By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Agriculture policy may not be the most high-profile political issue, but it’s an immensely important one that significantly shapes millions of lives — human and animal alike. During his presidency, Donald Trump’s actions on agriculture, animal welfare and factory farming were a stark departure from that of his predecessor, and could be a hint of things to come if Trump wins a second term in November. Let’s take a look at what we could expect from a second Trump presidency when it comes to these issues.
In recent weeks, Trump has begun saying that he wants to “make America healthy again.” He appears to have gotten this slogan from former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. Kennedy speaks a lot about improving Americans’ diets and health, and Trump has recently started using some of the same language, pledging to “make America healthy again” and “get toxic chemicals out of our environment [and] our food supply” at a recent rally in Pennsylvania.
As many observers have noted, however, this is more or less the opposite of what Trump actually did during his presidency. In addition to reversing a ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that can be fatal to humans, Trump’s deregulation of factory farms made it more difficult to track toxic pollutants in the air and water supply, and his USDA moved to let schools reduce the amount of fruits and vegetables served to students at lunch.
How Can a President Impact Meat and Agriculture Policies?
When it comes to implementing and changing the country’s agricultural policies, presidents have a number of tools at their disposal.
They can, of course, sign or veto bills sent to them by Congress. A president can also signal to Congress which legislation they’d like to see on their desk — and if the president’s party also controls the House of Representatives and the Senate, such signaling might actually be effective.
Perhaps more significantly, the president has significant latitude when it comes to shaping and implementing federal regulations. Much of this has to do with how they manage the various agencies under their control, says Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of the nonprofit Farm Forward.
“Federal agencies, and the way in which the agencies operate — how they interpret their own regulatory mandates, [and] how they choose to be more or less aggressive towards certain industries” all fall under the president’s purview, deCoriolis tells Sentient.
This element of the equation is particularly significant in the meat and agriculture industries, as both are subject to significant — though not necessarily comprehensive — regulations.
As we’ll see, Trump had a significant impact on U.S. agriculture policy, and he used all of the above tools to do so.
How Did Trump Impact Farm and Agriculture Policy As President?
Trump struck a pro-business, anti-regulation stance toward agriculture and meat producers during his time in the Oval Office, and took many actions to assist those industries — sometimes, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the expense of the general public.
In general, Trump’s actions as president also indicated a lack of concern for animal welfare. However, there are a couple of significant exceptions to this that are worth highlighting.
First, Trump signed a Farm Bill in 2018 that outlawed the slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption — something that, incredibly, was only illegal in six states prior to that bill’s signing. That bill also reauthorized a program that provides federal assistance not only to victims of domestic violence, but also to their companion animals, as they transition out of abusive relationships.
The next year, Trump signed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT). This law strengthened existing laws against animal cruelty by closing a loophole that made it difficult to prosecute acts of animal cruelty that took place on federal land and in federal facilities.
To be clear, Trump didn’t vocally champion either of these policies, and the PACT Act was so uncontroversial that it passed unanimously in the Senate. Nevertheless, the former president could have plausibly killed either initiative if he’d so desired, and he didn’t.
But again, these were the exceptions. Most of what the Trump administration did in the agricultural realm did not improve the lives of animals, and instead empowered factory farmers and agribusiness interests.
Is Trump Funded by Agribusiness?
During his 2016 campaign, Trump did receive some donations from some major players in the agriculture industry. But it would be wrong to blame these donors for Trump’s pro-agribusiness stance, simply because these donations, in the grand scheme of things, were relatively small.
According to data from OpenSecrets, Trump received around $4.5 million in agribusiness money during the 2016 cycle. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not exactly eye-popping either, and amounted to a relatively small share of Trump’s total haul from donors that year. By contrast, Sen. Marco Rubio received almost $7 million in agribusiness donations during that same cycle — and he didn’t even make it out of the Republican primary.
That said, Trump has received almost $10 million in agribusiness donations this cycle, more than twice as much as in 2016. If nothing else, this does suggest that the industry was pleased — or at least not displeased — with his actions the last time he was president.
Trump Withdrew Organic Livestock Rules
Food in the U.S. must be produced in accordance with specific standards in order to be labeled “organic,” and the USDA is responsible for writing and enforcing these standards. At the very end of his second term, President Obama finalized a sweeping update to the organic standards for livestock that, while far from perfect or comprehensive, would significantly improve the welfare of farmed animals.
