The National Pork Producers Council is encouraging farmers to highlight October 11, the day the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the constitutional challenge of California’s Proposition 12.
The Supreme Court case opposing Prop 12 was the recent focus of a media roundtable hosted by the NPPC about the case, filed by the NPPC and the National Farm Bureau Federation, which questions the constitutionality of the California law.
NPPC legal strategist Michael Formica said the law intends to regulate farmers a long distance outside California.
“We had filed this challenge to Proposition 12, a ballot initiative California voters passed in 2018, nearly three and a half years ago.”
NPPC’s feeling and now if any law is unconstitutional and violates the dormant commerce clause of the U.S. constitution, Proposition 12 is unconstitutional. It reaches thousands of miles outside the state of California and imposes very prescriptive standards on farmers who have no contact with the state of California. It will force them to incur millions of dollars in renovations to their farms and host inspectors from the state of California to their farms. While being in the name of improving animal welfare, ironically, they’ll significantly decrease the welfare, health, and safety of those animals in the fare of these farmers.
“It is incredibly disruptive to the industry and will be very disruptive to the supply chain.”
Formica said according to USDA there are only about eight thousand sows in California which are simply insufficient to feed a state of 40 million people. Most are show pigs, so the most significant impact will be on farmers far outside California.
Keeping that thought of decreasing the welfare, health and safety of those animals the president-elect of the NPPC said rather than improving animal welfare it would set it back.
At the media roundtable Scott Hays, a pork producer from Monroe City, Missouri said as a fifth-generation farmer, his family considers the California law a step backwards in animal care.
“We’ve spent well over a century raising pigs on the same farm and I vividly remember conversations with my dad and grandpa about pigs and how we can improve their lives.”
“It’s just known in our family if the pigs do well, we do well.”
At one point Scott’s dad and grandpa built some feeding stalls in dirt lots when pigs were outside because of the aggressive behaviour of pigs, especially around feeding time.
It didn’t work but they tried.
“We’re very frustrated about the animal welfare part of this thing.”
He said five generations deep in raising pigs and now some folks that know nothing about raising pigs, or very little about raising pigs come to their farm and tell them how to raise pigs. “We’ve done it that way because that’s the only way we could do it 50-60 years ago. It doesn’t work so we’re very frustrated. We feel like we’re going backward in animal care.”
Hays said he hopes people outside the pig industry understand their frustration because it’s not how to care for their animals.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case on October 11. Although the Supreme Court has no deadline for bringing down its decision, a ruling is expected by January-February 2023 or spring 2023. •
— By Harry Siemens