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Amid high egg prices and the spread of avian flu, Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary is pushing an industry-friendly agenda to dismantle state-level animal welfare regulations designed to limit corporate eggflation and protect against livestock diseases.
In recent years, a handful of states have passed reforms that rein in industrial agricultural production by banning crates and cages for farm animals. Cage-free advocates have long argued the confined conditions of concentrated animal feeding operations are unhealthy for livestock and inadvertently incubate the spread of diseases such as avian flu.
These laws also level the playing field for independent smaller farms, enabling them to compete against the giant industrial producers in new markets for cage-free pork and poultry products.
Agribusiness has spent millions of dollars fighting these regulations. Now with the help of the Trump administration, they’re working to eliminate the rules under the auspices of lowering egg prices for consumers.
The Department of Agriculture’s own data, however, indicates that states’ cage-free requirements are not contributing to an egg shortage or driving up costs.
“It’s a red herring [to focus on cage-free laws] and simply [caters] to corporate agriculture special interest groups at the expense of American farmers and animal welfare,” said Holly Bice, a representative for the Responsible Meat Coalition, made up of small to medium-sized farms.
Other evidence such as the industry’s record profit levels suggests that the largest egg producers have used relatively minor disturbances from avian flu as a smoke screen to jack up prices, according to industry experts.
From December to February, egg prices saw a record-setting price jump to the highest they’ve been since the 1980s, adjusting for inflation. Over the past year, prices went up by 50 percent. During that same period, the largest egg producers — led by Cal-Maine, which controls 20 percent of the market — increased their gross profit margins by 230 percent, even while egg production remained at stable levels.
Citing indications of industry profiteering, recently fired Democratic Federal Trade Commission member Alvaro Bedoya has urged the administration to probe potential price fixing by the egg cartel. Shortly after, the Department of Justice began investigating the issue. Meanwhile, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has opted for a pro-business approach by subsidizing the largest egg companies’ investments in biosecurity to the tune of a billion dollars and slashing regulations.
In the meantime, Rollins, who selected an agribusiness lobbyist as her chief of staff, suggested Americans simply get their own backyard chickens if prices are too high for them.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed laying out her plan to lower egg prices, Rollins specifically vowed to roll back state cage-free state laws. “We will remove unnecessary regulatory burdens on egg producers where possible . . . [that are] increasing production costs,” she wrote, singling out California’s Proposition 12, a precedent-setting 2018 law banning battery cages that’s been a fixture of Big Ag’s ire. In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld its legality against a years-long lawsuit backed by corporate agriculture.
Buoyed by Rollins’s criticism of these restrictions, Republicans in state houses across the country are backing legislation to suspend their states’ own cage-free requirements. In February, Nevada’s newly elected Republican governor signed a bill to lift those requirements for egg sales in the state. Similar proposals are still making their way through Arizona and Colorado’s state governments.
While business groups lobby for these bills, citing regulatory burdens, testimony submitted on the Nevada bill came from independent chicken farmers unanimously defending the cage-free restrictions as vital to their business model.
At the federal level, congressional Republicans are also expected to take up legislation called the EATS Act, designed to preempt state animal welfare regulations like Proposition 12. But as written, the bill is so expansive that rural policy groups warn it would undo state food safety and even child labor laws.
Similar language rolling back animal welfare rules, borrowed from the EATS Act, was inserted into the House’s draft version of the farm bill in the last congressional session, but it excluded state egg restrictions. Washington insiders say eggs will likely be included in new versions of the farm bill, at Rollins’s behest. “The door is wide open now,” said one rural policy lobbyist involved with the farm bill negotiations.
Over a decade ago, states across the country began passing animal welfare laws to address growing concerns about the health effects for both food and animal safety posed by concentrated animal feeding operations.
For egg production, giant mega-farms can hold up to five million egg-laying hens in a single high-density facility, subdivided into rows of wire cages stacked on top of one another. Each battery cage will typically contain about ten egg-laying hens packed together in an area of less than six square feet. The scale of these operations is highly efficient for the egg-processing giants, but the conditions for livestock are so unhealthy that companies use genetic modification to prevent atrophying muscle mass and pump them with antibiotics to stop diseases.
The largest processors, which act as middlemen between buyers and sellers, have accrued enormous power over the market. As has been the trend for pork, poultry, and beef, egg farmers either have to contract with these giant processors — and accept the meager rates they pay them — or try to make it on their own in a significantly constrained market throttled by these middlemen.
Cage-free laws, now in place in ten states, set minimum distancing requirements between farm animals. These requirements in effect ban confined cages for livestock, known as battery cages for poultry and gestation crates for hogs.
The wide-ranging coalition backing these laws includes a mix of unlikely allies, including farmers, animal welfare activists, environmentalists, and food safety advocates. Most of these laws don’t just ban caged production within their borders but also the sale of products from caged facilities in other states. These requirements have been a boon to independent farmers, who generally don’t contract with corporate processors or operate factory farms and have seen new demand for their cage-free products.
But agriculture monopolies have fought these laws at every turn. The main battlefront has been centered in California in part because the state has been an early adopter of animal welfare policies and because the massive size of its economy ends up setting standards for much of the country.
