Most individuals know Sonoma County, the Northern California area generally referred to as America’s Provence, for its lush vineyards, Mediterranean-style villas, and farm-to-table eating places. However once I traveled to wine nation final yr, it was to watch a aspect of Sonoma that few outsiders find out about: a dead-of-night animal rights protest at an industrial rooster slaughterhouse, positioned inside a stone’s throw of a gastropub, an natural bakery, and a serious vegan cheesemaker.
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Run by a subsidiary of the poultry big Perdue, which raises lots of of 1000’s of chickens on manufacturing unit farms throughout Sonoma, the slaughter plant typifies the weird politics of agriculture on this a part of the nation, the place a cultivated picture of light, humane farming generally sits uneasily alongside an more and more consolidated agriculture sector. The county has additionally seen a current inflow of new residents fleeing rising housing costs in San Francisco, a longtime middle of animal rights activism and utopian thought.
The area’s rural heritage and progressive politics will collide subsequent month when Sonoma County residents vote on a first-of-its-kind poll measure that might banish Perdue’s rooster services, together with all different giant manufacturing unit farms. The proposed regulation — which might cap the scale of animal agriculture services and section out all giant manufacturing unit farms within the county inside three years — faces lengthy odds. If profitable, it might reshape the face of farming within the county and set a precedent that has terrified agricultural pursuits in California and throughout the nation.
Generally known as Measure J, the proposal has produced fierce debate within the county over the environmental, public well being, and animal welfare impacts of recent animal agriculture. It’s poised to generate the very best marketing campaign spending of any poll measure in Sonoma County historical past, with about $2 million in contributions made for and in opposition to — the overwhelming majority of which has been spent by business in opposition.
Measure J is certainly one of a pair of native poll initiatives this fall looking for to abolish industrial animal agriculture. In Denver, a historic middle for the Western livestock commerce and nonetheless an essential hub for the US sheep business, voters will determine subsequent month whether or not to ban slaughterhouses within the metropolis. The measure’s passage would shut down a lamb slaughter plant that butchers as much as 500,000 lambs per yr, accounting for between 15 and 20 % of all US lamb meat.
Each measures face opposition from their respective political elites, together with the native Democratic Events in Denver and Sonoma and all the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. Whereas some prior farm animal welfare poll measures — like California’s historic 2018 animal welfare regulation, Proposition 12 — have been extra restricted in scope, aiming to incrementally enhance horrific manufacturing unit farm situations, the Sonoma County and Denver measures are extra clearly perceived as bans.
The measures are simply perceived as damaging, as snatching issues away from individuals — they usually put proponents within the awkward place of attempting to steer voters to successfully abolish an business, at the very least domestically, on which they rely for plentiful low-cost meat.
It’s already famously costly to stay in California partially as a result of it’s tough to construct housing, and a few Sonoma residents could roll their eyes at Measure J as one more bid to make it prohibitively costly to do enterprise within the Golden State. However industrial animal agriculture — a sector that exacts immense prices on the general public within the type of greenhouse gasoline emissions, air pollution, pressure on native assets, illness threat, and animal struggling — makes a extra worthy goal for a ban.
In precept, there’s loads of sense in capping the scale of manufacturing unit farms. Measure J’s proponents are betting that progressive Sonoma County, higher recognized for its tasting rooms than its slaughterhouses, can push California — and the nation — in that route.
Animal cruelty in a farming paradise
Measure J, superior by a coalition of animal rights, environmental, and public well being teams generally known as the Coalition to Finish Manufacturing unit Farming, would require farms categorised by the US Environmental Safety Company as giant “concentrated animal feeding operations” (generally known as CAFOs) to both downsize or shut down inside three years. The proposal is much like a farm reform invoice launched by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) that will section out giant CAFOs by 2040.
Sonoma doesn’t have the mega manufacturing unit farms discovered within the Midwest or South, or elsewhere in California, that pack collectively hundreds of thousands of chickens or a number of thousand cows in a single place. However it does have large industrial farms that make use of normal manufacturing unit farm strategies.
Weber Household Farms, one of many county’s prime egg producers, was hit final yr with a chook flu an infection and killed its flock utilizing “air flow shutdown plus” — a extremely controversial, painful technique getting used on many giant farms to mass cull poultry birds by sealing up sheds and pumping in excessive warmth, killing them through heatstroke.
The Sure on J marketing campaign has compiled a listing of 21 farms in Sonoma County that they imagine meet the big CAFO threshold, together with a number of egg farms and rooster meat farms, six dairies, and one duck farm. Dairy operations of 700 or extra mature dairy cows are categorised as giant CAFOs, whereas rooster farms can home as much as 125,000 birds earlier than being thought-about giant CAFOs.
