Canadian hog farmers face months of anxiety as the biggest pork market in the United States perseveres with its attempt to dictate production standards to out-of-state producers.
Regardless of the outcome of a challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court to California’s Proposition 12 law, the potential impact of unclear humane-focused regulations has Canadian producers unsure if they will be able to sell pigs and pork to their usual buyers in the U.S.
“It’s uncertainty, and uncertainty equates to risk, and risk is always costly,” said Cam Dahl, general manager of Manitoba Pork.
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“There’s no question Proposition 12 is going to reach into Manitoba.”
That reach will be shared by producers and processors in other provinces that also ship young pigs to U.S. feeders and pork to U.S. distributors and grocery chains.
Prop 12 requires that livestock and meat sold in California comply with regulations aimed at ensuring animals be raised in humane circumstances, such as with open housing for gestating sows, but the regulations are not finalized. Many producers fear that differing standards between their operations and the final regulations will prevent them from supplying pigs to California-focused feeders and processors, even if they have redesigned their barns for systems such as open housing.
“What exactly (the regulations are,) how we address it, I don’t know the answer to because I don’t think it’s clear,” said Dahl.
Prop 12 would require 24 square feet per gestating sow, but the exact configurations of the open housing systems required are not fully fleshed out. There will also be regulations for veal calves and poultry cages.
Some hog operations in the U.S. and Canada have moved to open housing, but most have not. With California importing more than 99 percent of the pork it consumes, blocking pork and pigs from most North American and world production could have a major impact on consumers in California as well as out-of-state farmers.
The main bodies representing U.S. hog farmers, the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, took their challenge of the California law to the U.S. Supreme Court Oct. 12. Their lawyers described California’s attempt to influence livestock production methods in other jurisdictions as unconstitutional since it interferes with interstate trade, which is a federal responsibility. If California is allowed to control the import of goods produced in other states, then any state could consider itself entitled to interfere with other states’ trade too. That could cause severe disruptions of internal U.S. trade.
“As we’ve contended since 2018 (when Prop 12 was approved,) one state should not be able to regulate commerce in another state and set arbitrary standards that lack any scientific, technical or agricultural basis,” said NPPC, summing up its position after the court hearing.
California’s representatives described Prop 12’s impact on out-of-state producers as being indirect but an incentive on them to produce livestock in a manner which fits with Californians’ expressed will. They denied the rules are protectionist or an attempt to interfere with trade.
The supreme court hearing saw some of the world’s most famous jurists debating a hog industry law, with much back and forth between the justices and the representatives of California and the hog industry.
Left of centre judges such as Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson were active in pondering the consequences of Prop 12, as were right of centre judges Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
All of Canada’s hog industry has been worried by Prop 12 since it was first proposed, but no place is as potentially severely affected as Manitoba. The province ships up to three million weanlings per year to U.S. feeders, and those buyers will be hit by whatever rules California eventually imposes if the law is not thrown out.
Manitoba is also home to Western Canada’s largest hog slaughter plant, with much of its meat production heading to U.S. distributors and grocery chains.
The U.S. Supreme Court is not expected to rule on the law until late June. The hog industry has launched a lawsuit against Prop 12, which could encourage the supreme court to delay ruling on the law’s constitutionality until that lower court matter is resolved.
Open housing for gestating sows appears to be an industry-wide inevitability for all Canadian producers. At some point, all hogs will have to come from open housing systems to comply with future codes of practice.
In that, Canada is further down the open housing road than the U.S., which does not have aggressive targets for the transition. Maple Leaf Foods, for example, has managed to transition all its owned production to open housing systems.
However, with legislation the devil can be in the details, and the details of California’s — as well as any other states that begin imposing state-based regulations — will leave Canada’s industry on tenterhooks until they are clear.
A farmer could conceivably convert his barn to open housing and still fall afoul of Prop 12 regulations on technical grounds.
“Right now, you have no idea what (an approved) retrofit might look like,” said Dahl.
