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The owner of Florida-based Oakes Farms, known for his political views and conspiracy theories, has no legitimate legal claim against a Florida school district that terminated the farm’s food-supply contract over COVID-19 concerns, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.

“To be fair, we can understand why Alfie Oakes assumed that his speech on controversial racial topics must have motivated the contract termination,” a panel of the U.S. 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the opinion. “The problem for him is that the evidence did not support that supposition. Because Oakes Farms has not shown that the school district’s food-safety concerns were pretextual, we AFFIRM the entry of summary judgment.”

Oakes, the owner of Oakes Farms Food & Distribution Services, part of a large farm operation in Florida with thousands of acres in Naples and surrounding areas, filed suit against the Lee County School District and its leadership in 2020, claiming freedom of speech violations and retaliation.

It all began in the early days of the COVID crisis. Amid concerns about how the COVID virus could spread, the school district asked the farm to provide its food-safety protocols. Alfie Oakes around that time had posted on social media that the COVID pandemic was a hoax, and he made disparaging remarks about the Black Lives Matter movement, the court explained.

Oakes Farms sent a response to the school district from a subsidiary, not Oakes Farms itself, the court said. The school superintendent found that to be inadequate and soon terminated the district’s contract with Oakes.

Alfie Oakes sued, but a federal district court found that the district’s concerns about food safety outweighed Oakes’ free speech rights. He appealed, and the 11^th Circuit this week upheld the lower court, noting that the contract termination was not done as punishment for Oakes’ controversial statements.

“To be sure, it appears obvious that (school Superintendent Gregory) Adkins did disagree with Oakes about Covid-19,” the opininon reads. “But that difference in viewpoint was not the basis for his actions鈥攁 concrete concern about food safety was.”

The appellate court relied on the long-established 1996 Pickering/Umbehr court decision and legal doctrine, which allows some limits on speech to protect workers when a government agency acts as a marketplace consumer.

“The point is that the school district has presented no shortage of evidence that student safety drove its actions,” the court noted.

A Lee County School District representative was not immediately available Thursday for comment about what the district has spent on legal fees in the case, or the district costs were covered by an insurance trust or insurance policy.

The full opinion can be seen here.

Top photo: Alfie Oakes, who also owned Seed to Table Supermarket, records a video message inside his store during a new coronavirus pandemic in 2021, in Naples. Oakes vowed to fight any government mandates requiring his employees or customers to wear face masks or get vaccinated to help curb the spread of COVID-19. (Phelan M. Ebenhack via AP)

Related: Former Oakes Farms’ Manager, Insurance Agent Tied to Crop Insurance Fraud

Topics Agribusiness K-12