By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Deborah Van Fleet for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

If you consider yourself a conscious consumer, grocery shopping can get very complicated very quickly, with countless different labels implying that the food inside was produced humanely. It's important to know what these labels mean, and that can be difficult with a term like "organic," which is often used loosely in casual conversation. But what does meat or dairy being organic really mean for animals, farmers and consumers? We break the latest rules down in this explainer.

To start, the answer is more complicated than you might think. Just six percent of all food sold in the U.S. is organic, but any meat or produce that's marketed as such has to be approved by the United States Department of Agriculture. Although the Trump administration had suspended any updates to the organic standards, the Biden Administration reversed that decision, and earlier this year, the USDA announced its updated rules for organically-produced livestock.

The change was the culmination of a years-long push by some organic farmers to improve how animals are treated on organic farms, and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack celebrated the changes as a win for animals, producers and consumers.

"This organic poultry and livestock standard establishes clear and strong standards that will increase the consistency of animal welfare practices in organic production and in how these practices are enforced," Vilsack said in a statement. "Competitive markets help deliver greater value to all producers, regardless of size."

Before looking at what "organic" means under these changes, however, it's important to know what it doesn't mean.

Does 'Organic' Mean Pesticide-Free?

No. Organic doesn't mean pesticide-free, and this is a common misconception. Although the standards for organically-produced livestock do place some limits on the use of medications, antibiotics, parasiticides, herbicides and other synthetic chemicals in livestock farming, they don't prohibit the use of all pesticides - just most of the synthetic ones, though even then, there are exceptions.

What Do the Current Organic Rules for Livestock Require?

The purpose of the USDA's new Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards is to ensure "clear, consistent and enforceable" animal welfare standards, according to the Organic Trade Association. The rules cover all types of livestock: non-aviary species like lamb and cattle have one set of requirements, while birds of all kinds have another. There are also some additional rules that apply to specific species, such as pigs.

It's long - over 100 pages in total. Some of the rules are fairly simple, like the bans on certain practices, including gestation crates for pregnant pigs; others, like those addressing how much space livestock must have in their living quarters, are much more lengthy and complex.

One thing to keep in mind is that these rules only apply to farms and companies that want their products to be certified organic. It's perfectly legal for producers to ignore all of these requirements, so long as they don't market or refer to their products as "organic." They might instead opt for one of the food labels with less or no regulation at all, like "natural."

Lastly, although these rules take effect in 2025, there's one big exception: Any farm that's certified as organic before 2025 will have until 2029 to abide by the new standards. This provision effectively gives existing producers, including the largest ones, more time to adapt to the new rules than any new farms.

With that said, let's take a look at what these standards are.

New Organic Rules for Livestock's Outdoor Access

The new rules require organically-produced livestock to have access to outdoor space, a privilege many livestock are not afforded. Under the new rules, non-avian livestock like cows and lamb must have year-round access to "the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, clean water for drinking, and direct sunlight." If that outdoor area has soil, it must be maintained "as appropriate for the season, climate, geography, species of livestock." The previous rule required outdoor access, but didn't specify any maintenance requirements for outdoor areas.

Birds, meanwhile, need to have "year-round access to the outdoors, soil, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, direct sunlight, clean water for drinking, materials for dust bathing, and adequate space to escape aggressive behaviors."

The shelters must be constructed such that birds have "ready access" to the outdoors throughout the day. For every 360 birds, there must be "one (1) linear foot of exit area space;" this, according to the USDA's calculations, would ensure that no bird has to wait more than an hour to come inside or go outside.

Egg-laying chickens are required to have access to at least one square foot of outdoor space for every 2.25 pounds of bird at the facility; this requirement is calculated per pound, rather than per bird, to account for variations in size between different birds of the same species. Broiler chickens, on the other hand, are to be given a "flat rate" of at least two square feet per bird.

New Organic Requirements for Livestock's Indoor Space & Housing

The new organic standards also require farmers to give animals enough space to stretch their bodies, move around, and engage in their natural behaviors.

