How California Made Pig Farmers Squeal With Animal Welfare Law — For Different Reasons

California’s Proposition 12, an animal welfare law upheld last month by the U.S. Supreme Court that imposes strict standards on the spaces where pigs are born and live, could change how farmers grow the bacon on Americans’ breakfast tables.

Basically, the law says that if hog farmers want to sell pork in California, they can’t use gestation crates — 7-foot-by-2-foot metal cages that leave pregnant sows with no room to turn around. Sows, who typically weigh between 500 and 800 pounds, spend their entire pregnancies in these crates, a practice that a 63 percent majority of California voters rejected when the referendum sailed through in 2018.

After years of fighting its implementation, pork industry leaders said last weekend at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, that they’re committed to a smooth transition to the California standards so the nation’s more than 60,000 hog producers, who collectively, market about 115 million pigs in the $54 billion annual industry, can compete.

About 13 percent of the pork meat market is in California, and though Massachusetts is a much smaller state, the Supreme Court ruling opens the door for a similar law to take effect there.

Pledges for cooperation aside, industrialized ag leaders are seething at what they call government overreach by one state to impose its policies on others. They warn it will increase the price of bacon, chops and other pork products at the grocery store, drive small operations out of business, and further consolidate what is already one of the most concentrated of ag industries.

“That’s yesterday’s story,” said Paul Willis, an Iowa hog farmer who co-founded the Niman Ranch meat company almost three decades ago to establish a market for humanely raised pork.

“It’s the industrial model that ran family farmers out of business,” he said in a telephone interview with Patch.

How Stress Tastes In Meat

Willis said animal welfare laws open the gate a little wider for more niche meat companies like Niman Ranch that raise meat the way a growing number of Americans prefer, with an emphasis on their wellbeing from the moment the sows conceive through the slaughter process.

“Anything you can do to reduce stress is important, from the gestating sows to the baby pigs to the final day when they go to the packing plant,” he said, giving as an example the hard-line policy prohibiting the use of electric prods, common in large operations. “During that process, it’s important they’re not stressed or frightened.”

From a practical standpoint, the meat tastes better when animals aren’t scared or frightened when they die, according to research. It has to do with the conversion of muscle glycogen to lactic acid after death. In unstressed animals, the lactic acid keeps the meat tender, juicy and flavorful. But adrenalin produced during stress uses up the glycogen, meaning there isn’t enough lactic acid to prevent the meat from being dry, tough and tasteless.

Consumers can literally taste the difference, Willis said. And, as a growing farm-to-table movement opens the agricultural industry to criticism about animal welfare practices, they know the right questions to ask.

“The whole idea of where food comes from and how it’s raised is kind of a nationwide phenomenon. Whether it’s an animal or a bean, people are interested in how it was raised,” he said. “It’s becoming more important to people all the time.”

Humane Farm Animal Care, a leading nonprofit that certifies farm animals that are humanely raised, including those owned by Niman Ranch farmers, said in a report two years ago that 58 percent of U.S. consumers are more concerned now about food animal welfare than they were just a few years ago.

Grocery stores are taking notice of the shift in consumer behavior, too, making room in their meat cases for the products their customers want.

‘I Don’t Want To Raise Animals Like That’

For Niman Ranch farmers, there’s no switch to flip to meet the animal welfare standards in California and Massachusetts. The laws also require more generous housing accommodations for veal calves and egg-laying chickens.

“We’ve been compliant always and the industry in general is not, for the most part,” Willis said of the 750 family farmers who raise pigs for Niman Ranch. “So it just seems logical that it would create markets for us. Retailers and distributors are looking for a supply chain that’s compliant.”

If Willis had an epiphany, it was in the mid-1990s when the growth of factory farms — confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, where as many as 2,500 pigs lived their entire lives in a single barn — threatened to crowd out independent farmers in top pork producing states like Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Illinois, and Indiana.

At the time, he was pasturing about 3,000 pigs a year on his family farm in central Iowa, raising them the way he always had, giving them the freedom to graze and make choices.

“In the spring, we would start moving the bred sows into the field,” Willis said. “They would pick an individual hut and that’s where they would give birth. They would stay with pigs with six weeks, and then the sows would go back to a breeding pen. All the pigs would not be born at the same time, so there was a flow of animals.”

His survival in a fast-changing industry on the line, Willis decided to see for himself what it was like for pigs to live like that.

The difference between his husbandry practices and those at the factory farm was stark.

“In confinement, the bred female spends her entire gestation period — three months, three weeks and three days— standing on concrete over a liquid manure pit, and then she goes to a farrowing crate, which has some area to the side [so piglets can nurse],” Willis said. “The gestation time on my farm was a group of sows living together with feed spread out, so everyone has an equal opportunity to get their share.

