Farming Tradition vs. Animal Rights
Kathy Tresch swings open the gate, and a cavalcade of cows—black, white, caramel and beige—trots past, heading for the pasture at Tresch Family Farms in Petaluma.
Founded in 1905, owned and run by Tresch and her family, the organic farm’s 750 cows graze on 2,500 acres of gently rolling hills and pastureland. But changes will be in store for the ranch if Measure J, a fiercely debated initiative on the November ballot, passes.
The controversial measure would make Sonoma County the first in the nation to outlaw operations the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, also known pejoratively as factory farms.
Facilities that meet the EPA definition of a CAFO are not necessarily polluters. Basically, the definition of a CAFO includes animals stabled or confined for 45 days or more in any 12-month period. The size of the farms that qualify for the designation varies by type of animal and according to how the farms handle the discharge of manure.
The measure’s sponsor, the Coalition to End Factory Farming, a group of animal welfare advocates, environmentalists and small producers, says there are 21 concentrated animal farming operations befouling watersheds and mistreating animals in Sonoma.
The Sonoma County Farm Bureau disagrees with these assertions, and has gone on record against the measure. The Sonoma Board of Supervisors in May voted to submit a letter of opposition, calling the initiative a threat to the farming industry in Sonoma County.
An academic at California State University East Bay says that, unlike some of the cows at Tresch, the issue is not wholly black or white.
“I am critical of industrial agriculture and we need to think about how we produce food,“ says Antonio Roman-Alcalá, a Berkeley-based educator and organizer and assistant professor of geography and environmental studies at the university.
“I share the activists’ concern for negative treatment of animals. I sympathize with wanting to challenge [food] producers,” says the assistant professor, who serves on the board of the Ecological Farming Association of California, which advances ecological and just farming and food.
The measure is “an effort to shut down a certain kind of production that is known to cause harm,” the assistant professor says, noting that research has shown that certain production practices are harmful to animals and the environment.
But at the same time, Roman-Alcalá says, “I would never want to support an initiative that includes people who are really trying” to do things the right way. “I would not want to demonize those farmers along with those who are less ethical.”
There are concentrated animal feeding operations that are harmful, Roman-Alcalá says. But whether this particular legislation targets farms that are harmful is uncertain, he says.
“I would express uncertainties as to whether all facilities that would be affected by this law match the conditions the research is about,” he says. “I am not clear that all of the facilities that this describes actually have those impacts.”
Roman-Alcalá says his specific concern is organic dairies like Tresch.
“If organic dairies are managed well, they are unlikely to have such impacts on the environment—or, if they are having such impacts, they could be mitigated,” he says.
These organic dairies have been lumped in with factory farms because there is a relatively short period of the year in which Sonoma County cows are sheltered indoors, he says. (The definition of a CAFO includes animals stabled or confined for 45 days or more in any 12-month period.)
“If you care about animal welfare, the cows benefit from being sheltered from the rain and cold,” Roman-Alcalá says.
Cows in organic dairies must have access to the outdoors, shelter, shade, fresh and clean water.
Overall, 84% of the cow dairies in Sonoma County are organic, according to Randi Black, a dairy advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension who covers dairies in Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties.
“All Sonoma County dairies with over 200 cows are either organic certified, or they have American Humane Certified status,“ says Black, who has a doctorate in animal science and has been in her current role for seven years.
The American Humane certification is a program in which a third party visits the facilities and checks to see that animals are treated humanely, she says.
There about 50 dairies in Sonoma County and, according to Black, their average herd is 350 cows.
A true factory farm doesn’t give the cows any grass at all, Roman-Alcalá says. Those cows eat corn and soy feed, instead of grazing, the feeding method “they are designed to do,“ he says.
The herd at Tresch Family Farms grazes on grass during the outdoor season, which typically begins in April and ends in late October or early November. When the rains come, the cows are housed indoors to protect both the animals and the soil—but not necessarily continuously.
“Keeping our milk cows in the barns when the ground is saturated is done to protect the environment, keeping sediment from trampled wet pastures out of the creek,“ Kathy Tresch says. It also shelters the cows from severe weather events, she adds.
“And though the cows have access to the barns year-round, we do not confine them to the barns in every rains,“ she says.
Measure J would mean modifying operations
While most of the attention on Measure J has focused on the language shutting CAFOs down, the language includes a three-year phase-out period for CAFOs that offers alternatives other than closing.
“Sonoma County farms that currently qualify as CAFOs would not necessarily have to shut down if Measure J passes. They could modify their operations to no longer meet the definition of a CAFO,“ says Cassie King, a spokeswoman for the Coalition to End Factory Farming.
