Prop 2 Aftermath – Farmers Say They Weren’t Kidding About Prop 2 Ruining Their Lives
November 12, 2008 by Johnny California
Filed under Ballot Propositions
For all of us city slickers that thought the No-On-2 campaign’s threats about farmers being run out of business was a bunch of campaign hoo-ha, the proverbial egg may be on our collective faces (except ours! We told you to vote “No”!)
California Farm Bureau Federation Reports:
“The problem is the language in the ballot measure is so ambiguous that nobody knows what it means,” said Arnold Riebli, an egg producer in Sonoma County. “It doesn’t tell you what you can do. I don’t know what kind of equipment I can or cannot use. So I think we’re going to have to sit down and wait for the regulators to interpret whatever it is going to be.”
Others, such as San Joaquin County egg producer Richard Jenkins, are less steadfast about their prospects in the state. With one daughter who’s already in the business and a college-aged son who’s interested in getting in the business, Jenkins said the passage of Proposition 2 puts him in a disheartening position of telling his children they will need to find other careers.
“We’re just going to close our doors and go out of business,” he said. “That’s what I’m discussing with my family. We’re going to have to discuss an exit strategy.”
A second-generation farmer, Jenkins said he’s already spent more than $2 million in the last 12 months upgrading his facility to a state-of-the-art system that improves efficiency, air quality and the health of his birds. But in six years, his facility will be worthless, he said. What’s more, he’ll likely have to spend more money to rip the chicken houses down and get the land back to bare ground before he can sell it.
Jenkins already farms a small percentage of his eggs as cage-free organic and said he could possibly expand that part of his operation if there is more of a market for the eggs. But he said that despite passage of Proposition 2, he is not convinced that California consumers will buy cage-free eggs if they can choose the less expensive eggs, produced conventionally elsewhere.
He noted that specialty eggs–cage-free, cage-free organic or free-range–make up only 5 percent of the state’s current egg sales.
“The farmer will produce whatever the public wants,” he said. “If they would buy it, I will convert everything we’ve got into cage-free. But out of the 95 stores that I supply, I have not gotten a phone call saying that they’re out of cage-free eggs. Why is that? The shopper doesn’t care. They voted for (Proposition 2), but they’re not going to buy (cage-free eggs).”
The Turlock Journal spoke with Steve Gemperle of Gemperle Enterprises, a large Turlock-based egg producer.
“It’s a death sentence for the industry,” Gemperle said. “We’re not going to be able to keep up with producers in Mexico and the Midwest.”
Stanislaus County, one of the top egg-producing counties in the state, was one of only 12 California counties to vote against Prop 2. But while 55.5 percent of Stanislaus County residents voted against the measure, citizens in 46 other counties in the state voted in favor of Prop 2, with an overwhelming 72.3 percent majority of San Francisco County voters approving the measure.
Gemperle said that the future of Gemperle Enterprises’ operations – and the 200 local workers they employ – was in question in the wake of Prop 2. The industry is currently working to ascertain what exact specifications would be required of enclosures under the letter of the new law, but an early projection states that statewide retrofit of hen cages alone could cost more than $500 million over the next six years.
We still say these guy’s ain’t going without a fight and to look out for the lawsuit.
I think the big problem here is the existence of propositions in the first place. As a new Californai resident, I was surprised to learn about the existence of voter propositions. It seems to me that issues like Proposition 2 would be much better decided by our state representatives with input from experts on the issue, rather than by the masses with no livestock experience who are responding to misleading TV commercials put out on both sides of the debate.
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Heather, you’re right. But that gets us back to the problem of the legislature that doesn’t compromise to get things accomplished, but rather retreats into strict ideologist positions and throws bricks at each other. Hopefully Prop. 11 will pass (it’s leading 50.8% to 49.2%, but almost 2 million provisional ballots have yet to be counted, so we won’t know until official results are published 35 days after the election), but it will take time for implementation to effect a change of legislators.
In the meantime, I suggest we all contact the Yes on 2 campaign and say that while it’s nice that Prop. 2 passed, the decent thing for the campaign to do now is to press our congressional representatives for nationwide regulation, so as to level the playing field for our egg producers. It’s kind of an “if you break it, you have to pay for it” situation. Let’s turn this into a win-win deal. I’ve already contacted the Prop. 2 campaign, but I haven’t received a response. Let’s crank up the pressure on them to now do the right thing. BTW, I voted for Prop. 2. I don’t want to live to regret it by seeing egg producers lose their businesses.
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I voted against Prop 2, and my nightmare scenario is that Prop 2 is taken nationwide. In my opinion, it’s not about levelling the playing field – it’s about the fact that these changes in the industry will bankrupt egg producers. The new regulations essentially would double their cage size. That’s double the real estate. It will cost egg producers a fortune, and even with a level playing field, the payoff on their investments would be a long time coming. And we can’t level the playing field against Mexico, as far as I know.
As a former farm girl, I’m also very troubled by ag policy being written by people with no experience around livestock or agriculture. Much of the information put out by HSUS and PETA is misleading propoganda. I would’ve voted for Prop 2 as well, if I thought the video they showed in their commercials was the standard for animal care in the livestock industry. What they failed to mention was that they were showing egregious abuses, not a standard of care. (The calf being moved by a fork lift was especially over the top.)
By the way, many of the cage-free eggs you see are from traditional egg producers who have a small cage-free side business. So many of the cage-free operations will be in trouble with Prop 2 as well.
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well the hsus distorted facts and snowballed the people into voting for prop 2, all , they are the worst enemy states have, they are an emotion based group who will lie to get their way, they do care about people in the state losing their jobs, farming operations shutting down or comsumers paying higher prices, all they care about is they got their way, and what happened to everyone else means nothing to them
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