The newest iteration of the long-overdue Farm Bill leaves intact California’s Prop 12. There’s an obscene amount of information within the bill, but animal welfare laws have the potential to shape the food systems here in America. A country unable to feed itself is a country unable to defend itself. In terms of Prop 12, hog producers are the most impacted, so I defer to hog producers who raise their livestock in housing, a production method about which I lack expertise. I’m much like an animal welfare ballot proposal proponent in that way.

In a nutshell, passed in 2018, Prop 12 established arbitrary guidelines for the size of confinement pens and required that pork sold in the state be compliant with the pen sizes.

The American Veterinary Medical Association has said the pen sizes do little to improve animal welfare and may unintentionally cause harm. It’s been a few years since I mentioned that sows will periodically eat their piglets. Sows are aggressive, and sow fights are ear-splitting, violent, and fast. Think a barfight involving 600-pound aggressors who can move like the most agile wide receiver in the league. And then add sharp teeth. There are producers able to raise pasture pigs or pigs in large pens and the beauty of this country is they may do so and be paid a premium for this value-added production method marketing. There are certainly some in California who were ahead of the curve when Prop 12 requirements took effect. I spoke to a producer last week who said Prop 12 was positive for him, consumers, and hogs.

On a large scale, retrofitting existing facilities to comply gets more difficult and very expensive.  Some university studies have concluded that facilities built or refurbished to be in compliance with Prop 12, cost as much as 40% more than conventional facilities. That’s in addition to what studies have estimated to be a 15% loss in efficiency and performance. For price takers, that just doesn’t pencil. As consolidation becomes a greater concern within agriculture, these greater costs and lower returns encourage that very thing. There is room for the big operators – the Chinese-owned Smithfield, for example, but there should also be room for the producers between the big boys and a backyard, pasture-type farm.

If hog producers can only be sustainable at a huge scale, the small to medium-sized operations will sell to larger corporations or will, like the poultry industry, raise stock on contract.

Eleven of the world’s top 25 pork-producing companies are in China, and only 7 are here in the U.S.  Notably, hog facilities in China look nothing like the long, nondescript barns in the U.S. Chinese hog producers are operating on extremely limited space and huge production needs. Especially since the rise of African Swine Fever (ASF), Chinese hog growers are going up and staying contained for the life cycle of the animal. State-of-the-art barns are stacked six stories high with each floor housing over 600 sows from farrow to fork. One large Chinese pork company produces 30 million pigs annually. That’s about 20% of total U.S. production raised by one company.

It was in 1995 the last time small, backyard operations out-produced larger ones in China. Now, it’s estimated that 65% of the nation’s pork is produced at these mega farms.

The main concern with Prop 12 and other measures in other states is the creation of a patchwork of requirements. For example, there is a proposal in Oklahoma that increases pen sizes beyond the increases in California. If that measure were to pass, the pork producers nationwide who want to access that market would, for the second time, be out of compliance. That’s just throwing good money after bad and not because I wish for anything but hogs that gain weight and are healthy. The measurements are arbitrary and could have been pulled out of the hip pocket of a hog. In that way, it’s not unlike the number of wolves Colorado needs to be sustainable. It’s a guess.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is an assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agricultural publication.