The indoor shelters for non-avian livestock state that the animals have to be given enough space "to lie down, stand up, and fully stretch their limbs and allow livestock to express their normal patterns of behavior over a 24-hour period." This is much more specific than the previous version, which only required enough space for "natural maintenance, comfort behaviors and exercise," and made no reference to how often the animals must have access to this space.

The new rules say that animals may be temporarily confined to spaces that don't meet these requirements - for instance, during milking - but only if they also have "complete freedom of movement during significant parts of the day for grazing, loafing, and exhibiting natural social behavior."

For birds, the indoor shelters must be "sufficiently spacious to allow all birds to move freely, stretch both wings simultaneously, stand normally, and engage in natural behaviors," including "dust bathing, scratching, and perching." In addition, although artificial lighting is allowed, birds must be given at least eight hours of continuous darkness every day.

The rules require that egg-laying chickens be given at least six inches of perch space per bird; chickens who are raised for meat, and non-chicken birds that also lay eggs, are exempt from this requirement.

Organic Rules for Livestock's Health Care

Under the new rules, all surgeries to treat disease in livestock must be carried out "in a manner that employs best management practices in order to minimize pain, stress, and suffering" of the animal. This is a significant addition, as the previous rules did not require farmers to do anything to minimize the pain of animals during surgery.

The USDA has a list of approved anesthetics that may be used on animals during surgery; however, if none of those anesthetics are available, producers are required to take alternative steps to ease the animal's pain - even if doing so results in the animals losing their "organic" status.

Banned Practices for Organic Livestock

The following procedures and devices are completely banned under the new rules for organic products:

• Tail docking (cows). This refers to the removal of most or all of a cow's tail.


• Gestation crates and farrowing cages (pigs). These are harshly-confining cages that mother pigs are kept in during pregnancy and after giving birth.


• Induced molting (chickens). Also known as forced molting, this is the practice of depriving chickens of food and/or daylight for up to two weeks in order to temporarily increase their egg output.


• Wattling (cows). This painful procedure involves slicing off chunks of the skin under a cow's neck for identification purposes.


• Toe clipping (chickens). This refers to cutting off a chicken's toes to prevent them from scratching themselves.


• Mulesing (sheep). Another painful procedure, this is when portions of a sheep's hindquarters are cut off in order to reduce the risk of infection.

The new regulations also contain partial bans on other common factory farm practices. They are:

• Debeaking (chickens). This is the practice of cutting off chickens' beaks to prevent them from pecking one another. The new regulations prohibit debeaking in many contexts, but still permit it so long as a) it takes place within the first 10 days of a chick's life, and b) it doesn't involve removing more than one-third of chick's upper beak.


• Tail docking (sheep). While tail docking of cattle is flatly prohibited, sheep's tails may still be docked under the new regulations, but only up to the distal end of the caudal fold.


• Teeth clipping (pigs). This refers to removing the top-third of a pig's needle teeth to prevent them from injuring each other. The new rules state that teeth clipping may not be performed on a routine basis, but is permitted when alternative attempts to reduce infighting have failed.

Do Organizations Other Than the USDA Offer Certification for Animal Products?


Yes. In addition to the USDA, several nonprofit organizations offer their own certifications for ostensibly "humane" food products. Here are a few of them; for a more thorough comparison of how their welfare standards compare to each other, the Animal Welfare Institute has you covered.


Animal Welfare Approved


Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) is a certification granted by the nonprofit A Greener World. Its standards are quite rigorous: all animals must have continuous outdoor pasture access, tail-docking and beak-trimming are prohibited, no animals may be kept in cages and calves must be raised by their mothers, among other requirements.


Over the last century, the chicken industry has selectively bred chickens to grow so abnormally large that many of them can't support their own weight. In an attempt to combat this, AWA standards place a limit on how quickly chickens can grow (no more than 40 grams a day, on average).


Certified Humane


The Certified Humane label is granted by the nonprofit organization Humane Farm Animal Care, which has developed its own specific welfare standards for each of the most commonly farmed animals. Certified Humane standards require that cows have access to the outdoors (but not necessarily pasture), pigs have adequate bedding and access to rooting materials, egg-laying hens have at least one square foot of space per bird, and perhaps most significantly, no animals of any kind are kept in cages.


