By Nina Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
When Brent Hershey entered the hog business, he was told that every pork producer in America uses gestation crates on their farm. Gestation crates are metal enclosures, typically seven feet long and two feet wide, where a pregnant female pig, a sow, is kept during her pregnancy. The stalls are so small that sows typically cannot sit or lie down for four months — the entirety of their pregnancy while in the stall. And these gestation crates, long a fixture in industrial pork production, are at the center of a fierce debate between industry groups and the hog farmers who say they don’t want to go back to using them.
Florida was the first state to ban gestation crates in 2002. At the time, Hershey thought Floridians had no idea what they were doing — that they didn’t “understand good production.” Twenty years and a California ballot initiative later, Hershey would be tearing all the gestation crates out of his 1,000-head Pennsylvania sow farm and his 2,000 head Delaware sow operation.
The new laws got Hershey rethinking the crates. “We thought, look at the life that we are asking the animal to live,” he says. “They’re going to be safe, but they can’t walk, they can’t turn around. At the same time, we started going to see some barns that animals were free in. We looked at that and thought, wow, that really looks more natural.”
California’s Proposition 12 and Question 3 in Massachusetts are state ballot measures that banned the sale of pork born to gestation crate-sows. These laws also offer protections to egg-laying hens and veal calves. Organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) have long called for Prop 12 to be overturned, and in 2023, their case against the California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary traveled from the Ninth Circuit to the Supreme Court of the United States. The highest court eventually upheld the constitutionality of Prop 12, but the two industry groups did not drop their opposition. Instead, they shifted focus to Congress.
The public position of the Farm Bureau and the National Pork Producers Council on gestation crates has never wavered — both groups insist pork farmers do not want the ban — yet Hershey and other farmers say differently. “As soon as the Supreme Court announced this decision, within weeks, we tore all our gestation crates out,” Hershey said at a briefing for the U.S. House of Representatives. “Now we’re on [the California] standard, and we’re doing better. It’s very ironic.”
Not long after the decision, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall introduced the “Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act” to the Senate, which would prohibit “against interference by state and local governments with production of items in other states.” In effect, this bill would overturn Prop 12. And in the May 2024 version of the Farm Bill, House lawmakers included language similar to the EATS Act that would “ensure that producers of covered livestock are not subject to a patchwork of State laws restricting access to a national market.”
Farmers like Hershey are concerned that the language, if passed, could destroy the more humane pork market that has been created, nationwide and internationally, for farmers looking to serve the California market. California is the 5th largest economy in the world, and the state gobbles up close to 15 percent of the country’s entire pork consumption.
Yet the Farm Bureau and the Pork Council continue to deliver a national campaign that all pork farmers are in favor of the EATS Act and that Prop 12 is killing their farms. “It’s not true at all,” Hershey tells Sentient. “They’re saying that they represent us all, but they do not represent us at all.”
Calling “Baloney” on the Farm Bureau
In a statement released after the Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall wrote, “This law has the potential to devastate small family farms across the nation through unnecessary and expensive renovations, and every family will ultimately pay for the law through higher food prices.”
“I call baloney on that,” says Iowa hog farmer Ron Mardesen, who has been raising hogs in Iowa since the 1980s. Mardesen is a farmer with Niman Ranch, a network of farmers who produce meat that is hormone-free, cage-free and compliant with Prop 12.
Mardesen sees a lack of representation for independent farmers. “We’ve lost 90 percent of independent hog farmers in the last 35, 40 years. The National Pork Producers just sit and bobble their head every time everybody wants to get bigger and wants to get more consolidated.”
In a recent advertisement campaign backing the EATS Act, the Pork Producers Council highlights “Cindy,” a fictional character who runs a barbeque food truck that sources from Perkins Family Pig Farm. Cindy’s operation shutters due to rising pork prices, and the farm does too.
A note with the video reads: “This scenario could soon become a reality across America.” The video stresses that Prop 12 especially hurts smaller farmers: “A farm that would have been transferred to future generations deteriorates into ruin or is sold to a big company,” the narrator says. “Proposition 12 has burdened every link in the food supply chain, from the farmer to the business owner.”
Yet Missouri sow farmer Hank Wurtz says he has no idea where this is coming from. All of the farms he knows are converting to Prop 12. If a sow farm is closing, it is not because of Prop 12, Wurtz adds.
