How the meat business — and members of Congress — are attempting to overturn animal welfare legal guidelines within the Farm Invoice

Final 12 months, practically 130 million pigs have been raised for meat within the US, however they didn’t come out of nowhere; that they had dad and mom. Or as pork producers name them, “breeder pigs.”

For the reason that Seventies, producers have been holding a lot of the breeding females — often known as sows — in tiny enclosures known as gestation crates. It’s a means for producers to extra carefully monitor the pigs’ pregnancies and management their feeding, however in doing so, they’ve created one of many worst types of widespread animal abuse.

The crates are so small that the pigs — who’re extremely social and clever — can’t stroll and even flip round, and it causes many to chew the bars of their crate and have interaction in different repetitive behaviors which can be indicators of continual stress. They’re confined within the crates for just about their whole life, till they themselves are shipped off for slaughter when their reproductivity wanes at round 5 years previous.

The animal welfare scientist Temple Grandin has likened gestation crates to forcing a human to reside in an airline seat.

If the usage of these crates disturbs you, you’re not alone. In 2002, Floridians — through a poll measure — voted to require pregnant pigs to have not less than sufficient room to show round and prolong their limbs, successfully banning the usage of gestation crates within the state. 4 years later, Arizona voters did the identical. Later, seven different states adopted swimsuit.

As essential as these legal guidelines are, they weren’t that efficient in truly getting many pregnant pigs out of gestation crates as a result of most of these states host little of the nation’s pork manufacturing. However the whole lot modified in 2016, when Massachusetts put a measure on the poll to not solely prohibit the usage of gestation crates within the state, however to additionally prohibit the sale of pork from farms that use such confining crates, whether or not the farm is in Massachusetts or not. (Disclosure: I labored on this marketing campaign throughout my time on the nonprofit Humane World for Animals.)

It handed overwhelmingly, with 78 p.c of voters in help. And two years later, 63 p.c of California voters supported an almost an identical regulation. Hastily, pork producers across the nation needed to cease utilizing gestation crates in the event that they wished to promote meat into these two states that, mixed, contained virtually 15 p.c of the US inhabitants.

However now, these overwhelmingly well-liked legal guidelines have an opportunity of being upended — and gestation crates getting used to restrict extra pigs sooner or later — if a provision within the new Farm Invoice, now being hashed out in Congress, turns into regulation.

The struggle over caging pigs is falling throughout surprising strains

Not everybody has embraced liberating the sows from their intense confinements.

A number of meat commerce teams, together with Triumph Meals — one in every of America’s largest pork firms — have sued California and Massachusetts quite a few instances to attempt to overturn their gestation crate legal guidelines. The business’s authorized argument facilities across the declare that the animal welfare legal guidelines violate a authorized doctrine known as the dormant commerce clause, which places some limits on states enacting legal guidelines that have an effect on different states.

However the entire lawsuits have failed, together with one from the Nationwide Pork Producers Council that made it to the US Supreme Court docket, which in 2023 dominated to uphold California’s regulation as constitutional.

Corporations and business teams have additionally labored with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal laws to nullify legal guidelines like these in California and Massachusetts. The newest iteration known as the Save Our Bacon Act, initially proposed final 12 months.

This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone laws in Congress, now has an honest probability at turning into regulation as a part of the brand new Farm Invoice, a bundle of laws that’s alleged to be reauthorized each 5 years and is the principle automobile for federal agriculture and vitamin coverage.

In late April, the Home of Representatives handed its model of the Farm Invoice, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act.

It’s “actually a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, informed me. “A vote for the farm invoice,” he stated, “is a vote to cage an animal that may’t stroll or flip round.”

Hershey had used gestation crates for a lot of his decades-long profession elevating pigs in Pennsylvania, however a couple of years in the past, he had a change of coronary heart because of his daughter, who was upset in regards to the crates.

“In the future, my daughter simply checked out me and she or he stated, ‘Dad, we’re not going to just accept that,’” Hershey informed me final 12 months. “‘We’re going to demand that you just do it a greater means.’” Hershey transformed his hog-rearing observe to group housing, during which a number of pregnant sows are saved collectively in a bigger pen — a standard means producers convert their services to accommodate these legal guidelines.

Many different hog farmers, like Hershey, don’t need Congress to overturn California and Massachusetts’ legal guidelines on ethical grounds, but additionally on financial grounds: They’ve transformed their barns to conform to allow them to promote their pork in these states. Overturning them implies that the money and time they spent on doing so would have been for naught.

Based on an April 2025 USDA estimate, 27 p.c of US hog producers had made or have been within the course of of creating investments to adjust to the legal guidelines, a determine that has doubtless grown during the last 12 months.

Clemens Meals, one of many largest pork firms within the nation, has vocally opposed the Save Our Bacon laws.“Many within the business, together with Clemens, have invested important capital (and human capital) to satisfy the rules set by the folks of California and Massachusetts,” a Clemens spokesperson informed Vox in an electronic mail final 12 months. “Accordingly, Clemens stays vehemently against any legislative or regulatory motion that might overrule” the legal guidelines.

However not the entire business feels the identical means. Smithfield Meals, the nation’s largest pork producer, has publicly supported federal laws to nullify California and Massachusetts’ legal guidelines. Seaboard Meals, one other main pork producer, declined to remark for this story and referred me to the Nationwide Pork Producers Council, which declined an interview request and declined to reply detailed questions over electronic mail.

