Missouri Farmer Pleads Guilty To $140 Million Organic Grain Fraud Scheme

A Missouri farmer has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges after he charged customers more than $140 million for conventionally produced grain sold as certified organic.
Randy Constant, who farms near Chillicothe, Missouri, owned and operated a business called Organic Land Management, as well as a grain marketing firm in Iowa called Jericho Solutions. In federal court, Constant said he pocketed an enormous premium selling corn, wheat and soybeans as certified organic when they were not.

Three Nebraska farmers who supplied Constant pleaded guilty earlier this year to fraudulently marketing the non-organic grain.

The fraud ended a decade into the scheme and only when buyers discovered that Constant’s grain tested positive for GMOs, according to Mark Kastel, who co-founded organic-industry watchdog Cornucopia Institute.

“Its magnitude is pretty much unprecedented, and jaw-dropping in scale,” Kastel lamented.