Hannah Thompson-Weeman

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83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Hannah Thompson-Weeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Bites and Bytes Podcast · Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack · 4 Mar 2025 podcast

That's great. Hannah, do you want to introduce yourself? Hi, everyone. Hannah Thompson-Wieman. I'm president and CEO of the Animal Agriculture Alliance. We are a nonprofit working to safeguard the future of animal agriculture and its value to society by bridging the communication gap between the farm and food communities.

Everything we do falls in the areas of connect, so connecting stakeholders from across animal agriculture and the food chain. Engage, so engaging with key influencers on hot topics like animal welfare, sustainability, responsible antibiotic use. And then lastly, the juicy stuff, protect. which is our monitoring of adversarial groups out there.

So individuals and organizations that just don't believe there's a way to ethically and responsibly raise animals for food and are working very fervently to try to advance that mindset using a variety of different tactics, including some that would fall in the realm of what we're going to be talking about here today.

So monitoring those groups and informing the industry about security management and other ways that we can make sure that we're protecting our livelihoods. The alliance has been around since 1987. So we have quite a bit of history in this area and we're based in the D.C. area. Great. Thanks, Hannah. Appreciate that. And last but not least, Mike.

So my current hyper fixation is we have a house guest staying with us right now from Spain. And she brought us these chocolate bars is way underselling. In Spanish, it's called Tron. But I don't really know what that exactly translates to. But it's like the fanciest chocolate bar. And she knows that I love Oreos. So she found an Oreo one.

So it is a very rich and premium chocolate bar with Oreos in it, which I love. Yeah. I had to bring it into my office and hide it from my husband because she brought him one too. But of course, he started to eat mine first. Of course. I just had to ration it and bring it in and hide it. So that's my current fixation at the moment is my Spanish chocolate bar.

And then the first thing that popped in my head, not to stay on this international theme, but when you started talking about a food memory, was when I studied abroad in Brazil and we went to like an actual Brazilian steakhouse. And at this point, I had never been to Brazil. you know, the Fogo de Chão and the Americanized version. So it was all new to me.

And just the parade of meat and different types of meat from Brahma hump to chicken hearts to picanha and everything else. And it just kept appearing and we just kept eating it. So that's the first like very distinct food memory. And especially again, I never been to even the American version of one before that. So it was just

meat as far as the eye can see, which at the Animal Agriculture Alliance, we love that. So that was my distinct food memory was my first authentic in Brazil, Brazilian steakhouse experience. That is awesome. Mike, why don't you go ahead?

I spoke at a meeting in Lancaster recently and I'm not that far away, but I legit went up like a day early so I would get to go to the dinner at the Shady Naples. I was like, that's on the agenda. I'll be there the night before, even though I could drive up the morning of. So, yeah, it's definitely worth the trip.

And I found that same definition when Kristen kind of spoiler alert earlier that she was going to be asked to define agroterrorism. I was like, oh, I better like have something at the ready.

And I found that same definition that focused on disease introduction, which I thought was interesting and maybe needs to be updated and probably has been updated in practice because from what we see, it's much broader than that. And we look to like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act from an animal perspective, which does not limit it to disease introduction.

It's about disrupting the supply chain. So the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act talks about that you're engaging in conduct for the purpose of damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise.

So that would be kind of our definition that we work under when we talk about this concept at the Alliance that, you know, it's about stopping the food supply chain or preventing the ability of getting food to people. And that's when it becomes this definition of agroterrorism.

And then similarly to you guys mentioned, it says a statute covers acts that damage property or cause the loss of real or personal property or places someone in reasonable fear of injury. So from an animal perspective, we really look to that Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act that came about in 2006 because of incidents related to this.

And biosecurity is definitely a big part of it. I mean, that's why we have a big concern a lot of times with trespassing on farms and in operations that there's a reason why, you know, if you've ever been to a hog farm or a broiler farm, you've got to shower in, shower out, suit up at the very least. You can't wear shoes you've worn on another farm. There's restricted access.

And that's not about limiting transparency. That's about limiting disease transfer from farm to farm. So the disease element is definitely still a big part of it. I would just say it's probably not everything that would fall in that bucket. Yeah, that's really interesting.

So we've seen it come up and really what tends to be the hold up to it being applied is, first of all, that documented economic harm. Because for a good thing, the animal agriculture supply chain is very resilient, so it tends to be very adaptable.

So even if there's an activist incident that does disrupt the supply chain, does cause operations to be hindered or become problematic, it doesn't rise to the threshold. I would have to look at what the dollar amount, but exactly what you and Mike were talking about. There is a dollar amount of documented damages you have to show.

So that tends to be a big problem is being able to document that these activist incidents rose to that threshold in the individual circumstances that we can point to. So there's definitely been a lot of interest because we have seen in the last five to 10 years, a big uptick in the more extreme on-farm actions. Thank you so much for having me.

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