“The pattern is towards mergers and towards ever-increasing sizes in animal agriculture,” Woody Hastings, a Sonoma County resident who works in local weather coverage and helps Measure J, advised me. Hastings has labored with environmental justice organizations in California’s Central Valley, a much more CAFO-dense, ultra-productive agricultural area the place residents are troubled by air and water air pollution and horrible odors. “What I discovered in my work within the Central Valley is seeing how unhealthy issues can get if there isn’t any cap on the scale,” he stated.
Animal farming industries have mobilized an all-out conflict in opposition to Measure J, pushing social media campaigns, TV adverts, and a unsolicited mail blitz, at occasions making exaggerated claims in regards to the measure’s potential to wipe out all animal agriculture within the county or trigger a dramatic spike in meals costs.
One direct mailer sponsored by Western United Dairies (WUD), a dairy commerce group, claimed the measure would shut down “greater than 60 natural dairy farms” — however there are solely 50 dairy farms of all classes within the county, in response to the latest USDA information, and most of them don’t meet the edge to be affected by Measure J. “We don’t differentiate between any dairy farming operations,” WUD advised me in a press release, including that they had been involved that Measure J would have an effect on all dairy farms.
The measure is written in a complicated method, and there’s been uncertainty within the county about its scope, with some arguing that it could possibly be construed to incorporate farms which can be smaller than giant CAFOs. The measure says that it might section out each medium and huge CAFOs, however as a result of the definition of a medium CAFO requires that it straight discharge manure into floor water, no recognized farm within the county, primarily based on EPA information, meets the EPA’s normal to be a medium CAFO.
A lot of the opposition to Measure J has centered on Sonoma County’s dairy business, which has been declining in current many years and has nearly totally transformed to natural, pasture-based operations as a result of they command larger retail costs, in response to Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Though the measure wouldn’t have an effect on shopper costs a lot as a result of grocery shops would merely inventory extra milk from elsewhere within the area, Sumner stated, it’s more likely to cut back considerably how a lot milk is produced in Sonoma.
That’s left some Sonoma voters asking: Why punish dairies which can be doing issues higher than the overwhelming majority of the US dairy business? Measure J “threatens what might be among the finest progressive dairy environments, actually in California, most likely within the nation,” Roy Smith, a small farmer in Sonoma County, advised me. “Sure, there are compromises which can be made, but when we needed to enhance the well-being [of animals], I might recommend that extra dairies reopen right here, and shut those which can be low-welfare in Wisconsin.”
No dairy farm in Sonoma is as large as America’s greatest mega-dairies, and it’s undoubtedly true that cows with entry to a pasture have it higher than these raised on typical manufacturing unit farms. However natural dairies can nonetheless qualify as CAFOs. Most of Sonoma’s milk cows are nonetheless targeting farms which can be very giant, and large-scale dairy manufacturing of any variety is tough to justify on environmental and animal welfare grounds.
Whether or not they’re raised natural or typical, ruminant grazing requires loads of land and water — the latter more and more scarce within the parched American West — and produces important greenhouse gasoline emissions. Natural dairy CAFOs, together with some in Sonoma, share among the traits of typical ones, like using manure lagoons — big swimming pools of animal waste that pollute air and water and might hurt human well being. And, natural or not, the dairy enterprise mannequin is dependent upon repeatedly impregnating dairy cows and taking away their newborns (extremely social animals which can be then usually compelled to stay alone in small hutches) to extract the cows’ milk, maintaining them alive simply so long as they continue to be productive.
A current Atlantic investigation into one of many nation’s most celebrated natural dairies, just a few counties north of Sonoma, discovered pervasive animal cruelty, together with some strategies that had been distinctive to the natural mannequin. (As a result of milk from cows which have ever obtained antibiotics can’t be marketed as natural, cows might be denied them even after they actually need them for a painful illness or harm.)
In my expertise writing in regards to the livestock business, it’s typically the worst manufacturing unit farms that set the bar for the way we discuss animal agriculture, permitting different producers — together with natural services — to look idyllic by comparability. We not often body the dialog round what animals really deserve: Does it actually make sense to mass produce one other mammal for its milk, separating moms from infants, all for a product that isn’t nutritionally crucial and that local weather scientists say is so excessive in emissions that we have now to scale it down?
Measure J, a blunt instrument for shrinking a bloated business, provides one potential reply: We have now to make much less of it.