Note that Certified Humane is not the same as American Humane Certified, a different program that many animal rights activists believe is insufficiently committed to animal welfare at best - and actively deceptive at worst.


GAP-Certified


The Global Animal Partnership, another nonprofit, differs from the other organizations on this list in that it offers a ranked certification program, with products receiving different "grades" depending on which level of standards they adhere to.


Most of GAP's standards focus on what sort of access animals have to pastures, and the organization has many different metrics for assessing this. It also addresses other areas of animal welfare; under GAP standards, cages are prohibited for both pigs and chickens, and beef cows may not be fed any growth hormones of any kind.


How Does 'Organic' Compare With Other Labels?


Animal products are often marketed as being "cage-free," "free-range" or "pasture-raised." All of these terms have different meanings, and some can have multiple meanings depending on the context.


Cage-Free


At least three different organizations offer "cage-free" certification: The USDA, Certified Humane and United Egg Producers (UEP), a trade group. Naturally, all three of them define the term differently; in general, all three prohibit cages, but some are more stringent than others. For instance, the USDA has no minimum space requirements for cage-free chickens, while Certified Humane does.


Additionally, all eggs produced in California are cage-free, thanks to the passage of Proposition 12.


In any event, a lack of cages doesn't necessarily mean these chickens are living happy, healthy lives. There's no requirement that cage-free chickens be given access to the outdoors, for instance, and although the UEP discourages beak-trimming on cage-free farms, it doesn't prohibit it.

Despite these shortcomings, studies have shown that cage-free systems significantly reduce the amount of pain that chickens experience on factory farms.


Free-Range


Under current USDA rules, poultry products can use the label "free-range" if the flock in question was "provided shelter in a building, room, or area with unlimited access to food, fresh water, and continuous access to the outdoors during their production cycle," with the stipulation that outdoor areas can't be fenced in or covered with netting.


Certified Humane's Free-Range standards are more specific, with a requirement that the chickens get at least six hours outdoor access a day and two square feet of outdoor space per bird.


Pasture-Raised


Unlike "cage-free" and "free-range," "pasture-raised" labeling is not regulated by the government at all. If you see a product that's labeled "pasture-raised" without the mention of any third-party certification, it's essentially meaningless.


If a product is Certified Humane Pasture-Raised, however, it means quite a lot - specifically, that every chicken had at least 108 square feet of outdoor space for at least six hours a day.

Meanwhile, all AWA-certified products are pasture-raised, regardless of whether those words appear on the label, as this is a core requirement of their certification.


The Bottom Line


The new USDA Organic regulations do hold organic meat companies to a higher level of animal welfare than non-organic products, and that includes large players like Tyson Foods and Perdue with organic product lines. The new standards aren't quite as high as those of some third-party certifiers, like AWA, and even for the best certifications, how animals are raised in reality depends on the quality of oversight and independent inspectors. Ultimately, "humanewashing" has become a common enough marketing practice that it's easy for even the savviest shoppers to be fooled by unverified or deceptive labeling. The fact that a product is marketed as "humane" doesn't necessarily make it so, and likewise, the fact that a product is marketed as organic also doesn't necessarily mean it's humane.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the largest health threats to humanity, according to the World Health Organization. It's been over 40 years since the discovery of a new antibiotic class; an ominous gap in modern medicine given the rise of superbugs and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The spread and severity of antibiotic resistance is exacerbated by antibiotic overuse and lax prescribing standards, but also by animal agriculture. Depending on the country, roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics produced are used in agriculture to prevent disease, or enhance animal growth. This overuse not only fosters the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals, but in humans who consume that meat.

At a critical meeting last month, the United Nations made a global pledge to reduce deaths from antibiotic resistance, which includes clamping down on antibiotic use in animal farming. Sentient's recent investigation in collaboration with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Cargill routinely uses critically important antibiotics in livestock, despite rules from the FDA and warnings from the WHO.

