Ohio Farming On The Hot Seat?
07/29/2010 07:56AM
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An interesting development has occurred in the wake of the June 30 compromise reached by Ohio agriculture leaders, state government and the Humane Society of the United States over farm animal welfare issues. As reported by the Dayton Daily News, within days of the announcement by Gov. Ted Strickland that the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board would implement a number of concessions on housing and handling issues, livestock farm consultants are reporting that they received calls pitching potential egg production and hog farm locations in neighboring Indiana and Pennsylvania.
Unlike Ohio, those states don’t allow citizens to place animal welfare and other farm-related issues on the ballot for voters to decide. Tom Menke, an agricultural consultant whose business is based in Ohio’s Darke County, told the newspaper he believes that restriction gives those states an advantage in attracting new agricultural investment.
States already compete for new business investment and actively encourage manufacturing and other information industry operations to relocate to their jurisdictions with the promise of tax incentives and other perks. But agriculture has traditionally been located where farming was best: Good soils, sufficient water and access to the marketplace.
That may be changing, if the regulatory climate state-to-state produces an uneven playing field.
Robert Boggs, director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, told the newspaper that if there is evidence that some states are keeping animal care standards low to make themselves more attractive for farm investment, he and other state agriculture directors would request that the federal government “do something about it.”
But even if changes in federal regulations could create uniform animal husbandry standards, or mandate other standards relevant to crop production (such as the use of inputs, recordkeeping standards, etc.), some Ohio farmers are already worried that food production could move elsewhere.
“It may not even be in the United States,” Phillip Jordan, a second-generation hog farmer in Preble County, Ohio, was quoted as saying.
Hitting a moving target
The background to the angst in Ohio is the success that HSUS has had success in winning ballot initiatives in California, Arizona and Florida, all of which overwhelmingly passed measures implementing the changes Ohio’s leaders agreed to voluntarily implement, such as a phasing out of gestation stalls in pork production. Ohio agricultural groups had hoped to stay a step ahead of the activists by convincing legislators in 2009 to place a constitutional amendment the ballot creating the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board. Voters approved the measure last November.
However, HSUS had collected enough signatures to put its own measure on the statewide ballot in 2010, one that would have compelled the Livestock Care Standards Board to phase out gestation crates and battery cages for chickens. Most polling showed that the HSUS measure enjoyed more than 60% voter support.
HSUS officials dismissed the notion that the agreement could end up driving agriculture out of Ohio.
“These types of claims are dubious and unsupported by what’s happened in other states,” said Paul Shapiro, senior director of HSUS’s “End Factory Farming” campaign. Similar claims were made during campaigns in other states and haven’t come true, he said. “This is about helping agriculture move into the future.”
Farm industry officials were left coping with the notion that they had “sold out” to the activists.
Dick Isler, executive vice president of the Ohio Pork Producers Council, told the newspaper that many of the group’s members were initially shocked by the agreement, but he said that the industry had to face the reality that the HSUS ballot initiative, if successful, would have been devastating.
“The agreement we got was by far the best agreement that the chicken and pork industries have gotten in any state,” Isler said. People who still want to fight “probably don’t have a lot of investment in the pork and poultry industry,” he said.
Menke, the agricultural consultant, noted that farmers and other business people have a history of adapting to new realities.
“Whatever the consumer wants, we will provide it,” he said. “We’ll figure out a way.”
Unfortunately, the way forward may affect certain states more dramatically than others.
Dan Murphy is a veteran food-industry journalist and commentator