“I know for a fact that there are many [gestational] crate farms in this country right now that are considering shutting down,” he says. “They’re not able to be viable anymore, but that’s not caused by California. That’s caused by 20,000 sow operations going up all over the Midwest. It is the rest of the industry’s large-scale operations that are making the small family farms irrelevant.”
According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since 1990, “the number of farms with hogs has declined by more than 70 percent as individual enterprises have grown larger.” Meanwhile, the number of hogs continues to grow in the U.S., primarily in concentrated animal feeding operations that typically house anywhere from 750 to tens of thousands of hogs per building.
Rising input costs and stagnant pig prices are causing smaller, independent farmers to turn to alternative strategies to stay afloat.
A New Type of Sow Farm
When Prop 12 was passed in 2019, Wurtz saw an opportunity in a niche market. According to Wurtz’s research, sow farmers have been getting approximately the same price — around $42 — for piglets throughout the past ten years. With Prop 12, Wurtz saw an opportunity to make his farm more economically viable.
“We love farming, but we need to be able to make money and support our families,” he says. “When Prop 12 came along and they’re offering around $50 a pig, that’s a game changer.”
Wurtz says he has invested $12 million into building a brand-new Prop 12 sow barn to replace his gestation crate operation in Northwest Missouri.
“It wouldn’t have been feasible in 2019 to go build a $12 million farm based on just the animal humane aspect of it. We wouldn’t have been able to bankroll it. It had to pay around 30 percent more because it cost 30 percent more to make it Prop 12,” he says.
When the law was challenged by the Supreme Court, Wurtz felt abandoned by the NPPC, and envisioned a future where small, family farms like his would no longer be able to exist.
“We were actually shaking in our boots at that time,” he says. “We’d be no longer financially viable.”
Wurtz did not get into the Prop 12 business for animal welfare — he’s sure to clarify that. But the increased quality of life for his sows has been an unanticipated benefit.
“We didn’t feel like we were abusing our animals all those years. But in hindsight, now looking at the farm that we have in Missouri here, I get the point,” he tells Sentient. “If you grow up a certain way, you just think crates are normal.”
Wurtz says he knows a lot of farmers who do not want to speak out in support of Prop 12 because they do not want to be associated with animal rights activists.
“But the fact of the matter is, Prop 12 is one of the best things, economically, that’s happened to us in a very long time,” he says. “That’s good for American farmers. We need to make a living somehow. If Californians want to pay more for it, we welcome that.”
The Farm Bill as a Legislative Vehicle
The last farm bill to pass through the U.S. Congress was in December 2018. It expired in Sept. 2023, got a one-year extension, and then expired again at the end of September 2024. The EATS Act is included in the House Republicans’ version of the 2024 farm bill draft.
“[The EATS Act] was introduced with the strategy of them trying to attach it to the farm bill,” says Farm Action Fund Senior Director of Programs Christian Lovell at an EATS Act event held at George Washington Law School. “I don’t think anybody thinks that a bill like that would be considered as a standalone item.”
The EATS Act is unprecedented in that the broad language of the bill could have larger ramifications to states’ rights than just what kind of food can be sold. According to a report by the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, certain terms in the bill, like “agricultural products” are “defined so broadly as to potentially include vaccines, vitamins, and even narcotics.” The Act could even threaten the labeling of meat, including where it comes from.
At the G.W. Law event, Lovell emphasized that consumers care about where their food comes from and how it was raised, and the EATS Act could obstruct that information.
“The corporations that control our food system, it’s almost like they want to hang a veil over that,” he says. “They don’t want the consumer to see anything until it gets to the grocery store shelves, and that’s because those corporations have rigged a food system that is extractive to rural communities like the ones I grew up in and now live in.”
For Mardesen, the fact that the EATS Act was just slipped into the farm bill makes the prospect of its passage more likely.
“I have not seen this as a hill that many people are willing to die on. The thing that scares me, and it really worries me, is that, look, if we get into this 11th hour wheeling and dealing, and you’ve got somebody who says, ‘Okay, I’ll do this. If you do this,’ I don’t know how pivotal this is [for legislators] at this point,” he says.
The saddest part for Mardesen is the impact this could have on farmers like Wurtz, who have shifted their entire operation for Prop 12.
“So many guys have already made the commitment, already made the investment, already made the transition to gestation-crate-free systems in order to reap the benefits from the higher markets, and that stool is going to be kicked right out from underneath them,” he says. “And that’s a lot of good, hard working pork producers that we need.”
