. I think you’ll see blockchain emerge in areas you don’t think of seeing it.”
Ag labor
With more aggressive immigration enforcement, farms that use H-2A labor should be prepared in case of a raid.
“There needs to be one employee who is trained to respond, who is the interface with the agent in charge” in case Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears, said Brandon Davis, a partner at Phelps Dunbar LLP.
If ICE appears, “don’t panic. Don’t run. We don’t want an apprehension scenario” which may raise tensions and present a danger to other employees, he said.
When developing the paperwork for an H-2A petition, as an attorney, “you can’t do this without walking a day at the farm so you can see what the client has happening at the farm,” he said.
Long and winding road
Elizabeth Rumley, senior staff attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center, recounted the half-century of history behind the legal battles over the Illinois River.
The fight had its origins in Oklahoma’s Scenic Rivers Act of 1970, in which Oklahoma designated the Illinois River as a scenic waterway. The following decades would see:
- Oklahoma passed a law in 1993 making it “unlawful for any person to cause pollution of any waters of the state … Any such action is hereby declared to be a public nuisance.”
- The finding high levels of contaminants in Lake Tenkiller in 1996
- A 2003 settlement between the City of Tulsa and Tyson Foods and an agreement for Arkansas and Oklahoma to work together to reduce pollution in the Illinois River watershed.
Nearly a quarter of a century of further legal tussling ensued. In January 2026, the Oklahoma attorney general announced settlements with poultry integrators. However, by April, a judge rejected all of the settlements finding them to be insufficient in funding and time to remediate the watershed.
The judge’s rejection of the settlements is now on appeal by the named parties, as well as Oklahoma’s attorney general and secretary of energy.
Failure to warn
NALC Staff Attorney Brigit Rollins provided an overview of Monsanto v. Durnell, which is awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. Congress has also dipped its collective toe in the water with the “Uniformity of Pesticide Labeling Requirements” that were in initial drafts of the 2026 Farm Bill. Since 2024, many states have enacted or are working to institute pesticide liability limitation bills.
As the states wait on SCOTUS and Congress, they’ve decided to jump in the game, Rollins said.
“By and large, what these bills do is say ‘a federally registered pesticide label, in our state, would be a complete defense to a failure to warn claim’,” she said.
Failure to warn laws have been passed in Georgia, Kentucky and North Dakota. Meanwhile, legislation has been introduced in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming.
For more information about the NALC, visit NationalAgLawCenter.org and subscribe to receive NALC communications, including webinar announcements, the Quarterly Newsletter and The Feed.
About the National Agricultural Law Center
Created by Congress in 1987, the National Agricultural Law Center serves as the nation’s leading source of agricultural and food law research and information. The NALC works with producers, agribusinesses, state and federal policymakers, lenders, Congressional staffers, attorneys, land grant universities, students, and many others to provide objective, nonpartisan agricultural and food law research and information to the nation’s agricultural community.
The NALC is a unit of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and works in close partnership with the National Agricultural Library, a subsidiary of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. For information about the NALC, visit nationalaglawcenter.org. The NALC is also on X, Facebook and LinkedIn as @nataglaw. Subscribe online to receive NALC Communications, including webinar announcements, the NALC’s Quarterly Newsletter, and The Feed
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Nkordsme@uada.edu