What won't Trump blame on California?

Vox

3 days ago

is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat.
President Donald Trump's second term has been very good to large meat companies, which raise and slaughter some 10 billion animals each year. But his administration just gave the industry perhaps its biggest gift yet — in the form of a lawsuit against California.
The lawsuit, filed on July 9 by the Department of Justice, seeks to dismantle part of California's Proposition 12, the nation's strongest law for farmed animals, which requires that pork, veal, and eggs sold in California come from animals who were raised with minimum space requirements — essentially cage-free conditions.
Passed by ballot measure in 2018, Proposition 12 doesn't quite guarantee humane conditions for farmed animals, but it does at least ban some of the worst factory farming practices: confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages and female breeding pigs in 'gestation crates,' cages so small that they prevent the pregnant pigs from turning around for virtually their entire lives.
The Trump administration's lawsuit would nullify the part of the law that covers eggs, which it partially blames for high egg prices not just in California, but across the whole country.
Most female breeding pigs in the US are confined in gestation crates for virtually their entire lives. The crates prohibit them from even turning around. Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals
A little more than half of US egg-laying hens are perpetually confined in battery cages, which prevent them from opening their wings. Getty Images/iStockphoto
The lawsuit, however, is confusing two entirely separate issues. Cage-free eggs do cost more than eggs produced with cages, though not by much — just a few pennies per egg. Agriculture economists overwhelmingly agree that US egg prices have skyrocketed nationwide over the last few years not because of cage-free egg laws, but because of the bird flu, which has led to the brutal culling of more than 100 million egg-laying hens since 2022. That has caused acute egg shortages and price spikes — especially in fall and winter months when bird flu hits the hardest.
'What you saw was this huge amount of birds out of the system, and then we just have a shortage of eggs,' said Jada Thompson, an associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas. She estimates that 90 percent of the rise in national egg prices can be attributed to bird flu.
So ending cage-free laws won't do much to bring down egg prices, nor do egg producers want to dismantle those laws, because they've already invested billions of dollars to convert their barns to cage-free.
Then what, exactly, is the point of the lawsuit? The Justice Department didn't respond to an interview request for this story. But a number of factors suggest it's likely a smokescreen for other political goals.
The Trump administration and Republicans like to beat up on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who many speculate has presidential ambitions of his own. The administration is also motivated to be seen as doing something — anything — to bring down grocery prices.
And according to Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the lawsuit is also being used to drum up support for a federal bill, known as the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, which would nullify Proposition 12 and similar laws. The bill has gone by many names in recent years and has so far failed to pass, and has long been a priority for the pork industry.
The goal of the lawsuit, Green believes, is 'to attach Trump's name to this [issue], and to try to whip votes' for the Food Security and Farm Protection Act. US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has also called for striking down Proposition 12.
There are lots of reasons why the Trump administration might be eager to help the pork industry. All politicians like being viewed as supportive of farmers, an issue that doesn't always fall neatly across party lines: The Biden administration, too, sided with the pork industry against Prop 12. But the industry overwhelmingly donates to Republican candidates, and Bruce Rastetter — a pork magnate, Republican megadonor, and Iowa political kingmaker — has backed Trump and served as an agricultural adviser during Trump's first term.
In other words, although the case is facially about egg prices, it might really have nothing to do with eggs at all. It instead represents the Trump administration's effort to help the pork industry preserve one of the cruelest farming practices ever devised.
The decades-long fight over keeping animals in tiny cages
Over the last two decades, animal protection groups have successfully campaigned to persuade major food companies, like McDonald's and Chipotle, to eliminate gestation crates for pigs and cages for egg-laying hens from their supply chains. Many states, like California, have banned cages, too. (Disclosure: I worked on a 2016 ballot measure in Massachusetts that is similar to California's law.)
Although they initially pushed back against cage-free campaigns, egg producers eventually embraced cage-free production to comply with state laws and meet demand from restaurants and grocery stores. In a recent letter to Agriculture Secretary Rollins, the president of the country's top egg industry trade group wrote that dismantling state laws like Proposition 12 would squander the industry's investments in cage-free production and create an 'additional burden' for egg farmers.
