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 your ability to farm or ranch. This is not hyperbole.
Most notable in the anti-agriculture movement is the success of California’s Proposition 12, which went fully into effect in January of this year. Approved by voters in 2018, Proposition 12 forbids the in-state sale of pork that comes from breeding hogs that are “confined in a cruel manner.”
The law has created ripple effects across the pork industry because California consumes 13% of all U.S. pork, yet only produces 1%.
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% of the total U.S. lamb harvest, with 160 employee-owners. A study by Colorado State University’s Regional Economic Development Institute found the Denver ban on slaughterhouses could cost Colorado’s economy up to $861 million and impact nearly 3,000 jobs.
In Sonoma County, Calif., 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 would be the first county in the U.S. to ban such “factory farms.”
Direct Action Everywhere, the group behind the Sonoma initiative, says it’s also collecting signatures to get a similar question before Berkeley voters, though that 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, Pro-Animal Future: “We are starting at the local level in Denver. We have a few cities that are in the works right now.
Definitely Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, Ohio. We definitely want to go national with it and our main goal is to ban factory farming at the state level within ten years.”
