Media Must Cover FAA Drone Crackdown as Ag Industry Capture

A licensed drone pilot named Joseph Allman filmed ranch hands in California's Central Valley kicking and pulling young calves with pliers. One worker was fired. Now Allman is under FAA investigation — while the very cattle company at the center of his footage has submitted public comments demanding the FAA ban drone flights over agricultural facilities entirely, framing legal oversight of animal abuse as a "food security vulnerability."

This is the ag-gag playbook updated for the drone era. When activists sneaked onto farms with cameras, the industry backed criminal laws to stop them. Now that drone pilots can document abuse legally from the air, the industry is lobbying federal regulators to take their licenses — and the FAA appears to be listening. The same agency that has let the investigation drag without responding to Allman's lawyer is simultaneously advancing new rules that could ground animal rights groups permanently.

We call on the media to cover the FAA's investigation of Joseph Allman not as a routine aviation enforcement story, but as a case study in corporate capture — where an industry caught on camera abusing animals uses its political influence to shut down the cameras. The public deserves reporting that asks who the FAA is actually protecting: the food supply, or the companies that profit from keeping abuse out of sight.