Reposted from: https://civileats.com/2025/05/06/opponents-of-prop-12-ask-congress-to-overturn-it-again/
May 6, 2025
In May 2023, nearly eight months after hearing a case brought by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), the Supreme Court upheld a California law that banned the sale of pork from systems that confine mother pigs in small crates.
Soon after, Gary Malenke’s phone started ringing. “There were a lot of customers looking for product and a lot of concern about, ‘Hey, where’s my supply gonna come from? Are my shelves gonna be empty?’” he said.
As senior vice president of pork operations for Perdue Premium Meat Company, Malenke oversees a mid-size pork processing plant in Iowa. The pork processed there—for brands including Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Foods—already meets Prop. 12’s requirements, since gestation crates are not used in their systems. So, he was a logical contact for buyers suddenly concerned about finding pork to sell.
But, Malenke said, after about six months, the calls mostly stopped. On the ground, he’s heard little talk about the law, and from his vantage point, the market has met the moment. “California seems to have aligned with their suppliers in a way where the balance between what’s coming in the pipeline for Prop. 12 product seems to be aligning relatively well with what the demand is,” he said.
That’s not how the NPPC sees it.
The week of April 7, NPPC members, who represent the country’s biggest pork companies, arrived in Washington, D.C. to try once again to convince Congress to overturn Prop. 12. They started the week with an advertising takeover of Politico’s influential Weekly Agriculture newsletter, in which ads pleaded with lawmakers to correct Prop. 12’s “damaging consequences nationwide for both farmers and consumers.”
On April 8, Iowa’s Republican U.S. Senators, Jodi Ernst and Chuck Grassley, and Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), introduced the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, which, if incorporated into an upcoming farm bill, would overturn Prop. 12 and prevent other similar bills in the future.
The new act is essentially a renamed version of the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, which was first introduced in 2023. The NPPC praised the senators’ “efforts to avert [a] pork industry crisis.”
While the battle over Prop. 12 has been raging for nearly a decade, this is the first time it’s possible to look at the impacts the law has had on farmers and the market for pork. The law’s requirements were phased in starting in July 2023, and were fully implemented in January 2024, a little over one year ago.
Looking for Signs of Crisis
More time is needed for price and farm data to catch up, so analysis is still limited. But based on Civil Eats’ reporting and research, it’s hard to find signs of the crisis NPPC describes, and some available evidence points the other way.
Experts say the premiums being paid to farmers who changed their systems more than cover the cost of the upgrades required. Brands like Niman Ranch, which supports a network of independent small farms, have increased their sales. Many of the country’s biggest corporations, which experts say shouldered more of the costs associated with the transition, increased the performance of their pork segments in 2024 compared to 2023.
Price data is harder to parse: the price of the pork covered by the law has increased in California, but economists say more and better data is needed to definitively say how much of the jump is attributable to the law (versus other factors that impact prices) and whether the initial disruption is starting to ease.
Many people also say the scrambled political landscape that exists around Prop. 12 seems to have shifted more toward support for keeping the law in place. While the Biden administration, Trump’s past and current U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and many farm-state lawmakers have all sided with the NPPC in favor of overturning Prop. 12, groups from across the political spectrum are dedicated to preserving it.
One coalition working to stop legislation that would nullify Prop. 12 includes diverse organizations concerned about a broad range of issues, from animal welfare and the environmental impacts of meat production to corporate consolidation and state’s rights.
“I think we have done a really good job making the case against the [former] EATS Act on so many different levels. We’ve got very far-right members of our coalition and we’ve got left members of our coalition,” said Christian Lovell, the senior director of programs at Farm Action Fund, a nonprofit focused on anti-monopoly policies and a leader of the effort to protect Prop. 12. “There’s also a lot of market opportunity for producers that do want to meet these standards. That to me is just incongruent with what the industry is describing.”
However, House Agriculture Committee staff said in an email to Civil Eats that they have heard from “over 900 federal, state, and county agricultural stakeholders” asking lawmakers to overturn Prop 12.
As a result, Committee Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) plans to again include language that does so in the next draft of the farm bill, as he did in 2024. Thompson’s provision is narrower than the language in both the former EATS Act as well as the new bill introduced in April, and only applies to livestock (as opposed to nullifying state laws that regulate the production of all agricultural products).
