These California and Colorado ballot measures are terrifying the meat industry

Most people know Sonoma County, the Northern California region sometimes called America’s Provence, for its lush vineyards, Mediterranean-style villas, and farm-to-table restaurants. But when I traveled to wine country last year, it was to observe a side of Sonoma that few outsiders know about: a dead-of-night animal rights protest at an industrial chicken slaughterhouse, located within a stone’s throw of a gastropub, an organic bakery, and a major vegan cheesemaker. 

Run by a subsidiary of the poultry giant Perdue, which raises hundreds of thousands of chickens on factory farms across Sonoma, the slaughter plant typifies the unusual politics of agriculture in this part of the country, where a cultivated image of gentle, humane farming sometimes sits uneasily alongside an increasingly consolidated agriculture sector. The county has also seen a recent influx of new residents fleeing rising housing prices in San Francisco, a longtime center of animal rights activism and utopian thought.

The region’s rural heritage and progressive politics will collide next month when Sonoma County residents vote on a first-of-its-kind ballot measure that could banish Perdue’s chicken facilities, along with all other large factory farms. The proposed law — which would cap the size of animal agriculture facilities and phase out all large factory farms in the county within three years — faces long odds. If successful, it could reshape the face of farming in the county and set a precedent that has terrified agricultural interests in California and across the country. 

Known as Measure J, the proposal has produced fierce debate in the county over the environmental, public health, and animal welfare impacts of modern animal agriculture. It’s poised to generate the highest campaign spending of any ballot measure in Sonoma County history, with about $2 million in contributions made for and against — the vast majority of which has been spent by industry in opposition. 

Measure J is one of a pair of local ballot initiatives this fall seeking to abolish industrial animal agriculture. In Denver, a historic center for the Western livestock trade and still an important hub for the US sheep industry, voters will decide next month whether to ban slaughterhouses in the city. The measure’s passage would shut down a lamb slaughter plant that butchers up to 500,000 lambs per year, accounting for between 15 and 20 percent of all US lamb meat. 

Both measures face opposition from their respective political elites, including the local Democratic Parties in Denver and Sonoma and the entire Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. While some prior farm animal welfare ballot measures — like California’s historic 2018 animal welfare law, Proposition 12 — have been more limited in scope, aiming to incrementally improve horrific factory farm conditions, the Sonoma County and Denver measures are more clearly perceived as bans. 

The measures are easily perceived as negative, as snatching things away from people — and they put proponents in the awkward position of trying to persuade voters to effectively abolish an industry, at least locally, on which they depend for abundant cheap meat.

It’s already famously expensive to live in California in part because it’s difficult to build housing, and some Sonoma residents may roll their eyes at Measure J as yet another bid to make it prohibitively expensive to do business in the Golden State. But industrial animal agriculture — a sector that exacts immense costs on the public in the form of greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, strain on local resources, disease risk, and animal suffering — makes a more worthy target for a ban.

In principle, there’s a lot of sense in capping the size of factory farms. Measure J’s proponents are betting that progressive Sonoma County, better known for its tasting rooms than its slaughterhouses, can push California — and the nation — in that direction.

Animal cruelty in a farming paradise

Measure J, advanced by a coalition of animal rights, environmental, and public health groups known as the Coalition to End Factory Farming, would require farms classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as large “concentrated animal feeding operations” (known as CAFOs) to either downsize or shut down within three years. The proposal is similar to a farm reform bill introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) that would phase out large CAFOs by 2040.

Sonoma doesn’t have the mega factory farms found in the Midwest or South, or elsewhere in California, that pack together millions of chickens or several thousand cows in one place. But it does have big industrial farms that employ standard factory farm methods. 

Weber Family Farms, one of the county’s top egg producers, was hit last year with a bird flu infection and killed its flock using “ventilation shutdown plus” — a highly controversial, painful method being used on many large farms to mass cull poultry birds by sealing up sheds and pumping in extreme heat, killing them via heatstroke. 

The Yes on J campaign has compiled a list of 21 farms in Sonoma County that they believe meet the large CAFO threshold, including several egg farms and chicken meat farms, six dairies, and one duck farm. Dairy operations of 700 or more mature dairy cows are classified as large CAFOs, while chicken farms can house up to 125,000 birds before being considered large CAFOs. 

