The Farm Bill is Bad for America and an Attack on Animal Welfare

This year’s Farm Bill — a grab bag of policies related to agriculture, research, and nutrition — would roll back existing legal protections for America’s farmers, farm animals, and consumers, all to benefit some of the most powerful multinational corporations on Earth. It is anti-democratic legislation that will degrade the American standard of living for generations to come and turn the clock back on animal welfare.

One highly controversial provision in the Farm Bill — whose official name is the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — is a liability shield to protect corporations like Germany’s Bayer-Monsanto from lawsuits over their alleged failure to warn users about the risks of the pesticide Roundup. This policy will strip farmers, maintenance workers, landscapers, and consumers of their right to seek compensation in state courts when they develop illnesses allegedly linked to pesticide exposure, including cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Another provision with far-reaching, adverse implications for farm animals and farmers is a giveaway to the one foreign company that already controls a quarter of the U.S. market share for pork: China’s Smithfield Foods. The Farm Bill would federally repeal the states’ most important farm animal welfare laws — Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts — pulling the rug out from under countless small and midsize U.S. farmers who have invested millions to adopt more humane housing systems. If enacted, this Farm Bill would hand America’s pork sector to our largest global economic competitor, allowing China to outsource its high-rise factory farms onto America’s shores unencumbered by any federal or state laws that might slow them down.

While the bill manufactures a controversy and repeals state laws that give animals enough space to “stand up, lie down, turn around, and freely extend their limbs,” it ignores dangerous enterprises, such as dogfighting and cockfighting, which, at this very moment, threaten our homeland and the functioning of the egg and poultry industries in America.

This Farm Bill inverts our national priorities, putting people and animals at risk, and hands the key to the city to multinational and foreign-owned businesses that are already causing so much harm to people and animals.

An Attack on Voter-Approved Animal Welfare Laws

The Farm Bill seeks to overturn California’s Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 — measures approved in landslide votes by more than 10 million Americans to place limits on the in-state sale of pork and eggs that come from factory farms relying on immobilizing cages and crates for breeding sows and laying hens.

These laws have forged thriving value-added marketplaces in California and Massachusetts in which thousands of farmers across the country are participating. Producers who meet higher welfare standards are earning a living. Consumers are choosing products aligned with their values.

But by including the Save Our Bacon Act, H.R. 4673, in the Farm Bill, a handful of lawmakers in Congress are trying to put their thumbs on the scale to favor the major corporations using cages and crates to immobilize animals, in a moral race to the bottom in agriculture and a glaring example of crony capitalism.

There is no “crisis” to fix and there is no “50-state patchwork” of sow treatment laws, as the National Pork Producers Council and Smithfield Foods have falsely charged. The two voter-approved state laws are just expressions of a much bigger set of drivers facilitating a non-jarring, decades-in-motion transition away from cage-based animal housing systems in American agriculture.

If the chairman of the Agriculture Committee was thinking about keeping farmers on the land in the long term — while also paying attention to the needs of animals — he’d use these state laws as a model and facilitate a national transition away from extreme confinement crates.

But the committee chairman included the Save Our Bacon Act in his bill even though it has just 23 Republican cosponsors; that’s roughly 10% of House Republicans and 0% of Democrats.

At the same time, the chairman ignored a raft of pro-animal-welfare policies — such as the FIGHT Act to combat animal fighting and the SAFE Act to stop horse slaughter — that have hundreds of cosponsors across both parties and have thousands of American-based agencies and organizations backing them.

Cartels, Cockfighting, and Escalating Violence

The leader of the Agriculture Committee is fighting efforts by our Republican and Democrat allies in Congress to confront a menace that threatens our nation and amounts to savage abuse of animals. I am talking about the FIGHT Act, H.R. 3946, which is written to eradicate the scourges of dogfighting and cockfighting and to stop American animal fighters from spreading this form of organized crime across the globe.

