Farm bills are often loaded with “special interest” lard that favors, say, crop insurance companies, international grain merchandisers, meatpackers, and other farm and food players looking for an unearned edge in the marketplace.
Few special ag interests today slide on more lard than the nation’s highly integrated pork giants. And I do mean giants: According to Successful Farming’s most recent Pork Powerhouses report, only 34 “swine companies manage and/or own 4,035,200 sows, or about 68% of the nation’s breeding hog inventory.”
The largest Big Pig member, Smithfield, owns 550,000 sows, or nearly 14% of the U.S. total.
Despite their incredible size and market power, these industrial giants want Congress to crush voter-approved and U.S. Supreme Court-tested state animal welfare laws they say are forcing hog farmers – at least these 34 waddlers – to grow hogs without “today’s technology.”
What they mean is that some states like California and Massachusetts have animal welfare laws that ban restrictive sow gestation crates and laying hen cages. Voters in both states have – through referendums – agreed that if you’re selling pork or eggs in their markets, the source of those products must be raised and treated “humanely.”
In early 2026, after years of attacking the laws as anti-farmer and anti-free market, the Big Bacon Gang convinced the House Ag Committee to include what it calls the Save Our Bacon Act in the now-pending farm bill. Its only purpose is to overrule state-passed animal welfare laws. The House approved its farm bill on April 30, tossing the contentious issue to the Senate.
The bill’s primary pushers, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), say the federal government must override the local welfare laws to save hog farmers big and small alike from the commerce-killing state laws as well as these states’ pork and egg buyers from higher prices.
Both reasons are as phony as Grade A baloney.
Any hog or egg farmer anywhere in the U.S. can sell their goods in either California, Massachusetts or any other state with “welfare” laws by simply following the local laws. And many are. Moreover, there’s no shortage of either eggs or bacon in either state.
But it costs more, claims the Big Bacon Gang. Yes it does and, according to a recent analysis of those higher pork prices, 30.2% of the increase flows back to the farms as a “producer premium.”
So crate-less hog farmers – and, in all likelihood, cage-free egg farmers too – are not only making the new law work, they are making more money too.
That, in fact, is what’s really behind the Save Our Bacon Act – or SOB: their name, my abbreviation – push. California is off-limits to the integrators because sow gestation crates are at the heart of their industrial production model. That means a market that bought about 13% of all U.S. pork now buys a little over half of that amount and very little – if any – comes from the big integrators.
Big Bacon Gang’s big ask of Congress is now drawing big-time attention. In the last week of May, two prominent journalists, Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times and Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group, wrote scorching columns against how these pork powerhouses want Congress to favor them while overturning voter-approved local laws.
Parker, a right-leaning conservative, found this piggish move particularly odious. “Whatever happened to the Republican love affair with state rights?” she asked. “I guess it all depends on whose bacon is getting fried.”
The Senate is scheduled to take up the farm bill this month. It should drop the SOB carve-out before some members find themselves in the frying pan too.
This article originally appeared on Farmers Advance: Big Bacon Gang’s farm bill carve-out needs to be carved out
Reporting by Alan Guebert, Farmers’ Advance / Farmers Advance
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Alan Guebert, Farmers' Advance | USA TODAY Network
