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DES MOINES, IOWA--"I believe that equity strongly favors giving producers the opportunity to vote on this checkoff program," Agriculture Secretary wrote to his top staff in February. "The checkoff after all is a mandatory assessment akin to a tax that all producers must pay even if they disagree with it."

With those words Glickman put the best face on the fact that his staff did a poor job verifying what he called the "thousands and thousands" of signatures on a petition calling for a vote. The USDA agreed to call a referendum on whether hog farmers must pay for promotion of pork products. Family farmers, including those working with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, no longer wish to pay into a system that they see supporting factory farms and hurting their own business.

"Among other things, USDA's data entry process was flawed, valid petitions were deleted and duplicate entries not removed, making it impossible to state precisely the final number of petitions," Glickman wrote in his letter authorizing the vote, which is expected in late summer just before harvest.

Now family farmers are fighting to ensure that individuals who have been forced out of the business temporarily since they signed the petition be allowed to participate in the vote. How many weeks voters will have to return ballots, who gets ballots in the mail and who must go to a special location for in-person voting, and what the ballots will actually say are all issues that remain to be decided.

"Nearly 1,000 hog farmers and other people sent in comments to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service regarding the proposed rules for the referendum to end the mandatory pork checkoff," said Larry Ginter of CCI. "An overwhelming majority of the commenters favored the position of the Campaign for Family Farms to hold the vote in a way that encourages the highest level of hog farmer participation."