It's clear that farmers need to reduce their dependence on antibiotics. But a complete ban would be a naive solution, says Jennifer Ronholm, Canada's research chair in agricultural microbiology and professor at McGill University. Ronholm argues a ban could result in food shortages and an uptick in livestock diseases. That's why her lab aims to uncover whether they can design and optimize animal microbiomes to lessen the need for antibiotic use in agriculture.

How Farming Practices Lead to Antibiotic Resistance

A lot of the pathogens we're seeing with high drug resistance originate from animals. Since the 1940s, roughly 50 percent of zoonotic diseases have been traced back to agriculture. "They're circulating in agriculture environments, picking up the [antibiotic resistance] genes and then circulating back to humans. So, figuring out a way to cut that zoonotic transfer feels like a really effective way to deal with the problem," Ronholm tells Sentient.

To prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases, a 2022 paper called for reducing meat consumption to alleviate animal confinement on farms, and also to avoid clearing more land for agriculture. The paper's author, Matthew Hayek, described animal agriculture as a "trap of rising infectious diseases," and urged that escaping this trap means "limiting meat consumption."

Poor conditions on farms - such as cramped facilities and poor ventilation - can exacerbate the spread of antibiotic resistance. Recent estimates found 1.7 billion animals in the U.S. live on factory farms, up nearly 50 percent since 20 years ago, in response to growing demand for animal products. Further, factory farms produce twice as much sewage as the country's population. These confined conditions can create physical and mental stress for the animals, which may lead to weakened immune systems, making them more susceptible to infection. This, in tandem with the farm's high amounts of waste, creates an optimal environment for disease spread.

A study looking at the effects of various pig farming conditions found lower levels of antibiotic resistance in organic and alternative farms than in conventional farms. The authors suggest the lower levels were from tighter regulation of antibiotic use, straw bedding and open ventilation.

Optimizing Animal Microbiomes to Prevent Disease

The premise of Ronholm's research ties into a key microbial concept of competitive exclusion, or simply, that particular healthy gut bacteria will outcompete harmful bacteria. By maintaining a balanced microbiome, this competition can prevent infection and disease from taking place.

At a recent presentation for World Antimicrobial Resistance Congress Week, Ronholm explained how her lab isolates these bacteria that competitively exclude infectious bacteria from healthy animals. The goal is then to create a tailored probiotic solution that optimizes animal's microbiome to lessen reliance on antibiotics for treatment.

Ronholm is particularly interested in mastitis infection, which is the most common disease in dairy cattle. Cows can get mastitis when bacteria infect their udder from the process of milking, dirty milking equipment or from their environment. Mastitis infection causes udder pain, swelling, and may leave the cow disorientated and feeble. The probiotic, when developed, could be applied to the cow's udder daily after milking. This probiotic could then strengthen their udder microbiome to fend off infection.

In a 2022 study, her team looked at Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria known for causing mastitis, and identified microbial differences in the cows who were susceptible to infection or not. The results showed three bacteria, most notably Aerococcus urinaeequi, as being protective against infection. In a further study published last month, the researchers also looked at mastitis caused by Escherichia coli infection and found that A. urinaeequi again prevented microbial colonization. Both papers were funded, in part, by a Canadian initiative called The Mastitis Network that aims to prevent mastitis and reduce antibiotic use on farms.

Erika Ganda, an assistant professor of food animal microbiomes at Penn State University, attended Ronholm's presentation and says the prospects of her research are "fantastic." Ganda's lab researches animal microbiomes to tackle antimicrobial resistance, while also bolstering health and food production.

For example, although antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock and poultry were banned in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration, probiotics can act as a growth promotion alternative. Disease prevention and growth promotion aren't mutually exclusive, Ganda says. "It costs energy to fight disease, so if that energy doesn't go into the immune system but goes instead into making milk or putting on muscle mass, that is a way of growth promotion." In Ganda's 2024 paper, probiotic supplementation improved growth in broiler chickens compared to other natural sources like essential oils. However, it's important to note that various fast growth methods in chickens come with animal welfare concerns.

