As the number of states mandating increased space for hogs and other livestock rises, language in the House’s new draft Farm Bill seeks to take it all away.
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 narrow, 7-foot by 2-foot pens, in which pregnant sows have little ability to move. And 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 — originally 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’ 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 producers selling within its borders.)
But in 2002, it was voters in red Florida who were the first to ban gestation crates for pigs, suggesting that consumer distaste for lengthy confinement of pregnant sows in narrow cage is a bipartisan issue. 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. It became 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 and now moves on to the Senate, is a provision that would overturn all state farm animal welfare laws and replace them with … nothing. 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.
To undo state confinement laws would punish “the producers who stepped up and the consumers who voted in favor of practices they believe in.”
The years-long war against such bans has been waged largely by lobbying groups American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), which argue 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.)
It is something of a misnomer that confinement is functionally banned anywhere in the U.S. State pig-related confinement laws mostly call for keeping gestating sows “in a manner that allows [them] to stand up, lie down, and turn around without touching the sides of the enclosure;” only a few specify increasing crate space from 14-square-feet to 24-square-feet; and none mandate a truly crate-free system. Some laws dictate how much time a sow can be confined (beginning 5 or 7 or 12 days before she gives birth, until she’s done weaning, for example); many have loopholes; and the use of gestation crates comes in between the use of breeding crates and the farrowing crates that sows are placed in to nurse.
The National Pork Board says the latter are necessary to keep moms from rolling over and crushing their piglets — an outcome that does occur but that some experts say can be mitigated with different management techniques. These farrowing crates are similarly cramped and remain largely un-banned — except, as of 2025, in organic production; Ohio now limits the use of breeding crates. Greg Gunthorp, a fifth generation Indiana farmer who raises 4,000 pastured pigs a year that he sells to Walt Disney World, Caesar’s Palace, and O’Hare airport, equates larger crates for gestating sows to “making your prison cell bigger,” he said.
Still, it’s expensive to achieve even Prop 12’s incremental level of improved confinement. 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. However, thousands of farmers did take the gamble that expansion would be worth the 5-ish percent premium to sell into California and Massachusetts.
“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.”
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. This contradicts industry talking points about the science behind confinement crates, which it says are necessary to give sows targeted care and to keep them safe from other hogs. A 2024 review paper conducted by the American Veterinary Medical Association 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.)
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.
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.
