A companion bill was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) earlier this month that is akin to Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) Farm System Reform Act.
While the Government Publishing Office has not published the text for the bill, the title of H.R. 6718 reads, “To place a moratorium on large concentrated animal feeding operations, to strengthen the Packers and Stockyards Act, 1921, to require country-of-origin labeling on beef, pork, and dairy products, and for other purposes.”
Khanna said, “Giant meatpackers cannot be permitted to continue to profit off of the labor of family farmers, consolidating the food industry to the point that oursupply chain is threatened.”
“Congress must step in to ensure an honest market, or risk losing another historic industry to the hands of big corporations. If we had a food system with fair competition, independent and diversified producers would provide a dependable and sustainable food supply.”
The Farm System Reform Act (S. 3221) introduced by Booker in January, calls for an immediate and permanent moratorium on the construction and expansion of all large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) and outlines a plan to close all existing large CAFOs by 2040.
The USDA defines a CAFO as having a particular number of confined animals per year. It comes out to 1,000 cattle, 700 dairy cows, 2,500 hogs, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg-laying hens.
The bill provides an incentive program of $100 billion over 10 years to entice farmers to leave the CAFO system. The bill would also shift liability for emissions, manure disposal, and potential adverse health outcomes in surrounding communities from individual farmers to meatpacking companies that process the animals and sell them.
The bill would also change the Packers and Stockyards Act to address ranchers’ concerns about how much power meatpackers have over livestock markets. The bill states it would eliminate the tournament system, in which meatpackers or poultry processing companies rank producers in a payment structure where a raise in one farmer’s pay comes at the expense of another’s.
It would also require that forward contracts are competitively bid, that spot market sales be set at a fixed price, and “livestock are slaughtered not more than seven days after the date on which the agreement is entered into.”
Finally, it would reinstate the country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law for meat and implement the labeling for dairy products as well.
The Farm System Reform Act is supported by several family farm and environmental organizations, including Family Farm Action, the Indiana and Pennsylvania Farmers Unions, American Grassfed Association, and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
Others have opposed the bill, including the National Pork Producers Council, other farm groups, and Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA) after R-CALF said Booker “included language in his Senate Bill 3221 that we absolutely do not support. So, we began looking for Senate sponsors to either amend S.3221 to take out the bad language or to simply take the already drafted competition reforms and place them in a stand-alone bill.”
Khanna sent a letter to his colleagues urging members to co-sponsor Booker’s bill, however, there are no co-sponsors at this time. Khanna’s bill is co-sponsored by six other members of the House. — Charles Wallace, WLJ correspondent
