Large and Small Producers Swing Behind Prop 12

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) is seeing massive defections within its ranks on its 15-year campaign to overturn Prop 12 and other state farm animal welfare laws.

Drubbed time and again in the courts, including in a failed challenge to Prop 12 before the U.S. Supreme Court, the NPPC renewed its request more than two years ago that Congress take up the issue. The pork industry trade group cajoled its allies in Congress to introduce the EATS Act, but the legislation stalled. This year, in the new 119th Congress, it also swapped in a new name for the bill — promoting H.R. 4673 as the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act, along with the introduction of a similar bill, S. 1326, in the Senate.

But with nothing appearing to go their way in Congress or the courts, the NPPC is now facing trouble on a third front. The group is witnessing major erosion of its support among pig farmers and pork producers across the country. And that hollowing out of support has accelerated since Prop 12’s provisions took full effect in January 2024, with virtually every major pork producer in America supplying California with Prop 12-compliant pork directly or through their distribution networks. Many of these companies once denounced Prop 12, but they’re now knee-deep in its implementation and cogs in California’s pork supply chain.

The Oklahoma-based Seaboard Foods appears on the registry of companies supplying Prop 12-compliant pork and reports increased profits from “higher margins on pork products.” Tyson Foods’ CEO Donnie King acknowledged the company’s ability to supply Prop 12-compliant pork, stating, “we can align suppliers, and we can certainly provide the raw material to service our customers in that way.” Triumph Foods, which has led multiple lawsuits against Prop 12 — and just lost a challenge to Question 3 in Massachusetts in a unanimous ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit — maintains active California distribution.

Other industrial-scale pork companies are in more open revolt against the NPPC. Iowa Select Brands and even the Brazil-based giant JBS appear to be actively opposing the NPPC on this campaign to overturn Prop 12 and may no longer be members of the trade association.

Brad Clemens, president of Clemens Food Group, also a top-10 national producer, says the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act and its precursor measures undermine years of work the company has put in to prepare for Prop 12 and other similar animal welfare laws. “We’ve given our producers choice,” he says. “This is their choice to be able to make this conversion, and a lot of them have. It’s given them choice, and it will absolutely take away a choice they have if the EATS Act [now the SOB Act] were to pass.”

What’s more, hundreds of smaller, independent producers and distributors have found profitable niches in the Prop 12 market. “Our farmers have invested millions to become compliant with Proposition 12. The EATS Act threatens the livelihoods of our farmers and the future of our business,” said Phil Gatto, co-founder and CEO of True Story Foods. And Russ Kremer, head of Farm Partnerships, added recently: “Voters made their voices heard, and we agree with them that animals deserve space to move… . Prop 12 gives small farms like ours the opportunity to survive during a time when agriculture is heavily consolidated and independent farmers are being pushed out.”

“Consumer interest in animal welfare continues to accelerate with no signs of slowing down, and undermining Prop 12 punishes the producers who stepped up and the consumers who voted in favor of farming practices they believe in,” said Mike Salguero, founder and CEO of ButcherBox.

On October 8, 2025, more than 200 farmers — with 40 farmers from Minnesota alone — traveled to Washington, D.C., to urge Congress not to pass the SOB Act or its Senate counterpart, the Food Security and Farm Protection Act.

“Opponents of Proposition 12 claim that the law hurts small family farms, and I’m here to tell you that’s just not true,” said Trisha Zachman, a Minnesota farmer who markets her hogs to Niman Ranch. She explained that Prop 12 protects the market for crate-free pork so farms that invested in humane housing can “continue to compete.” Other farmers reported tangible benefits after converting — healthier, longer-lived sows — and warned that gutting these laws now would destabilize their businesses (and likely bankrupt them).

Prop 12, Question 3 Working Seamlessly from California to Massachusetts

In a recent Agri-Pulse interview, David Newman, CEO of the National Pork Board, said pork producers are doing “spectacularly well.” An outspoken opponent of Prop 12, Smithfield Foods, the Chinese-owned company that controls a quarter of U.S. pork sales, reported over a billion dollars in operating profits in 2024 while maintaining its California sales through strategic distribution partnerships with registered customers like Sysco, US Foods, and Costco. Its 2023 Sustainability Report explicitly states that “some of our sow farms are now Prop 12 compliant,” an on-the-record confirmation they’re producing and routing compliant product to California through subsidiaries like Farmer John.

