The National Pork Producer’s Council is holding its biannual Legislative Action Conference in Washington, D.C., April 15 and 16. NPPC President Rob Brenneman said the nation’s producers are the “real people” that lawmakers need to hear from directly.
“These people you voted for, you say, ‘Hey, I’m a real producer. This is my living, and I want you to help represent me and stand up for me, ‘ and it means something. When you show up, they know who you are, and they remember you. And so, as producers, we’ve just got to tell our story, to share our voice. But we are mighty, and we gotta get a fix to Prop 12. Get the Farm Bill closed up. We’ve gotta work on the USMCA. The trade policy. We’ve gotta work on labor. Without that labor, we’ve got a problem.”
He said this year’s conference is a pivotal moment in the fight against California’s Proposition 12.
“You know, everybody needs to work on their House people, and get them to pass that through with the Prop 12 fix in it. When it goes over the Senate, then it’s not done yet, because then you got to go over to the Senate side and start defending it, because I don’t think they have a lot of things on the table, and so they’re going to take a lot from the House, and they all have their own ideas. You got to lobby on both sides of that to make sure everybody understands, and we’ve been fighting Prop 12 since 2018. We need to get this over the line. We need to get it into the Senate’s hands, and we need to get it passed as is. And that is the fix for Prop 12, that is the most important thing that can happen in that farm bill from a poor producer’s standpoint.”
The risks to pork producers if the Prop 12 preemption is removed from the Farm Bill 2.0 are enormous, but it would also hit consumers in the grocery store.
“The risk to producers is we kind of don’t know what direction we need to go, because if there are patchworks that come along, then we have to make changes on the fly to produce pigs. That’s going to get expensive, and it’s going to lead to be the people don’t want to do it. So, that’s going to lead to consolidation. Consolidation is going to lead to the price of pork going up in the grocery stores for the consumer, and it’s also going to confuse the consumer on what they need to purchase and what’s what, because there’ll be so many different patchworks, and I think that just totally is wrong for everybody involved.”
Brenneman said they’ll be discussing multiple policy topics of interest to U.S. pork farmers, one of which is the USMCA agreement renewal.
“That’s in discussion right now, and that happens to probably include some of our labor, because I think some of that’s built into the USMCA, but we need that fixed or passed, because it’s been working very well. Labor is a huge deal. We just got to maintain our labor force. A lot of it does come from south of the border, and it’s all legal, and we just need to make sure we keep it that way. I mean, those are the big ones. As we all go to D.C., let’s continue to ask for the help and support of the U.S. Swine Health Improvement Plan. That’ll be good for the entire industry and retail.”
Farmers who can’t make the trip to Capitol Hill can still help push the Prop 12 Fix across the finish line.
“Just load them up with emails and phone calls, and you just get their ear for just a minute. Say, ‘Hey, you know, the Farm Bill. We need it. I’m a pig farmer. It’s our livelihood, and we need to make sure that we don’t have to raise pigs 50 different ways.’ Email them. Call them on the phone. They will return your calls. They will remember us.”