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GoGreenNation News: How Pig Welfare Became a States’ Rights Issue
GoGreenNation News: How Pig Welfare Became a States’ Rights Issue

This week, the House Agriculture Committee approved a version of the farm bill, the sprawling piece of recurring legislation governing federal agriculture, conservation, and nutrition policy. Written by House Republicans, the bill was approved largely along party lines, with four Democrats joining all GOP committee members in voting to advance the measure.This will likely not be the final form of the farm bill, which is approved roughly every five years in Congress. Most Democrats have bristled at the Republicans’ proposal, arguing that it is overly partisan; they are particularly concerned about how food stamp benefits would be calculated and rescissions to the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ seminal climate policy bill, which passed in 2022.The GOP farm bill would divert unspent IRA conservation funds to other priorities, out of a belief that climate-related policy should be determined by the states, rather than the federal government mandating farming practices that reduce emissions.“Every state is different, because every state has different soil types, commodities, climate, weather patterns,” Representative Glenn “GT” Thompson, the Republican chair of the House Agriculture Committee, told me on Thursday. “We’ve always known that the most successful conservation investments are those that are locally led, incentive-based, and voluntary.”But another element of the Republican bill would overturn a California state law that requires some meat products sold in the state to be produced under certain welfare standards. The potential ramifications of this California law, known as Prop 12, extend beyond agriculture. Opponents say that it would inhibit other states’ ability to implement their own regulatory policy.“States would no longer be able to set consistent standards for meat and dairy products sold or consumed within their borders, potentially disadvantaging in-state producers, creating deregulatory pressure, and increasing food safety and quality risks,” said Kelley McGill, a legislative policy fellow at the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic, in an email.In 2018, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 12, a ballot initiative that established housing standards for certain livestock. Prop 12 requires that farmers provide a minimum amount of space for laying hens, breeding pigs, and calves raised for veal, as well as specifically banning gestation crates, cages that are too small for pregnant pigs to even turn around in. This mandate applies to all covered products sold in California, and so affects producers outside of the state. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Prop 12, after out-of-state pork producers attempted to block it through litigation.“Companies that choose to sell products in various states must normally comply with the laws of those various states,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list.”Shortly thereafter, Republican members of Congress introduced the Ending Agriculture Trade Suppression, or EATS, Act, legislation that would prohibit one state from regulating farming practices for food produced in another. Similar language was incorporated in the text of the House farm bill, which declares that “no state or subdivision thereof may enact or enforce, directly or indirectly, a condition or standard on the production of covered livestock other than for covered livestock physically raised in such state or subdivision.”Rather than infringing on a state’s ability to determine its own regulatory standards, Thompson argued that this provision was in keeping with the redirecting of conservation funds, as a victory for states’ rights. “We respect [that] a state can mandate, intrastate, their own agricultural practices, but they can’t dictate to other states,” Thompson said.Opposition to Prop 12 does not fall neatly along party lines. In February, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told the House Agriculture Committee that there would be “chaos” in the market if other states followed California’s lead. Vilsack later argued before the Senate Agriculture Committee that the California market is so large, out-of-state producers functionally have no choice to opt out of the state’s requirements.“When you’re dealing with 12 percent of the pork market in one state, there is not a choice between doing business with California and not in California,” Vilsack said. “At some point in time, somebody’s got to provide some degree of consistency and clarity. Otherwise, you are just inviting 50 different states to do 50 different iterations of this.But California’s law is not wholly unique. While Prop 12 has been the leading example of influential state policy, 14 other states have also passed laws banning certain types of confinement for livestock or instituting regulations for animal enclosures; like California, Massachusetts also approved similar policy by ballot measure. “The long-standing status quo under our federalist system,” McGill said, “is for states to be able to regulate products that enter their borders—so long as such regulations do not impermissibly discriminate—and states have long exercised that right across many aspects of agricultural production and points all along the food supply chain. Prop 12 will lead to no more chaos than will those existing state provisions.”Experts further warn that overturning Prop 12 might not mitigate the regulatory chaos. In a November open letter sent to congressional leaders, 30 law professors warned the EATS Act would “initiate years of lengthy court battles to resolve the act’s constitutionality and derive the act’s scope, as well as an endless flood of concurrent challenges to innumerable state and local laws.” Overturning Prop 12 via legislation “would create a staggeringly uncertain legal and regulatory landscape,” the letter