July 28, 2025
California’s law setting minimum housing requirements for certain livestock is facing pressure from Congress as large pork producers and lobbying groups back a congressional push to preempt the voter-approved rule.
Federal intervention could have significant ramifications for pig farmers throughout the state — as well as your dinner plate — with some California farmers and the San Francisco restaurateurs they serve speaking out in opposition to the effort to unwind Proposition 12.
“The product is better, it tastes better, and we can feel better about what it’s doing to the environment and promoting the continued existence of these [small farmers] and supply chains,” David Barzelay, chef and owner of Lazy Bear, said of sourcing pork under California’s requirements.
“Part of it is the romanticism of it,” he said. “We love being able to talk to our guests about where our product comes from and we want to see more of the idyllic, pastoral images of these small farms.”
Nearly 63% of California voters approved Prop. 12 in 2018. The measure required any pork, chicken eggs or veal sold in California to have come from farms providing a minimum amount of space per animal. The law requires that breeding pigs have at least 24 square feet of floor space without touching the sides of the enclosure or another animal.
Republicans in the House of Representatives — with the support of pig farmers, pork producers and lobbying groups from the Midwest — are seeking to preempt the portion of the California law that sets minimum requirements for housing pregnant pigs. Pork products that don’t comply with the law cannot be sold in California markets.
The law, which went into full effect last year following years of litigation, has divided the national pork industry since its passage. Some local farmers, producers and animal-rights activists have argued that Prop. 12 is a small but revolutionary step toward more humane farming practices, but opponents contend that it negatively affects interstate commerce, blocking farmers in top pork-producing states such as Iowa and Minnesota from selling their products in a lucrative market.
“The revolutionary piece [of Prop. 12] is that it makes it illegal to sell [non-Prop. 12 compliant products] in California so that gives it so much power to shape an entire industry, which is what some are resisting,” said Michael Dimock, executive director of Roots of Change.
Roots of Change develops and campaigns for farm policies that affect California’s ranchers and meat producers. The group, which supported Prop. 12, now opposes the new congressional bill that aims to override the state law and block similar farming regulations cropping up across the country.
Several other states — including Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado and Ohio — have passed laws establishing minimum-space requirements and banning the use of small crates to confine pregnant pigs. Not all the states ban sales of pork raised in noncompliant spaces.
Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican who represents Iowa in the U.S. Senate, introduced the Food Security and Farm Protection Act in April. The legislation seeks to prevent states from imposing laws “interfering” with interstate pork sales. Ernst has argued that California’s Prop. 12 is “dangerous and arbitrary overregulation” that drives up the cost of pork in all states, puts family-owned farmers in the Midwest out of business and “jeopardizes the nation’s food security.”
“I’m proud to be leading the charge to strike down this harmful measure and will keep fighting to make sure the voices of the farmers and experts who know best — not liberal California activists — are heard,” Ernst said in a statement introducing the bill.
The House Committee on Agriculture held a hearing last week centered on Prop. 12. Pennsylvania Rep. Glenn Thompson, the committee chair, and fellow Republican lawmakers on the body discussed including language in the 2025 version of the so-called “farm bill” — this year’s version of legislation passed every five years setting federal food policy — that would strip states of the ability to set agricultural standards, effectively nullifying Prop. 12.
The proposal has earned the backing of the National Pork Producers Council, an industry group that led an unsuccessful legal push to overturn Prop. 12. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had correctly affirmed the dismissal of that case by a federal district-court judge in San Diego.
Dimock said the lobbying groups have a clear monetary incentive to rally against humane farming regulations like Prop. 12.
“How many companies really control the pork market? There’s probably two, maybe three, that really control the entire pork market,” Dimock said. “[Those companies] want the lowest possible price they can pay per pound for those pigs coming out of those confined animal speeding operations. So they’re really the ones putting the pressure, because it’s not the individual farmers.”
But as lawmakers say Prop. 12 poses a major threat to family farms and food security, some California farmers are pushing back against these claims.
Small-time Sonora pig farmer Samuel Santry packs his refrigerated van — embossed with Sweet Water Farm and Ranch Co.’s sun-and-hills logo — every Thursday at the crack of dawn. He makes the 150-mile trip to San Francisco weekly to personally deliver his pork products to Che Fico, Lazy Bear, Octavia, State Bird and other top restaurants in a city recently crowned the food capital of the U.S. by Travel and Leisure magazine.
Santry fills his van with pork tenderloins, oso bucco, chops and bellies, and delivers his product while taking video calls between deals to master his company’s social-media presence — a necessary albeit tedious task for the veteran-turned-rancher.
“I want to hire a social-media person to do this so I don’t have to,” he told The Examiner. “I also want to hire a reliable distributor and some more [ranch hands]. We can’t do that right now.”
Sweet Water started in 2019, a year after voters passed Prop. 12. Santry said that the first five years tend to “make or break” a business in the farm-and-ranching industry, and despite the luxurious accounts he has attained in San Francisco, his company is “almost always breaking even.”
Santry joined a group of more than 100 farmers nationwide to pen a letter introduced at last week’s hearing expressing opposition to the Food Security and Farm Protection Act.
Santry said the regulations ensure a healthier, safer product that’s worth more than the money he invests in caring for the hogs.
“We work directly with our pigs every day, and we understand firsthand their needs and behaviors,” Santry said. “Stress-related health issues are a real concern when animals are confined to small spaces. I mean, pigs get sad. They get depressed. Then, disease spreads.”
Santry said that Prop. 12 “barely scratches the surface” when it comes to humane farming practices. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the national animal rights advocacy group known as PETA, agreed.
In an unattributed statement to The Examiner, a PETA spokesperson said “a civilized society needs to impose restrictions on how living beings are treated, from children to chickens — Prop. 12 offered barely a pittance of protection, so to do away with even that shames the nation.”
Some witnesses at the House committee hearing argued that Prop. 12 regulations harmed restaurant owners by driving up pork prices. Lily Rocha, executive director of the nationwide Latino Restaurant Association, said Prop. 12 “[smashed] like a wrecking ball the livelihoods of small restaurants and the communities we serve by disrupting supply chains and dragging up the cost of culturally vital foods like pork.”
But owners of some of the restaurants to which Santry delivers paint a different picture. Barzelay said San Francisco diners often prefer food sourced from local, humane farming operations such as Sweet Water. He said preempting Prop. 12 could make it more difficult for local restaurants to do so, forcing them to buy from larger producers.
Dimock said that could strain competition in California and put producers such as Santry at risk.
“I think that if we could break the monopoly, the oligopoly of these pork producers, you could see, over time, more and more Sweet Water operations, because that’s really how pigs want to be raised,” Dimock said.
By Allyson Aleksey