A federal judge in St. Paul sentenced a 66-year-old Minnesota farmer to three years in prison for falsely selling rail cars full of conventional grain as organic product.
"People looking at defrauding the organic sector in this way will have heard about [this case]," U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez said at a federal courthouse Monday morning.
James Clayton Wolf, a corn and soybean farmer in Jeffers, Minn., pleaded guilty in May to a scheme to defraud organic grain customers. While Wolf lost his organic certification in 2020, prosecutors said his scheme to sell genetically modified grain under false representation began years earlier.
Menendez noted that she was even an organic food consumer herself, saying the victims of organic grain fraud — though they couldn't individually be identified in this case — was anyone who participated in the specialized food system that requires different growing practices than traditional agriculture, including, generally, the absence of synthetic fertilizers.
The government had sought a five-year prison sentence for Wolf.
Prosecutors said they only uncovered Wolf's fraud — which began back in 2014 — because of a consolidation of the company from whom Wolf purchased conventional grain.
According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Lewis, Wolf purchased genetically modified grain on rail cars and sold to an organic broker in Pennsylvania. Wolf represented the corn and soybeans as certified organic, which fetches a far more lucrative price than traditional grain.
Those organic grains, which are certified under a U.S. Department of Agriculture program, are often sold to livestock producers to feed cattle.