said. “The result would surely be an unprecedented chilling of state and local legislation on matters historically regulated at the state and local level.”Producers are also divided on on Prop 12. The National Pork Producers Council vehemently opposes the policy, as do other large agricultural coalitions; but some individual producers are in favor of Prop 12, in part because they believe it’s better for smaller farms that have been pushed out by the large-scale pork production industry. Other producers have already invested significant funds in preparing their farms to meet Prop 12’s requirements.Thompson believes that heeding these standards results in higher costs, which then leads to poor and middle-income Americans being unable to purchase pork products. “When people can’t afford their bacon, they’re going to rise up, and there will be a future proposition that repeals it,” Thompson predicted about the future of Prop 12 in California.A September survey by Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability found that 32 percent of consumers would decrease their purchases of pork products due to a general price increase. However, when respondents were asked about price increases due to Prop 12, fewer consumers said they would decrease spending on pork if they knew the cost hikes were related to animal welfare. A 2022 poll by Data for Progress, a liberal think tank, further found that 80 percent of likely voters believe farm animal welfare is a moral concern.The farm bill provision that would overturn Prop 12 also has potential ramifications for health outcomes: In a 2022 amicus brief to the Supreme Court, several public health organizations and experts wrote that Prop 12’s requirements “protect the health and safety of Californians.” Intensive confinement of pigs results in weaker immune systems and increased growth of pathogens, and the close quarters of gestation cages “facilitates the transmission and mutation of pathogens into more virulent forms that can be transmitted to and sicken, or even kill, humans.”Although the provision in the farm bill is slightly narrower than the language of the EATS Act, McGill warned that its passage could make it more difficult for states to regulate “the sale of meat and dairy products produced from animals exposed to disease, with the use of certain harmful animal drugs, or through novel biotechnologies like cloning, as well as adjacent production standards involving labor, environmental, or cleanliness conditions.” Those who think Prop 12 shouldn’t be overturned thus worry about the ramifications not only for animals but for the humans consuming meat products.It’s unclear whether this provision will end up in the final version of the farm bill—it has significant opposition from hundreds of Democrats in Congress, as well as some Republicans, which could ultimately result in it being excised from the final bill. But Senator John Boozman, the Republican ranking member of the Agriculture Committee, noted that Congress has the authority to legislate on an issue after the Supreme Court has made a decision; if it’s removed from the final text of the farm bill, there’s still an opportunity for supporters to append it. “We’ll either have it in the base bill, or it will come up as an amendment,” Boozman said.

GoGreenNation News: The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers
GoGreenNation News: The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers

Few environmental documentaries boast the star power of Common Ground, a forthcoming sequel to Netflix’s award-winning 2020 documentary Kiss the Ground, which presented regenerative agriculture as the “first viable solution to the climate crisis.” Executive produced by Demi Moore with narration from Jason Momoa, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, Laura Dern, and other celebs, the new film is set to be released on Amazon Prime Video this Earth Day. It features a diverse mix of food and farming activists, wellness influencers, and even two U.S. senators (Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Mike Braun), all linked by a common narrative that farming should work with nature rather than against it to save our food system. The film is just one example of the increasing popularity of this thesis among everyone from Hollywood A-listers to lefty food sovereignty activists to right-leaning podcasters and the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. Nowhere are regenerative ag’s claims bolder than when it comes to “regenerative” beef, whose evangelists insist that by capturing carbon in the soil, natural cattle grazing can completely eliminate the climate impact of raising ruminants, which currently contributes somewhere between 11 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately for the planet, these claims don’t pan out. Earlier this month, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new study that found grass-fed beef has no climate benefits over industrial beef and likely doesn’t help much with arable soil carbon sequestration, either. For those who follow the peer-reviewed literature on agriculture and climate, this is no surprise. Proponents of regenerative agriculture have several useful ideas worth pursuing, but at the end of the day, cows are still cows and they still belch lots of methane, so beef is not and never will be a “solution” to the climate crisis.And yet, no matter how many studies get published, the hype around this and other “natural” fixes for environmental and health problems shows few signs of slowing down, winning adherents from across the social and political spectrum, and now finding its way into the executive branch. New Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spoken about regenerative farming in near-magical terms, claiming that “the best thing that you can do for climate is to restore the soils.” He has also boosted the supposed health benefits of fries cooked in beef tallow (as opposed to seed oils), championed raw milk, called for a “let it rip” bird flu strategy, in