Soon after, Gary Malenke’s phone started ringing. “There were a lot of customers looking for product and a lot of concern about, ‘Hey, where’s my supply gonna come from? Are my shelves gonna be empty?’” he said.
As senior vice president of pork operations for Perdue Premium Meat Company, Malenke oversees a mid-size pork processing plant in Iowa. The pork processed there—for brands including Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Foods—already meets Prop. 12’s requirements, since gestation crates are not used in their systems. So, he was a logical contact for buyers suddenly concerned about finding pork to sell.
But, Malenke said, after about six months, the calls mostly stopped. On the ground, he’s heard little talk about the law, and from his vantage point, the market has met the moment. “California seems to have aligned with their suppliers in a way where the balance between what’s coming in the pipeline for Prop. 12 product seems to be aligning relatively well with what the demand is,” he said.
That’s not how the NPPC sees it.
The week of April 7, NPPC members, who represent the country’s biggest pork companies, arrived in Washington, D.C. to try once again to convince Congress to overturn Prop. 12. They started the week with an advertising takeover of Politico’s influential Weekly Agriculture newsletter, in which ads pleaded with lawmakers to correct Prop. 12’s “damaging consequences nationwide for both farmers and consumers.”
A screenshot of one of four advertisements from the National Pork Producers Council in the April 7 Weekly Agriculture email newsletter from Politico.
On April 8, Iowa’s Republican U.S. Senators, Jodi Ernst and Chuck Grassley, and Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), introduced the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, which, if incorporated into an upcoming farm bill, would overturn Prop. 12 and prevent other similar bills in the future.
The new act is essentially a renamed version of the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, which was first introduced in 2023. The NPPC praised the senators’ “efforts to avert [a] pork industry crisis.”
While the battle over Prop. 12 has been raging for nearly a decade, this is the first time it’s possible to look at the impacts the law has had on farmers and the market for pork. The law’s requirements were phased in starting in July 2023, and were fully implemented in January 2024, a little over one year ago.
Looking for Signs of Crisis
More time is needed for price and farm data to catch up, so analysis is still limited. But based on Civil Eats’ reporting and research, it’s hard to find signs of the crisis NPPC describes, and some available evidence points the other way.
Experts say the premiums being paid to farmers who changed their systems more than cover the cost of the upgrades required. Brands like Niman Ranch, which supports a network of independent small farms, have increased their sales. Many of the country’s biggest corporations, which experts say shouldered more of the costs associated with the transition, increased the performance of their pork segments in 2024 compared to 2023.
Price data is harder to parse: the price of the pork covered by the law has increased in California, but economists say more and better data is needed to definitively say how much of the jump is attributable to the law (versus other factors that impact prices) and whether the initial disruption is starting to ease.
Many people also say the scrambled political landscape that exists around Prop. 12 seems to have shifted more toward support for keeping the law in place. While the Biden administration, Trump’s past and current U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and many farm-state lawmakers have all sided with the NPPC in favor of overturning Prop. 12, groups from across the political spectrum are dedicated to preserving it.
One coalition working to stop legislation that would nullify Prop. 12 includes diverse organizations concerned about a broad range of issues, from animal welfare and the environmental impacts of meat production to corporate consolidation and state’s rights.
“I think we have done a really good job making the case against the [former] EATS Act on so many different levels. We’ve got very far-right members of our coalition and we’ve got left members of our coalition,” said Christian Lovell, the senior director of programs at Farm Action Fund, a nonprofit focused on anti-monopoly policies and a leader of the effort to protect Prop. 12. “There’s also a lot of market opportunity for producers that do want to meet these standards. That to me is just incongruent with what the industry is describing.”
However, House Agriculture Committee staff said in an email to Civil Eats that they have heard from “over 900 federal, state, and county agricultural stakeholders” asking lawmakers to overturn Prop 12.
“There’s also a lot of market opportunity for producers that do want to meet these standards. That to me is just incongruent with what the industry is describing.”
As a result, Committee Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) plans to again include language that does so in the next draft of the farm bill, as he did in 2024. Thompson’s provision is narrower than the language in both the former EATS Act as well as the new bill introduced in April, and only applies to livestock (as opposed to nullifying state laws that regulate the production of all agricultural products).
“The threat to producers goes way beyond NPPC and the pork industry,” Thompson said in a statement provided to Civil Eats. “States like California must be held accountable. They cannot be allowed to enact mandates that dictate production standards to producers outside of their borders.”
The NPPC declined a request for an interview, and the organization’s spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions that Civil Eats sent asking for their perspective on multiple points laid out in this story.
