Farm Aide: Janie Simms Hipp 'was put on this earth’ to work in agricultural law
In the 1980s, a severe economic downturn led hundreds of thousands of farmers to default on their loans and lose their land. Known as the farm financial crisis, it devastated entire agricultural communities, as many businesses closed and families left for better opportunities.
At the time, Janie Simms Hipp was in private practice in Oklahoma City, representing banks and handling commercial litigation. As part of her job, she helped clients take people’s homes and businesses. Until, she says, she couldn’t do it anymore.
“I just literally woke up one morning, and I walked into my partner’s office, and I said, ‘I quit,’” says Hipp, a 1984 graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. “I cannot live with myself if I do this.”
Hipp, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, grew up in Idabel, Oklahoma. She understood what life was like for farmers and small business owners, including her grandfather, who had a local tractor dealership. After he lost his dealership, she knew she needed to make a change.
Over the past 40 years, Hipp has become a leading agricultural lawyer and an expert in the intersection between agricultural law and Indian law. She has worked at both the state and federal levels to advocate for farmers and ranchers and their families. This includes with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she served as the first Native American and fourth female general counsel.
“Janie is one of those people who is quietly getting a lot of things done that most people don’t get to see,” says David Grahn, who served as principal deputy general counsel under Hipp at the Department of Agriculture. “She is a tremendous example, not just because she’s a Native woman, but because she is somebody who has real special gifts and has been able to bring people together to make other people’s lives better.”
Becoming an ag advocate
In 1987, Hipp joined Oklahoma Attorney General Robert Henry’s office, where she worked to get farmers back on their feet.
In Hipp’s first year as an assistant attorney general, she attended a meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General’s agriculture and rural legal affairs committee. There, lawyers and farm and ranch advocates discussed what to do about the farm financial crisis.
A major issue was the Department of Agriculture Farmers Home Administration’s move to foreclose on many farms without due process, Hipp says. The agency, which since has disbanded, was created after the Great Depression to finance loans for farmers and rural communities.
“Here I am as a social worker, a baby lawyer, my grandfather just lost everything, and I walk into this,” says Hipp, who earned her bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Oklahoma and worked for the state’s mental health department before deciding to go to law school.
“I came back to Robert’s office, and I sat down and I said, ‘We have to do something. There are other AGs offices that are doing something, and we need to find out what’s happening in Oklahoma,” Hipp adds.
Hipp began presenting testimony to the U.S. Senate about the farm financial crisis. She helped educate Oklahoma farmers on the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which strengthened their rights as borrowers. She also advised the Oklahoma legislature on agricultural issues.
“Janie is always thinking of other people, and she’s always using her skills to support other people,” says Sarah Vogel, the former North Dakota commissioner of agriculture, who then worked alongside Hipp as an assistant attorney general in North Dakota. “She also refuses to become discouraged.”
Hipp discovered the University of Arkansas School of Law offered an LLM program in agricultural and food law, which she began attending in 1992. While finishing her thesis, she taught at the university and worked as a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center. It is the country’s leading source of agricultural and food law research and information.
“I started going across the country, invited by ag groups and rural communities and federal agencies, to talk to people about what ag law was and how varied it was, but also how critical it was,” says Hipp, who later served as the center’s associate director and interim director. “It was great fun. I think it’s what I was put on this earth to do.”
Taking the lead
Hipp served in the Department of Agriculture three times, starting in 2007 under President George W. Bush. At that time, she was the national program leader for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which supports programs that advance agriculture-related sciences.
In 2009, under President Barack Obama, Hipp became the senior adviser for tribal relations to Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. She also was the founding director of the department’s Office of Tribal Relations.
“I had an enormous amount of trust in her judgment, and when she would make a recommendation, 99.9 times out of 100, I would just simply say we’re going to do what Janie suggested we should do,” Vilsack said in a video celebrating Hipp’s induction to the Chickasaw Hall of Fame last year.
President Joe Biden nominated Hipp to serve as general counsel of the Department of Agriculture in 2021. During her tenure, she advised on law and policy in food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition and numerous related issues.
“I was popping in one hour and 30-minute meetings across that entire portfolio,” Hipp says. “I was able to do that because I had already spent 20-some-odd years teaching agricultural law and living agricultural law, from the beginning of it being a specialization and having my roots come out of the financial crisis.”
By then, Hipp had directed the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative, which she helped start at the University of Arkansas School of Law in 2013. Its mission includes assisting Native leaders with model food and agriculture code development. It also hosts an annual leadership summit for Native youth who are interested in agriculture policy and production.
Hipp served as the founding chief executive officer of the Native American Agriculture Fund from 2018 to 2021. This private charitable trust emerged from the settlement of Keepseagle v. Vilsack, a class action lawsuit over claims that the Department of Agriculture discriminated against Native farmers and ranchers.
Vogel, who also was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the Keepseagle case, says no one objected to Hipp taking the helm of the fund.
“With thousands of claimants, that says something,” Vogel adds.
Planning for the future
After leaving the Biden administration, Hipp stepped into yet another founding role.
In 2023, she became the chief executive officer of Native Agriculture Financial Services, the nation’s first “other financing institution” that helps meet the capital needs of Native farmers and ranchers and their communities. According to Hipp, other financing institutions are entities within the Farm Credit System, the largest lender in agriculture and rural communities.
“Other financing institutions have been around for decades, but nobody had ever tried to build one to reach deeper into Indian country,” Hipp says.
Her work is more important than ever as current financial struggles in agriculture remind her of those experienced by farmers 40 years ago, says Hipp, a longtime ABA member.
“We are in need today of doing what we did in the ’80s, which is putting a new set of glasses on and figuring out what our policy initiatives are going to be to solidify our agricultural sector at this moment and for the next 100 years,” she says.
Hipp, who lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and recently welcomed her first grandson, intends to be part of that planning.
Members Who Inspire is an ABA Journal series profiling exceptional ABA members. If you know members who do unique and important work, you can nominate them for this series by emailing [email protected].
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