Hamstrung

On January 1, after a 15-year rollout, Ohio commenced its ban of the gestation crates farmers use for raising hogs. It was the 11th state to outlaw these 7-foot by 2-foot pens; Ohio also mandated all confined pigs be able “lie down fully on [their] side” without touching the front and back of the stall, and to be able to “stand without [their] back touching the top of the stall or pen.” In addition, it was the 15th state to pass a law addressing the tight confinement of other farm animals, like laying hens and veal calves. It’s part of a small wave of additions to century-old animal cruelty laws, written to protect workhorses, that predate industrialized agriculture.

Out of the 15 states, California’s 2018 Proposition 12 is the welfare law that gets the most attention. (Like Massachusetts’s 2016 Question 3, it sets minimum space requirements for laying hens, pigs, and veal calves for in-state farms as well as — perhaps most contentiously — out-of-state farmers selling within its borders.) But in 2002, it was voters in red Florida who were the first to ban gestation crates for pigs. In 2007, leading pork producer Smithfield responded by promising to phase out gestation crates by 2017, followed in 2012 by similar pledges from corporations like Costco, McDonald’s and Kroger — making it clear that anti-confinement sentiment was “something of a trend,” said Delcianna Winders, an animal law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

That trend, though, may be about to meet its end.

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Included in the newest draft of the Farm Bill, which recently passed the House committee, is a provision that would overturn all state farm animal welfare laws. The language is lifted from 2025’s Save Our Bacon Act, sponsored by Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson from top pork-producing state Iowa, which sought to overturn Prop 12 and Question 3 in particular by protecting “the free movement in interstate commerce of products derived from … livestock.”

It was introduced after 2023’s failed EATS Act — another shot at overturning Prop 12 — introduced by Republican Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas (11th in pork production), that would prohibit states from restricting the sale of agricultural goods produced in other states. This was drafted on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling that Prop 12 was constitutional — but left the door open for Congressional intervention.

To undo state confinement laws would punish “the producers who stepped up and the consumers who voted in favor of practices they believe in,” according to the CEO of online meat purveyor ButcherBox — part of a growing consortium of suppliers and farmers who’ve split with the pork industry over its sustained attacks on Prop 12. He was alluding to farmers who’d paid out-of-pocket to remove gestation crates, expecting to sell more humanely raised pork into California at a higher price — a benefit that would dissolve (and leave many farmers in debt) if state confinement bans were overturned.

Organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) have long argued that gestation crates are necessary to protect sows from stress, injury, and fecal contamination. The battles rage on despite the fact that 27 percent of the U.S.’s 56,000 hog farms are now Prop 12-compliant, and farmers who’ve invested in the costly switch believe an overturn could doom their businesses. Even some animal welfare advocates were surprised over the fierceness of the pushback. “They’re just asking for animals to be able to turn around,” said Winders. “It’s not radical.” (AFBF and NPCC did not respond to a list of questions about the potential effects of undoing Prop 12.)

The Ohio initiative was the product of a compromise, after animal welfare groups gained 650,000 signatures opposing gestation crates and other “extreme animal confinement,” according to the Dayton Daily News. The Ohio Farm Bureau Federation and the Ohio Pork Producers Council were among the parties agreeing to the compromise. Mike King, communications director at Ohio Pork Council, told the Daily News the new rules were determined by veterinarians, animal scientists, and pig farmers “who understand local conditions and animal care needs,” he said. King also noted that the changes would be costly for family farmers: “Group housing systems require significantly more space and infrastructure, and those changes represented major investments for family farms,” he said.

While pig farmers in 15 states were mandated to make those costly upgrades, some in other states did it voluntarily, gambling a expansion would be worth the 5-ish percent premium to sell into California and Massachusetts. Outspoken Pennsylvania farmer Brent Hershey told the San Francisco Chronicle he’d shelled out $2.3 million — money few farmers have access to — to build even bigger-than-required, communal pens for his sows; he also reported that this had led to an unexpected increase in piglet production and a decrease in sow deaths. Conversely, one North Carolina farmer estimated that she’d have to build two new barns at a cost of $1 million each: “This farm is not worth a million dollars“ and she wouldn’t be upgrading, she told WRAL News.

Hershey’s experience contradicts pro-gestation crate arguments made at the Supreme Court review of Prop 12, which argued are necessary to give pregnant sows targeted care and to keep them safe from other hogs. A 2024 review paper conducted by the American Veterinary Medical Association — a group which has received blowback for its pro-industry alignment — found that gestation crates could protect from aggression and allow for individually tailored diets. The trade-offs: increased confinement-related injuries like pressure sores, behavioral restrictions on things like walking, and more repetitive actions like biting and licking.

“The ‘science’ behind it is the automation, the faster growth, the maximizing output, so [companies will] throw words around like ‘health monitoring’ and precision ‘management,’” said Craig Watts, a former North Carolina contract chicken farmer for Purdue who now helps financially imperiled contract farmers. (In contract farming, prevalent in industrial meat chicken production and on the rise in hog production, farmers raise animals for companies, a model that leaves them vulnerable.) “But at the end of the day, if the sow can’t turn around for — you’re talking about 115 or 120 days. Where the hell is the science in that?” he said.

The magnitude of debt that Hershey took on — on top of the California premium he stands to lose — can break a farm, as Watts knows all too well. “When you have a million dollars in debt, there’s nothing you can grow that would get the income to pay the mortgage on that farm,” he said. But he also draws a throughline between improved animal welfare standards and farmer well-being. “Farmers have a genuine concern with the animals,” he said. Working in a system where livestock is treated better, “You’re talking about a total 180, you’re talking about job satisfaction for the farmer — that’s improved mental health, which is a big deal in agriculture,” where suicide rates are high. “I always felt like, how productive could I have been if I got up looking forward to going to work every day, instead of just, I’m dreading it, just grinding out days.”

Gunthorp has never sold into California because as an independent small producer, he said he hasn’t been able to get a toehold there. “The same people that dominate the commodity market dominate the niche [animal welfare] market in California,” he said, referring to the largest companies, including Smithfield and Iowa Select Farms, that control 70 percent of the pork industry. But he’s also contemptuous of Congress’s attempts via the new draft Farm Bill to “step on states’ rights” by trying to overturn them. “That’s a no-go for me,” he said.

But how to solve for any of this presents a quagmire. In Gunthorp’s opinion, “Regulation by states is probably not the way to decide how animals are raised. I believe that the marketplace should decide, but I also believe that the concentrated marketplace is highly, highly dysfunctional, and that it’s very difficult for smaller producers, smaller processors, and especially niche producers. I feel like the choices are that you support industrial pork production or you support states … and I don’t know that I’m on either one of those sides.”

Whose side is he on? “Independent pork producers.” How many of those are left? Fewer every year.

Correction: This article initially stated the Farm Bill had left the House, rather than made it through committee.