Don’t ruin a market for responsible farmers

As a farm kid from a small Iowa town, I want to underscore that Wayne Pacelle of Animal Wellness Action has it exactly right about why it is wrong to overturn California’s Prop 12. This law creates critical markets for farmers who raise pigs responsibly, without subjecting sows to intensive confinement in gestation crates.

Farming was my family’s entire income until my dad retired at age 68. Today he is almost 95 years old, and he still holds the very same beliefs about treating animals humanely. We grew soybeans and corn, and we tended to pigs. My dad never went down the road of intensive confinement. As his eldest daughter, I would not have stood for it because I cared deeply about the pigs and their well-being. During the farm crisis of the 1980s, as consolidation surged and multinational corporations squeezed family farms, we ultimately gave up raising pigs. We held onto our 160‑acre Century Family Farm and continued with corn and soybeans, but the losses shaped our lives.

I have talked to farmers across Iowa, and many raise pigs in ways that honor their own husbandry standards and the values of their customers. A great number of us never wanted to adopt extreme confinement practices in the first place. California’s Prop 12 gives Iowa producers who do the right thing a vital and stable market.

Eliminate it, and we risk triggering another wave of pig‑farm foreclosures, echoing the painful losses so many families like mine endured in the 1980s.

Cynthia Brinkman

Ackley