“The threat to producers goes way beyond NPPC and the pork industry,” Thompson said in a statement provided to Civil Eats. “States like California must be held accountable. They cannot be allowed to enact mandates that dictate production standards to producers outside of their borders.”
The NPPC declined a request for an interview, and the organization’s spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions that Civil Eats sent asking for their perspective on multiple points laid out in this story.
More Data Needed on Price Increases
One of the messages the NPPC is featuring most prominently is how much more Californians are now paying for pork. Back in 2021, the industry created the “Food Equity Alliance” to push the message that the animal welfare law would hurt low-income Californians due to price increases. Then, they commissioned and publicized an analysis that said bacon prices would rise 60 percent in Los Angeles due to a 50 percent reduction in supply. That didn’t happen. (Longtime opponents of animal rights groups are also behind another new campaign Politico reported on yesterday that includes a website filled with misinformation on price increases in both pork and eggs.)
On its current website dedicated to the issue and in some of its ad campaigns, the NPPC has emphasized that Prop. 12 caused a 41 percent “surge in certain pork prices” and a 20 percent average increase.
Those numbers come from an analysis conducted by USDA economists and published by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California. Using proprietary retail data, researchers attributed a 20 percent average price increase in pork covered by the law in California to the implementation of Prop. 12. (Pork products covered by the law include fresh cuts and bacon; ground pork and cooked products like sausages and hot dogs are not covered. It’s unclear why the law was written to only cover certain products.) Price increases ranged depending on the cut, with pork loin (a category that is mostly pork chops) increasing the most, by that 41 percent. Those increases significantly outpaced average price increases across the country.
However, the analysis comes with many limitations. The data only applied to a seven-month period—the first six months of the law as it was being phased in, plus just one month where it was fully in effect.
It also was not a peer-reviewed study, and Daniel Sumner, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at U.C. Davis and the director of the Giannini Foundation, said that the data acted in a strange way that warranted additional scrutiny. He published it, he said, primarily “because it was the only data available.”
If the average 20 percent jump is accurate, the price disruption would also likely be higher at the start, since costs to upgrade housing for pigs, for instance, occur once at the beginning of the process and markets need time to adjust, said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. “You would expect the immediate shock and then a bit of a decay as things adjust and you spread costs over more product,” he explained.
But researchers have not yet analyzed more recent data on what has happened in the year and a half since Prop. 12’s full implementation. In response to an inquiry from Civil Eats, USDA Chief Economist Seth Meyer, who was involved in the original analysis, said there was no public data he could provide but that his team had since looked at “subsequent periods” and “the story remained consistent with the initial findings.”
Other numbers provided to Civil Eats that relied on the same source of retail price data between January 2024 (when the law went fully into effect) and December 2024 showed an average price increase for covered pork that would be closer to 10 percent higher than the rest of the country. But the data is limited in a way that doesn’t allow for a one-to-one comparison or more significant, definitive conclusions. It’s also hard to isolate Prop. 12’s effect from other factors, since California’s pork consumption is not identical to other states.
The retail data Sumner works with is on a two-year delay. “I’m anxious to see what actually happened,” he said.
Companies Take on Costs, But Still Post Profits
As of the end of April, 387 companies have chosen to distribute Prop. 12-compliant pork products in California, according to the California Department of Agriculture. Those include food-service distributors, like Sysco, and the country’s biggest pork processors, like Cargill.
One of the things Sumner emphasizes is that debates on Prop. 12 always focus on the cost of upgrading the barns that house mother pigs to comply with the law. However, he said, it turns out that the cost of separating Prop. 12-compliant pork from the other pork being produced accounts for much more of the price increases than those upgrades. “Most of it has to be traceability, because the costs at the farm level aren’t that high,” he said. “Everybody agrees on that.”
The bulk of the extra costs, then, fall on the pork processing and distribution companies, Sumner said.
Since the law went into effect, Smithfield, Tyson, and Seaboard, the three biggest public corporations that produce American pork and therefore provide detailed financial accounting, reported increasing profits in their pork segments. (Of course, there are many other pork companies that do not share financial data, and those could show different impacts.)
Tyson reported “significant improvement in profitability” across the company in 2024 compared to 2023. While its pork segment operated at a loss, it reduced its loss by about $100 million last year. Smithfield reported about a billion dollars in operating profits in 2024, nearly four times its 2023 profit.
