Commissioner of Agriculture
About this race: This office licenses hemp cultivation in Texas, so the two major-party nominees have both taken positions on hemp. They point in opposite directions. The three-term incumbent is not on the ballot, having lost his primary in March.
Whose record this page shows. The paragraph above is about the
race, and part of it describes a different person. Everything after this line on this page is
Austin R. Kelly’s own record and nothing else — including, where it says so, the
finding that no record was located. Every record the paragraph above describes is
set out candidate by candidate on the
Commissioner of Agriculture race page.
Austin R. KellyLibertarian
75/100
support for legal access — top band, 67 to 100
thin — one or two records produced this number · 1 of 1 records scored
How this score is worked out
Seven kinds of act move this number, and they do not count equally. A recorded vote
counts 3, and so does authoring a bill or signing an executive action; signing on to
somebody else’s bill counts 2. A statement or a questionnaire answer counts 2 as
well, and an organisational endorsement counts 1. A vote takes its direction from the
bill, whose effect is set out in advance; the rest take it from our reading of what was
said, and each one below shows that reading and the reason for it. Acts shown with no
number were examined and deliberately left out of the arithmetic, with a reason given.
- 2026-03-14 statement — Pledges to cut regulation of the hemp industry, which eases the supply side, though it says nothing about THC or legal access for consumers, counted as +1 at weight 2
-
Said2026-03-14
Campaign issues page, under a heading reading "1. Unleash Agricultural Freedom", states that the Texas Department of Agriculture is "treating small farmers like criminals and hemp producers like threats", and pledges: "Deregulation: Aggressively cut the bureaucratic red tape surrounding the hemp industry, cottage food production, and local meat processing."
⚠️This is a hemp regulation position only: hemp is framed as an over-regulated agricultural industry, and the page contains no statement about THC, marijuana or legalization. The page carries no date: 2026-03-14 is the date of the earliest Internet Archive capture containing this text, a capture date and not a publication date, so the position was published by at least then.
kellyfortx.com, web.archive.org
See the whole Commissioner of Agriculture race, including every opponent →
Who is paying for this campaign
Campaign finance — Texas Ethics Commission
Texas Ethics Commission filer 90468, filed as
“Kelly, Austin R.”, treasurer appointment for Agriculture Commissioner, dated 2025-12-09.
Why there are no figures and no industry breakdown here.
Texas does not require a candidate to report a contributor’s employer or occupation —
the Commission’s own 2026 guide asks for the amount, the contributor’s name and
address, and the date, and that is all. So there is nothing in these filings to group into
industries, and we have built no such grouping rather than imply one. Separately, the
Commission’s bulk filing archive tells automated readers to stay out of it, and we
honour that, so we have read no individual Texas contribution record. Treat the itemised
question as unchecked by us, not as checked and found empty.
Read this filer’s own reports at
the Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) → — choose Transaction Type
“Contributions”, then Search By “Filer ID” and enter
90468. The Commission’s search posts its results, so there
is no direct link to one filer’s page; the number above is what makes it one step
instead of a hunt.
Any grouping of contributors into an industry is weedvoter’s own classification, applied to employer and committee names exactly as filed. The Commission publishes employers and committees; it never publishes industries. OpenSecrets discontinued its public interface in April 2025, so nothing here is an OpenSecrets classification.
Money received is not a position. Everything on this card is money that changed
hands. It is not evidence that any contribution influenced any decision, nothing on it is
placed beside a roll call, and we make no claim about anyone’s motive.
For what Austin R. Kelly has actually done about cannabis, read the record above on this
page — the roll calls, the bills that carry their name, and the date of each one,
every entry linked to the document it came from. That is the part of this page built to be
judged, and it is the part the score is calculated from. No contribution on this card moves
that score by a cent.