Under Trump, however, the USDA withdrew this rule — which was over 10 years in the making and had garnered overwhelming public support during its public comment period — before it could be implemented. This meant that the previous rules, which have been widely criticized for their vague language surrounding animal welfare standards, remained in place.
Ultimately, President Biden reversed Trump’s decision and implemented the new livestock standards; as such, Trump’s move to withdraw the rules amounted to little more than a three year delay. It’s also worth noting that, while the new rules were generally lauded by animal rights activists, they contained some significant loopholes and still allowed for certain gruesome farming practices, like the debeaking of chickens, to continue on organic farms.
One could argue, however, that this makes Trump’s decision even more damning than it otherwise would have been, as it indicated that even a modest improvement in animal welfare was unpalatable to his administration.
Trump Fought Against Regulating Factory Farm Emissions
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), more commonly known as factory farms, release massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the air. This exacerbates global warming and, in many cases, sickens people in nearby communities.
There are several federal laws that, in theory, would require CAFOs to track their greenhouse gas emissions and report them to the federal government. This would be the first step to eventually empowering the government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from factory farms.
However, thanks to a series of legal loopholes, the largest factory farms are exempt from these reporting requirements. This is largely due to several actions taken by the Trump administration.
In 2018, Trump signed a law that exempted factory farms from the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), a decades-old law that requires businesses to notify federal emergency response agencies when they spill, leak or otherwise accidentally discharge hazardous waste.
The next year, Trump’s EPA adopted a rule that exempted factory farms from the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), which is similar to CERCLA but covers state and local emergency agencies instead.
Trump Ordered Meatpacking Plants to Stay Open During COVID
In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, businesses involved in food preparation came under heightened scrutiny due to the highly contagious nature of the disease and the centrality of food in American life.
Three months into the pandemic, Trump signed an executive order compelling meatpacking plants to stay open amidst the outbreak, despite mounting public health concerns. Citing the Defense Production Act, it ordered the Secretary of Agriculture to “take all appropriate action under that [act] to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations” during the pandemic, even when some state and local governments were taking measures to close those plants.
It was later revealed that the meat industry had been vigorously lobbying the Trump administration to enact such an order in the weeks before Trump issued it. The North American Meat Institute (NAMI), a trade group, had drafted a hypothetical executive order on meatpacking plants and sent it to the administration a week before Trump issued the order. Certain parts of the final order mirrored the language in NAMI’s proposal.
Two weeks before signing the executive order, he announced the formation of an advisory committee to guide efforts on reopening the economy in the wake of the pandemic. Its members included several meat industry CEOs, such as Ronald Cameron, a wealthy Republican donor and chair of the fourth-largest poultry producer in the country.
DeCoriolis cites Cameron’s appointment as a key development in the administration’s COVID response — and the subsequent consequences of that response.
“The Trump administration elevating a meat executive to a position of influence in its COVID response had huge effects on workers, primarily in slaughterhouses, many of whom got sick and died because of their exposure at work,” deCoriolis says.
In the final tally, at least 59,000 workers at meatpacking plants contracted COVID in the first year of the pandemic, 269 of whom died. A subsequent congressional investigation later found that the president and CEO of NAMI had praised the USDA for “representing our industry’s interests” in the weeks leading to the executive order.
Miscellaneous Policies, Initiatives and Actions
The day he took office, Trump suspended all proposed regulations that hadn’t yet been finalized or published, which included withdrawing a rule that would have ended the painful procedure of horse soring. However, the courts later determined that this decision was unlawful, and the rule was eventually implemented under Biden.
In 2019, Trump’s USDA came under fire again after a damning Washington Post report about the agency’s threadbare enforcement of animal welfare laws. In one particularly controversial incident, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture reportedly blocked the agency’s own inspectors from rescuing hundreds of heat-distressed raccoons they’d discovered in a metal shed in Iowa.
In 2020, Trump’s Department of the Interior issued a rule that allows a variety of controversial hunting practices in Alaska’s national reserves, such as shooting hibernating black bears in their dens and hunting swimming caribou from motor boats.
The Bottom Line
It’s worth keeping in mind that the past actions of an elected official aren’t always a perfect indicator of what they’ll do in the future; plenty of politicians have changed, or “evolved,” their stances on various issues over time, and Trump is certainly one of them.