“This strong rebound reflects our resilient business model, led by another year of record profits in our Packaged Meats segment, our third consecutive year of profit growth in our Fresh Pork segment and a more than $600 million increase in Hog Production segment profitability,” President and CEO Shane Smith said in a statement.
Some of those improvements could be attributed to the fact that the company had a very bad 2023, shuttering dozens of hog operations in Missouri and Utah. But the company attributed the closures to oversupply, not Prop 12. In one of its 2024 financial filings, the company mentioned being an “early industry mover” on Prop. 12-compliant pork.
Neither Tyson nor Smithfield responded to requests for interviews.
That aligns with Malenke’s observation that companies seemed to be catching up and even benefiting from the transition. “As you’ve seen some people convert facilities and supply and demand start falling into place, I’d say there’s not as much of a unified voice against [Prop. 12] maybe as there was two years ago,” he said. “It’s a little more mixed today, because there are people that have made investments, and they’re capitalizing on the market opportunity as well.”
In 2023, Seaboard said it would shift its sales away from California so it wouldn’t have to make changes to its housing for mother pigs. However, the company is now on the list of certified distributors. It reported an increase in operating income in 2024 attributable to “higher margins on pork products and market hogs sold, primarily due to higher sale prices and lower hog production costs.”
That supports Farm Action Fund’s Lovell’s argument around any industry-led effort to blame high food prices on a factor like Prop. 12. “Time and time again, these big corporations really take the opportunity, whenever there’s a ‘supply chain disruption’—whether that’s a change like Prop. 12 or that’s avian flu where yeah, prices go up a little bit—to tack on their own premium,” he said.
Seaboard did not respond to a request for an interview.
Farmers Get Paid a Premium
Aside from the prices Californians pay for bacon at the grocery store, the pork industry’s other main argument for overturning Prop. 12 is that “small family farmers will be crushed” by the law. On the website, NPPC displays a statistic: 5,000 hog farms lost in the U.S. from 2017 to 2022.
Those numbers are from the USDA Agricultural Census and show the tail end of a trend that started in the 1990s. At the same time the pork industry was shifting to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) model and the companies raising and buying animals became more consolidated, farms began disappearing and the ones that remained got bigger to survive. Since the implementation of Prop. 12 began in July 2023, after the end of the available stats, it’s unclear what the numbers from 2017 to 2022 are intended to show.
Farm Action credits the industrialization and consolidation of industries like pork for much of the decline in farms and sees Prop. 12 as an opportunity for farmers that work within that system to get a higher price for their animals. “We’ve seen farmers either changing their operation or just flat-out getting into a new type of system where they’re raising pork that meets the standards.”
After Prop. 12 went into effect, the USDA began tracking the premium paid to farmers. It’s hovered around $5 per 100 pounds of pig, which Sumner says is enough to make the transition worth it. In October of 2023, a group of Missouri and Illinois farmers sent a letter to House and Senate agriculture leadership asking them to reject overturning Prop 12.
“We have invested in substantial and profitable adjustments to our operations—from modifying our production methods, to expanding our supply chain reach, and spending resources to inform consumers about our product compliance,” they wrote. “As independent farmers, product differentiation is a crucial avenue for maintaining our ability to compete and remain in the marketplace against powerful multinational corporations that control the majority of the market.”
Companies like Niman Ranch, which buys from a network of about 500 family farmers that already raise pigs according to higher welfare standards, have also benefited. A spokesperson told Civil Eats the company landed a few big accounts due to Prop. 12, and thanks to increased demand from California (and elsewhere), the company increased its hog numbers 15 percent in 2024 and expects another 10-15 percent increase in pigs in 2025.
These are exactly the kind of small family farms the NPPC claims to care about, Lovell said.
“We know small farms are the most likely to be diversified. We know that small farms are the most likely to have high welfare standards, and we know that small farms are really the most likely to use more sustainable regenerative practices, right? So, I would take issue with the premise of Prop. 12 being incongruent with supporting small farmers,” he said.
Of the pork industry’s big push on Capitol Hill, he continued, “We think their policy is wrong. We think their tactics are wrong. We think that on the merits and on the data they’re wrong. Whether or not they changed the bill name, whatever they want to call it, our coalition will be there to oppose it.”