Most individuals know Sonoma County, the Northern California area generally known 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 hen slaughterhouse, positioned inside a stone’s throw of a gastropub, an natural bakery, and a significant vegan cheesemaker.
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Run by a subsidiary of the poultry big Perdue, which raises lots of of hundreds of chickens on manufacturing facility farms throughout Sonoma, the slaughter plant typifies the bizarre 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 hen services, together with all different giant manufacturing facility farms. The proposed legislation — which might cap the scale of animal agriculture services and part out all giant manufacturing facility 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.
Often 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 necessary hub for the US sheep business, voters will resolve 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 p.c 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 the complete Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. Whereas some prior farm animal welfare poll measures — like California’s historic 2018 animal welfare legislation, Proposition 12 — have been extra restricted in scope, aiming to incrementally enhance horrific manufacturing facility farm situations, the Sonoma County and Denver measures are extra clearly perceived as bans.
The measures are simply perceived as detrimental, as snatching issues away from individuals — and so they put proponents within the awkward place of attempting to steer voters to successfully abolish an business, a minimum of domestically, on which they rely for considerable low cost meat.
It’s already famously costly to reside in California partially as a result of it’s troublesome 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 fuel emissions, air pollution, pressure on native assets, illness threat, and animal struggling — makes a extra worthy goal for a ban.
In precept, there’s plenty of sense in capping the scale of manufacturing facility 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 course.
Animal cruelty in a farming paradise
Measure J, superior by a coalition of animal rights, environmental, and public well being teams referred to as the Coalition to Finish Manufacturing facility Farming, would require farms labeled by the US Environmental Safety Company as giant “concentrated animal feeding operations” (referred to as CAFOs) to both downsize or shut down inside three years. The proposal is just like a farm reform invoice launched by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) that may part out giant CAFOs by 2040.
Sonoma doesn’t have the mega manufacturing facility 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. But it surely does have massive industrial farms that make use of customary manufacturing facility farm strategies.
Weber Household Farms, one of many county’s high egg producers, was hit final yr with a chicken flu an infection and killed its flock utilizing “air flow shutdown plus” — a extremely controversial, painful methodology 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 an inventory of 21 farms in Sonoma County that they imagine meet the big CAFO threshold, together with a number of egg farms and hen meat farms, six dairies, and one duck farm. Dairy operations of 700 or extra mature dairy cows are labeled as giant CAFOs, whereas hen farms can home as much as 125,000 birds earlier than being thought of 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 bothered by air and water air pollution and horrible odors. “What I realized in my work within the Central Valley is seeing how dangerous issues can get if there isn’t a cap on the scale,” he mentioned.
Animal farming industries have mobilized an all-out warfare in opposition to Measure J, pushing social media campaigns, TV advertisements, and a junk mail blitz, at occasions making exaggerated claims concerning 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 keeping with 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 an announcement, 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 might be construed to incorporate farms which might be smaller than giant CAFOs. The measure says that it could part out each medium and huge CAFOs, however as a result of the definition of a medium CAFO requires that it immediately discharge manure into floor water, no recognized farm within the county, based mostly on EPA information, meets the EPA’s customary 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 a long time and has virtually solely transformed to natural, pasture-based operations as a result of they command larger retail costs, in keeping with 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 mentioned, it’s prone to cut back considerably how a lot milk is produced in Sonoma.
That’s left some Sonoma voters asking: Why punish dairies which might 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, definitely in California, most likely within the nation,” Roy Smith, a small farmer in Sonoma County, advised me. “Sure, there are compromises which might be made, but when we wished to enhance the well-being [of animals], I’d counsel that extra dairies reopen right here, and shut those which might be low-welfare in Wisconsin.”
No dairy farm in Sonoma is as massive as America’s largest mega-dairies, and it’s undoubtedly true that cows with entry to a pasture have it higher than these raised on typical manufacturing facility farms. However natural dairies can nonetheless qualify as CAFOs. Most of Sonoma’s milk cows are nonetheless targeting farms which might be very giant, and large-scale dairy manufacturing of any form is difficult to justify on environmental and animal welfare grounds.
Whether or not they’re raised natural or typical, ruminant grazing requires plenty of land and water — the latter more and more scarce within the parched American West — and produces vital greenhouse fuel emissions. Natural dairy CAFOs, together with some in Sonoma, share a number of the traits of typical ones, like the usage of manure lagoons — big swimming pools of animal waste that pollute air and water and may hurt human well being. And, natural or not, the dairy enterprise mannequin depends upon repeatedly impregnating dairy cows and taking away their newborns (extremely social animals which might be then typically pressured to reside alone in small hutches) to extract the cows’ milk, protecting 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, a number of 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 acquired antibiotics can’t be marketed as natural, cows might be denied them even once they really want them for a painful illness or damage.)
In my expertise writing concerning the livestock business, it’s usually the worst manufacturing facility farms that set the bar for a way we discuss animal agriculture, permitting different producers — together with natural services — to seem idyllic by comparability. We not often body the dialog round what animals actually 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 now have to scale it down?
Measure J, a blunt instrument for shrinking a bloated business, provides one attainable reply: We’ve 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.
During the last 50 years, American lamb farming has declined precipitously; the Denver slaughterhouse that may be shut down by the poll measure, run by high lamb producer Superior Farms, is certainly one of comparatively few necessary services remaining.
If the measure passes, it’s attainable that some producers will be capable 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 buyers are saying, “Gee, I feel I’ll go into the lamb slaughtering enterprise,” he mentioned. “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 way to begin civic conversations about constructing a extra humane, planet-friendly meals system, with out making individuals really feel like the one possibility accessible to them for making change is to go vegan.
The lamb business, significantly an industrial slaughterhouse, is an inexpensive 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 affect of sheep’s meat can also be vital, second solely to beef. The Superior slaughterhouse, underneath the title Mountain Meadows, was additionally lately 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 carry 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 the usage of “Judas sheep”: sheep who reside on the slaughterhouse and have been skilled to greet incoming truckloads of lambs and cause them to slaughter.
Superior Farms spokesperson Bob Mariano advised me in an announcement that “nothing included within the footage we now have seen is proof of utmost 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 customary, legally compliant components of the slaughter course of in an try to shock voters and affect an election. This isn’t the primary time our staff 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 Submit op-ed by Denver resident Jose Huizar, who labored on the slaughterhouse a long time in the past: “Somebody has to wield that knife — again 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 onerous 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 because of the measure in workforce coaching applications.
“Our hope isn’t just to stay it to this one slaughterhouse, however to attract a connection to the truth that that is how the business is run typically,” Olivia Hammond, an organizer for Professional-Animal Future, advised me.
Woody Hastings, the Sonoma resident, in contrast the combat in opposition to manufacturing facility farming to grease and fuel 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 might be financial impacts to such change that must be distributed pretty, and staff who lose their jobs must be handled with dignity.
The anti-factory farming motion has a protracted strategy to go in convincing the individuals of Sonoma County and Denver to see industrial animal agriculture the best way 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, prone 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 process 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. Join 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.
