WASHINGTON – To make an omelet, you need to crack a few eggs. To improve hen housing, you need to crack them all.
That’s the thrust of an amicus curiae or friend-of-the-court brief filed last week by the American Farm Bureau Federation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It concerns California’s egg law, which went into effect on January 1 and prescribes, among other things, expanded cage space for layer hens.
Last October the law was challenged by several states, including Iowa, which argued the new cage requirements would require substantial investment on the part of egg producers, and that California’s law overstepped the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
“The judge didn’t get to the merits of the case because she said that the plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to bring the lawsuit,” explains staff attorney Kristine Tidgren at Iowa State University’s Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation. “They said that they had not shown injury, actually, to the state itself, and so that’s why the case was dismissed. So that’s the portion of the case that’s on appeal right now. It’s whether or not the states the brought the lawsuit were the proper parties to challenge the California law.”
Residents of California consume roughly one in every ten or so eggs produced in the U.S., which makes it an integral player for Iowa, which leads the nation in egg production.
According to AFB’s brief, the cost of upgrading hen housing to comply with California’s law would be “crushing,” as well as irreversible. The brief also challenges the lower court’s determination that the states which filed the original suit did not have standing to do so; it claims one aspect of protecting sovereignty is in instances of California inspectors auditing facilities in Iowa and Ohio.
If California?s law is upheld, Tidgren says it would set a worrisome precedent.
“If they can regulate the production of chickens and the production of eggs, then they could essentially tell farmers in any state how to conduct any sort of agricultural practice,” she sayd. “Perhaps it would be something to do with how hogs are raised, or how you treat the cattle in your feedlot. So it’s a very important case for agriculture. It kind of sets a precedent for a whole patchwork of different sorts of laws and regulations.”
To hear more about California’s egg law, click the audio player above this story.
