I'm in Washington D.C. with about 200 farmers lobbying against the Food Security and Farm Protection Act (aka EATS Act in the Senate) or the Save Our Bacon Act (SOB in the House).  This legislative effort at the federal level seeks to overturn California Prop 12 from seven years ago and Massachusetts Question 3.  These two states went beyond what 11 states have done in outlawing gestation crates in hog factories.  Sows lives in these crates all their lives.  They can only stand up and sit; they can't walk or turn around. 

                  While 11 states have outlawed this protocol, California and Massachusetts went a step further and outlawed the sale of pork sourced from piggies born to sows in these despicable gestation crates.  Roughly 40 percent of the industry still uses the crates; many operations have voluntarily remodeled to eliminate them.  But that's not enough for Big Ag. They're trying, through the upcoming (always upcoming) Farm Bill, to stick the federal government's nose in state governance by overturning these laws.

                  At the National Press Club yesterday the organizers asked me to be one of the six speakers and here are my comments: 

                  Polyface farm raises about 800 pastured pigs per year in a habitat that honors their pigness--digging, running, discovering, fresh air, new salad bars--the respect in life creates sacredness in their sacrifice for bacon and pork chops.  A nation uninterested in happy pigs, or honoring the pigness of pigs, soon loses its moral and ethical framework to honor the Tomness of Tom and Maryness of Mary, or how to ensure happy people. 

                  Our culture is in a crisis of trust.  We raise pigs on pasture not because of Prop 12, but because our patrons don't trust factory farming.  If Big Ag thinks it can engender trust by promoting a mechanical inanimate view toward life, it's mistaken.  Life is not inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly and obscenely hubris can imagine.

                  But as much as I appreciate our farm's pastured livestock, I want to focus on something different:  the ability of a group to determine its own governance. 

                  The Bill of Rights constrains the federal government from infringing on numerous freedoms.  Animal production systems are not an enumerated purview.  In case we've forgotten, the constitution is silent on most things because the objective was robust experimentation--the 50-state experiment--and putting governance as close to the citizenry as possible. 

                  The reason our nation is in the throes of amplified partisan acrimony is because we continue arrogating regulatory intervention to the federal level.  This creates an unnecessary and unprecedented winner-to-all environment, which raises the stakes on every policy issue to aggressively partisan levels.  If we are ever going to reduce the rage temperature it must start by reducing federal meddling at the state and local level.  Remanding governance to the states does numerous things:

1.  Reduces partisan hostility by lessening the number of people affected by legislation.

2.  Increases diversity by encouraging people to think about how they want to live without demanding everyone else conform.

3.  Allows choice in the marketplace exercised at a level more at human or community scale.

4.  Enables experimentation in marketplace governance easier to reverse or correct due to scale and scope.

5.  Creates a check on industrial/government prejudice against self-governance and local agency in an effort to cater to interests who care not a whit about hog happiness. 

                  Today is day two.  We're meeting with elected officials all day.

                  Is this effort worthwhile?