“Animal fighting isn’t a minor offense,” said the leaders of the National Sheriffs’ Association in endorsing the FIGHT Act. “It is a gateway to narcotics trafficking, illegal guns, and violence.” The Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association told federal lawmakers that “cockfighting rings in our region fuel organized crime and threaten public safety,” while the Pennsylvania Sheriffs’ Association related that “dogfighting operations bring cruelty, gun violence, and gambling into our communities.”

This week, Mexican authorities moved decisively against cartel leadership, targeting Nemesio “El Mencho” Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — one of the most violent criminal organizations in the hemisphere. We’ve known about this cartel’s involvement in animal fighting for a long time. El Mencho’s son-in-law was apprehended in Riverside County, California, last year for illegal cockfighting — interrupting the organized crime spree he was executing in the United States as an emissary for the crime boss.

We’ve often said that when we bust up cockfights and dogfights, we cast a net that catches cartel members, gang members, narcotics traffickers, money launderers, and all sorts of other criminals. Look no further than the Jalisco New Generation Cartel to validate that claim.

The vast majority of America’s law enforcement community — with more than 500 agencies, including the Major County Sheriffs of America, the National District Attorneys’ Association, and sheriffs’ associations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and numerous other states — are demanding action because they understand that the illegal movements of animals and people across our southern border for fighting are a menace to society.

There can be no question that U.S.-based cockfighters are business partners with cartel-linked organizations that run and control major cockfighting venues in Mexico and the Philippines. Mass shootings, murder, and other mayhem are their stock in trade. (See our exclusive report here.)

In the Philippines, live and online cockfighting (“e-sabong”) is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, and hundreds of murders have been connected to gambling debts and organized crime conflicts. One cockfighting leader is being chased now by Interpol for 34 murders in the Philippines, where our investigations team just documented dozens of Americans at the World Slasher Cup selling and fighting their birds and abetting the organized crime in that southeast Asian nation.

Animal fighting is not a pastime or a privilege. It is a criminal venture, orchestrated by people who relish violence and show contempt for the rule of law. It is a revenue stream for organized crime and a gathering place for violent actors whose enterprises tear and rip the fabric of a civil society.

A Biosecurity Time Bomb

Cockfighting is also a direct threat to our commercial poultry industry and public health.

The smuggling of cockfighting birds from Mexico into the United States caused 10 out of 15 outbreaks of virulent Newcastle disease to hit the United States in recent decades. In Asia, cockfighting played a role in spreading H5N1 (“bird flu”), which has a 53% mortality rate — 100 times deadlier than COVID-19.

That viral spread is now a pandemic that has resulted in the killing of 195 million birds in our homeland — two-thirds of them laying hens. That mass loss of birds drove up the price of a dozen eggs to $10 and collectively cost American consumers more than $20 billion at the cash register. Taxpayers unwittingly forked over $2 billion to indemnify farmers for their losses.

The CEO of the United Egg Producers said “a bird flu outbreak launched or sustained by cockfighting could lead to a zoonotic avian influenza plague more harmful than the COVID-19 pandemic.” And the executive director of the North Central Poultry Association noted that “Iowa is the largest egg-producing state and stopping the illegal movement of fighting animals, especially cockfighting, is vital to our nation’s poultry industry and to public health.”

Instead of giving a lift to big pesticide manufacturers and foreign factory farms, the drafters of the Farm Bill should have focused on these commonsense ways to stop the bird flu epidemic and reduce other zoonotic diseases.

Misplaced Priorities

Congress should be defending democratic outcomes, strengthening enforcement against organized animal fighting, protecting American agriculture from preventable disease outbreaks, and ensuring that criminal enterprises — including cartel family members operating within our borders — are not given a pass.

Please help us mobilize against this destructive Farm Bill, defend Prop 12 and Question 3, and press Congress to focus on the real threats to animal welfare, public health, and public safety.

Write and call your federal lawmakers. Tell them to oppose this Farm Bill. Tell them to strip out its many unacceptable provisions and to add in reforms supported by American law enforcement, animal welfare groups, agriculture groups, and so many other key stakeholders in our nation.