In Denver, in the meantime, the proposed slaughterhouse ban, led by the advocacy group Professional-Animal Future, looms like a “black cloud” over the US sheep business, as one sheep feedlot worker put it.
Over the past 50 years, American lamb farming has declined precipitously; the Denver slaughterhouse that will be shut down by the poll measure, run by prime lamb producer Superior Farms, is certainly one of comparatively few essential services remaining.
If the measure passes, it’s potential that some producers will have the ability to ship their animals to be slaughtered elsewhere or {that a} new slaughterhouse will open outdoors Denver limits. Or, Sumner advised me, the measure might hasten the loss of life of the lamb business altogether. Not many traders are saying, “Gee, I feel I’ll go into the lamb slaughtering enterprise,” he stated. “Principally they search for one thing that’s rising, and no person thinks the lamb enterprise is rising.”
Professional-Animal Future, very like the coalition campaigning for Measure J in Sonoma County, sees the poll initiative as a method to begin civic conversations about constructing a extra humane, planet-friendly meals system, with out making individuals really feel like the one choice obtainable to them for making change is to go vegan.
The lamb business, significantly an industrial slaughterhouse, is an affordable goal for such a reckoning: Most individuals not often eat lamb — making them maybe extra sympathetic to them as animals — whereas slaughterhouses are, just about invariably, websites of horrible violence. The per-serving local weather influence of sheep’s meat can be important, second solely to beef. The Superior slaughterhouse, below the identify Mountain Meadows, was additionally not too long ago fined by the EPA for Clear Air Act violations, and has been fined a number of occasions for labor violations.
This week, the Intercept revealed findings from a current undercover investigation into situations on the Superior slaughterhouse, together with ugly footage of partially eviscerated, thrashing lambs hanging the other way up on the slaughter line, with one lamb showing to elevate its head and open its mouth, and injured lambs who’re unable to stroll being thrown, dragged, and kicked towards slaughter. It additionally documented what seems to be using “Judas sheep”: sheep who stay on the slaughterhouse and have been educated to greet incoming truckloads of lambs and make them slaughter.
Superior Farms spokesperson Bob Mariano advised me in a press release that “nothing included within the footage we have now seen is proof of maximum violence, animal cruelty, or halal violations [the slaughterhouse is halal-certified]. That is one more instance of proponents of the slaughterhouse ban misunderstanding or misrepresenting normal, legally compliant elements of the slaughter course of in an try to shock voters and affect an election. This isn’t the primary time our employees have been attacked by activist teams falsely claiming that illegally obtained footage reveals issues that it merely doesn’t.”
The investigation’s findings echoed a current Denver Put up op-ed by Denver resident Jose Huizar, who labored on the slaughterhouse many years in the past: “Somebody has to wield that knife — time and again,” he wrote. “Spending your day slitting throats, stepping in guts, ripping the pores and skin from the spasming our bodies of animals who had been alive moments in the past — it’s arduous to go dwelling to your loved ones after that.”
The slaughterhouse, positioned in Denver’s low-income, majority nonwhite neighborhood of Globeville, employs about 160 individuals — individuals who don’t wish to lose their jobs. Like Measure J, the Denver poll initiative directs native authorities to prioritize individuals whose jobs are eradicated on account of the measure in workforce coaching applications.
“Our hope is not only to stay it to this one slaughterhouse, however to attract a connection to the truth that that is how the business is run usually,” Olivia Hammond, an organizer for Professional-Animal Future, advised me.
Woody Hastings, the Sonoma resident, in contrast the struggle in opposition to manufacturing unit farming to grease and gasoline phase-outs: Simply as we have to transition away from fossil fuels, we all know we have to scale down industrial animal agriculture. We additionally know there will probably be financial impacts to such change that should be distributed pretty, and employees who lose their jobs should be handled with dignity.
The anti-factory farming motion has an extended strategy to go in convincing the individuals of Sonoma County and Denver to see industrial animal agriculture the way in which they do fossil fuels. And with out significant change in both the underlying demand for meat and dairy, or in nationwide regulation of CAFOs, remoted native initiatives are, for now, more likely to solely shift manufacturing elsewhere.
However ought to even one of many poll measures succeed subsequent month, political leaders is likely to be persuaded that their constituents care sufficient about farm animal points to create momentum for additional reform. Win or lose, although, animal advocates will nonetheless face the wearying job of attempting to bridge the general public’s cognitive dissonance about the place our meat comes from and channel it productively into politics.
This story was featured within the Processing Meat publication. Enroll right here.
Replace, October 10, 4:45 pm ET: This story, revealed October 10, has been amended to make clear the scope of Measure J.
