Western Wisconsin farmers say Van Orden behavior derailed meeting on agricultural policy

Two farmers from western Wisconsin are speaking out after a meeting last month on agricultural policy with Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden was derailed by the congressman when he and his staff interrupted and yelled at them, taking issue with the farmers’ apparent political affiliations.

Farmers Dylan Bruce and Darin Von Ruden, who are members of the Wisconsin Farmers Union but spoke out as individuals and not on behalf of the organization, said that they and a handful of other farmers met with Van Orden in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 10. They were visiting the city with the National Farmers Union for the purpose of discussing policy and for Wisconsin farmers to share their experiences with Van Orden. But that didn’t happen, they said.

The meeting started out with a civil conversation between the farmers and one of Van Orden’s staff members, both Bruce and Von Ruden said. But when Van Orden joined the meeting, Von Ruden said, the congressman almost immediately narrowed in on him for having criticized Van Orden for failing to support family farms.

He “just went into quite a barrage of things, pointing directly at me and not really concerned about anybody else that was in the room,” Von Ruden, a Westby dairy farmer and the president of the union, told the Wisconsin Independent. He called it a “scolding.”

“Coming out of that meeting, I felt a lot of frustration from our members not being able to tell their story when they had taken time out of their busy schedules to come and talk with our elected officials,” Von Ruden said.

Bruce, who owns and operates the farm Circadian Organics in Ferryville, a small town in Crawford County, said the meeting and Van Orden’s behavior were disappointing.

“It is part of a pattern that is disturbing, and it’s not that he’s part of the other party, quote-unquote, that makes me not want to vote for him,” Bruce told the Wisconsin Independent. “I voted for Republicans when I believed that they stand up for small farms and agricultural policy. But I’m not going to vote for someone who just shouts me down when I’m trying to have those conversations.”

The Wisconsin Independent reached out to Van Orden’s office for comment but did not get a response.

Van Orden is running this fall for a second term to represent Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District. He has a history of explosive incidents.

In 2023, Van Orden cursed at teenage Senate pages who were taking photographs in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. While running for office in 2021, he yelled at a teenage library page over a Pride Month display at his local library. He has also cursed at White House staff, had heated confrontations on the House floor, and interrupted President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address earlier this year.

One big piece of the farmers’ visit was to discuss the farm bill being crafted by the Republican-led House Agriculture Committee, which Van Orden sits on. 

The committee must rewrite the farm bill every five years. It sets policy and funding for nutrition, agricultural and conservation programs. It has been stalled for months, largely due to complaints over cuts the bill makes to low-income food assistance programs. According to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which prepares budget information for Congress, the bill would cut roughly $30 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the next decade, a fact Van Orden has called a lie. SNAP provides financial assistance to low-income families to purchase food and groceries.

Bruce said he was excited to meet with Van Orden because he believed the congressman cared about agriculture. He said he prepared questions about the farm bill, including about changes to how individual farmers get paid and increases to income caps for farm aid programs that Bruce said benefit bigger farm operations.

“We need to support small farms so that our families stay on the landscape and with these rural communities.” Bruce said. “So I wanted to ask Congressman Van Orden, because it seems to me like your policies are supporting this feedback loop of bigger and bigger in agriculture, What’s your intention here? How can we support small farms? How can we meet in the middle?”

But when Bruce asked Van Orden questions about the farm bill and the CBO report, he said, it seemed to set the congressman off.

According to Bruce, Van Orden went into a “stream of consciousness, run-on sentence monologue” about the CBO, Bruce said, calling the group “Democratic liars” and the report “bullshit.” He said Van Orden looked agitated and was slapping his desk, saying, “That kind of agitation just built into what really felt like being subjected to a tirade rather than having a conversation.”

Bruce said that Van Orden and his staff were dismissive of him because they believed he was a Democrat, saying he wore “the other jersey” and would never vote for Van Orden anyway.

Bruce, who has been advocating for farm issues since 2017, said it was the most disappointing meeting he’s ever had with a legislator.

“I think that’s inappropriate. I don’t want other farmers or other constituents, no matter what their business is, to have to face that same dynamic,” Bruce said.

“It’s good that we have different opinions, and we just have to work to that more common ground. So how can we work with somebody that doesn’t really want to work with the other side of the aisle at all?” Von Ruden said.

Bruce left his card with Van Orden’s staff at the end of the meeting, saying he was open to meeting again while he was still in D.C., but he never heard from them. He said he still wants to have the conversation, inviting Van Orden to have a beer with him at his farm, as long as the discussion can be civil.

“If he can’t give us the time of day or listen, if this is a dynamic that’s going to continue, it’s untenable,” Bruce said. “And so that’s why I now at this point want to either see him turn that page and start to have better conversations and treat his constituents better and his peers better, or we need a different representative that can have that integrity and will have those conversations.”

Van Orden was first elected to office in 2022, flipping the district red and replacing longtime Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who retired after 26 years.

He’s facing a challenge from Eau Claire Democratic small-business owner Rebecca Cooke in the Nov. 5 election. Cooke previously ran for the seat in 2022, but lost in the Democratic primary.