A Kansas senator drops a bill to kill California's pork rule, and the question of who gets a vote on farming returns

Food & Farming 4 min 80 sources

A California law on how pigs are housed lands hardest on farmers in states that never voted on it — and the fight over who decides reaches the Senate floor.

Key takeaways

A Kansas senator dropped a bill to overturn California's Prop 12, and the Senate is likely to leave the override out of the farm bill.
Prop 12 governs only sales inside California, but because the state is ~15% of the US pork market, it effectively sets barn standards for farmers nationwide who never voted on it.
The same "who decides" tension runs through a Minnesota beef-fee vote settled by three ballots and Idaho's split over the farmworkers who feed the country but rarely have a say.

A US senator walked away from a bill last week, and in doing so reopened one of the strangest standoffs in American food. On June 10, Roger Marshall of Kansas withdrew as a cosponsor of the Food Security and Farm Protection Act — the Senate twin of a House measure nicknamed the Save Our Bacon Act [17]. Its single job was to undo a California law called Proposition 12. With Marshall gone, seven cosponsors remain, and the Senate Agriculture Committee chair has signalled he’ll leave the provision out of the farm bill entirely [17].

What Proposition 12 actually does

California voters passed Prop 12 at the ballot box. It bans the sale of pork, veal, and eggs in the state unless the animals were raised with a set minimum of space — for breeding pigs, room to turn around and lie down [17]. The catch is in the word “sale.” California doesn’t raise much of its own pork. It eats it. And it is about 15% of the entire US pork market [17].

So a farmer in Iowa or Kansas who wants access to one of the biggest markets in the country has to build their barns the way California’s voters decided — even though those voters live two thousand miles away and the farmer never cast a ballot on it. As one Iowa pork producer put it, farmers “compete in a marketplace increasingly shaped by mandates coming from states thousands of miles away from our farms” [17].

That is the mechanism worth holding onto. A single large market can set the rules for everyone who sells into it. California writes the standard; the rest of the country either meets it or gives up a sixth of its buyers. The law technically governs only what crosses California’s border, but in practice it reshapes barns across the Midwest.

Why the override stalled

The Save Our Bacon Act tried to flip the table. It would bar states from setting “preharvest” production standards on farming done in other states [17]. Supporters lean on the Constitution: Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa argued from the Senate floor that regulating commerce between states is Congress’s job, not California’s, and that “one state out of 50” shouldn’t dictate how pigs are raised everywhere [17].

But the bill kept losing. Animal-welfare groups note that courts rejected attempts to overturn these voter-passed laws in 23 of 23 cases, and Congress threw out similar amendments to the 2014 and 2018 farm bills [17]. The split isn’t clean by party. Some Kansas producers told Marshall they’d already upgraded their barns and now wanted to protect their access to California’s market — so killing Prop 12 would strand the money they’d spent [17]. Others warned the override mostly helps large processors, including a Chinese-owned firm that controls over a quarter of US pork production [17]. The bill meant to defend farmers turned out to divide them.

The wider table

The same question — who gets to decide — runs under other food stories this week. In Minnesota, beef producers voted last month on whether to raise a per-animal fee that funds beef marketing. It failed by three votes out of 757 cast, from 3,477 ballots mailed [55]. A program that touches every producer was settled by a margin thinner than a single barn’s worth of cattle, decided by the fraction who returned a ballot.

And in Idaho, one of the country’s reddest farm states, a Boise State survey found public opinion on immigration drifting away from federal crackdowns [61]. The reason is concrete: roughly 86% of US farmworkers are foreign-born and about 45% are undocumented [61]. The people who pick and pack much of the country’s food rarely have a vote in the policies that govern them — yet farms feel the loss first when those workers vanish.

For someone who eats

None of this hits the till tomorrow. But pork raised to Prop 12 standards costs more to produce, and if a federal override never passes, that cost stays baked into bacon and chops nationwide — not just in California. The deeper thing to watch isn’t the price. It’s the precedent: a big consumer state quietly setting farm rules for the whole country, one ballot measure at a time.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The rule gets written by the people it won't land on

Whoever isn't in the room when a rule is made tends to be the one who carries it — and their absence shapes what counts as fair.