From Research Lab to Farm Use

While Ronholm's team has yet to put one of these synthetic microbiomes in an animal, they are hopeful to get to this stage soon. "We have one product that we tried in a pre-clinical trial this year that worked well. I think in less than 10 years these types of products will be on the market," Ronholm says, but notes that her lab is purely focused on the research, not the business end of things.

An important next step is to understand the exact mechanisms of these gut bacterial battles that prevent infection."It's possible that they won't be as effective as antibiotics and people will not want to switch. But I don't foresee large limitations, efficacy issues or scaling factors," Ronholm says.

Research suggests that probiotics, among other gut-enhancing products, may also ward off avian flu - a serious disease that affects both animals and humans. Probiotics appear to clear harmful microbes and repair inflammatory damage in later stages of the infection. However, an exact probiotic cocktail to protect against avian flu in all of its infectious stages requires further work, the researchers concluded.

Managing this issue of antibiotic resistance on farms, at its core, boils down to proper management practices and vaccination strategies on farms, Ganda says. "The cleaner [and] the healthier animals are, the less antibiotics we're going to need, the less antimicrobial resistance you're going to find," she says. For now, researchers like Ronholm and Ganda endeavor to create tailored and effective solutions that can be added into farm systems easily to protect animals from infection and mitigate the larger issue of antibiotic resistance. Other researchers are looking into viruses that kill harmful bacteria in animals and selective breeding to produce animals that are more resistant to infection.

However, the onus is ultimately on the industry to address their role in this growing global public health challenge, which is predicted to kill 10 million people annually by 2050. Whether new strategies such as targeted probiotics are incorporated on a large scale into farming practices is also up to the agricultural industry. Antibiotic resistance is becoming increasingly widespread in both humans and animals, and the cramped and unsanitary conditions on factory farms are clearly a systemic root of the problem.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Nina Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Brent Hershey entered the hog business, he was told that every pork producer in America uses gestation crates on their farm. Gestation crates are metal enclosures, typically seven feet long and two feet wide, where a pregnant female pig, a sow, is kept during her pregnancy. The stalls are so small that sows typically cannot sit or lie down for four months — the entirety of their pregnancy while in the stall. And these gestation crates, long a fixture in industrial pork production, are at the center of a fierce debate between industry groups and the hog farmers who say they don’t want to go back to using them.

Florida was the first state to ban gestation crates in 2002. At the time, Hershey thought Floridians had no idea what they were doing — that they didn’t “understand good production.” Twenty years and a California ballot initiative later, Hershey would be tearing all the gestation crates out of his 1,000-head Pennsylvania sow farm and his 2,000 head Delaware sow operation.

The new laws got Hershey rethinking the crates. “We thought, look at the life that we are asking the animal to live,” he says. “They’re going to be safe, but they can’t walk, they can’t turn around. At the same time, we started going to see some barns that animals were free in. We looked at that and thought, wow, that really looks more natural.”

California’s Proposition 12 and Question 3 in Massachusetts are state ballot measures that banned the sale of pork born to gestation crate-sows. These laws also offer protections to egg-laying hens and veal calves. Organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) have long called for Prop 12 to be overturned, and in 2023, their case against the California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary traveled from the Ninth Circuit to the Supreme Court of the United States. The highest court eventually upheld the constitutionality of Prop 12, but the two industry groups did not drop their opposition. Instead, they shifted focus to Congress.

The public position of the Farm Bureau and the National Pork Producers Council on gestation crates has never wavered — both groups insist pork farmers do not want the ban — yet Hershey and other farmers say differently. “As soon as the Supreme Court announced this decision, within weeks, we tore all our gestation crates out,” Hershey said at a briefing for the U.S. House of Representatives. “Now we’re on [the California] standard, and we’re doing better. It’s very ironic.”

Not long after the decision, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall introduced the “Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act” to the Senate, which would prohibit “against interference by state and local governments with production of items in other states.” In effect, this bill would overturn Prop 12. And in the May 2024 version of the Farm Bill, House lawmakers included language similar to the EATS Act that would “ensure that producers of covered livestock are not subject to a patchwork of State laws restricting access to a national market.”

