Egg Industry - July 2008

www.WATTpoultry.com

JULY 2008 volume 113 number 7

The farm bill: What’s not in it matters most Industry News

Composting manure boosts bottom line Egg producers rally in hopes of defeating California ballot initiative

Asia to lead in both production and consumption to 2015

Calendar Marketplace

The farm bill: What”s not in it matters most

By James C. Webster

The egg industry can be more enthusiastic about features that don’t appear in the final 2008 farm bill than anything that became law.

The big victory for egg producers and others in animal agriculture – the bill has none of the animal welfare regulations that activist groups had been pushing.

Another plus: the final conference committee deleted language from the Senate bill that might have complicated grower-processor contract relationships.

The egg industry doesn’t normally play a big role in farm bills, which focus mostly on crop support programs, but legislative maneuvering for the past year presented issues that demanded attention.

The first took the form of efforts launched in May 2007 by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to persuade the House Agriculture Committee to include a separate animal welfare title in the farm bill.

HSUS President Wayne Pacelle hoped that it would require USDA and military food purchasing programs to buy only cage-free eggs and meat and milk from farms that followed procedures that his group classifies as “humane” – including bans on forced molting and crates for veal calves and pregnant sows.

Pacelle’s ideas never got any serious consideration in the agriculture committees and no serious attempt was made to add them when the bill was on the floor.

“Other than some minor laboratory animal provisions, there is no ‘animal welfare’ title, nothing that would outlaw modern, scientific production methods,” says Howard Magwire, Washington representative of United Egg Producers (UEP). “We never saw any proposal float to the top, although we had heard rumors of some.”

Grower contract ‘protection’

He also was relieved that conferees dropped several features of the Senate-

passed bill that would have further regulated contracts between livestock and poultry growers and processors.

“We considered that a win,” he said.

Although the contract provisions were directed mostly at pork and broilers, “they might have inadvertently brought a portion of our industry under the Packers and Stockyards Act. It would have had a negative effect on relationships with contract producers.”