At the same time, Trump’s history of policies on agriculture and factory farms strongly suggests that, if elected to a second term, he would be much more of an ally to agribusiness and factory farmers than to animals, consumers or the environment.
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for California News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
In 2023, UC Berkeley student and activist Zoe Rosenberg removed four severely ill chickens from a slaughterhouse truck in Petaluma, California, and brought them to an animal sanctuary. Now, she's facing over five years in prison. Rosenberg's trial is scheduled for later this year, and her allegations tell a story of horrific conditions at ostensibly "free-range" chicken farms, as well as the steep uphill battle activists face in convincing law enforcement to even investigate allegations of animal cruelty on factory farms.
Rosenberg is an activist with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a Bay Area-based animal rights organization. In addition to supporting ballot propositions and hosting conferences, DxE carries out undercover investigations of slaughterhouses and factory farms. In some cases, its activists rescue ill and imperiled animals from such facilities; this is what's known as "open rescue," a popular tactic among some animal rights activists.
The prospect of risking prison time for saving a few chickens, who are routinely sold for less than $20 apiece, may seem outlandish. But DxE activists like Rosenberg see it as a necessary risk to accomplish their ultimate goal: the complete abolition of slaughterhouses and factory farms.
"I think that if people don't take action and don't risk their freedom to create change, nothing will ever change," Rosenberg, who's currently wearing an ankle monitor while out on bail, tells Sentient. "We've seen time and time throughout history that it has been the sacrifices of the very few that have changed the world."
Petaluma Poultry did not respond to Sentient's request for comment on this story, but a company spokesperson denied DxE's claims to the San Francisco Chronicle, characterizing the group as "extremist" and its efforts as "theft."
What Is Open Rescue?
In essence, open rescue is the act of removing animals from dangerous or harmful environments without permission from the person, company or facility that oversees said animals. Those who carry out open rescues don't hide what they are doing, and often publicize their actions. Animals that are removed via open rescue are typically provided with medical care and/or taken to animal sanctuaries.
The goal of open rescues, which date back to at least the early 1980s, is not only to provide relief for the animals in question, but also to highlight the conditions in which farm animals are held, and to normalize the act of rescuing them. But it's a controversial practice, even among activists, and law enforcement officials generally treat open rescues as acts of theft, trespassing or other crimes.
This often leads to prosecution, but in the eyes of open rescue advocates, this isn't entirely a bad thing. Prosecutions often bring media attention and publicity to both the topic in question and the relevant laws surrounding that topic. Rosenberg's case, for instance, draws attention not only to the conditions of factory farms, but also to the fact that removing a few sick animals from a slaughterhouse can get you a half a decade in prison.
Do People Usually Go to Prison for Open Rescue?
Although charges are often brought in open rescue cases, they're frequently reduced or, in some cases, dropped entirely before trial. It's not uncommon for open rescuers to be acquitted, either; in a verdict that drew international headlines, DxE founder Wayne Hsiung and another defendant were facing 60 years in prison for rescuing two sick piglets from a Smithfield Farms facility in Utah, only to be acquitted of all charges.
That said, Hsiung did recently spend 38 days in Sonoma County jail for an open rescue in which he participated, so it's not unheard of for activists like Rosenberg to serve time for carrying out open rescues.
The Incident in Question
On June 13, 2023, Rosenberg entered a Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse partially disguised as an employee. A truck delivering chickens to the facility was parked outside, and Rosenberg spotted four chickens in the back of the truck who she says were "covered in scratches and bruises." She took them from the truck, left the slaughterhouse and both she and DxE publicized her actions on social media.
Rosenberg says that she intentionally took the chickens that "seemed like they most needed medical attention." Subsequent examinations found that all four birds were infected with Coccidia parasites; one of them also had a respiratory infection and an injured toe, while a third had a foot infection.
Five months later, Rosenberg was arrested and charged with five felonies relating to the June 13 rescue. These charges were later reduced, and as of this writing, she faces one felony conspiracy charge, two forms of misdemeanor trespassing charges, one misdemeanor theft charge and one misdemeanor charge of tampering with a vehicle. Her trial is scheduled for September 15, 2025.
The chickens she rescued were all treated for their illnesses, and are now living at an animal sanctuary.
A History of Animal Neglect At Petaluma Poultry
Petaluma Poultry, a subsidiary of the chicken giant Perdue, presents itself as a humane operation where, in the words of its website, "chickens are free to be chickens."