Farmers like Hershey are concerned that the language, if passed, could destroy the more humane pork market that has been created, nationwide and internationally, for farmers looking to serve the California market. California is the 5^th largest economy in the world, and the state gobbles up close to 15 percent of the country’s entire pork consumption.

Yet the Farm Bureau and the Pork Council continue to deliver a national campaign that all pork farmers are in favor of the EATS Act and that Prop 12 is killing their farms. “It’s not true at all,” Hershey tells Sentient. “They’re saying that they represent us all, but they do not represent us at all.”

Calling “Baloney” on the Farm Bureau

In a statement released after the Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall wrote, “This law has the potential to devastate small family farms across the nation through unnecessary and expensive renovations, and every family will ultimately pay for the law through higher food prices.”

“I call baloney on that,” says Iowa hog farmer Ron Mardesen, who has been raising hogs in Iowa since the 1980s. Mardesen is a farmer with Niman Ranch, a network of farmers who produce meat that is hormone-free, cage-free and compliant with Prop 12.

Mardesen sees a lack of representation for independent farmers. “We’ve lost 90 percent of independent hog farmers in the last 35, 40 years. The National Pork Producers just sit and bobble their head every time everybody wants to get bigger and wants to get more consolidated.”

In a recent advertisement campaign backing the EATS Act, the Pork Producers Council highlights “Cindy,” a fictional character who runs a barbeque food truck that sources from Perkins Family Pig Farm. Cindy’s operation shutters due to rising pork prices, and the farm does too.

A note with the video reads: “This scenario could soon become a reality across America.” The video stresses that Prop 12 especially hurts smaller farmers: “A farm that would have been transferred to future generations deteriorates into ruin or is sold to a big company,” the narrator says. “Proposition 12 has burdened every link in the food supply chain, from the farmer to the business owner.”

Yet Missouri sow farmer Hank Wurtz says he has no idea where this is coming from. All of the farms he knows are converting to Prop 12. If a sow farm is closing, it is not because of Prop 12, Wurtz adds.

 “I know for a fact that there are many [gestational] crate farms in this country right now that are considering shutting down,” he says. “They’re not able to be viable anymore, but that’s not caused by California. That’s caused by 20,000 sow operations going up all over the Midwest. It is the rest of the industry’s large-scale operations that are making the small family farms irrelevant.”

According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since 1990, “the number of farms with hogs has declined by more than 70 percent as individual enterprises have grown larger.” Meanwhile, the number of hogs continues to grow in the U.S., primarily in concentrated animal feeding operations that typically house anywhere from 750 to tens of thousands of hogs per building.

Rising input costs and stagnant pig prices are causing smaller, independent farmers to turn to alternative strategies to stay afloat.

A New Type of Sow Farm

When Prop 12 was passed in 2019, Wurtz saw an opportunity in a niche market. According to Wurtz’s research, sow farmers have been getting approximately the same price — around $42 — for piglets throughout the past ten years. With Prop 12, Wurtz saw an opportunity to make his farm more economically viable.

“We love farming, but we need to be able to make money and support our families,” he says. “When Prop 12 came along and they’re offering around $50 a pig, that’s a game changer.”

Wurtz says he has invested $12 million into building a brand-new Prop 12 sow barn to replace his gestation crate operation in Northwest Missouri.

“It wouldn’t have been feasible in 2019 to go build a $12 million farm based on just the animal humane aspect of it. We wouldn’t have been able to bankroll it. It had to pay around 30 percent more because it cost 30 percent more to make it Prop 12,” he says.

When the law was challenged by the Supreme Court, Wurtz felt abandoned by the NPPC, and envisioned a future where small, family farms like his would no longer be able to exist.

“We were actually shaking in our boots at that time,” he says. “We’d be no longer financially viable.”

Wurtz did not get into the Prop 12 business for animal welfare — he’s sure to clarify that. But the increased quality of life for his sows has been an unanticipated benefit.

“We didn’t feel like we were abusing our animals all those years. But in hindsight, now looking at the farm that we have in Missouri here, I get the point,” he tells Sentient. “If you grow up a certain way, you just think crates are normal.”

Wurtz says he knows a lot of farmers who do not want to speak out in support of Prop 12 because they do not want to be associated with animal rights activists.

