Tell Congress to help small farmers by opposing federal preemption of Prop 12 and Question 3
By Nate Beaulac
I’ve raised pigs, chickens, cattle and turkeys in northeast Oklahoma for nine years. You won’t find hog barns or chicken houses at Prairie Creek Farms. In fact, you won’t find much concrete at all. Our critters live as naturally as possible. Our cattle graze and seek shade under the oak trees in the hot afternoons. Our pigs give birth in the woods and come down the hill for supper during the cool evenings. Our chickens follow the herbivores looking for grasshoppers or earthworms.
Small farms like ours produce just four percent of all meat sold in the United States. The other 96 percent comes from a few massive corporations. “Food is a great metaphor for the consolidation of corporate power in the hands of very few, who are mostly interested in their own profits and not the well-being of the animals they’re slaughtering, or the land and the water they’re using or abusing, or the workforce they’re exploiting or even the people eating it,” said Robert Kenner, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Food, Inc.” State laws like California’s Proposition 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 hold the world’s largest meat companies accountable by mandating minimum housing requirements for certain farmed animals and banning the sale in those states of many meat products made using confinement practices. The laws create a national market for small farms, offer consumers more choices and help animals.
That’s why Big Meat wants to overturn them.
Industrial pork producers are lobbying Congress to pass deceptively named legislation such as the Food Safety and Farm Protection Act (S. 1326) and the Save Our Bacon Act (H.R. 4673). These bills purport to protect interstate commerce by overturning Prop 12 and Question 3, but they only protect Big Meat’s profit margin. After receiving landslide approval in state elections, Prop 12 and Question 3 went into effect in 2023 following several unsuccessful pork industry lawsuits. In all, 15 U.S. states have now enacted bans on the extreme confinement of farmed animals, specifically targeting battery cages for laying hens, gestation crates for pregnant pigs and veal crates for calves. Likewise, more than 60 national meat retailers have committed to selling crate and cage-free products.
Prop 12 and Question 3 taught Tyson and Smithfield a lesson: when given the opportunity to ban confinement animals from the table, the public will take it. Big Meat won’t stand idly for that. In Oklahoma, Seaboard Foods’ Guymon plant processes about 21,500 pigs per day, producing 1.4 billion pounds of pork annually. Nearly all of them are born by breeding females housed in Concentrated
Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)—vast, indoor facilities where thousands of pregnant sows spend most of their abbreviated lives locked inside individual gestation crates. The coffin-sized metal cages give the smart, sociable animals just enough space to stand, eat, drink, urinate, defecate, give birth and go insane.
This brutal corporate standard results in subpar products, merciless animal welfare practices and competitive advantages for the largest producers. Leaders from the National Pork Producers Council recently testified before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, trying to convince lawmakers that federal preemption is necessary to help small producers, which is preposterous. The proposed legislation would hasten corporate consolidation in the U.S. meat industry, not sustain local farmers.
I do have one thing in common with the Big Meat executives: we agree if people realize the whole truth, they’ll demand better, for pigs and for their tables.
Please tell Congress to exclude S. 1326 and H.R. 4673, or any similar language, from the next Farm Bill to give independent farmers like me a chance to compete.
Nate Beaulac is one of the owners/operators of Prairie Creek Farms in Kellyville.