Even strong critics of Prop 12 are conceding that their original arguments against Prop 12 fell flat. “Initially, when California passed Prop 12 (in 2018), there was an effect in the market, because we didn’t really know how it was going to affect Iowa producers,” said Iowa Pork Producers Association president Matt Gent. “Since then, over the past year, there’s been enough production change to meet Prop 12 demand that it really truly doesn’t affect a producer that doesn’t want to adjust operations to comply with the California law.”

Foreign producers are also getting in on the economic action, voluntarily opting for more humane housing systems to gain access to more humane-oriented markets. Canadian companies, like duBreton, and several European companies such as Dutch meat processor Vion Food Group, have registered to supply California. Pork producers in Chile have also switched over to gestation-crate-free production strategies so they can access the California market.

From the get-go, the NPPC has underestimated American farmers, and the evidence for their resourcefulness is evident in evolving and more humane farming practices all across the nation and increasingly across the world.

Congress and the Federal Courts Aren’t Buying NPPC’s Arguments

The NPPC is opposing Prop 12 based on an anti-animal-welfare ideology rather than practical concerns about profitability for producers. Yet, the trade group and its surrogates make elaborate attempts to adorn their case in economic malaise and misery.

“California’s Prop 12, along with Massachusetts’ Question 3, are based on arbitrary, nonsensical standards and have resulted in a harmful patchwork of regulations across the 50 states, and risk pushing smaller hog producers out of business,” said one prominent Iowa lawmaker. A leader of the Agriculture Committee declared, at a summer hearing about Prop 12, that there’s “chaos” in the marketplace from the measure. Others charge that Iowa and Minnesota farmers are “forced to comply” with Prop 12 and that the costs of converting to new housing systems are enormous.

But these arguments are, at best, a contrivance. There was certainly an economic calamity in the pork industry, but those problems long preceded Prop 12 or any other state animal welfare law. The number of pig farmers has declined already from over 870,000 in 1970 to fewer than 57,000 today, a decrease of more than 90%. This trend has been in evidence for the last 50 years, and it’s due to monopolistic control of the industry by a few production giants, including China’s Smithfield Foods. Prop 12, Question 3, the Organic Livestock and Poultry Protection Standards, and other market-based opportunities that give farmers value for their farming work offer the best chance of arresting these trends.

In 2002, when one of the authors of this column led the nation’s first ballot initiative to ban gestation-crate confinement in Florida — approved by a wide margin in that state — just 2% or so of sow housing systems in the United States were crate-free. Now, it’s nearing 50%. Today, you’d have to search far and wide to find any producers still building extreme confinement systems for sows. That’s an upward slope with such a steep grade that you’d need special climbing equipment to scale it.

It’s apparent that there is an emerging national consensus among consumers that they dislike gestation crates and want more humane treatment of the sows. Voters have approved five of five anti-gestation crates ballot measures in the 21st century — each by double-digit margins. During that same period, 60 major food retailers — including just about every big name in the domains of restaurant sales, food service, and supermarkets — have issued statements opposing gestation-crate confinement.

NPPC Campaign Has Produced Abysmal Results, Squandered Tens of Millions

The pig industry cannot at the same time be doing “spectacularly well,” as the Pork Board leader noted, and also be in “chaos” because of Prop 12, according to a politician pushing the SOB Act.

It seems abundantly clear which claim is fake news.

And it’s not the first time that the NPPC’s claims have proven spurious. The NPPC and its surrogates have lost 20 straight cases challenging Prop 12 and Prop 2 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts, all of which dealt with extreme confinement of farm animals. And they’ve failed to make any gains on this issue in Congress on the 2014 or 2018 Farm bills. They’re back at it again but with unprecedented internal discord within their industry.

Congressional opposition to their campaign has also reached a new high-water mark. This week, 182 House Democrats — nearly 90% of the total number of Democrats in the House — wrote to Agriculture Committee leaders and declared their opposition to the SOB Act. That came after 14 Republicans sent a letter in opposition to the measure in September. In July, 32 Democrats in the Senate issued their own letter of opposition to S. 1326.

Members of Congress made plain that the SOB Act is an attack on American farmers, states’ rights, and animal welfare. “It is imperative to ensure that American farmers — not foreign governments — maintain control over U.S. domestic food production and supply chains to safeguard national interests,” wrote Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and more than a dozen of her Republican colleagues this fall. They told the Agriculture Committee that they don’t want Smithfield Foods, acquired in 2013 by China, bringing its dystopian high-rise factory farms to the American heartland. Prop 12 is a bulwark against that foreign takeover of American agriculture.

Please do donate $25, $50, or $100 today to help us battle the DOJ in court and beat back NPPC and its allies in Congress. I cannot underscore how much is at stake.