Nearly six months after the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture’s first attempt to come onto poultry farmers’ property and take near 1,000 soil samples and then have the soil tested for 34 parameters in out-of-state labs, ODAFF showed up again in Delaware County. On Tuesday, Oct. 18, ODAFF state inspectors John Littlefield and David Berry, who were ordered to do the testing by Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Terry Peach, and the out-of-state CDM lab team appeared at the Joel and Rhonda Reed farm in Colcord, Okla. Later in the morning, ODAFF’s attorney obtained search warrants to conduct the soil sampling on four area farms – the Reed’s, Julie Anderson Chancellor and her father Bill Anderson, Jim and Michelle Pigeon and Kenny and Frank Glenn. All are members of Poultry Partners. District Judge Robert Haney signed the search warrants.

Later in the day, due to the outbreak of “LT” in the area, the inspectors were called back to a motel in West Siloam Springs to review bio-security procedures.  At the end of the day the inspectors had not gained entry to any property. That evening ODAFF agreed to hold off on executing the warrants and searches until Poultry Partners’ attorneys Ken Williams and Michael Graves could present the farmers’ side of the story to the judge. The following day, legal documents were filed.

A hearing date was set the following week but before it got before the judge, ODAFF asked the case be moved to Oklahoma County because it involved a state agency. A couple of weeks later, Judge Haney agreed to move the case to Oklahoma County and that’s where it is today.

Poultry Partners will keep you updated on the outcome of this case.

In the meantime, it has been hinted that ODAFF will try to get four new warrants for different farmers, possibly in Adair or Cherokee Counties. We urge all poultry producers to join Poultry Partners and stand together on this issue. Poultry Partners sent out more than 800 letters to registered Oklahoma poultry producers in November concerning this issue. In each letter was a membership form. If you did not receive this form and would like to join, please call 918-422-4030 and another one will be sent.

“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)

 “Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)