Our opinion: Possible worries for agriculture | News, Sports, Jobs

State agriculture leaders are worried about the ripple effects of a California regulation that would place strict limits on how animals are raised if their meat is to be sold in California.

They should be — because the state’s pork farmers may soon feel like an overcooked piece of bacon if California’s animal welfare bill spreads like its standards for emissions from cars and trucks.

California’s Proposition 12 was passed by voters in 2018 and will require pork sold in the state to come from pigs whose mothers were raised with at least 24 square feet of space, with the ability to lie down and turn around. That rules out confined “gestation crates,” metal enclosures that are common in the pork industry. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Proposition 12 earlier this year, and quickly a New York state legislator introduced a similar bill there.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and the Iowa-based National Pork Producers Council said that while Californians consume 13% of the pork eaten in the United States, nearly all of that pork comes from hogs raised in other states. The vast majority of sows raised in those states are not raised under conditions that would meet Proposition 12’s standards. They also say that the way the pork market works, with cuts of meat from various producers being combined before sale, it is likely all pork would have to meet California standards, regardless of where it is sold. Pork producers argued that 72% of farmers use individual pens for sows that do not allow them to turn around and that even farmers who house sows in larger group pens do not provide the space California would require.

Complying with Proposition 12 could cost the industry $290 million to $350 million, they said. That cost, then, is likely on its way to Pennsylvania pork farmers.

It is against that backdrop that Chris Hoffman, president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, warned of a downturn for the commonwealth’s poultry and pig farmers. Pennsylvania is the eighth-largest poultry state, Hoffman noted, and processes over half a million pig carcasses daily.

“It is important that one state doesn’t dictate how we grow our animals,” Hoffman said, according to a Center Square report. “If we lose that market, it really is going to create a huge deficit in pork that’s consumed.”

One of the worries is that even humanely raised pigs and chickens can’t meet the California standard. Before this ripply effect hits farmers throughout the country and send the prices consumers pay for pork sky high, the federal government needs to help find a common ground that protects farmers, consumers and animals.