Republicans want to put pigs back in tiny cages. Again.

Every five years, farm state politicians in Congress perform their fealty to Big Ag in a peculiar ritual called the Farm Bill: a massive, must-pass package of legislation that dictates food and farming policy in the US. 

At the urging of the pork industry, congressional Republicans want to use this year’s bill to undo what little progress the US has made in improving conditions for animals raised on factory farms. The House Agriculture Committee late last month advanced a GOP-led Farm Bill with a rider designed to nullify California’s Proposition 12 — a landmark ballot measure, passed by an overwhelming majority in that state in 2018, banning extreme farm animal confinement — and prevent other states from enacting similar laws. 

Prop 12, along with a comparable law in Massachusetts passed by ballot measure in 2016, outlaws the sale of pork produced using gestation crates — devices that represent perhaps the pinnacle of factory farm torture. While many of the tools of factory farming are the product of biotech innovation, gestation crates are deceptively low-tech: They’re simply small cages that immobilize mother pigs, known as sows, who serve as the pork industry’s reproductive machines. 

Sows spend their lives enduring multiple cycles of artificial insemination and pregnancy while caged in spaces barely larger than their bodies. It is the equivalent to living your entire, short life pregnant and trapped inside a coffin. 

Ian Duncan, an emeritus chair in animal welfare at the University of Guelph in Canada, has called gestation crates “one of the cruelest forms of confinement devised by humankind.” And yet they’re standard practice in the pork industry. 

While Prop 12 has been celebrated as one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the world, its provisions still fall far short of giving pigs a humane life. It merely requires providing enough space for the sows to be able to turn around and stretch their legs. It still allows the use of farrowing crates, cages similar to gestation crates that confine sows and their nursing piglets for a few weeks after birth. And about 40 percent of pork sold in California is exempt; Prop 12 covers only whole, uncooked cuts, like bacon or ribs, but not ground pork or pre-cooked pork in products like frozen pizzas. 

The pork lobby refuses to accept even those modest measures and has sought to link Prop 12 to the agenda of “animal rights extremists.” It has also claimed that the law would put small farms out of business and lead to consolidation, even though it is the extreme confinement model favored by mega factory farms that has driven the skyrocketing level of consolidation seen in the pork industry over the last few decades. 

For nearly six years, instead of taking steps to comply with Prop 12, pork lobbyists sued to get the law struck down. They lost at every turn. Last year, the US Supreme Court rejected the industry’s argument that it had a constitutional right to sell meat raised “in ways that are intolerable to the average consumer,” as legal scholars Justin Marceau and Doug Kysar put it. 

The Supreme Court loss appeared to be the end of the road. Now, though, pork lobbyists are counting on Congress to pass the “solution” to Prop 12 that it couldn’t win in the courts. 

For animal advocates, the protracted battle to defend Prop 12 has consumed years of attention and resources that could otherwise have been spent moving on to new issues. It’s shown how hard it is to make even marginal progress for animals in a system where they are commodities that exist to make money and where policy leaders prioritize the unencumbered flow of meat production over minimal standards of decency. 

Overturning Prop 12 would be extreme, and it could have far-reaching consequences

Several other states have gestation crate bans, but the California and Massachusetts laws are unique because they outlaw not just the use of crates within those states’ borders, but also the sale of pork produced using gestation crates anywhere in the world. Both states import almost all of their pork from bigger pork-producing states (the top three are Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina), so the industry has argued that Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 unfairly burden producers outside their borders. California in particular makes up about 13 percent of US pork consumption, threatening to upend the industry’s preferred way of doing business for a big chunk of the market. 

The California and Massachusetts laws also ban the sale of eggs and veal from animals raised in extreme cage confinement. Both industries opposed Prop 12 before it passed but have largely complied with the law; neither has put up the fierce legal fight that the pork industry has, led by Big Meat lobbying groups like the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, and the American Farm Bureau Federation. 

House Agriculture Committee chair Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who introduced this year’s House Farm Bill last month, touts “addressing Proposition 12” as a core priority. The legislation includes a narrowed version of the EATS Act (short for Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression), a bill introduced by Republicans in both chambers last year to ban states from setting their own standards for the production of any agricultural products, animal or vegetable, imported from other states. 

