09/27/2024
Yesterday, we joined with co-counsel to bring a lawsuit on behalf of 13 Arkansas poultry farmers against the principal executive officers of Cooks Venture — the much-hyped “progressive” chicken processor that abruptly shuttered in late 2023, causing financial ruin across the Ozark countryside.
Among other unlawful conduct, our complaint alleges that the defendant executives — Matthew Wadiak, Blake Evans, Tim Singleton, and John Niemann — directed Cooks Venture to extract tens of millions of dollars’ worth of chicken-growing facilities and services from Ozark farmers through a systematic campaign of fraud and deceit stretching throughout its years of operation, from 2019 to 2024.
Our complaint also alleges that, in the weeks following Cooks Venture’s shutdown, the defendants sought to avoid their firm’s obligation to feed, slaughter, and pay farmers for raising more than a million birds it had already placed in their care by conspiring with the Director of the Livestock and Poultry Division of the Arkansas Department of Agriculture — Mr. Patrick Fisk — to have state agents murder them under false color of law. Pursuant to this conspiracy, the complaint states that Mr. Fisk instructed his Division’s agents to enter farmers’ property without legal authority, flood their chicken houses with a suffocating foam to murder the tens of thousands of birds inside, and leave the rotting carcasses of the dead animals on the ground for farmers’ to clean up.
Our clients are thirteen of the scores of Ozark farmers who have suffered grievous injuries as a result of the reprehensible executive malfeasance alleged in the complaint. They deserve justice under the law. We intend to get it for them.
Antimonopoly Counsel represents thirteen chicken farmers in a lawsuit under the Packers and Stockyards Act against the principal executive officers of Cooks Venture, the poultry processing startup that went bankrupt after swindling, stiffing, and exploiting farmers for over four years.
