USDA begins reporting pork produced to comply with extreme confinement laws

Increased crate-free production merits separate reporting, USDA says.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it has begun including statistics about pork raised in compliance with animal confinement legislation to a weekly national report that provides market information about the American pork industry.

The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service said in a news release that it began the new reporting on November 20, adding a non-carcass merit premium for hogs raised in compliance with animal confinement legislation (ACL) to its National Weekly Direct Swine Non-Carcass Merit Premium report. “This addition will provide pork industry stakeholders with the information necessary to make informed production and marketing decisions relating to ACL-compliant hogs,” the federal agency said.

Non-carcass merit premiums are increases in the base pork price offered by individual packers based on factors other than carcass characteristics. For example, a packer may pay a premium for hogs shipped expediently from the farm to the packing house.

Under its Livestock Mandatory Reporting Program (LMR), the USDA was already publishing non-carcass merit premiums paid for ACL-compliant hogs on the Non-Carcass Merit Premium report. Before the announcement, however, those statistics were included in the “other” category on the report, which includes specialized production methods such as antibiotic-free, genetics, diet/feed, meat quality, process verified programs, and sow housing. “The number of ACL-compliant merit premiums currently being submitted under LMR are sufficient for this information to be published under a separate category,” the news release stated.

Beginning with Florida in 2002, eleven U.S. states have now banned the use of sow gestation crates—two-foot by seven-foot enclosures that prevent pregnant pigs from standing erect, turning around, and extending their legs. New Jersey was the most recent state to pass such a ban in July. California and Massachusetts have gone a step further, banning the in-state sale of pork, veal, and eggs produced using extreme confinement. California’s Proposition 12 faced a legal challenge from the National Pork Producers Council, which ended in May 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the voter-approved law was legal. Massachusetts’ similar Question 3 is also fighting lawsuits from pork producers.

At least sixty major American food retailers, including McDonald’s and Costco Wholesale, have created policies against buying pork produced using extreme confinement. Claims that laws like Prop 12 are an economic threat to the American pork industry are a red herring, according to Animal Wellness Action, a national animal welfare nonprofit. “Complete implementation of Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts collectively affect just six percent of the sales of U.S.-produced pork, and there is already sufficient supply capacity to handle that demand,” wrote Dr. Jim Keen, DVM, PhD, a veterinarian and infectious disease epidemiologist who was the primary author of a 2023 report about the effects of Prop 12 and Question 3 published jointly by Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, a nonprofit animal welfare organization that focuses on influencing the conduct of corporations to forge a humane economic order.