Their Target is You
By Greg Henderson
Agriculture is on the ballot in November. Again.
Animal extremist groups, anti-agriculture groups and other organizations are forging ahead with an agenda designed to hobble food animal production and ultimately, to end our ability to farm and/or ranch. This is not hyperbole.
Most notable in the anti-agriculture movement is the success of California’s Proposition (Prop) 12, which went into effect in January of this year. Approved by voters in 2018, Prop 12 forbids the in-state sale of pork that comes from breeding hogs which are “confined in a cruel manner.”
The law has created ripple effects across the pork industry because California consumes 13 percent of all U.S. pork, yet only produces one percent.
This year, new ballot initiatives in Denver and California could further chip away at agriculture.
A group calling itself Pro-Animal Future (PAF) has successfully put the “Prohibition of Slaughterhouses and Prohibition of Fur Products” on the November ballot in Denver.
PAF, in its own words, is an organization of “volunteers and small donors building a political movement to end factory farming.”
The only slaughterhouse operating in Denver is Superior Farms, in business for 40 years and accounting for 15 to 20 percent of the total U.S. lamb harvest, with 160 employee owners. A study by Colorado State University’s Regional Development Institute found the Denver ban on slaughterhouses could cost Colorado’s economy up to $861 million and nearly 3,000 jobs.
In Sonoma County, California, farmers are battling what they call a “vegan mandate,” officially known as Measure J, which would prohibit large poultry and livestock operations in the county.
If passed, the law could force at least two dozen farm operations to downsize or shut down within three years. Sonoma County, California would be the first county in the U.S. to ban such “factory farms.”
Direct Action Everywhere, the group behind the Sonoma County, California initiative, says it’s also collecting signatures to get similar question before Berkeley, Calif. voters, though it is largely symbolic because there are no commercial farms in the Bay Area college town.
The alarming activist battle plan to end animal agriculture was outlined on Iowa Public Radio by Natalie Fulton of PAF, who said, “We are starting at the local level in Denver. We have a few cities in the works right now – definitely Portland, Ore.; San Diego; San Francisco; Houston and Ohio. We definitely want to go national with it, and our main goal is to ban factory farming at the state level within 10 years.”
Greg Henderson is the editor of Drovers magazine and can be reached via e-mail at editors@farmjournal.com or on Twitter @Greg_Drovers. This article was originally published in the Drovers July/August 2024 magazine.
