Farm Bill Goes Whole Hog in Embracing Factory Farming

If you want to see Washington at its worst, behold the hash of the current version of the 2026 Farm bill.

“If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made,” said one observer with an awareness of both slaughterhouse methods and the legislative process. In the case of the Farm bill, it all blends together — congressional lawmaking at its worst and done in the name of making sausage from tortured pigs.

There are two provisions within the 1,000-page Farm bill, perhaps soon to come to the full House for consideration, that might cause a person of average emotional capacity to avert the eyes: locking breeding sows in tiny, immobilizing crates, and propping up a fading mink farming industry that jams together solitary, wild mink in cages only to later poison them with gas or break their necks for their pelts.

Regular Americans stand to benefit in no way from these provisions. Two major beneficiaries, however, are found on the other side of the planet: 1) China’s Smithfield Foods, with designs on bringing its dystopian, high-rise factory farms to the American heartland once the states’ most consequential farm animal welfare laws are eviscerated, and 2) Chinese millionaires who are courted by U.S. government-funded advertisers to buy and don mink coats and stoles made in America.

Overturning Elections and Propping Up Archaic, Inhumane Factory Farms

I’ve written many times about the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act to repeal the nation’s most important, consequential state animal welfare laws — notably Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts. American voters approved these measures to restrict in-state sales of pork from millions of sows kept in coffin-like crates that deny them any kind of normal movement. Now a handful of Members of Congress want to give China’s Smithfield Foods the keys to the pig shed, so the foreign-owned company can double its existing and startling 25% share of American pig production.

The second legislative item of grave concern has had no visibility in Congress — no legislative antecedent to a Farm bill amendment, no hearings, no legislative discussion. The House Agriculture Committee chairman snuck the provision into to a deeply corrupted Farm bill, seeking in this case to unwind a federal law to subsidize the factory farming of mink and to enlist taxpayers in their deceptions and their moral race to the bottom.

That 1996 law is one I worked to pass 30 years ago to forbid the use of taxpayer dollars to spend money in China on advertising and fashion shows to promote the sale of mink pelts from the relative handful of mink farms still doing their ugly work in remote places in the United States.

House and Senate votes on cutting the USDA/mink industry scam were decisive and the misuse of taxpayer dollars on foreign fashion so acute and galling. In October 1995, President Clinton signed (104^th Congress) H.R. 1976, the Fiscal Year 1996 Agriculture, FDA spending bill. It contained the following provision:

SEC. 723. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to provide assistance to, or to pay the salaries of personnel who carry out a market promotion program pursuant to section 203 of the Agricultural Trade Act of 1978 (7 U.S.C. 5623) that provides assistance to, the U.S. Mink Export Development Council or any mink industry trade association.

Members of Congress stated that the USDA was spending “about $2 million a year” on mink industry export promotion (see Congressional Record — House debate, July 21, 1995), and Senate findings from the same period noted that more than $13 million had been provided to the Mink Export Development Council since 1989 prior to enactment of the prohibition. While repeal would not mandate a fixed level of spending, it would reopen eligibility for mink producers to access USDA trade promotion programs that today operate at a much larger scale, increasing potential taxpayer exposure.

Even more so today, it makes no sense to keep afloat a dying, subsidized mink industry — with about 50 farms, producing fewer than a million pelts — that threatens human and wildlife health for a luxury fashion item. With almost zero commercial sales of fur in the U.S., mink are factory-farmed for pelts for export, with nearly all pelts sold to high-end consumers in China. Elites in China get the coats while the CCP outsources the viral risks to our homeland.

Farmed mink are highly susceptible to and readily transmit and amplify avian-, human-, and mammalian- (e.g. swine) influenza A strains. This includes the pandemic zoonotic bird flu H5N1 mink mutant strain that infected and caused the deaths of more than 200,000 farmed mink on six farms in Spain and Finland in 2022-2023. This bird flu strain has killed 476 of 991 human cases since 2003, a case fatality rate of 48%, roughly 50 times more deadly than COVID-19 and much higher than any known influenza virus including the infamous 1918 H1N1 pandemic strain.

Before the H5N1 super-spreading event, mink farms in Europe and the U.S. spawned five deadly COVID-19 variants (Cluster 5 in Denmark and the Netherlands, Marseille-4 in France, N501T in Michigan, Y453F in Poland, and unreported mutations in Latvia). These are the only confirmed cases of spillover of COVID-19 variants from animals to people. Unless we shut down mink farms, other variants will almost certainly emerge and threaten human health and the global economy.

Only humans and mink contract the virus in large numbers and are able to spill it back to other species — with more than 21 million captive mink (includes culling) and more than 7 million people perishing directly as a result of the pandemic. The COVID-19 outbreaks at a third of U.S. mink farms are certainly an undercount because of reckless and deficient U.S. government oversight, including a months-long failure by the CDC to report transmission of a new mink variant in Michigan to people living near a mink farm in the western part of the state.

A Factory Farm Bill

Attaching the SOB Act to the Farm bill is itself an outrage, seeking to restore the cage age in pig production. But the mink subsidy, too?

Are there no limits to the hubris of the engineers of the House Farm bill? Any attention to even the most basic needs of animals? Any understanding of the gratuitous nature of these abuses and the menacing zoonotic disease threats they portend to unspool, all coming at the expense of the American taxpayer? You can be sure we’ll do everything within our power to remove these awful provisions. If we fail, we’ll do all we can to derail the entire deeply corrupt bill.

It’s not a Farm Bill. It’ a Factory Farm bill. A legislative scandal happening in real time in the Congress.