Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Tim Walz as her operating mate final month, {a photograph} of the Minnesota governor with an lovely piglet nestled in his arms on the 2019 Minnesota State Honest went viral, to the delight of Democratic voters, activists, and pundits alike.
Earlier this month, Walz made a marketing campaign cease at a dairy farm the place he bottle-fed a child cow, tweeting, “Made a brand new good friend.”
Many politicians come off a bit stiff at compulsory farm visits and state festivals, the place they swap their fits for a flannel and a turkey leg. However Walz matches proper in, seamlessly mixing a real affection for farmed animals with a hearty enthusiasm for consuming them.
Have questions or feedback on this text? Electronic mail us at futureperfect@vox.com!
At this yr’s Minnesota State Honest, he declared pork on a keep on with be the “breakfast of champions.” In one other viral video from final yr’s truthful, Walz’s daughter tells him she received’t eat turkey as a result of she’s vegetarian. Walz replies that in Minnesota — the nation’s high turkey-producing state — turkey isn’t meat. “Turkey’s particular,” he quips.
These photos have helped shore up Walz’s healthful vibes and “Huge Dad Vitality,” exuding the “Minnesota good” attraction that Democrats hope may also help them lock down votes in essential Midwest and Rust Belt states.
I, too, have been swept up by the Harris-Walz fervor, so I really feel like a killjoy poking a gap in Walz’s harmless sheen. However there’s a darker facet to the story: Walz has a lengthy historical past of offering free promoting and public funding to the meat and dairy sectors, industries that trash Minnesota’s treasured waterways, torture animals, and endanger public well being and weak staff.
To be truthful to Walz, he’s doing what each different politician, Republican or Democrat, does to outlive in farm nation. Minnesota is a high producer of turkey, pork, and dairy, in addition to corn and soybeans, the primary crops fed to livestock. Despite the fact that simply round 1 % of Minnesota households make a dwelling from farming, agribusiness has accrued monumental affect over federal and state agricultural coverage by showering candidates — together with farm-state Democrats like Walz — with marketing campaign contributions. It then makes use of them to promote a narrative that Huge Ag is past criticism as a result of it’s “feeding the world.”
As Democrats watch their share of the vote in farm nation slip away, characters like Walz — a steadiness to Harris’s picture as a San Francisco liberal — deliver an apparent enchantment to the social gathering. However in what might in the end be a quixotic quest to enchantment to rural voters in Center America, Democratic leaders are compromising their commitments elsewhere to environmental safety, labor rights, and public well being once they go heavy on selling the meat business and light-weight on regulating its harms.
That the Democratic base seems to be celebrating Walz’s farm-friendly picture with little scrutiny reveals how far manufacturing unit farming’s opponents need to go in educating the American public in regards to the cruelties of our meals system. Very similar to the deceptive cartoons of pleased, “humanely raised” pigs and cows on meat packaging — which frequently imply little on the farm itself — Walz’s photo-ops with child farmed animals reinforce the false romanticized picture that Huge Ag has so efficiently seared into the general public’s consciousness.
The truth, nonetheless, is something however healthful.
Dissecting Walz’s viral farm moments — and his voting report
With out context, the photograph of Walz holding a piglet on the Minnesota State Honest seems harmless, even endearing. However the pork business, and that piglet’s life? Not a lot.
The photograph was taken at a pavilion sponsored by Christensen Farms, the ninth largest US pork firm, and run by the Minnesota Pork Board. Virtually all pigs raised for meals within the US come from manufacturing unit farms — together with Christensen’s, as seen on this disturbing 2015 investigation by an animal rights group — which use a constant set of practices. Feminine breeding pigs — people who give beginning to piglets who’re then raised for slaughter — are confined in crates so small they’ll hardly transfer for his or her whole lives, struggling by means of being pregnant after being pregnant to churn out piglets till their productiveness wanes and so they’re despatched to slaughter. The Minnesota Pork Producers Affiliation, a sister group to the Minnesota Pork Board, lobbies in favor of protecting pregnant pigs in tiny cages and towards primary environmental measures.
It’s additionally widespread within the US pork business to feed these breeding pigs ground-up piglet intestines to construct immunity towards illness.
Piglets have their tooth clipped and tails chopped off, and the males’ testicles are lower out, all with out ache aid. They spend their quick lives in darkish, unsanitary warehouses earlier than being shipped on a grueling journey to the slaughterhouse and shocked unconscious in a carbon dioxide fuel chamber, a follow that may be excruciatingly painful.