“The trend is toward mergers and toward ever-increasing sizes in animal agriculture,” Woody Hastings, a Sonoma County resident who works in climate policy and supports Measure J, told me. Hastings has worked with environmental justice organizations in California’s Central Valley, a far more CAFO-dense, ultra-productive agricultural region where residents are afflicted by air and water pollution and terrible odors. “What I learned in my work in the Central Valley is seeing how bad things can get if there is no cap on the size,” he said. 

Animal farming industries have mobilized an all-out war against Measure J, pushing social media campaigns, TV ads, and a direct mail blitz, at times making exaggerated claims about the measure’s potential to wipe out all animal agriculture in the county or cause a dramatic spike in food prices. 

One direct mailer sponsored by Western United Dairies (WUD), a dairy trade group, claimed the measure would shut down “more than 60 organic dairy farms” — but there are only 50 dairy farms of all categories in the county, according to the most recent USDA data, and most of them don’t meet the threshold to be affected by Measure J. “We do not differentiate between any dairy farming operations,” WUD told me in a statement, adding that they were concerned that Measure J would affect all dairy farms. 

The measure is written in a confusing way, and there’s been uncertainty in the county about its scope, with some arguing that it could be construed to include farms that are smaller than large CAFOs. The measure says that it would phase out both medium and large CAFOs, but because the definition of a medium CAFO requires that it directly discharge manure into surface water, no known farm in the county, based on EPA data, meets the EPA’s standard to be a medium CAFO.   

Much of the opposition to Measure J has centered on Sonoma County’s dairy industry, which has been declining in recent decades and has almost entirely converted to organic, pasture-based operations because they command higher retail prices, according to Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Although the measure wouldn’t affect consumer prices much because grocery stores would simply stock more milk from elsewhere in the region, Sumner said, it is likely to reduce significantly how much milk is produced in Sonoma. 

That’s left some Sonoma voters asking: Why punish dairies that are doing things better than the vast majority of the US dairy industry? Measure J “threatens what is probably one of the best progressive dairy environments, certainly in California, probably in the country,” Roy Smith, a small farmer in Sonoma County, told me. “Yes, there are compromises that are made, but if we wanted to improve the well-being [of animals], I would suggest that more dairies reopen here, and close the ones that are low-welfare in Wisconsin.” 

No dairy farm in Sonoma is as big as America’s biggest mega-dairies, and it’s undoubtedly true that cows with access to a pasture have it better than those raised on conventional factory farms. But organic dairies can still qualify as CAFOs. Most of Sonoma’s milk cows are still concentrated on farms that are very large, and large-scale dairy production of any kind is hard to justify on environmental and animal welfare grounds. 

Whether they’re raised organic or conventional, ruminant grazing requires a lot of land and water — the latter increasingly scarce in the parched American West — and produces significant greenhouse gas emissions. Organic dairy CAFOs, including some in Sonoma, share some of the characteristics of conventional ones, like the use of manure lagoons — giant pools of animal waste that pollute air and water and can harm human health. And, organic or not, the dairy business model depends on repeatedly impregnating dairy cows and taking away their newborns (highly social animals that are then generally forced to live alone in small hutches) to extract the cows’ milk, keeping them alive just as long as they remain productive.

A recent Atlantic investigation into one of the nation’s most celebrated organic dairies, a few counties north of Sonoma, found pervasive animal cruelty, including some techniques that were unique to the organic model. (Because milk from cows that have ever received antibiotics can’t be marketed as organic, cows can be denied them even when they really need them for a painful disease or injury.) 

In my experience writing about the livestock industry, it’s often the worst factory farms that set the bar for how we talk about animal agriculture, allowing other producers — including organic facilities — to appear idyllic by comparison. We rarely frame the conversation around what animals truly deserve: Does it really make sense to mass produce another mammal for its milk, separating mothers from babies, all for a product that isn’t nutritionally necessary and that climate scientists say is so high in emissions that we have to scale it down? 

Measure J, a blunt instrument for shrinking a bloated industry, offers one possible answer: We have to make less of it. 

Slaughterhouse zero

In Denver, meanwhile, the proposed slaughterhouse ban, led by the advocacy group Pro-Animal Future, looms like a “black cloud” over the US sheep industry, as one sheep feedlot employee put it. 

