Posted on 03/08/2014 11:22:49 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In 2008, California voters endorsed Proposition 2 which banned the confinement of animals. California egg producers had to ensure that chickens had enough room to move around which negated so-called “factory farming” and would end up raising the price of eggs by 20%.
Obviously this was a problem for California agriculture which would have trouble competing on price with free agriculture. And there’s only so much of a market for fair-trade free-range organic chickens lovingly raised in a Quaker school by social justice experts on a strict diet of granola and NPR broadcasts.
And so California’s reds decided to instead raise the price of eggs across America. Sounds fair, right?
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster (D) said Tuesday morning he has filed a federal lawsuit against the state of California over the Golden State’s new regulations on enclosures that house egg-laying hens. The regulations, Koster alleges, violate the constitution’s Commerce Clause.
California voters in 2008 passed a ballot initiative that require larger enclosures for egg-laying hens. Farmers in California worried the new rules, which would increase their costs, would put them at a competitive disadvantage with egg farms in other states, so the state legislature passed a measure in 2010 to require out-of-state producers to comply with California rules.
That, Koster says, is unfair to his state’s egg producers.
“If California legislators are permitted to mandate the size of chicken coops on Missouri farms, they may just as easily demand that Missouri soybeans be harvested by hand or that Missouri corn be transported by solar-powered trucks,” Koster said in a statement.
California farmers must begin complying with the cage law beginning in 2015, under the terms of Proposition 2. The legislature requires out-of-state farmers to begin complying with the same rules by the end of that year.
Koster’s office estimated that Missouri egg producers would have to pay $120 million to expand the size of their coops, and that production costs would rise 20 percent.”
That’s the whole point. The left can’t compete on product or price, but it can kneecap everyone else as long as it has control over populous states. Businesses and individuals can flee California, but they can’t escape its regulatory creep.
The country is awash in ballot initiatives and legislative efforts to increase regulation of agriculture. Maine and Connecticut have passed GMO labeling laws, although they won’t go into effect until other states in the Northeast have passed labeling laws as well. Florida has laws outlawing the most common method of pork production. Several states have outlawed small chicken coops, and states have also banned the sale of foie gras and shark fins. Only California has had the chutzpah to impose the preferences of that state’s voters on the rest of the country.
Make no mistake about it, if egg prices increase by 20 percent, people who face tight budgets at the grocery store will suffer.
But the people who make these laws won’t and California voters have become mindless stooges of the left. And if you buy your eggs with EBT cards, you don’t tend to care how much they cost because you aren’t paying for them anyway.
Hard to believe but California will have a illegal black market for eggs if this passes legal hurdles...
State prison:
"What's you in for ?"
"I'm doing 5 to 10 for selling illegal eggs"
I do.
I am glad you have enough disposable income to be able to buy top of the line stuff but the rest of the world does not.
The argument is the same liberals make about having a Wal-mart move into an area.
My question is why should fly over country be short changed in relation to these soon to be very important skills? My plan will level the playing field for everyone. As an advanced course I will soon be offering to the surviving students of my chicken and cattle courses, Pig Stealing Made Easy. I plan to put the bacon back in bringing home the bacon. Now accepting Visa and Mastercard.
Is that suppose to pass for wit?
We could have a philosophical discussion all day over why that is. Is it because they think they're doing us a favor? Reducing health-care costs? Maybe they don't like paying more for "organic" and think the cost of that stuff can be driven down by forcing all food to be handled that way?
Beats me. Doesn't matter to me, they need to butt out. As for this bit about California determining how everybody else lives, I think about that every time I pump gas into my car. I live in AZ and we get our gas from CA primarily, and we have to pay whatever little premium they choose to add onto the price.
So, you feed a nation by torturing the animals?
Actually I think this will affect the cost of eggs only in CA.
Most producers will not comply and will maintain lucrative contracts elsewhere.
Then there will be some who comply from out of state and they'll have a lucrative market within CA.
And the going rate for eggs will be $2.50/doz everywhere but CA where it will be $4.00.
Or thereabouts.
As someone who has raised a quarter million hogs, birth to market, I know a little something about how best to raise animals.
You, apparently, not so much.
Nor do these other clowns who want to impose their religious beliefs on me at the point of a gun.
You’ll clean up. You’ll be accepting AmEx before Obastard leaves office. He’s leaning extra-hard on the flyover crackas.
The good news is that our food costs are so low that we can have these ‘discussions’, instead of fighting over who gets the last scrap of food.
A stressed chicken will not lay.
A starved chicken will not lay, and the other chickens will break and devour the eggs that are laid.
A debeaked chicken will not cannibalize other chickens. Only about 1/8 of the tip of the upper beak is removed from the baby chick.
Small coop doors help keep PREDATORS out. I lost my last flock to predator.
Too many roosters will fight each other and cause havoc and stress in the coop.
New chickens introduced into a flock will be thrashed and whipped without mercy by the older hens.
Free range chickens require constant monitoring because the chickens will often hide the eggs. Caged chickens don't.
The OLDEN method of raising free range chickens. You feed cattle, some food passes through undigested.
You run hogs after the cattle which eat the manure. Some of that feed will not be digested and passes through.
You run chickens behind the hogs to get the undigested feed in the manure.
Any chicken that dies is thrown to the hogs.
Now THAT is a free range chicken!
Think of it when you crack an egg.
Nice strawman you built there. He didn’t have a chance against your superior warrior skills.
Define 'animals quality of life'.
I think you are correct. The markets will develop to meet the new paradigm.
But: When Californians start bitching about their four-buck eggs, California will start looking for ways to force the rest of the country to pay. Ask Amazon about that, they’ll be happy to tell you about their experience with the CA machine.
Great minds think alike.
Nor does our concern about those creatures give us the moral right to control those who do not share those concerns.
Amen. Let’s make sure it stays that way.
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