After years of fighting California’s voter-approved Proposition 12 in court, meatpackers and the pork industry are asking for more time to comply with its animal welfare requirements. Estimates of the impact on consumers when Prop 12 takes effect on Jan. 1 vary widely, from increased pork costs of $10 per person annually to a warning by a hog-state senator that bacon could cost $17 a pound next year.
Prop 12 requires hog farmers in California to provide 24 square feet for each of their sows to move about, except for a few days before they give birth and for three weeks until their piglets are weaned. And it bans the sale of pork products that are produced outside the state in conditions that do not match state standards. California is the nation’s most populous state and gets much of its pork from outside its borders.
Voters approved Prop 12 by a 3-to-2 margin in 2018. It soon was challenged in court but withstood attacks. The Supreme Court refused on June 28 to hear a meat industry challenge to Prop 12, and a month later the U.S. appeals court in San Francisco agreed with a district court dismissal of a lawsuit by farm groups trying to overturn Prop 12. Both cases argued Prop 12 violated the so-called Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
During a public hearing online last Friday, the pork industry asked for a two-year delay in enforcement of Prop 12, counted from the day the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) finalizes its regulations. The trade group North American Meat Institute said a 28-month moratorium was needed.
“Those who contend the industry has had enough time to comply with Prop 12 either do not understand or ignore, perhaps willfully, the complexity of the pork supply chain and the segregation and other costs Prop 12 will impose on packer/processors and other players in that chain, said Mark Dopp, chief operating officer of the trade group.
To comply with Prop 12, hog farmers would have to remodel barns to give more space to sows and keep track of which pigs are their offspring; at present, few farms provide enough room. Slaughterhouses and meat distributors would need to create a system to identify the meat that comes from the California-compliant pigs and keep it segregated through the supply chain.
“Our base model … predicts that the average price of uncooked cuts of pork in California [the regulated products] will rise by 7.7 percent, or about 25 cents per pound,” said economists at the University of California-Davis. Their analysis, published this summer, estimated the cost of compliance from hog farm to pork consumer. With the higher prices, California would consume 8.3 percent of U.S. pork, down from the current 8.8 percent. “California pork consumers lose because they pay about $40 million more but they will buy much less pork.”
In its cost analysis, the CDFA said consumers would pay an additional $10 a year for pork, compared to an additional $40 a year for the cage-free eggs mandated by Prop 12. Some 7,700 farms in California, most of them poultry farms, are affected by Prop 12. A hog breeding farm with 1,000 sows would spend $66,000 to convert barns and pens comply with Prop 12, it said.
Other estimates are much higher. The consultancy Hatamiya Group said in June that if a state law “excludes a large volume of pork production entering into the market [Prop 12 as an example], this will reduce availability to consumers, thus driving up price.” A 50-percent reduction in supplies would result in 60-percent higher prices in Los Angeles, it said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the No. 1 hog state, said last week that bacon would cost as much as $17 a pound in California under Prop 12. He is the sponsor of a bill to obviate Prop 12’s restrictions on meat from other states. “It remains to be seen if we’ll see eye to eye before pigs fly,” he said.