That includes hog farmers like Hershey, who came to question what he once believed to be a necessary part of his work: “If, hypothetically, that model was the cheapest way to produce pork, putting pigs in cages that can’t turn around and can’t walk for four months at a time, if that’s legitimate, then you gotta ask the question, ‘yes, but is that okay?’”
Nina Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email
By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for California News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
In 2023, UC Berkeley student and activist Zoe Rosenberg removed four severely ill chickens from a slaughterhouse truck in Petaluma, California, and brought them to an animal sanctuary. Now, she's facing over five years in prison. Rosenberg's trial is scheduled for later this year, and her allegations tell a story of horrific conditions at ostensibly "free-range" chicken farms, as well as the steep uphill battle activists face in convincing law enforcement to even investigate allegations of animal cruelty on factory farms.
Rosenberg is an activist with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a Bay Area-based animal rights organization. In addition to supporting ballot propositions and hosting conferences, DxE carries out undercover investigations of slaughterhouses and factory farms. In some cases, its activists rescue ill and imperiled animals from such facilities; this is what's known as "open rescue," a popular tactic among some animal rights activists.
The prospect of risking prison time for saving a few chickens, who are routinely sold for less than $20 apiece, may seem outlandish. But DxE activists like Rosenberg see it as a necessary risk to accomplish their ultimate goal: the complete abolition of slaughterhouses and factory farms.
"I think that if people don't take action and don't risk their freedom to create change, nothing will ever change," Rosenberg, who's currently wearing an ankle monitor while out on bail, tells Sentient. "We've seen time and time throughout history that it has been the sacrifices of the very few that have changed the world."
Petaluma Poultry did not respond to Sentient's request for comment on this story, but a company spokesperson denied DxE's claims to the San Francisco Chronicle, characterizing the group as "extremist" and its efforts as "theft."
What Is Open Rescue?
In essence, open rescue is the act of removing animals from dangerous or harmful environments without permission from the person, company or facility that oversees said animals. Those who carry out open rescues don't hide what they are doing, and often publicize their actions. Animals that are removed via open rescue are typically provided with medical care and/or taken to animal sanctuaries.
The goal of open rescues, which date back to at least the early 1980s, is not only to provide relief for the animals in question, but also to highlight the conditions in which farm animals are held, and to normalize the act of rescuing them. But it's a controversial practice, even among activists, and law enforcement officials generally treat open rescues as acts of theft, trespassing or other crimes.
This often leads to prosecution, but in the eyes of open rescue advocates, this isn't entirely a bad thing. Prosecutions often bring media attention and publicity to both the topic in question and the relevant laws surrounding that topic. Rosenberg's case, for instance, draws attention not only to the conditions of factory farms, but also to the fact that removing a few sick animals from a slaughterhouse can get you a half a decade in prison.
Do People Usually Go to Prison for Open Rescue?
Although charges are often brought in open rescue cases, they're frequently reduced or, in some cases, dropped entirely before trial. It's not uncommon for open rescuers to be acquitted, either; in a verdict that drew international headlines, DxE founder Wayne Hsiung and another defendant were facing 60 years in prison for rescuing two sick piglets from a Smithfield Farms facility in Utah, only to be acquitted of all charges.
That said, Hsiung did recently spend 38 days in Sonoma County jail for an open rescue in which he participated, so it's not unheard of for activists like Rosenberg to serve time for carrying out open rescues.
The Incident in Question
On June 13, 2023, Rosenberg entered a Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse partially disguised as an employee. A truck delivering chickens to the facility was parked outside, and Rosenberg spotted four chickens in the back of the truck who she says were "covered in scratches and bruises." She took them from the truck, left the slaughterhouse and both she and DxE publicized her actions on social media.
Rosenberg says that she intentionally took the chickens that "seemed like they most needed medical attention." Subsequent examinations found that all four birds were infected with Coccidia parasites; one of them also had a respiratory infection and an injured toe, while a third had a foot infection.
Five months later, Rosenberg was arrested and charged with five felonies relating to the June 13 rescue. These charges were later reduced, and as of this writing, she faces one felony conspiracy charge, two forms of misdemeanor trespassing charges, one misdemeanor theft charge and one misdemeanor charge of tampering with a vehicle. Her trial is scheduled for September 15, 2025.
The chickens she rescued were all treated for their illnesses, and are now living at an animal sanctuary.
A History of Animal Neglect At Petaluma Poultry
Petaluma Poultry, a subsidiary of the chicken giant Perdue, presents itself as a humane operation where, in the words of its website, "chickens are free to be chickens."
