Big Ag Wants To Make It a Crime to Expose Animal Abuse at Factory Farms

By Wayne Pacelle
What do Florida and Iowa have in common when it comes to animal agriculture? They've both been hot spots, past and present, for the movement to combat some of the worst abuses in industrial agribusiness. And now the factory farming industry is fighting back in both states-and their latest methods represent their biggest overreach yet.

In Florida, the Humane Society of the United States and other groups pushed for the adoption of the first statewide law in the country to restrict the extreme confinement of animals on factory farms. In 2002, voters there passed Amendment 10, to phase out the caging of breeding sows in gestation crates. In Iowa, HSUS and other animal welfare groups have conducted a series of undercover investigations (see the video) to expose cruelty in the nation's biggest factory farming state.

Now, these two states have something else in common. They are trying to make it a crime to photograph or videotape farm animals. They don't want to criminalize animal cruelty, but they do want to make criminals of people trying to document abuse and to put an end to the cruelty. Lawmakers have introduced bills in both states to establish criminal penalties for going undercover at agricultural facilities and simply taking pictures.

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USDA Wants Us to 'Know Your Farmer,' FDA Wants Us to Stay Home

By David Gumpert
Grist, August 11, 2010
Straight to the Source

Customers of Country Hen, a central Massachusetts organic egg producer, found an upsetting announcement in their egg cartons recently: The farm tours that had been a tradition of the farm since it opened 22 years ago were being discontinued.

The reason? A new federal law that went into effect last month called the "Egg Safety Final Rule," or 74 FR 33030, which is designed to reduce the risk of a major form of contamination known as Salmonella enteritidis, or SE. The law requires farms with more than 3,000 hens not only to adhere to tight refrigeration protocols, create a disease protection plan, and abide by strict sanitation practices, but also to keep customers out of the chicken houses.

As in much of farming, a small number of large farms produce the bulk of the food. Though just 4,000 farms are above the 3,000-hen cutoff, they account for 99 percent of egg production, and another 65,000 produce the remaining 1 percent or so of egg production, the FDA estimates. It's these smaller farms, like Joel Salatin's well-known Virginia farm Polyface, where chickens often wander outdoors, eating bugs and grass, that we tend to picture in our imaginations. Many of these farms have intentionally kept their flocks under the 3,000 cutoff point to avoid the strict FDA rules.

The big farms tend to be the factory operations, out of public sight, where thousands of chickens may be crammed into dark henhouses. But Country Hen, as an organic operation that emphasizes humane treatment of its chickens, tries to project itself as more like one of the smaller operations, with everything open and available for viewing.

Writes George Bass, the owner of Country Hen, on the farm's Facebook page: "The most difficult change that we had to make because of (the new rule) is such a deep rooted part of our corporate culture, is no more tours of the farm. The biosecurity part of the new law addresses strictly limiting the number of visitors on the farm property and into the barns. Since we opened in 1988, our farm has always been open for customers or potential customers to stop by for a tour."

And indeed, a review of the lengthy new egg rules by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration contains this requirement for poultry farms: "Use a biosecurity program, meaning a program that includes limiting visitors on the farm and in poultry houses."

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