Pure Prairie Poultry Animal Cruelty Whistleblower Wins National PETA Award

A North Iowa man who below the whistle on animal cruelty at Pure Prairie Poultry (PPP) is the recipient of one of PETA’s highest honors.

Jeremy Schmidt of Nora Springs was presented with the 2025 Nanci Alexander Activist Award on April 6th. PETA says it recognizes Schmidt for risking his career reporting PPP’s decision to leave thousands of chickens on trucks for as long as five days with no food or water outside its now-shuttered processing plant in Charles City. 

Schmidt was presented with the award by Alexander herself, who founded the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida in 1989—during PETA’s “High Tea and Highballs” 45th-anniversary celebration in Miami.  

PETA says Schmidt, a 38-year-old Iraq War veteran who worked at PPP, was alarmed when the company left its contract farms without feed for millions of chickens—and said he “knew we had to get PETA involved” after executives gave employees conflicting accounts about the birds’ welfare.  

The information Schmidt provided led Iowa and Minnesota officials to feed over one-and-a-half million of starving chickens and sparked an ongoing federal investigation. Unfortunately, state officials could not complete the sale of the birds to other processors and the vast majority of the chickens were euthanized.

 PETA also notes that once Schmidt exposed Pure Prairie’s abandonment of millions of chickens amid bankruptcy—just two years after the company had collected over $45 million in taxpayer subsidies—lawmakers demanded accountability from the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the agency’s lack of oversight.