the hopes of promoting “natural immunity” among chickens, and proselytized about remedies like cod liver oil to stop the measles outbreaks spreading among primarily unvaccinated people in Texas and New Mexico.The proponents of these approaches tend to get one thing right: There are countless problems with the U.S. food and health systems. Industrialized animal agriculture harms the environment, workers, and animals; chronic diet-related disease has reached epidemic proportions; and powerful corporate interests are blocking change. But where they go wrong is believing that there is a simple, “natural” solution that will solve all of these issues in one swoop. The problem is not just the way that natural is equated with good—a dynamic that has a long and storied history. The bigger issue—and one that goes beyond regenerative beef—is an emerging ideology of nature-based solutionism, where all things “natural” are proposed as a sure fix for complex problems. Be it Common Ground or MAHA, the adherents of this ideology assume that a better world will emerge from letting “nature” run its course, no matter what the experts or regulators say.Troubled by the ambitious and even outlandish promises emerging from the tech sector in the Obama era, writer Evgeny Morozov popularized the term solutionism to describe the shared belief across government and industry that Silicon Valley capital and know-how could revolutionize the modern world—that blood tests could be instantly performed from a single drop, that predictive policing algorithms would end crime as we know it, and that if only billions of people logged onto Facebook then digital connection would lead to mutual understanding. It’s not that these pitches were overly optimistic. Optimism suggests some recognition that things might not go as planned, which wasn’t what prospective investors and TED audiences wanted to hear. No, the tech industry’s disruptors had to be sure that their technology was world-changing—or at least sound like they were sure.These solutions rarely if ever lived up to the hype, and some were outright failures. Most stumbled over the all-too-common mistake of not taking the time to understand the problems they were trying to solve; assuming that a technological solution was always needed, largely because that’s what they had on hand. They depended too much on the technocratic application of science, forgetting that the social sciences matter too, eschewing policy reform and cultural change as too messy, only to realize later that the success of any technology depends on policy and culture. Several books and countless articles have now been written about technological solutionism’s failures in food and agriculture, energy and the environment, and as part of the Covid-19 pandemic response. Today’s ubiquitous progressive refrain that “tech won’t save us” (to quote the name of a popular podcast) speaks to an emerging recognition of technology’s limited ability, absent a broader political strategy, to effect positive social change.But while the critics may be louder, those solutionists persist, perhaps most visibly today in the pursuit of artificial intelligence that, we are told, will solve pretty much everything, including the federal government’s alleged inefficiencies.While tech solutionism was booming, a different sort of solutionism was brewing in the background, rooted in the idea that it was modern technology that was at the root of many of our problems. But instead of scaling back tech solutionism’s delusions, this parallel revolution kept the delusions and swapped the solution: a return to our preindustrial roots could help us fix the world’s most intractable problems. On the topic of agriculture, this perspective appeared in bestselling food books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, especially in the form of its protagonist Joel Salatin, a libertarian small-scale farmer who championed free-grazing animals and opposition to federal regulations as the solution to the ills of the modern food system. It also found its way onto the TED stage, where “Rhodesian” farmer Allan Savory—also featured in Kiss the Ground—made the now-omnipresent claim in regenerative agricultural circles that so-called “holistic grazing” could reverse desertification and climate change. That TED talk has been viewed over nine million times, attracting big money support in the process. Oprah Winfrey meanwhile gave a platform to wellness gurus who touted the benefits of natural cures, including Dr. Oz, who claimed that saffron was a “miracle appetite suppressant.” And all of that was before the food and wellness influencers of the social media era took over Instagram and TikTok.Supercharged by the skepticism of the Covid-19 pandemic era, the line between legitimate critique of our public health and food infrastructures and pseudoscience grifting got increasingly blurry. Figures often celebrated as heroes within the alternative food and regenerative agriculture movements—from Joel Salatin to food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva to functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman (the latter a cast member of Common Ground)—built common cause with some of the internet’s biggest sources of health misinformation and helped lay the groundwork for the rise of MAHA, often hawking natural health products in the process. Amplified to huge audiences by the likes of Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, their claims reverberated around the internet without a fact-check in sight.The appeal of many “natural” claims is obvious. The world is complicated, confusing, and often corrupt, and those things that seem unsullied by industrial modernity can feel pure and healthful. There’s an attractive truthiness to claims that raw milk must be better than milk that was pasteurized and skimmed of fat in an industrial centrifuge, butter better than seed oil, cows grazing in the field better than those crammed into feedlots. Moreover, nature-based solutionism tantalizingly offers the