Sid Miller

But this is an issue where there's a political cost to that.

And I talked to the Republican Agriculture Commissioner, Sid Miller, the other day, who has been loud on some of this stuff, flock cameras and data centers.

He's coming from it mostly from the perspective of protecting farmland.

But I talked about with him, he and Greg Abbott have not had a great relationship.

I think voters would be right to suspect the moratorium is going to end the week after the election.

And there's going to be a couple months where the data center guys can get going and everybody agrees.

They can flood the legislature with their political donations and figure and work out a compromise that's beneficial to the companies and the people who want to build because Greg Abbott has gotten a lot of money from these people, as Sid Miller was keen to point out.

Is it a wedge issue? I think that's a good...

It's like there's a guy who is getting a lot of more notoriety within the party.

He kind of filled in the spot where we used to see people like, you know, Louie Gomer or Sid Miller or, you know, Ronnie Jackson.

You know, none of those people were near this or at least, you know, given speaking slots.

And so you can see almost like a new generation personality.

A USDA spokesman said the drop in cases is the result of aggressive USDA strategy to mitigate the spread of the New World screwworm.

Now, zero cases in wildlife is unexplainable to me, and the lack of NWS infections in wildlife or the capture of NWS flies is suspicious, said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.

Robert, what is happening here? Has the USDA eradicated the New World Screw Worm outbreak in the United States?

So the USDA said basically this is a result of an aggressive strategy to target New World Screwworm infections.

It's plausible that the USDA has, through specific targeted actions and increased funding, not necessarily eradicated, they're not reporting zero cases, but has significantly decreased... spread or mitigated the spread of New World School Room.

However, I do not think, I think amidst Sid Miller's comment, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, it's not implausible that something suspicious is going on here because they're, so Sid Miller, he said that the Texas Ag Commission has sent multiple fly trap samples to the USDA that they believed were new world screw room flies caught in the wild and the usda has said no they weren't it's not implausible that they're that that there's some kind of uh issue going on here maybe there's a time lag or or something like that where the usda's data is not correct here or that there's not or that there are cases they have not detected in august um so i i don't think actually that usda i i think it's i think it's plausible the USDA has stopped the spread of New World Screw Worm, but it's really more data is needed.

Too early to tell.

Yeah.

Nothing more.

That's Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican.

Unlike other state leaders, Miller has no dog in this fight.

He lost his primary election in March and is writing out his term until the end of the year.

Investigators accused participants of removing loaded semi-trailers without authorization from various facilities.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller called it, "An alleged organized operation targeting Texas agriculture on a massive scale," noting that grain sitting in a bin represents months of work and enormous investment.

Authorities arrested Larry Regalado, 57, of New Braunfels, Ricky Regalado, 52, of Smiley, and Pablo Franco Jr., 46, from Atascosa County, each facing charges involving property theft, organized criminal activity, and stolen grain.

The inquiry now covers more than 200 confirmed or potentially stolen shipments, with additional arrests remaining possible.

We've been talking to ranchers for the past week or so.

And one thing that's been consistent is anger about some of these decisions, including even Sid Miller, the Texas Ag Commissioner, who is MAGA through and through, described this as a reason not to vote MAGA for ranchers.

A lot of folks this midterm election season.

Listen to Sid Miller again.

He's the commissioner in Texas.

We also talked to Will Harris, a fourth generation cattleman, white oak pastures.