“But the fact of the matter is, Prop 12 is one of the best things, economically, that’s happened to us in a very long time,” he says. “That’s good for American farmers. We need to make a living somehow. If Californians want to pay more for it, we welcome that.”

The Farm Bill as a Legislative Vehicle

The last farm bill to pass through the U.S. Congress was in December 2018. It expired in Sept. 2023, got a one-year extension, and then expired again at the end of September 2024. The EATS Act is included in the House Republicans’ version of the 2024 farm bill draft.

“[The EATS Act] was introduced with the strategy of them trying to attach it to the farm bill,” says Farm Action Fund Senior Director of Programs Christian Lovell at an EATS Act event held at George Washington Law School. “I don’t think anybody thinks that a bill like that would be considered as a standalone item.”

The EATS Act is unprecedented in that the broad language of the bill could have larger ramifications to states’ rights than just what kind of food can be sold. According to a report by the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, certain terms in the bill, like “agricultural products” are “defined so broadly as to potentially include vaccines, vitamins, and even narcotics.” The Act could even threaten the labeling of meat, including where it comes from.

At the G.W. Law event, Lovell emphasized that consumers care about where their food comes from and how it was raised, and the EATS Act could obstruct that information.

“The corporations that control our food system, it’s almost like they want to hang a veil over that,” he says. “They don’t want the consumer to see anything until it gets to the grocery store shelves, and that’s because those corporations have rigged a food system that is extractive to rural communities like the ones I grew up in and now live in.”

For Mardesen, the fact that the EATS Act was just slipped into the farm bill makes the prospect of its passage more likely.

“I have not seen this as a hill that many people are willing to die on. The thing that scares me, and it really worries me, is that, look, if we get into this 11th hour wheeling and dealing, and you’ve got somebody who says, ‘Okay, I’ll do this. If you do this,’ I don’t know how pivotal this is [for legislators] at this point,” he says.

The saddest part for Mardesen is the impact this could have on farmers like Wurtz, who have shifted their entire operation for Prop 12.

“So many guys have already made the commitment, already made the investment, already made the transition to gestation-crate-free systems in order to reap the benefits from the higher markets, and that stool is going to be kicked right out from underneath them,” he says. “And that’s a lot of good, hard working pork producers that we need.”

That includes hog farmers like Hershey, who came to question what he once believed to be a necessary part of his work: “If, hypothetically, that model was the cheapest way to produce pork, putting pigs in cages that can’t turn around and can’t walk for four months at a time, if that’s legitimate, then you gotta ask the question, ‘yes, but is that okay?’”


Nina Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.


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A measure to end factory farming in Sonoma County has only received about 15% of the vote so far - so supporters are gathering tomorrow in Santa Rosa to find a new way forward. Measure J would have required big dairy and poultry farms classified as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to downsize significantly.

Cassie King, a member of the group End Factory Farming, said they raised the issue's profile - and will keep up the fight.

"The fact that the industry had to spend millions of dollars and rally so hard to defeat Measure J shows that they understand the public opposition to factory farming is growing and this system is on its way out," she said.

The No on J organization did not respond to a request for comment. In mailers before the election, it warned that Measure J would have cost jobs, hurt tax revenues as large farms shut down, led to higher food prices, and opened up the land to unwanted development.

Almira Tanner, lead organizer with the group Direct Action Everywhere, said cases of extreme animal confinement, cruelty and neglect have been exposed at factory farms around the country. And she calls the waste pits a huge environmental hazard.

"One of these dairy CAFOs in Sonoma County produces more waste than the human population of Petaluma. And that is not treated often. It is leaching into our groundwater," she explained. "It's emitting enormous amounts of methane, accelerating climate change."

Tanner noted that a similar initiative in Berkeley called Measure DD is currently winning with 60% of the vote. DD was intended to target the stables associated with Golden Gate Fields Racetrack, which ended up closing in June, five months before the election.

"There were up to 1,400 horses there at any given moment. They were in confinement for 22 to 23 hours a day, and of course, being trained and raced to death for profit," she continued.


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