prospect of a purer world without significant changes in consumption: Regenerative beef and beef tallow mean you can have natural and guilt-free burgers and fries. Each of these assumptions is rooted in a logical fallacy: the appeal to nature, or the view that a thing must be good if it is natural. This claim, of course, stands on shaky epistemological ground. Nature is far from benign, deadly pathogens being just as natural as soil-sequestering carbon. This is compounded by the fact that many appeals to nature are also appeals to an idealized past, like RFK Jr.’s desire to “reverse 80 years of farming policy,” before the advent of much modern agricultural technology. The British journalist George Monbiot calls this “storybook farming,” or a romanticization of the preindustrial past.Such claims are not only inaccurate but potentially dangerous. Where the appeal to nature really falls apart is when it is scrutinized using the scientific method, which has a decidedly unromantic way of cutting through just-so stories. Studies like the one mentioned at the beginning of this essay have shown that free-ranging cows emit just as much methane as those fattened on industrial feedlots; others have suggested that they might even emit more. Research consistently shows that raw milk is not more nutritious than pasteurized milk, will not cure asthma, and has no impact on gut health, but it is certainly less safe to drink. Recent publications suggest it’s the seed oils and not the butter that are more associated with lower cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. And letting a disease spread to develop natural immunity is a far more risky way to do exactly what vaccines are meant to do: expose people to small amounts of a disease so that they can develop immunity to it. Furthermore, in the case of diseases like avian flu, letting the virus run wild in hopes of finding the few birds who have natural immunity risks allowing the disease to mutate further, potentially increasing the risk for both animals and humans. As RFK Jr. promotes the benefits of “pox parties” as a natural way to boost immunity to measles, doctors scramble to convince parents otherwise. For some who follow his suggestion to dose their kids with vitamin A instead of a vaccine, the liver damage has already been done.The problem with techno-solutionism was never the technology itself. The benefits of many technologies are all around us, making food abundant and keeping us safer from disease than we would otherwise be. Pasteurization and vaccines alone have saved hundreds of millions of lives. The problem, rather, was the way technology was assumed to be a cure-all and a one-size-fits-all fix.Like its technological parallel, a defining characteristic of the ideology of nature-based solutionism is that its solutions are already decided upon before the fact, their success considered inevitable—natural, as it were—if only they can be implemented, which often means rejecting most technology altogether. Changing from conventional to regenerative agriculture, for instance, is believed to solve desertification, climate change, soil health, our ailing rural economies, our woeful eating habits, and whatever other problems confront its advocates. There is a presumed lack of friction in implementing such solutions, with legitimate critiques of technical, environmental, or economic feasibility, or of trade-offs and costs, hand-waved away. Solutionisms, as articles of faith, cleave society into believers and nonbelievers: techno-zealots versus Luddites or nature’s children versus those in thrall to Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Government. But this sort of simplification doesn’t just fail to solve problems, it fails to properly identify them. The food system’s many problems are varied and have distinct causes. Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock come from too much demand for meat; the overuse of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides comes partly from market and government incentives to grow more commodity crops destined for animal feed and ethanol; and chronic disease has many causes, only some of which are related to diet. Correctly identifying and addressing each of these problems takes research, time, and often a range of different solutions.But solutionists either underappreciate or openly fight the very things that help us understand problems in all their nuance and craft realistic solutions: research institutions and the regulatory state. Both of these operate on the belief that large claims require large bodies of proof. In the course of reviewing evidence, for instance, they might note that real-world examples show that the financial and labor costs of transitions to low-tech agriculture can be hefty, the benefits uncertain, and the potential for corporate co-optation and greenwashing very real. But in the world of the solutionists, expertise is treated as suspect, corrupt, or altogether illegitimate, with anecdotes and mantras replacing verifiable data.Ironically, this can lead the solutionists to overlook the real nature-based solutions demonstrably effective at improving health and food system sustainability. Eating lower on the food chain, reducing food waste, protecting ecosystems, and promoting conservation agriculture are some of the best climate solutions out there. They are not flashy, they won’t solve all of our problems, they likely don’t make for the most views on streaming platforms or the most memorable stump speeches, but at least they’re backed by science. Being wary of solutionisms is ever more crucial as solutionists permeate our media and increasingly hold political power. The embrace of AI exists side by side with the embrace of regenerative ranching. One side wants to move fast and break things, giving little consideration to what gets broken. The other side wants to eat grass-fed burgers, hoping that good vibes can capture carbon. Neither approach is going to save us.

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