In 2008, major egg and pork interests spent $10 million unsuccessfully fighting the passage of California’s Proposition 2, a ballot measure that banned farm animal cages in the state. Ten years later, industry groups dumped a similar amount of money to oppose Proposition 12, which closed loopholes in the earlier cage-free law and banned the sale of all eggs from concentrated animal feeding operations, which would be slowly phased in by 2022.
As other states moved forward with similar animal welfare reforms, egg companies, represented by the United Egg Producers lobbying group, saw the writing on the wall and stopped opposing these regulations outright. Instead, they settled on compromises to delay the implementation of the restrictions. Meanwhile, consumer demand for cage-free eggs grew, incentivizing the industry to bend to a new market. Even large egg companies like Cal-Maine heavily invested in cage-free facilities.
The pork lobby, represented by the National Pork Producers Council, instead dug in its heels. The industry group, which represents giant meat processors like JBS Foods, Tyson Foods, and Smithfield Foods, led the campaign against the passage of Proposition 12 in 2018, then dragged it through court.
In 2023, the National Pork Producers Council spent $750,000 lobbying for legislation to federally deregulate cage-free laws like Proposition 12.
Pork producers have tried other tactics reminiscent of Rollins’s current strategy on egg prices.
Last year, sticker prices for pork increased by 20 percent, and the industry blamed it on the implementation of Proposition 12. But the actual hog farmers who work on contracts for the middlemen processors reported they were only receiving a slightly higher amount for their hog sales, by about 5 percent.
The gap between those sticker prices and farmer earnings indicated that the bulk of the price increase was just going straight into the pockets of the middlemen, as the advocacy group Farm Action argued at the time. The meat processors in effect appeared to be using minor disruptions caused by animal welfare rules as an excuse to jack up prices.
“We’re seeing the same tired playbook being used once again with eggs,” said Joe Maxwell, a hog farmer who runs the organization Farm Action, which has pushed for the Department of Justice to investigate price fixing on eggs since 2022.
Industry interests are arguing that cage-free laws are artificially limiting the potential supply of eggs, which has led to high prices amid avian-flu-caused egg shortages. Undoing these laws, they claim, will increase the capacity for more eggs from megafarms and lower prices.
But this argument, echoed by Rollins in her recent op-ed, runs counter to the Agriculture Department’s own data from its most recent market study. For one, egg prices have not been notably higher in states with cage-free laws. Michigan’s law took effect this year, and its prices remain equivalent to the national average.
Avian flu outbreaks have occurred periodically over the past three years, causing minor egg-supply disruptions. Industry-wide, egg-laying flocks were just about 5 percent smaller in 2024 compared to 2021, before the outbreaks.
In the limited instances where avian flu is impacting egg-laying populations, the bulk of those infections are occurring in confined-caged systems, rather than cage-free facilities, according to a recent market report. Three-fourths of recorded chicken infections unsurprisingly take place at industrial facilities because these sites make up the bulk of overall production.
If bird flu outbreaks exacerbate at these megafarms, holding as many as five million hens, the losses from culling those entire flocks could pose a systemic risk and create real egg shortages.
Smaller, free-range facilities, however, appear to be at a lower risk of that doomsday scenario.
The recent market report found that while avian flu outbreaks infected roughly 12 percent of egg-laying hens in caged settings, the outbreaks infected only 8 percent of egg-laying hens on cage-free farms. Organic free-range chickens, meanwhile, boasted an infection rate of just 0.1 percent.
Agriculture experts argue minimum livestock distancing standards may be one of the few existing guardrails against a mass supply shortage if the avian flu epidemic gets worse. Cage-free laws, in their view, incentivize a less concentrated egg farming sector that would be more resilient against diseases.
Cage-free farmers are taking their own precautions to prevent avian flu infections from devastating their flocks. One example is Kipster, a medium-size free-range company with farms in Indiana. Sandra Vijn, Kipster’s managing director, told the Lever that its site operators have mostly moved their chickens to indoor barns, which can house up to 24,000 hens, instead of roaming outside, where they may contract the flu from other animals. These barns have open indoor space for hens to roam free.
So far, Kipster has avoided outbreaks, and its prices have remained at roughly $6 a dozen even as price shocks hit the rest of the sector.
Critics point to such data points to argue that Rollins’s new war on cage-free eggs may do more to placate corporate interests than it would to bring down egg prices or protect against risk.
“Rollins is standing in front of battery cages with Cal-Maine talking about lowering prices. . . . Well, you’re sitting there in bed with the very people causing high egg prices,” said Maxwell.
Even the egg industry barons are skeptical about the effort to revoke state cage-free laws.
On March 18, United Egg Producers wrote a letter to Rollins blasting her calls to dismantle minimum distancing requirements as “unproductive.” At this point, many of the producers the groups represent have invested millions of dollars into building cage-free facilities that accommodate state-by-state regulations.
But that hasn’t stopped efforts to revoke cage-free laws. Following Nevada’s lead, the Arizona legislature is now moving forward with an identical bill being pushed by the Arizona Farm and Ranch Group, a lobbying operation primarily representing hog and cattle ranchers in the state. These lobbyists are squaring off against the Humane Society and smaller farm groups defending the cage-free restrictions in the state.
As state senator Mitzi Epstein (D) put it in the Arizona Capitol Times, there are other options besides dismantling animal welfare laws that could help bring the prices down. “One of them,” she wrote, “is slowing down the growth of retail monopolies who are just raising the prices higgily-giggily.”
Great Job Luke Goldstein & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
