If you listen to the arguments from the National Pork Producers’ Council you might think the entire U.S. pig industry was on the verge of collapse because of the market effects of Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts. 

The laws are exerting, according to critics, an “extra-territorial” effect. The applause line aimed at conventional farmers is that California is telling farmers in Iowa and North Carolina how to raise pigs. 

The reality is quite different. California and Massachusetts, when it comes to agricultural commerce, are providing a major market for thousands of pig farmers who’ve already moved away from gestation crates, or never put sows in extreme confinement system in the first place.

As an architect of Prop 12 and the farm animal welfare ballot measures that preceded it, I’ve long called out opponents’ exaggerated claims about production capacity and market disruptions. A recent market analysis, conducted by economists and agricultural veterinarians with the Center for a Humane Economy, revealed that California and Massachusetts together will need just 6% of U.S. production to meet demand for gestation-crate-free pork. 

With close to half of the nation’s six million breeding sows already in group housing systems or pasture-based settings for most of their gestation period, supplying California and Massachusetts with pork is a matter of logistics, not capacity.  

A pork industry leader, who is no fan of Prop 12, affirmed that analysis just last week. In The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Matt Gent, president of the Iowa Pork Producers’ Council, said that “over the past year, there's been enough production change to meet Prop 12 demand that it really truly doesn't affect a producer that doesn't want to” adjust operations to comply with the California law.

Prop 12, passed in a landslide in 2018 in the nation’s biggest farming state, stipulates that whole cuts of pork sold within California must come from operations relying on sows afforded space to move around, no matter if the farm is inside or outside of California’s borders. (It exempts frozen pork and pork mixed with other foods – which account for about 42% of sales in California.)

NPPC and its allies lost a string of cases in the federal courts challenging Prop 12 and other state laws challenging extreme confinement, culminating in a strongly conservative U.S. Supreme Court rejecting its legal claims and determining that Prop 12 was a constitutionally sound exercise of state authority. With the ink still wet on Neil Gorsuch’s opinion against it, NPPC pivoted to Congress and worked with allies to introduce the EATS Act, apparently undaunted that nearly identical measures authored by former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, never found their way into the 2014 or 2018 farm bills.

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The EATS Act ignores one indisputable market effect of Prop 12 and Question 3: They allow farmers who’ve made investments in more extensive housing systems to recoup their investments by accessing that market. Conventional farmers also have plenty of certainty in the marketplace for their confinement pork, with the other 48 states and 139 other nations, led by Mexico and China, imposing no humane treatment sales standards. 

The prospective concern about other states passing ballot measures to halt sales of pork from extreme confinement is also ill-informed. The high-population states of Texas, New York, and Illinois do not permit citizen initiatives. Florida already banned gestation crates by ballot initiative in 2002, and critics of gestation crates aren’t looking for a replay on a souped-up measure there. The other initiative states have relatively small populations, and teeing up campaigns there isn’t worth the expense. 

The pig industry’s bigger problem is that its corporate customers don’t think gestation crates are aligned with the values of their customers. Sixty of the biggest names in food retail have issued statements opposing gestation crates.  

The voters who decide ballot initiatives and the consumers who shop at McDonald’s, Walmart, and Cracker Barrel are the same people. The EATS Act cannot undo instinctive consumer perceptions that it’s wrong to rely on a housing system that immobilizes intelligent, sociable animals.

Let’s establish that it was no accident that voters delivered double-digit victories to animal welfare advocates on all five ballot measures on the topic. NPPC should have been startled, among the other outcomes, that a remarkable 78% of voters backed Question 3. A landslide vote like that signals a moral consensus on an animal-welfare matter.

As for EATS, it also violates American values related to states’ rights and respect for American elections, compounding the case against it. 

The task for NPPC should not be to push EATS but to help farmers align their important work with the values of their customers on animal welfare.  

Wayne Pacelle, former president of the Humane Society of the U.S., is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. Two of his books have been New York Times best-sellers. His official website can be found here.