“They’re on concrete, and they can’t turn around,” Wilis continued, emphasizing the conditions inside confinements. “They chew repetitively on the bars. It’s a behavior called learned helplessness.

“I find it disturbing, frankly, as opposed to seeing an animal living with other animals of the same species. They socialize, they know each other, they graze together, and the sows often move into larger groups with others.”

After touring the confinement, Willis said he told himself, “I’m not going to do that. I don’t want to raise animals like that. It was hard doing what I was doing — or what I wasn’t doing, which was following the trend to industrial.”

From Iowa To San Francisco

A friend introduced Willis to Bill Niman, who was already selling sustainably raised, high-quality beef and lamb through San Francisco-based Niman. Willis said his approach had been a hard sell in Iowa, which for years has raised more pigs than any other state and was quickly industrializing.

“I had to find someplace that had a good food culture, and at that time, the Bay Area was a good place to start,” he said.

Niman liked the way Willis was raising pigs and said that if he could figure out a way to ship the meat to northern California, he would sell it — and make sure farmers got a fair price.

Today, the Niman Ranch pork operation that started with Willis’ single hog farm has grown to include more than 750 family farmers. The company’s meats are widely available through alliances with restaurants like Chipotle and grocery store chains like Whole Foods, Mariano’s and Plum Market.

“It’s pretty much available nationwide but not everywhere,” Willis said.

The math works for the farmers, Willis said, because the price they receive at any stage in the market cycle is based on the input costs, including feed, which represents between 60 percent and 80 percent of costs.

“We don’t pay commodity price,” Willis said. “To be sustainable, a farmer has to be paid enough to make some money. That’s an important part of who we are. Price adjusts according to the feed costs so the farmer is covered.”

Raising pigs the old-fashioned way requires more management, but less capital, making it an attractive option for new farmers. Their biggest equipment costs are the hoop houses where sows birth their litters and shelter from the weather, and that’s relatively inexpensive when compared to the cost of setting up a CAFO.

Although the scale is smaller, most farmers have row-crop operations and can grow their own feed. Because there’s less manure to manage, they can use it as fertilizer for their pastures and crops without risk of over-applicaton, thereby eliminating some of the water-quality issues stemming from the disposal of liquid manure.

And, Willis said, it makes for better relationships with neighbors. Rather than complaining about the smell when liquid manure pits are emptied, his neighbors asked if their grandchildren can come over and see baby pigs.

That’s a huge issue for Chris Petersen, a semi-retired farmer central Iowa farmer who maintains a herd of 30 free-range purebred Berkshire sows who produce between 400 and 500 pigs a year.

He has spent years advocating for rural Americans in hog-producing states through the Socially Responsible Ag Project and as a former president of the Iowa Farmers Union, an advocacy group for independent farmers. He’s still on the board.

Little has changed, though. In 1997, large farms accounted for about 40 percent of the pigs produced nationwide. Now, these operations produced 72 percent of U.S. hogs, according to an August 2022 report by the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service.

Industrial Ag Will Go On

While California and Massachusetts are the only states to ban sales of pork from farms that use gestation crates, several other states have banned the crates. Whether the combined effect of these laws and growing consumer awareness about how meat is raised are enough to create a sea change in husbandry practices remains to be seen.

Petersen thinks the National Pork Producers Council, whose lawsuit brought Prop 12 before the Supreme Court, and CAFO operators in general are overreacting to the decision.

“It won’t be [the end of industrialized agriculture],” Petersen told Patch in a telephone interview. “They will continue on. I don’t have a problem with Prop 12. I hope it adds to my business and the businesses of other people in niche pork.”

When they’re ready for finishing, Petersen sells most of his pigs through the Berkshire breed association. Petersen feeds out the rest and sells them to a local butchering locker, where customers have come to appreciate a reliably tender, juicy and flavorful cut of meat produced by someone they know.

“I think it’s going to be a step in the direction of better animal welfare,” Willis said. “Some farmers ware going to make the adjustment and move in that direction. One hundred percent of the pigs will not be raised like we do at Niman, but there is going to be some influence.”

Neither man thinks America is going to run out of bacon.

“Pigs weren’t raised this way in the past. In the ’50s and ’60s, when there were no factory farms and gestation stalls, there was plenty of the pork to supply all the U.S. in those days,” Willis said.

At the very least, consumers will have a better idea where their bacon and pork chops come from, Petersen said.

“What bothers me a lot is people eat that stuff. People need to be educated on food, where it comes from and who’s raising it,” he said.

“I’m for sure not an animal rights person, but I am an animal welfare person,” Petersen said. “At the end, we’re going to eat them. Treat them right. That’s where I come from. That’s how I was raised.”