"Our houses are spacious, with room for birds to move about and exhibit normal behaviors in a low-stress environment open to fresh air," the company's website says. "Our outdoor spaces are at least half the size of the poultry house, and typically as big as the barn itself."
But Petaluma Poultry's advertising is a classic example of humane-washing, when companies try to appeal to animal welfare-minded consumers by depicting their products as more humanely produced than they actually are.
Petaluma Poultry and its contractors have been accused of criminal animal cruelty on a number of occasions, and footage filmed by undercover investigators in the company's farms and slaughterhouse paints a much different picture than the company's marketing.
In 2018, a whistleblower provided DxE with footage from McCoy's Poultry, a factory farm contracted by Petaluma Poultry, that showed chickens collapsed on the ground, unable to stand or walk and surrounded by the corpses of other chickens. Shortly thereafter, Sonoma County Animal Services seized 15 chickens from McCoy's Poultry; six were already dead, while the other nine were injured, malnourished, unable to stand and exhibited signs of distress, according to a subsequent medical report. The facility was later shut down.
In 2023, another activist who infiltrated Petaluma Poultry's slaughterhouse said that she saw workers cutting into chickens while they were still alive, as well as evidence that chickens had been abused, tortured and boiled alive during the slaughter process. They also obtained documents showing that, on a single day in April, over 1,000 chickens were deemed unfit for human consumption after they were slaughtered due to suspicion that they had blood poisoning.
Prior to her arrest for the June incident, Rosenberg herself was involved in a separate DxE investigation of a Petaluma Poultry facility in 2023, where she recorded footage of more chickens suffering in the facility.
"I documented chickens who were collapsed on the floor of their factory farms, too weak to stand, unable to get to food and water, and slowly dying of starvation and dehydration," Rosenberg says. She ended up rescuing two of those chickens as well, both of whom required extensive medical care.
It remains unclear whether authorities prosecuting or investigating these allegations of criminal animal cruelty? And if not, how come?
Rosenberg Raised Allegations of Animal Welfare Abuses
Poultry is the most widely consumed meat in the U.S. and the world, yet there are no federal laws that protect livestock chickens from mistreatment on the farm. The Humane Slaughter Act establishes some baseline requirements for the treatment of livestock, but it specifically exempts chickens from these protections.
In California, however, livestock chickens are protected under a number of different laws. In addition to Proposition 12, which requires poultry producers to give egg-laying hens a specific amount of living space, Section 597(b) of California's penal code makes it a felony to subject an animal to "needless suffering" or deprive them of access to sufficient food or water, among other things.
This law would appear to be relevant in the context of Petaluma Poultry. If a chicken at a factory farm is physically unable to stand (let alone walk), they will be unable to reach the feeding trays and water, and will eventually die of thirst or starvation. If a chicken is boiled alive because they were improperly stunned beforehand, it has suffered needlessly.
The aforementioned investigations uncovered evidence of both of these things happening at Petaluma Poultry and its contracted facilities. Both DxE and Rosenberg claim they've presented multiple law enforcement agencies with this evidence, only to be rebuffed or ignored.
"The most common thing we've had is agencies directing us to another agency, directing us to another agency, directing us back to the place where we started, and just kind of sending us around in circles," Rosenberg says. "We didn't get any helpful response. No one took action."
It was this inaction that led Rosenberg to take the four chickens from the back of the truck in June, she says. After doing so, she again presented her findings to law enforcement, specifically the Petaluma Police Department. This time, she got a response.
"They said they had a detective who wanted to have a call with me, and so I had like a 15-minute call with a detective from the Petaluma Police Department," Rosenberg says. "She very much approached the call from an angle of, you know, 'I'm concerned about the reports you are making.' And so I told her about the animal cruelty that has been documented there."
But Officer Corie Joerger, the detective in question, didn't follow up with her after their call, Rosenberg claims, and ignored her subsequent attempts at communication. A couple of weeks later, Joerger handed Rosenberg a warrant for her arrest regarding the June rescue.
In the preliminary hearing for Rosenberg's case, Joerger acknowledged that Rosenberg had made allegations of animal cruelty, but stated that she did not investigate the matter.
This inaction by law enforcement wasn't an isolated incident. When the investigation at McCoy's Poultry facility uncovered dead birds on the farm floor and others that were unable to move, Sonoma County Animal Services referred the matter to the county sheriff's office for potential prosecution. But no prosecution followed then, either.
