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 look at a aspect of Sonoma that few outsiders learn 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 significant vegan cheesemaker.
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Run by a subsidiary of the poultry big Perdue, which raises a whole bunch of hundreds of chickens on manufacturing unit 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 mild, humane farming generally sits uneasily alongside an more and more consolidated agriculture sector. The county has additionally seen a latest inflow of new residents fleeing rising housing costs in San Francisco, a longtime heart 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 would banish Perdue’s rooster amenities, together with all different massive manufacturing unit farms. The proposed legislation — which might cap the dimensions of animal agriculture amenities and part out all massive manufacturing unit farms within the county inside three years — faces lengthy odds. If profitable, it may reshape the face of farming within the county and set a precedent that has terrified agricultural pursuits in California and throughout the nation.
Often called Measure J, the proposal has produced fierce debate within the county over the environmental, public well being, and animal welfare impacts of contemporary 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 towards — the overwhelming majority of which has been spent by business in opposition.
Measure J is considered one of a pair of native poll initiatives this fall in search of to abolish industrial animal agriculture. In Denver, a historic heart for the Western livestock commerce and nonetheless an essential 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 whole 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 unit farm situations, the Sonoma County and Denver measures are extra clearly perceived as bans.
The measures are simply perceived as unfavourable, as snatching issues away from folks — and so they put proponents within the awkward place of making an attempt to steer voters to successfully abolish an business, at the least regionally, on which they rely for considerable low cost meat.
It’s already famously costly to reside in California partly as a result of it’s troublesome to construct housing, and a few Sonoma residents might roll their eyes at Measure J as yet 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 sources, illness threat, and animal struggling — makes a extra worthy goal for a ban.
In precept, there’s numerous sense in capping the dimensions 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 often known as the Coalition to Finish Manufacturing facility Farming, would require farms categorized by the US Environmental Safety Company as massive “concentrated animal feeding operations” (often known 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 will part out massive 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 thousands and thousands of chickens or a number of thousand cows in a single place. Nevertheless it does have large industrial farms that make use of customary manufacturing unit farm strategies.
Weber Household Farms, one of many county’s prime egg producers, was hit final yr with a fowl flu an infection and killed its flock utilizing “air flow shutdown plus” — a extremely controversial, painful technique getting used on many massive 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 rooster meat farms, six dairies, and one duck farm. Dairy operations of 700 or extra mature dairy cows are categorized as massive CAFOs, whereas rooster farms can home as much as 125,000 birds earlier than being thought of massive 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, informed 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 stricken 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 a cap on the dimensions,” he stated.
Animal farming industries have mobilized an all-out struggle towards Measure J, pushing social media campaigns, TV advertisements, and a junk mail blitz, at instances 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 accordance with the newest USDA information, and most of them don’t meet the brink to be affected by Measure J. “We don’t differentiate between any dairy farming operations,” WUD informed 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 might be construed to incorporate farms which can be smaller than massive CAFOs. The measure says that it could part out each medium and enormous 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, primarily based 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 latest many years and has virtually solely transformed to natural, pasture-based operations as a result of they command larger retail costs, in accordance 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 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 best progressive dairy environments, definitely in California, in all probability within the nation,” Roy Smith, a small farmer in Sonoma County, informed me. “Sure, there are compromises which can 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 can be low-welfare in Wisconsin.”
No dairy farm in Sonoma is as large 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 unit farms. However natural dairies can nonetheless qualify as CAFOs. Most of Sonoma’s milk cows are nonetheless targeting farms which can be very massive, and large-scale dairy manufacturing of any form is tough to justify on environmental and animal welfare grounds.
Whether or not they’re raised natural or typical, ruminant grazing requires numerous land and water — the latter more and more scarce within the parched American West — and produces important greenhouse fuel emissions. Natural dairy CAFOs, together with some in Sonoma, share a few of the traits of typical ones, like using 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 is dependent upon repeatedly impregnating dairy cows and taking away their newborns (extremely social animals which can be then usually compelled to reside alone in small hutches) to extract the cows’ milk, maintaining them alive simply so long as they continue to be productive.
A latest 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 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 unit farms that set the bar for a way we speak about animal agriculture, permitting different producers — together with natural amenities — to seem idyllic by comparability. We hardly ever 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 mandatory and that local weather scientists say is so excessive in emissions that we’ve to scale it down?
Measure J, a blunt instrument for shrinking a bloated business, affords one doable reply: Now we have 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 will be shut down by the poll measure, run by prime lamb producer Superior Farms, is considered one of comparatively few essential amenities remaining.
If the measure passes, it’s doable that some producers will have the ability to ship their animals to be slaughtered elsewhere or {that a} new slaughterhouse will open exterior Denver limits. Or, Sumner informed me, the measure may hasten the demise of the lamb business altogether. Not many buyers are saying, “Gee, I believe I’ll go into the lamb slaughtering enterprise,” he stated. “Largely they search for one thing that’s rising, and no person thinks the lamb enterprise is rising.”
Professional-Animal Future, very similar to the coalition campaigning for Measure J in Sonoma County, sees the poll initiative as a way to start out civic conversations about constructing a extra humane, planet-friendly meals system, with out making folks really feel like the one choice accessible to them for making change is to go vegan.
The lamb business, notably an industrial slaughterhouse, is an affordable goal for such a reckoning: Most individuals hardly ever 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 also be important, second solely to beef. The Superior slaughterhouse, underneath the title Mountain Meadows, was additionally just lately fined by the EPA for Clear Air Act violations, and has been fined a number of instances for labor violations.
This week, the Intercept revealed findings from a latest undercover investigation into situations on the Superior slaughterhouse, together with ugly footage of partially eviscerated, thrashing lambs hanging the wrong way up on the slaughter line, with one lamb showing to raise 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 reside on the slaughterhouse and have been skilled to greet incoming truckloads of lambs and make them slaughter.
Superior Farms spokesperson Bob Mariano informed me in a press release that “nothing included within the footage we’ve seen is proof of maximum violence, animal cruelty, or halal violations [the slaughterhouse is halal-certified]. That is yet one more instance of proponents of the slaughterhouse ban misunderstanding or misrepresenting customary, legally compliant elements of the slaughter course of in an try and 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 latest Denver Publish 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 exhausting 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 folks — individuals who don’t wish to lose their jobs. Like Measure J, the Denver poll initiative directs native authorities to prioritize folks whose jobs are eradicated because of the measure in workforce coaching packages.
“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, informed me.
Woody Hastings, the Sonoma resident, in contrast the combat towards manufacturing unit 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 will likely 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 folks 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 perhaps 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 making an attempt 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.
