Florida’s Governor has some plans about how he can help Iowa pork producers sidestep a Supreme Court decision upholding California protections for nursing sows.
During an interview on the Barn Talk podcast, Ron DeSantis suggested his presidential administration would “look to see what administratively we have the authority to do federally to provide relief to Proposition 12 because there may be some things you can do under existing statutes.”
“And if there’s an existing statute that would be on point federally and it’s constitutional, well, that would trump what a state is going to do under the supremacy clause,” DeSantis said, adding that Congress should “fix that problem” with “Democrat senators from Minnesota” working “to side with your farmers on that.”
“I don’t think California should be able to dictate how people are producing pork. I mean, that’s just not good for the economy. It’s not the way the system was designed to work. And I want states to be able to make their own decisions. But when they’re trying to do things that have effects outside their state, that’s a different, different beast there,” DeSantis said.
Earlier this year, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a California law called Proposition 12, which mandates more room for breeding pigs. The Court sided with the state against the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, industry groups that contended California law would impose unreasonable burdens on pig farmers.
DeSantis noted that on this issue, he deviates from Justice Clarence Thomas, who “doesn’t ever usually … get anything wrong,” but in this case arrived at the conclusion because he doesn’t believe there is a “dormant” Commerce Clause precluding state regulations.
The California law holds “no person shall knowingly engage in a commercial sale within the state of whole pork meat for human food if the whole pork meat is the product of a breeding pig, or the product of the immediate offspring of a breeding pig, that was confined at any time during the production cycle for said product in an enclosure that fails to comply with all of the standards set forth in Chapter 10, Article 3, regarding Breeding Pigs.”
This includes pig meat brought in from out of state, meaning California markets would be closed to flesh from slaughtered pigs treated worse than state law requires.
California statute dictates that the “enclosure shall allow the breeding pig to lie down, stand up, fully extend limbs, and turn around freely,” with “a minimum of 24 square feet of usable floorspace per breeding pig.” But that’s a bridge too far for the purveyors of porcine flesh.
The Governor’s comments against the California law protecting pregnant pigs are the latest in a series.
DeSantis has vowed to “protect meat” from environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles, which he said would cause a “farm crisis” given the pressures being imposed on the agriculture sector.
“They’re trying to use things like global warming to go after agriculture. They want to go after meat, they want to go after all these things and it’s totally insane,” DeSantis said in October in South Carolina.
The Governor, while at a Never Back Down bus tour stop in Iowa back in August, said his presidential administration would not “let California regulate how farmers in Iowa conduct their business on things like, you know, these pork producers have to follow California law to do this stuff.”
“It doesn’t even make any sense,” DeSantis said.
Ironically given the Governor’s take, more than two decades ago Florida passed a constitutional amendment stipulating that “no person shall confine a pig during pregnancy in a cage, crate or other enclosure, or tether a pregnant pig, on a farm so that the pig is prevented from turning around freely, except for veterinary purposes and during the prebirthing period.”
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