In an announcement, an NPPC spokesperson stated that if left to face, California’s regulation “will immediate a patchwork of comparable state legal guidelines that can solely proceed to drive up the price of farming.”

The group pointed me to a just lately revealed white paper, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed, from economists at North Dakota State College and the US Division of Agriculture. The researchers discovered that from January 2024 (when the California regulation went into impact) to January 2026, the value of pork in California elevated by 73 cents per pound (a 15 p.c enhance) and 63 cents in Massachusetts (its regulation had gone into impact in August 2023). Nonetheless, the researchers notice, greater than half of the value enhance may be attributed to “retail amplification,” or supermarkets including a premium for this type of meat — past any enhance in precise manufacturing value.

Simply how a lot it prices hog producers to adjust to California and Massachusetts’ legal guidelines, whether or not by retrofitting their barns or constructing new ones, has been in dispute. The Nationwide Pork Producers Council has argued it prices producers not less than $3,400 per sow. Hershey has stated it value him round $600 per sow. Whereas there was the upfront value to changing to a crate-free system, he informed me it’s paying off; the share of sows who die prematurely has declined, and they’re additionally producing extra piglets.

Simply because the pork business is split over gestation crates, so too is Congress. For years, congressional division over gestation crates principally fell throughout partisan divides, with Republicans largely backing the pork business’s effort, and Democrats largely opposing it. However this 12 months has been totally different. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, launched an modification with bipartisan help to strip the Save Our Bacon Act out of the Farm Invoice. The Home Guidelines committee allowed votes on dozens of amendments to the Farm Invoice, however not Luna’s.

“We shouldn’t be doing something on the federal stage that might take away the autonomy of a state to determine what’s greatest for his or her farmers and what their residents select to placed on the poll after which move by regulation in that state,” Luna stated on Fox Information earlier this month.

Now, the Senate is drafting its personal model of the Farm Invoice, and if it passes, the 2 chambers might want to reconcile any variations between the 2.

I reached out to each Senate Democrat’s workplace to ask whether or not this try and overturn the need of California and Massachusetts voters could be a red-line situation for them within the Farm Invoice, and some — Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Alex Padilla (D-CA) — replied with robust opposition to the Save Our Bacon Act. Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have additionally been outspoken on the difficulty.

“It is not sensible for Republicans in Congress to bigfoot particular person states’ efforts to set increased meals security and animal welfare requirements — particularly these applied by a mandate from massive majorities of these states’ voters,” Van Hollen wrote in an announcement to Vox, including that it doesn’t belong within the Farm Invoice.

“It is a extremely controversial and toxic coverage that ignores the need of the folks,” Markey and Warren wrote to Vox in an announcement. “These state legal guidelines have been overwhelmingly supported by a well-liked vote — they shouldn’t be overridden due to big-dollar lobbying.”

Maybe most significantly although was who didn’t reply, together with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). Klobuchar is the rating chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, making her the lead Democrat on the Senate Farm Invoice. In earlier Congresses, former Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) held that place and managed to forestall previous iterations of the Save Our Bacon Act from advancing within the Senate. However Klobuchar is presently working for governor of Minnesota, the second largest pork producing state after Iowa, and the agribusiness sector has been a prime donor to her 2026 marketing campaign committee.

The meat business’s anti-democratic bent

The makes an attempt to overturn California and Massachusetts’ legal guidelines by congressional motion is maybe the inevitable final result of an business that’s intent on sustaining practices it might’t defend within the courts — or within the court docket of public opinion.

We’ve been right here earlier than. Within the early 2000s, animal safety teams more and more went undercover to movie inside farms and slaughterhouses and documented horrible practices — like pig gestation crates and staff horrifically abusing animals. The movies typically made nationwide information, stunning thousands and thousands of Individuals. However as an alternative of meaningfully enhancing animal welfare, business teams as an alternative efficiently lobbied state lawmakers in round two dozen states to introduce laws to make it unlawful to videotape inside farms. A number of handed, although some have been struck down within the courts as unconstitutional.

The meat business has additionally managed to contort rules with a purpose to obtain different particular therapy below the regulation. Animal farms, for instance, are exempt from a number of air pollution and labor legal guidelines and exempt from most state animal cruelty legal guidelines.

There are additionally much less blatant types of subversion, during which the business has withheld info and misled customers and policymakers:

A lot of the business’s success at hiding cruelty and thwarting regulation stems from its penchant for storytelling — portraying itself not as a big, highly effective, extremely concentrated group of some dozen firms however fairly a free community of thousands and thousands of salt-of-the-earth farmers simply making an attempt to scrape by.

“The business has at all times tried to make use of its ‘homestead narrative’ as a means of pushing fairly excessive measures,” Will Potter, creator of a latest ebook on deception within the agricultural business — Little Crimson Barns: Hiding the Reality, from Farm to Fable — informed me. “Popping out of journalism, I simply at all times had this religion…that if persons are uncovered to the reality and to details, the reality will win out.”

Not less than within the case of gestation crates and different intensive farming practices, this has held true. When voters are offered with the details on how they have an effect on animals, they vote to ban them. However because the Farm Invoice has revealed, these votes might not be secure.

Within the coming months, if the Senate manages to place collectively its personal Farm Invoice, we’ll discover out the place its members land: on the aspect of 1 business group, or the need of thousands and thousands of voters who’ve made it clear that locking pregnant animals in tiny crates has no place within the nation.