SHABUTA, Miss.—Michael Chiaradio lives in Shabuta in rural Clarke County, Mississippi, taking care of his cows and sheep. There is not a single kudzu leaf to be seen on the long drive out to his farm.
Chiaradio moves his cattle every few hours, dedicated to rotating them through small sections of his field to maintain sustainable farming practices. He lets the coyotes outback live; they keep the local feral hogs away, taking hits that might have otherwise gone to his three livestock guardian dogs.
Of all his animals, he only ever has to buy food for the dogs; the land handles the rest.
The New Jersey native spent two years looking at real estate across several states, pouring over a spreadsheet of 30 properties, before picking out what would become his home in Shubuta.
When his search began, Chiaradio was just looking for a house and some land to call his own. But as he tried to decide what to do with the land over time, he fell in love with the idea of sustainable farming.
“I just started watching YouTube videos, and I just got into it,” Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press. “I still got the bug, I guess, I’m still here.”
His dream landed him in Mississippi out of sheer dumb luck, he told the Mississippi Free Press, after a house sale in southern Tennessee fell through around the same time that the previous owner of his Shabuta farm dropped its listing price.
“It was really like a lucky circumstantial type of thing,” he said.
When he first came out to the Shabuta property that is now his farm, clouds of bugs descended upon Chiaradio.
Thankfully, Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press, the insect population quickly evened out after he reintroduced grazing animals—his livestock—into the ecosystem. Now, Chiaradio’s guests mostly just have to deal with love bugs (honeymoon flies) landing on their legs, and he has completely avoided buying a tractor.
While sustainable farming methods solved a few problems for Chiaradio, there were some expenses he could not avoid.
There is no local butcher he can take his cows to. He needs to drive each cow 90 minutes each way just to get a USDA stamp on the meat so he can legally sell it, Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press.
Just four companies—Cargill Inc. Tyson Foods Inc., National Beef Packing Co. and JBS S.A.—control about 85% of beef meatpacking in the United States, with the latter two based in Brazil.
Chiaradio is able to make money on his farm because, with his cows grazing on the plants that grow there year-round, he pays for their food in labor and sweat alone. But, when he had pigs, that was not the case.
“They burden the little guy,” Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press. “That’s why the big farmers can make money, because there’s such razor thin margins now.”
Factory farms are designed to run on “razor thin margins,” which are not sustainable for small farms, Chiaradio said.
“You’ve got to be huge, or you’ve got to get out, and it’s the same for the meat processor,” Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press. “They just don’t have enough heads to share the cost of that USDA regulatory burden, and so they get out of business, and the big (companies) eat up all the market share.”
In light of grocery supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, several senators asked that Congress pass a bipartisan resolution to have the four companies be investigated for price fixing in 2022, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., calling for the use of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 for the first time since the Great Depression.
A USDA study released two years later found that the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission largely abandoned enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act, a law intended to protect farmers and ranchers from monopolies, alongside other antitrust legislation almost entirely in the 1980s. The U.S. went on to lose 59% of its U.S. cattle, hog, and broiler farms between 1974 and 2024, resulting in consequences like price discrimination and a weak grocery supply chain—not to mention the situation it put rural farmers in when it comes to transporting and selling their livestock.
Now, Chiaradio is running for Congress in Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District with local farmers at the front of his mind. That includes strengthening domestic food production and incentivizing farmers to grow a bigger variety of food crops.
If elected, Chiaradio would be the first Democrat to hold the office since World War II and Korean War veteran Sunny Montgomery left office in 1997.
Chiaradio: ‘People Do Want Change’
Chiaradio works remotely, managing in-state Affordable Care Act portals from his living room and, on good days, from the rickety screen porch that guards his front door.
He had been doing public service work like this for years before deciding to run for office.
“I thought my trajectory would be public service on the back end or at an agency,” Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press. “I didn’t think I’d be in politics.”
He chose to run because no one was bothering to challenge incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Micheal Guest, and it was time for change, Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press.
“People do want a change and I think there’s untapped potential,” Chiaradio said.
Raised by Republican parents in New Jersey, the Democratic candidate for Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District is more concerned with getting things done than he is with maintaining the party line.
Growing up around contradictory political views and getting to know the U.S. state-by-state has prepared him to work with, and for, the diverse range of local American cultures, values and ideologies represented in Congress, Chiaradio told the Mississippi Free Press.
“I’ve been to 45 states, so I’ve been around, and I could work with people from all over the country, and I’m just not really ideologically driven,” Chiaradio said. “I want to go and solve problems, and I am willing to work on the job and make compromises, and not have it be some toxic political mess.”
An Uphill Battle
Michael Guest has faced little meaningful opposition in his four previous campaigns, even running unopposed in 2024. He beat Shuwaski Young, the last Democrat to run against him, in 2022 with 132,481 votes compared to Young’s 54,803 votes. Guest won the Republican primary without opposition in 2024 and 2026.
“I didn’t think (Guest’s last opponent) did a really good job, and then the two people before that really didn’t even try to raise any money,” Chiaradio said.
Shuwaski Young, who ran against Guest in 2022, raised just over $77,000 for his 2022 campaign, according to his FEC filings. Late civil rights activist Dorothy ‘Dot’ Benford, who ran against Guest in 2020, won 35% of the vote but did not report any fundraising to the FEC. Michael Evans, Guest’s opponent in 2018, reported raising $34,046 for his campaign.
By comparison, Guest spent over $1,610,000, $550,000 and $950,000 in the 2022, 2020 and 2018 elections respectively, FEC data compiled by Open Secrets shows.
Guest also spent $439,641 in the 2024 election, despite facing no opposition in the Republican primary or the general election. His campaign has only spent about 45% of what they raised for the 2026 race.
Chiaradio has raised a total of just over $155,000 for his campaign this year as of June 30, spending about $132,000 so far and breaking Democratic Party candidate fundraising records for his district.
All of Chiaradio’s campaign contributions came from individual donors across 23 states. About half of the money he raised is made up of donations of $200 or less, his FEC page shows. He has not received any official donations from either the national or state Democratic Party chapters, nor from any political action committees (more commonly known as PACs).
Considering Guest’s previous margins of victory, Chiaradio’s shot at the seat depends heavily on how many voters actually register and show up to the polls.
About 265,000 voters came out to the polls in Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District for the 2024 election, but the district’s population is more than 710,000.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of the 2026 elections and read past stories here.
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