Missouri farmer escapes prison term for his role in scheme that cheated consumers

Mike Hendricks
·2 min read

A Chillicothe, Missouri, farmer has been sentenced to probation for helping his friend and employer perpetrate one of the biggest and longest-running frauds in the history of American agriculture.

Steven Whiteside, 57, pleaded guilty in December to signing a document that allowed Randy Constant to misrepresent conventionally grown crops as higher-priced organic grain.

Federal prosecutors recommended that Steven Whiteside, 57, serve one year in prison, the maximum under the sentencing guidelines, followed by a year of supervised release and pay a $55,000 fine for his role in Constant’s long-running scheme that the government maintained had undermined consumer confidence in the organic food industry.

In their sentencing memorandum, prosecutors said Whiteside would be getting off easy with only a year in prison because “in a very real sense the loss figure used to calculate Defendant’s total offense level understates the harm caused by Defendant’s conduct.” Whiteside received $177,000 for grain that Constant resold to animal feed producers at a high price because it was supposedly organic.

Consumers, in turn, paid a premium for the meat from chickens and livestock they believed had been raised organically, such that the financial harm done up the supply chain was “a significant multiple” of that $177,000 Whiteside received, the document said.

But Whiteside’s Kansas City defense attorney, J.R. Hobbs, argued that his client deserved a lesser sentence because of his clean record and family obligations. Federal Magistrate Judge Jill A. Morris last week sentenced Whiteside in a Kansas City courtroom to three years probation and a $45,000 fine.

Constant killed himself in August 2019, three days after he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on one count of wire fraud. For more than a decade, the 60-year-old Constant had misled customers into thinking they were buying certified organic grain when it wasn’t. The scheme involved at least $142 million in grain sales, millions of which Constant squandered on lavish family vacations, trips to Las Vegas, prostitutes and ownership of a fish farm that Whiteside helped run.

Four other farmers, one from Missouri and three from Nebraska, also got prison sentences for selling non-genetically modified corn and soybeans that they knew Constant was misrepresenting as organic.

Constant’s fraud prompted calls for government regulators and the organic food industry to tighten their oversight to prevent future abuses.

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