The Farm Bill language has been tightened to focus solely on livestock, banning states from setting standards for how animal products imported from other states are raised. It is less extreme only in comparison to the sweeping EATS Act, but also more transparent about its aim to shield the meat industry from accountability. At the Farm Bill markup on May 23, when the legislation passed committee, Thompson urged his colleagues to protect the livestock industry from “inside-the-beltway animal welfare activists.” 

The provisions slipped into the Farm Bill may have consequences that reach far beyond the humane treatment of animals. They “could hamstring the ability of states to regulate not just animal welfare but also the sale of meat and dairy products produced from animals exposed to disease, with the use of certain harmful animal drugs, or through novel biotechnologies like cloning, as well as adjacent production standards involving labor, environmental, or cleanliness conditions,” Kelley McGill, a legislative policy fellow at Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program who authored an influential report last year on the potential impacts of the EATS Act, told me in an email. 

House Republicans have been trying to use the Farm Bill to overturn public preferences on animal welfare for more than a decade, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella reported last year, ever since the far-right former Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced the precursor to the EATS Act in 2013. What may seem more surprising, at first blush, is that the factory farm industry’s campaign to force animals back into immobilizing cages has drawn support from a broader swath of authorities, including the Biden administration. 

In 2022, to the dismay of animal advocates, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court backing the pork industry’s case against Prop 12. Earlier this year, US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declared that Prop 12 would cause “chaos” in the pork market if Congress doesn’t intervene. Both moves reveal the gulf between ordinary people’s intuitions about how animals ought to be treated and the priorities of policy leaders who defer to the meat industry about how things should be done. It’s a particularly cruel consequence of the agricultural exceptionalism that prevails in the US: the doctrine that places agriculture outside the bounds of democratic deliberation. 

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), meanwhile, the leading organization representing US veterinarians that is highly influential in animal welfare policy, has voiced “strong support” for the portion of the Farm Bill that would invalidate Prop 12, a move that reflects a central contradiction within the veterinary profession. While the public may expect the AVMA to represent the interests of animals, it plays a key role in the factory farm system and, as I’ve reported previously, has faced criticism for what some vets have called its corporate capture by the meat industry. The organization had not previously taken a position on gestation crate bans, but it has a close relationship with the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, a pork industry vet group that has long opposed Prop 12. That the AVMA is weighing in now suggests how urgently the pork industry is working to shore up support for overturning the law. 

Why this Farm Bill faces long odds

Despite the monumental effort from the pork lobby and its allies, the odds of this year’s Farm Bill nullifying Prop 12 appear slim. Democrats, who control the Senate, oppose the House bill’s proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which makes up about 80 percent of the bill’s $1.5 trillion in spending, and its removal of so-called climate-smart conditions from farm subsidies made available by the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, on the other hand, are likely to demand steeper cuts to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. 

The broader EATS Act has been opposed by more than 200 members of Congress, including more than 100 Democratic representatives and several members of the Freedom Caucus; Prop 12 nullification language is not included in the rival Senate Farm Bill framework introduced by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). Many lawmakers and other observers consider the House bill dead on arrival, which would mean that a Farm Bill may not get passed until 2025. 

Prop 12’s pork regulations, meanwhile, took full effect in California at the start of this year after two years of delay due to the industry’s legal challenges. After implementation, prices for pork products covered by the law abruptly increased by about 20 percent on average, a spike that UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Sexton attributes to the pork producers’ reluctance to convert their farms to gestation crate-free before they knew whether Prop 12 would be upheld by the Supreme Court. 

But after the Court’s ruling in May of last year, “the industry sprung into action,” Sexton told me in an email. “We believe the volatility in pork prices around the implementation of Prop 12 is due to a short-term disequilibrium as the industry adjusts to the new law.” Sexton and fellow ag economist Daniel Sumner, in research funded by the National Pork Board, have projected that over time Prop 12 would increase prices for covered pork by a more moderate 7.2 percent, while prices outside California would slightly decrease. 

“The nation’s largest pork producers are largely adapting to the new rules,” John McCracken and Ben Felder reported in March in Investigate Midwest, even as anti-Prop 12 lobby groups keep up the fight. Some producers welcome the opportunity to charge a price premium for selling compliant pork and oppose overturning Prop 12. 

Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, told me he’s optimistic that the struggle over Prop 12 is already won, despite the last-ditch maneuver in the Farm Bill. “This is just the last death throes of trying to maintain this unmaintainable situation, where they have no regulation on the way that they raise their animals,” he said.