Over the last 50 years, American lamb farming has declined precipitously; the Denver slaughterhouse that would be shut down by the ballot measure, run by top lamb producer Superior Farms, is one of relatively few important facilities remaining. 

If the measure passes, it’s possible that some producers will be able to send their animals to be slaughtered elsewhere or that a new slaughterhouse will open outside Denver limits. Or, Sumner told me, the measure could hasten the death of the lamb industry altogether. Not many investors are saying, “Gee, I think I’ll go into the lamb slaughtering business,” he said. “Mostly they look for something that’s growing, and nobody thinks the lamb business is growing.” 

Pro-Animal Future, much like the coalition campaigning for Measure J in Sonoma County, sees the ballot initiative as a means to start civic conversations about building a more humane, planet-friendly food system, without making people feel like the only option available to them for making change is to go vegan. 

The lamb industry, particularly an industrial slaughterhouse, is a reasonable target for such a reckoning: Most people rarely eat lamb — making them perhaps more sympathetic to them as animals — while slaughterhouses are, pretty much invariably, sites of terrible violence. The per-serving climate impact of sheep’s meat is also significant, second only to beef. The Superior slaughterhouse, under the name Mountain Meadows, was also recently fined by the EPA for Clean Air Act violations, and has been fined multiple times for labor violations.

This week, the Intercept published findings from a recent undercover investigation into conditions at the Superior slaughterhouse, including gruesome footage of partially eviscerated, thrashing lambs hanging upside down on the slaughter line, with one lamb appearing to lift its head and open its mouth, and injured lambs who are unable to walk being thrown, dragged, and kicked toward slaughter. It also documented what appears to be the use of “Judas sheep”: sheep who live at the slaughterhouse and have been trained to greet incoming truckloads of lambs and lead them to slaughter.

Superior Farms spokesperson Bob Mariano told me in a statement that “nothing included in the footage we have seen is evidence of extreme violence, animal cruelty, or halal violations [the slaughterhouse is halal-certified]. This is yet another example of proponents of the slaughterhouse ban misunderstanding or misrepresenting standard, legally compliant parts of the slaughter process in an attempt to shock voters and influence an election. This is not the first time our workers have been attacked by activist groups falsely claiming that illegally obtained footage shows things that it simply does not.” 

The investigation’s findings echoed a recent Denver Post op-ed by Denver resident Jose Huizar, who worked at the slaughterhouse decades ago: “Someone has to wield that knife — over and over,” he wrote. “Spending your day slitting throats, stepping in guts, ripping the skin from the spasming bodies of animals who were alive moments ago — it’s hard to go home to your family after that.” 

The slaughterhouse, located in Denver’s low-income, majority nonwhite neighborhood of Globeville, employs about 160 people — people who don’t want to lose their jobs. Like Measure J, the Denver ballot initiative directs local government to prioritize people whose jobs are eliminated as a result of the measure in workforce training programs. 

“Our hope is not just to stick it to this one slaughterhouse, but to draw a connection to the fact that this is how the industry is run generally,” Olivia Hammond, an organizer for Pro-Animal Future, told me. 

Woody Hastings, the Sonoma resident, compared the fight against factory farming to oil and gas phase-outs: Just as we need to transition away from fossil fuels, we know we need to scale down industrial animal agriculture. We also know there will be economic impacts to such change that ought to be distributed fairly, and workers who lose their jobs ought to be treated with dignity. 

The anti-factory farming movement has a long way to go in convincing the people of Sonoma County and Denver to see industrial animal agriculture the way they do fossil fuels. And without meaningful change in either the underlying demand for meat and dairy, or in nationwide regulation of CAFOs, isolated local initiatives are, for now, likely to only shift production elsewhere. 

But should even one of the ballot measures succeed next month, political leaders might be persuaded that their constituents care enough about farm animal issues to create momentum for further reform. Win or lose, though, animal advocates will still face the wearying task of trying to bridge the public’s cognitive dissonance about where our meat comes from and channel it productively into politics. 

This story was featured in the Processing Meat newsletter. Sign up here.

Update, October 10, 4:45 pm ET: This story, published October 10, has been amended to clarify the scope of Measure J.