Minnesota’s mammoth turkey business — just about all of the birds are raised on manufacturing unit farms — is equally abusive. Final yr, an animal rights group discovered stomach-churning situations on the state’s high turkey producer, Jennie-O: birds too weak and sick to even stroll, together with dwell birds pecking at lifeless and rotting ones and birds with seen wounds — indicators of cannibalism, a widespread drawback in poultry farming (on the time, Jennie-O instructed Vox that it “takes the welfare of the animals beneath our care significantly and has sturdy animal care requirements all through our provide chain”).
Jennie-O’s father or mother firm, Hormel Meals, is headquartered within the congressional district Walz held earlier than he ran for governor; Walz has promoted the firm’s merchandise and appointed its former CEO to a state financial council.
And bear in mind Walz’s photograph op with the dairy calf earlier this month? It masked the dismal actuality behind dairy farming, the place cows have been selectively bred to pump out increasingly milk, resulting in extra frequent leg and metabolic points, in addition to increased charges of painful udder irritation.
The marketing campaign cease came about at a comparatively small dairy farm, the sort that makes up an more and more tiny share of the milk Individuals purchase on the grocery retailer. Most dairy cows at this time will by no means set foot on open pasture, and farms sometimes separate infants from moms shortly after beginning, housing them alone and feeding them by means of a bottle in order that farmers can take their moms’ milk.
In Minnesota — the Land of 10,000 Lakes — livestock and the artificial fertilizer used to develop the corn they eat account for many of the state’s water nitrate air pollution; 4 in 10 our bodies of water are so polluted that they fail to satisfy primary well being requirements. Final yr, the US Environmental Safety Company directed Minnesota state companies to right away deal with the excessive nitrate ranges in consuming water, which may trigger a vary of significant well being points, that hundreds of Minnesotans had been uncovered to. The EPA additionally inspired the state to raised monitor air pollution from livestock manure.
Minnesota state authorities is proscribed in its capacity to crack down on these companies as a result of courtroom selections have largely exempted manufacturing unit farms from Clear Water Act regulation. And Walz, in fact, can’t bear the blame for an issue that started a long time in the past because of the unsavory realities of farm state politics. However environmental teams and even some state lawmakers argue Minnesota could possibly be doing rather more. As an alternative, Walz appears to have little to say about manufacturing unit farming dirtying the state’s waterways.
Previous to serving as Minnesota’s governor, Walz represented Minnesota within the US Home of Representatives for six phrases, through which he voted towards two vital agricultural air pollution measures. As a member of the Home Agriculture Committee, he performed a big function in negotiating the Farm Invoice — a multiyear legislative bundle that units federal agricultural coverage — and through his tenure, the laws shoveled increasingly cash to farmers rising livestock feed.
Walz has championed federal and state “conservation” funding for farmers to implement extra sustainable practices, however they’ve in the end made little to no progress in fixing the issue. And some of the federal conservation funding goes to massive meat and dairy operations for environmentally doubtful practices.
Gov. Walz’s workplace declined to remark for this story and as an alternative shared a remark from the Minnesota Division of Agriculture. “The Governor has persistently advocated for and applied packages that guarantee agriculture advantages the surroundings whereas remaining worthwhile,” the assertion reads, and factors to Walz’s help for conservation funding and a rule that units some limits on fertilizer software.
What Walz within the White Home may imply for the way forward for farming
If Harris wins the presidency, Walz could possibly be influential in setting the administration’s agricultural agenda. That will doubtless imply extra of the identical bipartisan, pro-factory farming consensus.
However, Harris has a surprisingly robust monitor report on the surroundings and animal welfare, having defended California’s bans on foie gras and confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages throughout her time because the state’s lawyer normal.
Walz’s rural bona fides may make him an efficient messenger for reforms {that a} Harris administration may pursue — if he’s keen to buck Huge Ag. However there’s little proof to date that he can be able to take that function.
To name out the meat business for its misdeeds and advocate for significant rules would require braveness few farm state politicians have been keen to point out. Doing so in the course of a tightly contested presidential marketing campaign, the place a number of of the battleground states have main agricultural sectors, could possibly be politically disastrous.
So, as an alternative, we get photographs of candidates with cute piglets and child calves caught up within the manufacturing unit farm system — photos that fortify the very mythologies that make it so tough for elected officers to face as much as Huge Ag. However that political calculation has gotten us to the place we’re at this time: poisoned waters, injured staff, and abused animals.
Whereas a second Trump time period would doubtless be even friendlier to Huge Ag than a Harris-Walz administration, there’s much less daylight between Republicans and Democrats on agricultural coverage than you may suppose.
“We’re not going again” has change into the de facto Harris-Walz marketing campaign slogan. However within the struggle towards manufacturing unit farming, their administration most likely wouldn’t transfer us ahead, both.