Activists with the animal protection group The Humane League protest outside of a Buffalo Wild Wings, asking the company to phase out battery cages from its supply chain. Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
The pork industry, however, has been an entirely different story.
For the last six years, meat trade groups have repeatedly sued against Prop 12. Two years ago, the US Supreme Court voted to uphold California's law. Having failed in the courts, the pork industry, led by the trade group National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), is now hoping that Congress will make it illegal for states to develop animal welfare standards for animal products sold within their borders, as California and Massachusetts have done.
The industry has argued that Prop 12 would lead to mass pork shortages in California — which didn't transpire — and skyrocketing prices for pork nationwide. The law did moderately raise prices in California, but it didn't affect national prices. And I would argue that California's modest price hike is a small price to pay to prevent what a reasonable person would only call torture. Temple Grandin, the renowned animal scientist, has likened gestation crates to forcing a human to live their entire life in an airline seat.
The pork industry's brewing civil war over cage-free bacon
NPPC has also claimed that Prop 12 would put many small pork producers out of business. But smaller producers are less likely to use crates, so the law actually gives them an edge by increasing demand for crate-free pork. According to the nonprofit Americans for Family Farmers, around 500 pig farmers have signed a letter opposing legislative attempts to dismantle cage-free laws, and some smaller and midsized meat companies — like Niman Ranch, True Story Foods, and ButcherBox — have taken the same position.
Some bigger farmers want to keep crate-free laws intact, too. One of them is Brent Hershey, a pork industry veteran based in Pennsylvania with 3,000 female breeding pigs, or sows, who give birth to nearly 80,000 piglets a year. Hershey had begun using gestation crates in the 1980s, and for a while, he brushed off criticism of the crates, both from people he took on tours of his farm and animal rights activists working to ban them in various states.
'Over and over again I would take people to see the farm, and I always got a reaction out of ladies. They would see that gestation crate, and they would just be like — right away — 'You mean they're in that all the time? When do you let them out of there?'' he said. 'There was always a negative reaction.'
Sows in gestation crates. Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media
Over time, he began to question the welfare of pigs confined in gestation crates, and so did his daughter. 'One day, my daughter just looked at me and she said, 'Dad, we are not going to accept that,'' Hershey said. ''We are going to demand that you do it a better way.''
Over time, he started to experiment with crate-free systems. Then a week after the Supreme Court upheld Proposition 12, he tore out his farm's gestation crates. Now, he says, his 3,000 sows have more space than the minimum 24 square feet per pig that California requires.
While the extra square footage costs him more money, he's seen a few benefits: Fewer pigs die prematurely, and he's able to charge a small premium for his pork. But he argues that it doesn't make sense to compare the higher cost of crate-free pork to that of conventional pork, as though gestation crates are a reasonable baseline. 'Why are we using it as a measurement?' he said. 'You're measuring yourself against a mistake.'
Pennsylvania-based Clemens Food Group, the nation's fifth largest fresh pork processor, which buys pigs from Hershey, wants to keep crate-free laws in place, too.
'Many in the industry, including Clemens, have invested significant capital (and human capital) to meet the regulations set by the people of California and Massachusetts,' a spokesperson told Vox in an email. 'Accordingly, Clemens remains vehemently opposed to any legislative or regulatory action that would overrule' those laws.
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Other top pork companies, including Tyson Foods, JBS, and Seaboard Foods are all listed as Prop 12-compliant vendors by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, though none of them responded to an interview request for this story.
Yet the National Pork Producers Council is still working to kill Prop 12. Hershey, who served on the board of the organization's Pennsylvania chapter for 20 years, said the trade group is out of touch with many consumers and is fighting for relevance within the industry. NPPC is really 'struggling to justify their existence,' Hershey said. NPPC declined an interview request for this story and directed me to its blog post about the Justice Department's lawsuit.
At a US House Agriculture Committee hearing on Prop 12 this week, meat industry representatives were invited to testify, while animal welfare scientists, animal advocates, and small farmers were not. It all amounts to political theater to set the stage for upcoming Farm Bill negotiations, where lawmakers are expected to try to fold in legislation to nullify state cage-free laws.
Even if it passes, though, I suspect Hershey will still be glad he tore the gestation crates out of his farm: 'This is not rocket science,' he told me. 'A 10-year-old can look at a gestation crate and tell you that's not okay.'