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.
I have. Large facilities where the bird is king, because 'if the birds aren't happy, no one is happy'. All farm efforts were and are directed towards that end.
The birds were clean, well fed, health, and content. The only way an owner can make money.
You also raise a second issue, the desire of CA voters to impose their Luddite beliefs as they relate to poultry production onto the rest of the country.
As with the homosexuals, CA voters aren't content to live and let live, they are determined to force their Luddite production beliefs on everyone else.
It is a sad day when people who know nothing about [insert liberal cause here] start demanding you [do it] their way or else!
With minor modifications, you have expressed a universal truth about “liberals” (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week).
A wise statement. *props*
I spent my early years working in a chicken and turkey hatchery. I’ve seen it all, and the tall tales that the animal rights groups comes up with is appalling.
I still raise a few chickens, and my neighbors raises turkeys. What you said about turkeys being stupid is true!
I can’t believe it took over 100 posts on FR for someone to finally point that out.
Through my youth, I worked will most kinds of farm animals. Chickens are by far the dumbest.
Would like to see what the reaction would be for some to see how male piglets are cut or how bulls become steers. Would that treatment also be considered turture by some posters?
I want to point out a small detail. From my earlier post it may seem that I still am in animal production.
I am not. I sold out more than 25 years ago, shortly before the Luddites got a foothold.
“...at the end of the day, they are all going to die.”
And so are we! So does that mean that we need to go out of our way to abuse another living thing? My bet is that “ranchers” have done university studies to try and figure out the lowest cost way to raise chickens, which most likely includes just how many they can cram into a coop and still get optimum output. That doesn’t make what they do ethical. Ever been to a Greyhound race? Know what they do to the dogs when they won’t run anymore? Think that that kind of treatment, just to make a buck is o.k.? I don’t! Same goes for chickens and calves raised for Veal. You can eat it if you want to, but we don’t.
I mean UC Davis has a program to develop square tomatoes so that more of them will fit in a box. It’s always about a buck, it’s seldom about product quality.
***we don’t eat Veal anymore either.***
What do you think the “Fatted Calf” was? You pen up a calf and feed it milk, lots of milk. It gets fat and is then slaughtered for veal.
Luke 15:23
King James Version (KJV)
23 And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:
I believe the author is in error about that, which I must admit is an extremely rare moment. This is Daniel Greenfield, one of the most brilliant writers out there today.
The hypothetical MO farmer is not compelled to only sell his eggs to people in CA. That said, some speaking up needs to be done because past experience teaches us that when California discovers they've done something to damage their market competitiveness, they go to the Federal government to enforce their rules nationwide. Basic rule about liberalism: If the solution doesn't solve the problem, metastasize the solution until the new problems are greater than the original one.
Well spoken and TRUE!
We have a few in the church who raise their own and at least one who has enough hens that he supplies eggs for many families in the church. They seem to prefer the farm raised, chicken yard eggs, and the truth be told his prices are just slightly above the grocery.
So, following that grand capitalist theory of “never regulate what folks can make on their own”, I suspect a lot lot lot of people will just start growing their own. Sounds like a good time to invest in the little chicks.
They’ll then have to pass ordinances banning chickens except in places they approve. By then, though, the commercial flock will be considerable smaller, and that will cause the price to explode, and that will then violate that capitalist dictum, “don’t expect high prices for easily obtained items to lower demand or entrepreneurial spirit.”
They’ll have people raising chickens in their basements. That will lead to “Chicken Police” and a “War Against Eggs”.
ATF will become ATFE.
Then Chicken Cartels will rule Mexico, and Chicken Shit will rule Washington.
And eventually everyone will finally realize that this is really, really stupid.
That charge was refuted and beat down in post #121.
There was much to learn about the life of poultry from that post.
You haven’t been listening to the other posters very well, have you? You seem to think that, absent your control, Ranchers would be as cruel as possible to their animals. Do you feel that way about other human endeavors as well? People won’t do the right thing unless they are forced?
This thread has been a typical ‘food production by Luddites’ thread; full of lies in the beginning, the truth speakers a little slow to respond at first.
Then, like a few drops of bleach in a pitcher of bacterial infested water, the fight is joined. Eventually truth prevails, and the bacteria cheering section retreats.
We are at, or near, the truth, and the end.
I think we have a closet liberal here, BE. It’s been explained numerous time, in a number of ways, the most profit in raising chickens is obtained by being kind and generous to the livestock. Yet he continues to insist that Ranchers, left to their own devices, would be cruel because, well, they’re Capitalists. They calculate how small they can make chicken cages so they can cram as many as possible into a storage locker.
I wonder if he would ever get the hidden message in “A Christmas Carol?”
This is why us old gray-hairs are so important. You’ve distilled the dynamic generated by 150 posts to a thread.
You may be right.
As most of us have experienced though life’s encounters, truth is often foreign to those who deal in lies.
Thanks for that info. I had no idea why they quit making gas cans that actually work. I was at a farm auction a few months ago. I bought several old gas cans just so I would have a supply.
Yes, speaking for myself, it took some of us awhile to gain our wisdom.
I'm always envious and heartened by the wisdom shown by many the younger crowd. There are still a lot of people who can pull us back from this cliff we are tipped over.
Our local gas can manufacturer in Oklahoma was put out of business a couple of years ago by the EPA.
They had a good product but no longer. Thankfully I still have some of the old style cans.
Ever wonder what happened to the vapors from all those “Jerry cans” from the last 70 years?
Yep, CA started that nonsense.
And you can thank them for the nonsense on auto standards.
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