A market that votes for everyone

California voters decided how pigs should be housed. Not California’s farmers — the state barely raises pork. Its eaters. And because they buy about 15% of all the pork sold in the United States, that single decision now reaches into barns in Iowa and Kansas, where farmers must build to California’s specification or surrender a sixth of their buyers.

Notice what happened. The people who made the rule don’t live with it. They don’t muck out the barn or borrow against next year’s herd. They voted at a ballot box and went to dinner. The people who do live with it — the producers two thousand miles away — never got a ballot. The rule fell on the ones who weren’t in the room.

This isn’t a story about villains. California’s voters weren’t trying to wreck Iowa. They were answering a question put to them, about something they cared about, with the only tool they had: their own vote in their own state. The trouble is structural. A decision made by some, in good faith, landed on others who had no voice in making it.

Why absence is the quiet bias

Every rule has people it touches and people it doesn’t. When the deciders and the bearers are the same crowd, the rule self-corrects — make it too harsh and you feel the harshness yourself. When they’re different crowds, that brake is gone. You can set a standard as strict as you like, because you’re not the one paying to meet it.

This is why “who’s at the table” matters more than it looks. It’s not just about fairness in some abstract sense. The absent party’s interests are the costs the system stops counting. They don’t show up in the debate, so they don’t show up in the trade-offs. The Iowa farmer’s rebuilt barn, the loan that paid for it, the smaller producer who couldn’t afford the upgrade and quietly left the business — none of that was in front of California’s voters. It couldn’t be. Those people weren’t in the room.

So the producer states pushed back. A bill — the Save Our Bacon Act — would forbid one state from setting farming standards on another. On its face that fixes the problem: stop California writing rules for Iowa.

But look at who’s in that room. It’s senators from pork-raising states. And the people not at that second table are the California voters who passed Prop 12 in the first place, and the animals the law was about. Flip the table and you don’t end the asymmetry — you just move it. Now the rule gets written by the side that doesn’t have to watch a pig in a crate.

That’s the part worth sitting with. “Who decides” doesn’t just settle the outcome. It settles what even counts as the harm. To California’s voters, the harm was animal suffering. To Iowa’s producers, the harm was a mandate they couldn’t vote on. Each room can only see the cost it can feel. Neither is lying. They’re standing in different rooms.

The pattern shows up everywhere

Once you see it, you see it past the pork. In Minnesota, a fee on every beef producer — money taken from all of them to fund marketing — was decided by 757 ballots out of 3,477 mailed, and failed by three votes. The fraction who returned a ballot set the rule for everyone who didn’t. The non-voters weren’t overruled; they were absent, and absence got counted as consent.

Or the people who pick the food. Most US farmworkers are foreign-born; nearly half are undocumented. They harvest and pack much of what ends up on the shelf, and they have close to no vote in the policies that govern whether they can stay. When those policies tighten, the farms feel it first — but the workers themselves were never at the table where the rule got drawn.

The reader is in some of these rooms too. Every time you, as an eater, back a food rule — for welfare, for safety, for the climate — you’re a voter whose dinner doesn’t depend on the cost of complying. That doesn’t make the rule wrong. Plenty of rules made by the unaffected are still right; voters outside a system are sometimes the only ones free enough to demand it improve. But it’s worth knowing which room you’re standing in, and asking who isn’t.

On the whole

The honest move isn’t to decide that only the affected may vote — taken far enough, that logic frees every industry from any outside check. It’s humbler than that. Before backing a rule, look around the room and notice who’s missing. Their absence isn’t neutral. It’s quietly deciding which costs the rule will count and which it will not. You won’t always be able to bring them in. But you can at least refuse to mistake their silence for agreement.

03 · Lab · your turn

Who's in the room

Pick a food rule and see whose interests get counted and whose drop out when you change who decides.

04 · Hope · carry this

The very fact that we keep arguing over who gets a seat at the table is a sign the table is widening — a generation ago, the farmer two states away, the worker in the field, and the animal in the barn had no standing in the conversation at all. Progress is slow and it is contested, but the circle of who counts has only ever grown.