In June of 2001, the US Supreme Court ruled that an industry-financed promotion program for mushrooms violated the First Amendment. Since the 1980s, generic advertising programs for dozens of farm commodities have been entangled in a great deal of litigation. This paper looks at the history of the generic advertising policies and why the litigation arose when it did. Although some have argued that the litigation is the result of either unbridled lawyers or free-riding farmers, the author argues that the current round of litigation is simply an inevitable outgrowth of fairly recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on commercial speech. The author concludes by predicting an increase in generic advertising litigation that will be based upon the degree of collectivization in an industry.