"Our houses are spacious, with room for birds to move about and exhibit normal behaviors in a low-stress environment open to fresh air," the company's website says. "Our outdoor spaces are at least half the size of the poultry house, and typically as big as the barn itself."
But Petaluma Poultry's advertising is a classic example of humane-washing, when companies try to appeal to animal welfare-minded consumers by depicting their products as more humanely produced than they actually are.
Petaluma Poultry and its contractors have been accused of criminal animal cruelty on a number of occasions, and footage filmed by undercover investigators in the company's farms and slaughterhouse paints a much different picture than the company's marketing.
In 2018, a whistleblower provided DxE with footage from McCoy's Poultry, a factory farm contracted by Petaluma Poultry, that showed chickens collapsed on the ground, unable to stand or walk and surrounded by the corpses of other chickens. Shortly thereafter, Sonoma County Animal Services seized 15 chickens from McCoy's Poultry; six were already dead, while the other nine were injured, malnourished, unable to stand and exhibited signs of distress, according to a subsequent medical report. The facility was later shut down.
In 2023, another activist who infiltrated Petaluma Poultry's slaughterhouse said that she saw workers cutting into chickens while they were still alive, as well as evidence that chickens had been abused, tortured and boiled alive during the slaughter process. They also obtained documents showing that, on a single day in April, over 1,000 chickens were deemed unfit for human consumption after they were slaughtered due to suspicion that they had blood poisoning.
Prior to her arrest for the June incident, Rosenberg herself was involved in a separate DxE investigation of a Petaluma Poultry facility in 2023, where she recorded footage of more chickens suffering in the facility.
"I documented chickens who were collapsed on the floor of their factory farms, too weak to stand, unable to get to food and water, and slowly dying of starvation and dehydration," Rosenberg says. She ended up rescuing two of those chickens as well, both of whom required extensive medical care.
It remains unclear whether authorities prosecuting or investigating these allegations of criminal animal cruelty? And if not, how come?
Rosenberg Raised Allegations of Animal Welfare Abuses
Poultry is the most widely consumed meat in the U.S. and the world, yet there are no federal laws that protect livestock chickens from mistreatment on the farm. The Humane Slaughter Act establishes some baseline requirements for the treatment of livestock, but it specifically exempts chickens from these protections.
In California, however, livestock chickens are protected under a number of different laws. In addition to Proposition 12, which requires poultry producers to give egg-laying hens a specific amount of living space, Section 597(b) of California's penal code makes it a felony to subject an animal to "needless suffering" or deprive them of access to sufficient food or water, among other things.
This law would appear to be relevant in the context of Petaluma Poultry. If a chicken at a factory farm is physically unable to stand (let alone walk), they will be unable to reach the feeding trays and water, and will eventually die of thirst or starvation. If a chicken is boiled alive because they were improperly stunned beforehand, it has suffered needlessly.
The aforementioned investigations uncovered evidence of both of these things happening at Petaluma Poultry and its contracted facilities. Both DxE and Rosenberg claim they've presented multiple law enforcement agencies with this evidence, only to be rebuffed or ignored.
"The most common thing we've had is agencies directing us to another agency, directing us to another agency, directing us back to the place where we started, and just kind of sending us around in circles," Rosenberg says. "We didn't get any helpful response. No one took action."
It was this inaction that led Rosenberg to take the four chickens from the back of the truck in June, she says. After doing so, she again presented her findings to law enforcement, specifically the Petaluma Police Department. This time, she got a response.
"They said they had a detective who wanted to have a call with me, and so I had like a 15-minute call with a detective from the Petaluma Police Department," Rosenberg says. "She very much approached the call from an angle of, you know, 'I'm concerned about the reports you are making.' And so I told her about the animal cruelty that has been documented there."
But Officer Corie Joerger, the detective in question, didn't follow up with her after their call, Rosenberg claims, and ignored her subsequent attempts at communication. A couple of weeks later, Joerger handed Rosenberg a warrant for her arrest regarding the June rescue.
In the preliminary hearing for Rosenberg's case, Joerger acknowledged that Rosenberg had made allegations of animal cruelty, but stated that she did not investigate the matter.
This inaction by law enforcement wasn't an isolated incident. When the investigation at McCoy's Poultry facility uncovered dead birds on the farm floor and others that were unable to move, Sonoma County Animal Services referred the matter to the county sheriff's office for potential prosecution. But no prosecution followed then, either.