There are three ways this could be accomplished, she says. First, a farm could downsize the animal population to below the relevant limit—for example, a dairy facility with 800 cows could downsize to under 700 cows over the three-year phase-out period and no longer be designated a CAFO.
Second, a farm could switch to a non-liquid manure handling system where applicable, King says. For chicken and duck facilities, this switch would increase the threshold of animals needed to make it a CAFO, according to King.
Third, no longer confining the animals for more than 45 days per year would also work, King says, even if they just stopped confining the relevant number of animals that makes them a CAFO for 45 or more days.
“If Measure J passes, pre-existing CAFOs in the county will have to either cease their operations, downsize the number of animals they have, or modify the confinement or manure management practices they use,“ King says.
With regard to downsizing the number of animals, Black says that in order to pay fixed expenses like debt, labor and utility bills, farmers have to make a certain amount of money per month. In order to make that money, they need to milk a certain number of cows, and it might not be possible for a dairy to meet its bills with fewer cows.
Also, a UC Davis assistant professor of cooperative education says reducing the number of animals on a farm does not necessarily mean the animals will get better treatment.
“When I did my PhD I studied respiratory disease in calves,” says Gabriele Maier of UC Davis, a veterinarian with a PhD in epidemiology, a branch of medicine dealing with the distribution and determinants of disease.
“We went to 100 different dairies across California and distilled it down to the factors that are most important. We found that if the milk the calves receive is pasteurized it really reduces the respiratory disease burden, that was the number one factor.”
“It has nothing to do with size,” Maier says—rather, good management is key. “Both large and small farms have management challenges.”
Size matters
The executive director of Sonoma County’s Farm Bureau responded to King’s point about modifying confinement or manure management practices.
“Sonoma County’s winter is longer than 45 days,” says Dayna Ghirardelli of the Farm Bureau. “The housing of animals in the winter months is done to provide clean, dry bedding, housing and food while protecting soil, pasture health and natural resources.”
Adds Ghirardelli: “To promote the elimination of this practice is counterproductive, not to mention contradictory to [the Coalition’s] other messaging.”
Opponents of the measure have made sweeping statements as to the measure’s effect on Sonoma County farming and the number of farms that would be shut down. The No on J website predicts dire consequences.
According to the FAQs on the Farm Bureau’s website, if enacted, the legislation would “force the shutdown of family farming operations that are designated as CAFOs (including nearly all the egg, poultry and dairy industry in Sonoma County) within three years of the measure’s passage.”
In sharp contrast, according to King, the initiative applies to only 21 Sonoma County farms: 10 egg farms, four chicken-for-meat farms, six dairies and one duck farm.
Maier says it’s less about the number of farms and more about their size.
“The largest producers will be affected, and even though the number of farms may not be that big, it is going to affect the Sonoma County farm industry as a whole because it will affect a very large number of animals,” says Meier.
A recurring criticism of the measure is that its proponents are almost all from out of the county.
Asked why this was material, Ghirardelli says, “This is material because absent having lived or worked in an agricultural region and respecting how multi-generational families have worked their entire lives in the business, it is impossible to understand why this measure is so objectionable.”
In Ghirardelli’s view, the proponents are attempting to pass an ordinance that burdens the county directly—a county in which they do not live and which they do not appreciate, she says.
The Agricultural Commissioner’s Office has said Measure J would necessitate ongoing expenses of $1.6 million or more for inspections and reporting if enacted, and Sonoma’s Human Services Department cites costs of almost $1.5 million for job assistance and retraining.
While Roman-Alcalá continues to look askance at Measure J, he also continues to advocate for new ways to legislate “that don’t put the onus on the state or the people who are passionate about social justice,” he says.
The industry itself should come up with the money for administering stricter regulation, he says.
“When someone gets found out, they get a slap on the wrist, but it rarely amounts to a system that prevents this kind of harm from happening in the first place,“ Roman-Alcalá says.
Roman-Alcalá notes that organic producers have to go through reams of paperwork and record-keeping to be certified organic, while non-organic producers have less paperwork.
It’s as though the good actors are being punished, the assistant professor says.
“It’s this backward system where if you are doing well, you have to go through tracking your inputs, the impacts they might have,” Roman-Alcalá says.
Instead, such record-keeping should be required of all producers, he says. That would both absorb some of the cost and make it not the onus on the government but something the industry itself pays for, he says.
“If producers were forced to pay into an inspection fund, unless they were provably using ecological techniques—including organic—that inspection could offer clearer understanding of farm impacts, individually and collectively, while incentivizing farmers to improve their environmental impacts and methods,” Roman-Alcalá says.
