Hog-tied

It’s early in the Iowa growing season, and the cornstalks are only about knee-high. Arvin Boote, a farmer and church elder, grows and harvests grain and says he’s praying the storm clouds will make their way over his crop. Boote, who has white hair and a neatly trimmed goatee, lives in a small house off a gravel road in Hull, a town of about 2,500 in the northwestern corner of the state. We sit in his living room talking and he occasionally gestures out the window. Three working grain silos tower over his house, but two barns on the property sit dormant.

Boote used to feed thousands of pigs in those barns every year. He scaled back in 1998 when it became unprofitable and switched to smaller-scale operations that allowed him to care for his neighbors’ pigs. Though Boote stopped keeping pigs two years ago, he still keeps up with the pork industry. In May, he read an item in his agriculture news magazine that left him shaking his head in frustration.

On May 11, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in National Pork Producers v. Ross upholding California’s Proposition 12, a 2018 ballot initiative that Golden State voters passed in a landslide.

The measure requires pork sold within California—even if it comes from out of state—be sourced from breeding pigs not kept in closely confined conditions. Now, pig farmers across the country are faced with an expensive dilemma: spend a mint to make their breeding facilities California-compliant or forgo Golden State buyers, who account for 13 percent of the U.S. pork market.

The legal fight against Prop 12 began in 2019, when the National Pork Producers Council sued California Secretary of Food and Agriculture Karen Ross. The suit claimed Prop 12 violated the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. California requires the offspring of 673,000 sows to satisfy demand. But California farmers raise only 1,500 sows. Most of the rest are raised in Midwestern states like Iowa.

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Prop 12 requires that the size of each sow’s gestation stall and farrowing crate be 24 square feet or greater to allow enough space for the female pigs to turn around, stretch their legs, or lie down. Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, described Prop 12 as the nation’s strongest farm animal welfare law. “Preventing animal cruelty and protecting public health are core functions of our state governments,” Block said. “Mother pigs … will actually be in enough space where they can have normal behaviors. … Mother pigs can roll over. They can stand.”

Biblical stewardship requires owners to care for the needs of their animals (Proverbs 12:10). But those on either side of the Prop 12 debate differ on breeding sows’ needs. While animal rights groups applaud the law’s intent to encourage more humane treatment of animals, farmers worry it will negatively affect their animals’ health.

That may seem counterintuitive, but during pregnancy, sows can become aggressive and territorial. Dwight Mogler, a fourth-generation farmer and second-generation pig breeder in Iowa, says farmers put them in tight gestation stalls “in order to prevent [them] from injuring themselves or others.” Small farrowing crates prevent sows from rolling over on their piglets and crushing them.

Under Prop 12, farmers will be forced to move to a group housing system, which they say puts their pigs at risk. Newborn piglets are especially vulnerable.

Eldon McAfee, a lawyer who wrote an amicus brief for the Iowa Pork Producers Association, also raised the issue of disease transmission. Inspectors checking for Prop 12 compliance could carry diseases between farms, making them more likely to circulate among pigs in a region.

A pig and piglets stand in a pen at a ranch in Nicasio, Calif. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

MOGLER OWNED SHARES in three barns, including a family pig barn he built in 2014. At the time, he said, pork processors he sold to considered that facility progressive and forward-thinking. But after voters passed Prop 12 three years later, Mogler’s new barn wasn’t even close to compliance with California’s new rules.

Though Iowa farmers took California to court, Mogler still faced uncertainty. He had two options: spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on renovations or lose out on 13 ­percent of the U.S. market share. To try and hedge their bets against a negative outcome in the courts, Mogler, his family, and his partners decided to renovate the 2014 facility and accept the loss in revenue on the others. As of 2022, Mogler had spent 75 percent above the original construction cost to bring the new barn into compliance, but he’s now operating that one at a loss, too. “Since Feb. 1 … our cost far exceeds what we will be paid as a premium for Prop 12 compliant pigs,” he said.

Some pig breeders will likely go out of business because they can’t afford to lose the California market. Some will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to remodel their barns, increasing the cost of raising each sow. Either way, farmers say the price of pork will rise for everyone, not just California residents.

Pigs in gestation crates. Business Wire/AP

“Pork is an affordable meat. It always has been,” Mogler said. “I mean, working-class Americans who live paycheck to paycheck … are the families that really rely on affordable protein choices. … Those who can least afford it are the ones who are being asked to pay the premium for this.”

Prop 12’s effects are rippling into other areas of the ­agriculture market. In western Iowa, Arvin Boote sits in his recliner and rattles off industry after industry affected by the ruling, occasionally pointing out the window in the direction of a corresponding business. Companies that ­supply farming equipment, feed, and manure will all see changes, he says. Even veterinarians could see a drop in business. “If less pigs are raised because it’s not profitable, then my grain prices could be less as well,” Boote concludes.

Some consequences of the new rules are so deeply entwined with the supply chain that the costs are hard to estimate. For example, the complex logistics of getting pork to market make tracking the origin of pork products sold in California a major challenge. At the top of the supply chain are the pig breeders. They handle the sows that give birth to litters of piglets. Breeders care for the piglets until they’re big enough to send to pig feeders. These farmers raise the piglets until they are of sufficient weight to be sold to packers like Tyson or Sysco.

With Prop 12, the supply chain becomes even more complicated. Now pigs marked as Prop 12 compliant will have to be kept in different pens, shipped at different times, and handled separately from pigs that aren’t.

McAfee noted the practical concerns: “If you can’t trace these products that are ending up in California, then could that result in that regulation being applied to pork products that would not end up in California? So our concern [is] with the ability to trace pork products.”

As we talk, Arvin Boote occasionally throws a toy for two dogs he is looking after. Afterward, we walk out to the barn where he used to keep his pigs. Above the door hangs a colorful checkerboard design with the letter B at the ­center, the Boote family crest. A cat races in front of us, and its litter of kittens tussles together in a corner. Outside, ­several cows eye us with curiosity.

“I would always marvel at God’s hand in nature,” Boote says, reflecting on his time raising pigs. He’s an animal lover and says most other farmers are as well. Many spend their whole lives in this sort of work, with farms handed down from one generation to the next. But not all consumers think of farmers as conscientious stewards.

“I’ve always thought for years and years you need to tell our story,” Boote says. “If you don’t tell our story, people will assume the worst.”

—Benjamin Eicher and Aidan Johnston are 2023 World Journalism Institute graduates