Sentient has reached out to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, the Petaluma Police Department and Joerger for clarification on these reports, but as of this writing, none have offered any comments.
Petaluma Poultry Is More the Rule Than the Exception
The allegations against Petaluma Poultry might sound extreme. But in fact, many are par for the course on factory farms, and chicken farms in particular.
For instance, the USDA estimates that every year, around 825,000 chickens are boiled alive at slaughterhouses. This is not standard protocol, but rather, the result of standard protocol gone wrong.
At poultry slaughterhouses, chickens are typically hung upside down by their feet and pulled through an electrified pool of water, which is meant to stun them. After that, workers slit the chickens' throats, and after they've bled out, they're placed into boiling water. This is to soften the skin and make it easier to defeather them.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least. In actuality, though, one or both of those first two steps often fail; chickens are either inadequately stunned before their throats are cut, or their throats aren't fully slit, or both. When both of these processes fail, the chicken is inadvertently boiled alive, and feels every bit of pain associated with this.
Similarly, the fact that those chickens at Petaluma Poultry couldn't stand up or walk isn't an accident. Over the decades, farmers have selectively bred chickens to be as fat as possible, as this maximizes the amount of meat they can sell. According to the National Chicken Council, farmed chickens now grow to be over twice as large as they were 100 years ago in less than half the time.
This unnatural rate of growth has wrought havoc on their internal biology, however, and farm chickens now routinely suffer from a number of illnesses and adverse health conditions as a result, including bone deformities, heart attacks, chronic hunger, ruptured tendons and, most relevantly to Petaluma Poultry, difficulty standing up or walking.
Finally, Petaluma Poultry is far from the only chicken producer to make questionable use of the "free-range" label, which is ostensibly regulated by the USDA. In 2023, undercover footage taken from a Tyson Foods-contracted chicken farm in Virginia depicted employees of both the factory and Tyson freely acknowledging that the "free range" label doesn't actually mean anything, and that "free range" birds often "don't go outside."
Why Wasn't Petaluma Poultry Investigated by Law Enforcement?
Though it's unclear why local law enforcement hasn't pursued any investigations into the allegations against Petaluma Poultry, DxE's director of communications has some ideas.
"It would be a massive undertaking for any government agency, no matter how well-staffed they actually might be, to suddenly address the systemic animal cruelty that we know is happening in factory farms," Cassie King, director of communications at DxE tells Sentient. "If they put their foot in the door and acknowledge that it's their responsibility to address these crimes, then there's a landslide of new cases they need to take on, and it's just a huge amount of work."
It also bears mentioning that chicken farms are an enormous part of Petaluma's local economy, and have been for quite some time. Once referred to as "the egg basket of the world," Petaluma was the birthplace of several egg-related technologies at the turn of the century, and pumped out over a half a billion eggs every year at its peak in 1945.
Although the city isn't quite the egg powerhouse it once was, chickens are still big business in Petaluma. Though official estimates are difficult to come by, the city is home to at least seven chicken farms large enough to qualify as factory farms, and those facilities collectively house around 1.8 million chickens at any given time, according to a 2024 analysis by an activist group that opposes factory farms.
To be clear, there's no evidence that the poultry industry's strong presence in Petaluma has played any role in law enforcement's response to allegations of cruelty at the city's chicken farms. But the fact that the Petaluma Police Department publicly celebrates the city's poultry industry, and participates in the annual Butter and Eggs Day festival in a non-law enforcement capacity, is not lost on DxE activists.
Rosenberg Awaiting Trial
For her part, Rosenberg maintains that her actions were legal. She cites the doctrine of necessity, a legal theory holding that it's sometimes permissible to break a law if doing so prevents even greater harm from occurring.
"For example, if a kid is drowning in your neighbor's pool and no one is helping that kid, you have the right to trespass into your neighbor's yard to rescue the kid," Rosenberg says.
How this defense plays out in court remains to be seen, but it's essentially the same argument Hsiung's attorneys successfully used in the Utah case. In the meantime, Rosenberg says she's been encouraged by the public reaction to her case (Paris Hilton is a prominent supporter), and doesn't regret her actions even if they do land her in prison.
"A few years of my freedom is worth significantly less than even one animal's entire life, and certainly less than four animals' entire lives," Rosenberg says. "And so it's absolutely worth it to me on that level."
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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