Iowa farmers prepare for California’s Prop 12

Some Iowa agricultural leaders have criticized the law, which prohibits the sale of pork from hogs that are the offspring of sows that were raised in pens with less than 24 square feet of usable floorspace per pig.

California accounts for about 15% of the U.S. pork market, the National Pork Producers Council said in a September news release. The NPPC is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to determine Prop 12’s constitutionality.

Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Farm and Ag Business Management Specialist Kelvin Leibold told The Center Square in an emailed statement that Iowa farmers are preparing for the enforcement of Prop 12.

Leibold said that while animal farms do their best to prevent the spread of disease, that’s not always possible.

“Pigs are like people,” Leibold said. “They move around from farm to farm, they play together and they ride in various forms of transportation. So, pigs get sick.”

One strategy to address sickness in pigs is “depop, repop,” he said.

“You sellevery last pig you have on the farm and sanitize the heck out of everything and then you bring in some new (hopefully disease free) pigs and start your herd back up,” he said.

That’s an opportunity to remodel.

“Several farms are remodeling their gestation barns to meet Prop 12 standards so when they come back into production they will meet the standards and hopefully get paid a bunch of extra money for doing it!” he wrote. “Now the ‘harvest facilities’ will have to figure out how to process pigs into bacon and be able to sell the whole pig into the California market and make some money doing that as well.”

Leibold said there will not be enough pork to meet demand, and he hopes Californians will continue to be willing to pay premium prices for pork that meets Prop 12 standards.

“The pork price and the pork supply will reach some kind of equilibrium that matches increased costs with the price point that works for everybody,” he said. “But that will be a price higher than the current high prices.”

The rules aren’t finalized, however, and the North American Meat Institute, which advocates for the meat and poultry industry, continues to contest Prop 12. It told the California Department of Food and Agriculture that the proposed rules, despite changes, remain flawed and that the department must finalize them before enforcing them.

“Until CDFA publishes final rules, no one can adequately prepare to comply with a law with criminal sanctions and that authorizes civil litigation,” NAMI General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer Mark Dopp said in a Dec. 20 news release regarding a Dec 17 letter he sent to the department’s Animal Care Program Program Manager Dr. Elizabeth Cox. “Rather than apply ‘band aids’ to address some challenges, NAMI suggests CDFA go further and afford everyone in the supply chain, from hog producers all the way to foodservice and retail entities, the 28-month preparation time the law, and the voters, contemplated before enforcing any aspect of Prop 12 or its regulations.”

Dopp said in the letter that if the department does not extend preparation time, it should clearly state on its website and in a final rule that both whole pork meat that has entered supply chain and meat from hogs born by the end of December is not subject to Prop 12, as it stated in a March FAQ document.

Under Prop 12, the department was supposed to announce regulations for the law by Sept. 1, 2019.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed a law Wednesday delaying the state’s similar voter-approved law, Question 3, until August 2022.

Supreme Court must hear Prop. 12 challenge

Pork industry in America will fundamentally change if measure goes into effect.

The fate of California’s Proposition 12, which makes it a civil and criminal offense to sell in the state pork from hogs born to sows raised in pens that do not comply with the state’s prescriptive animal housing standards, soon could rest in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, along with several states, recently asked the high court to take up and rule on the constitutionality of the initiative, which is set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2022.

The groups argue that the voter-approved 2018 ballot measure violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate trade among the states and restricts states from regulating commerce outside their borders.

Since only a small percentage of sows in the United States are housed in pens that meet California’s overly prescriptive and unscientific mandate – and 99.9 percent of them are raised outside the state – hog farmers throughout the country would need to collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars converting existing or building new barns to continue selling product in a state that represents 15 percent of the domestic pork market.

A study of the initiative’s impact conducted by North Carolina State University agricultural economist Barry Goodwin found construction costs alone for building a new 5,200-sow operation would be $15.6 million; retrofitting existing barns would cost an average of $10 per pig, or $770 million for the industry’s 77 million sows. There also would be compliance costs.

NPPC and the Farm Bureau have made a compelling case for Supreme Court review of Prop. 12, including citing the intimation by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that the Commerce Clause is all-but a “dead letter” – that is, no longer enforced but still on the books. (The 9th Circuit in July found NPPC’s challenge couldn’t move forward because of controlling 9th Circuit precedent.)

If the Supreme Court lets Prop. 12 stand – either because it refuses to hear the NPPC-Farm Bureau challenge, or a majority of justices don’t agree with their arguments – the pork industry in America will fundamentally change.

Some think it’s high time it did. But have they really looked at the insidiousness of the initiative, the similarly-styled Massachusetts Question 3 and other voter- and lawmaker-approved “animal welfare” measures?

Contrary to the lie activists told California voters, Prop. 12 isn’t about the well-being of animals, a cause farmers embrace by the nature of them being farmers. It’s about decreasing the consumption of meat, about having fewer animals relegated to farms.

Groups such as the Humane Society of the United States, which waged a propaganda war for Prop. 12, know that raising the cost of producing pork creates a cycle of higher prices – in this case either by forcing hog farmers to convert to or build California-compliant barns or prompting them to forgo selling to the state’s 40 million residents – followed by a decrease in demand and over and over.

The nine brethren on the Supreme Court should take note of that and rule accordingly.