Sentient has reached out to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, the Petaluma Police Department and Joerger for clarification on these reports, but as of this writing, none have offered any comments.
Petaluma Poultry Is More the Rule Than the Exception
The allegations against Petaluma Poultry might sound extreme. But in fact, many are par for the course on factory farms, and chicken farms in particular.
For instance, the USDA estimates that every year, around 825,000 chickens are boiled alive at slaughterhouses. This is not standard protocol, but rather, the result of standard protocol gone wrong.
At poultry slaughterhouses, chickens are typically hung upside down by their feet and pulled through an electrified pool of water, which is meant to stun them. After that, workers slit the chickens' throats, and after they've bled out, they're placed into boiling water. This is to soften the skin and make it easier to defeather them.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least. In actuality, though, one or both of those first two steps often fail; chickens are either inadequately stunned before their throats are cut, or their throats aren't fully slit, or both. When both of these processes fail, the chicken is inadvertently boiled alive, and feels every bit of pain associated with this.
Similarly, the fact that those chickens at Petaluma Poultry couldn't stand up or walk isn't an accident. Over the decades, farmers have selectively bred chickens to be as fat as possible, as this maximizes the amount of meat they can sell. According to the National Chicken Council, farmed chickens now grow to be over twice as large as they were 100 years ago in less than half the time.
This unnatural rate of growth has wrought havoc on their internal biology, however, and farm chickens now routinely suffer from a number of illnesses and adverse health conditions as a result, including bone deformities, heart attacks, chronic hunger, ruptured tendons and, most relevantly to Petaluma Poultry, difficulty standing up or walking.
Finally, Petaluma Poultry is far from the only chicken producer to make questionable use of the "free-range" label, which is ostensibly regulated by the USDA. In 2023, undercover footage taken from a Tyson Foods-contracted chicken farm in Virginia depicted employees of both the factory and Tyson freely acknowledging that the "free range" label doesn't actually mean anything, and that "free range" birds often "don't go outside."
Why Wasn't Petaluma Poultry Investigated by Law Enforcement?
Though it's unclear why local law enforcement hasn't pursued any investigations into the allegations against Petaluma Poultry, DxE's director of communications has some ideas.
"It would be a massive undertaking for any government agency, no matter how well-staffed they actually might be, to suddenly address the systemic animal cruelty that we know is happening in factory farms," Cassie King, director of communications at DxE tells Sentient. "If they put their foot in the door and acknowledge that it's their responsibility to address these crimes, then there's a landslide of new cases they need to take on, and it's just a huge amount of work."
It also bears mentioning that chicken farms are an enormous part of Petaluma's local economy, and have been for quite some time. Once referred to as "the egg basket of the world," Petaluma was the birthplace of several egg-related technologies at the turn of the century, and pumped out over a half a billion eggs every year at its peak in 1945.
Although the city isn't quite the egg powerhouse it once was, chickens are still big business in Petaluma. Though official estimates are difficult to come by, the city is home to at least seven chicken farms large enough to qualify as factory farms, and those facilities collectively house around 1.8 million chickens at any given time, according to a 2024 analysis by an activist group that opposes factory farms.
To be clear, there's no evidence that the poultry industry's strong presence in Petaluma has played any role in law enforcement's response to allegations of cruelty at the city's chicken farms. But the fact that the Petaluma Police Department publicly celebrates the city's poultry industry, and participates in the annual Butter and Eggs Day festival in a non-law enforcement capacity, is not lost on DxE activists.
Rosenberg Awaiting Trial
For her part, Rosenberg maintains that her actions were legal. She cites the doctrine of necessity, a legal theory holding that it's sometimes permissible to break a law if doing so prevents even greater harm from occurring.
"For example, if a kid is drowning in your neighbor's pool and no one is helping that kid, you have the right to trespass into your neighbor's yard to rescue the kid," Rosenberg says.
How this defense plays out in court remains to be seen, but it's essentially the same argument Hsiung's attorneys successfully used in the Utah case. In the meantime, Rosenberg says she's been encouraged by the public reaction to her case (Paris Hilton is a prominent supporter), and doesn't regret her actions even if they do land her in prison.
"A few years of my freedom is worth significantly less than even one animal's entire life, and certainly less than four animals' entire lives," Rosenberg says. "And so it's absolutely worth it to me on that level."
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
get more stories like this via email
Contact
