Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Tim Walz as her working mate final month, {a photograph} of the Minnesota governor with an cute piglet nestled in his arms on the 2019 Minnesota State Truthful went viral, to the delight of Democratic voters, activists, and pundits alike.
Earlier this month, Walz made a marketing campaign cease at a dairy farm the place he bottle-fed a child cow, tweeting, “Made a brand new buddy.”
Many politicians come off a bit stiff at compulsory farm visits and state festivals, the place they swap their fits for a flannel and a turkey leg. However Walz matches proper in, seamlessly mixing a real affection for farmed animals with a hearty enthusiasm for consuming them.
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At this 12 months’s Minnesota State Truthful, he declared pork on a persist with be the “breakfast of champions.” In one other viral video from final 12 months’s truthful, Walz’s daughter tells him she received’t eat turkey as a result of she’s vegetarian. Walz replies that in Minnesota — the nation’s prime turkey-producing state — turkey isn’t meat. “Turkey’s particular,” he quips.
These pictures have helped shore up Walz’s healthful vibes and “Massive Dad Vitality,” exuding the “Minnesota good” allure that Democrats hope may help them lock down votes in essential Midwest and Rust Belt states.
I, too, have been swept up by the Harris-Walz fervor, so I really feel like a killjoy poking a gap in Walz’s harmless sheen. However there’s a darker facet to the story: Walz has a lengthy historical past of offering free promoting and public funding to the meat and dairy sectors, industries that trash Minnesota’s treasured waterways, torture animals, and endanger public well being and susceptible employees.
To be truthful to Walz, he’s doing what each different politician, Republican or Democrat, does to outlive in farm nation. Minnesota is a prime producer of turkey, pork, and dairy, in addition to corn and soybeans, the primary crops fed to livestock. Although simply round 1 % of Minnesota households make a residing from farming, agribusiness has accrued monumental affect over federal and state agricultural coverage by showering candidates — together with farm-state Democrats like Walz — with marketing campaign contributions. It then makes use of them to promote a narrative that Massive Ag is past criticism as a result of it’s “feeding the world.”
As Democrats watch their share of the vote in farm nation slip away, characters like Walz — a stability to Harris’s picture as a San Francisco liberal — carry an apparent enchantment to the celebration. However in what might in the end be a quixotic quest to enchantment to rural voters in Center America, Democratic leaders are compromising their commitments elsewhere to environmental safety, labor rights, and public well being once they go heavy on selling the meat business and light-weight on regulating its harms.
That the Democratic base seems to be celebrating Walz’s farm-friendly picture with little scrutiny exhibits how far manufacturing unit farming’s opponents need to go in educating the American public concerning the cruelties of our meals system. Very similar to the deceptive cartoons of joyful, “humanely raised” pigs and cows on meat packaging — which frequently imply little on the farm itself — Walz’s photo-ops with child farmed animals reinforce the false romanticized picture that Massive Ag has so efficiently seared into the general public’s consciousness.
The fact, nevertheless, is something however healthful.
Dissecting Walz’s viral farm moments — and his voting report
With out context, the picture of Walz holding a piglet on the Minnesota State Truthful seems harmless, even endearing. However the pork business, and that piglet’s life? Not a lot.
The picture was taken at a pavilion sponsored by Christensen Farms, the ninth largest US pork firm, and run by the Minnesota Pork Board. Virtually all pigs raised for meals within the US come from manufacturing unit farms — together with Christensen’s, as seen on this disturbing 2015 investigation by an animal rights group — which use a constant set of practices. Feminine breeding pigs — those who give beginning to piglets who’re then raised for slaughter — are confined in crates so small they will hardly transfer for his or her whole lives, struggling via being pregnant after being pregnant to churn out piglets till their productiveness wanes they usually’re despatched to slaughter. The Minnesota Pork Producers Affiliation, a sister group to the Minnesota Pork Board, lobbies in favor of maintaining pregnant pigs in tiny cages and in opposition to primary environmental measures.
It’s additionally widespread within the US pork business to feed these breeding pigs ground-up piglet intestines to construct immunity in opposition to illness.
Piglets have their enamel clipped and tails chopped off, and the males’ testicles are reduce out, all with out ache aid. They spend their quick lives in darkish, unsanitary warehouses earlier than being shipped on a grueling journey to the slaughterhouse and surprised unconscious in a carbon dioxide fuel chamber, a observe that may be excruciatingly painful.
Minnesota’s mammoth turkey business — just about all of the birds are raised on manufacturing unit farms — is equally abusive. Final 12 months, an animal rights group discovered stomach-churning circumstances on the state’s prime turkey producer, Jennie-O: birds too weak and sick to even stroll, together with stay birds pecking at lifeless and rotting ones and birds with seen wounds — indicators of cannibalism, a widespread drawback in poultry farming (on the time, Jennie-O instructed Vox that it “takes the welfare of the animals below our care severely and has sturdy animal care requirements all through our provide chain”).
Jennie-O’s dad or mum firm, Hormel Meals, is headquartered within the congressional district Walz held earlier than he ran for governor; Walz has promoted the firm’s merchandise and appointed its former CEO to a state financial council.
And bear in mind Walz’s picture op with the dairy calf earlier this month? It masked the dismal actuality behind dairy farming, the place cows have been selectively bred to pump out increasingly more milk, resulting in extra frequent leg and metabolic points, in addition to larger charges of painful udder irritation.
The marketing campaign cease came about at a comparatively small dairy farm, the type that makes up an more and more tiny share of the milk Individuals purchase on the grocery retailer. Most dairy cows at this time will by no means set foot on open pasture, and farms usually separate infants from moms shortly after beginning, housing them alone and feeding them via a bottle in order that farmers can take their moms’ milk.
In Minnesota — the Land of 10,000 Lakes — livestock and the artificial fertilizer used to develop the corn they eat account for many of the state’s water nitrate air pollution; 4 in 10 our bodies of water are so polluted that they fail to satisfy primary well being requirements. Final 12 months, the US Environmental Safety Company directed Minnesota state businesses to right away handle the excessive nitrate ranges in ingesting water, which might trigger a vary of great well being points, that 1000’s of Minnesotans had been uncovered to. The EPA additionally inspired the state to higher monitor air pollution from livestock manure.
Minnesota state authorities is restricted in its skill to crack down on these companies as a result of courtroom choices have largely exempted manufacturing unit farms from Clear Water Act regulation. And Walz, in fact, can’t bear the blame for an issue that started many years in the past because of the unsavory realities of farm state politics. However environmental teams and even some state lawmakers argue Minnesota could possibly be doing way more. As a substitute, Walz appears to have little to say about manufacturing unit farming dirtying the state’s waterways.
Previous to serving as Minnesota’s governor, Walz represented Minnesota within the US Home of Representatives for six phrases, by which he voted in opposition to two necessary agricultural air pollution measures. As a member of the Home Agriculture Committee, he performed a big function in negotiating the Farm Invoice — a multiyear legislative package deal that units federal agricultural coverage — and through his tenure, the laws shoveled increasingly more cash to farmers rising livestock feed.
Walz has championed federal and state “conservation” funding for farmers to implement extra sustainable practices, however they’ve in the end made little to no progress in fixing the issue. And some of the federal conservation funding goes to giant meat and dairy operations for environmentally doubtful practices.
Gov. Walz’s workplace declined to remark for this story and as an alternative shared a remark from the Minnesota Division of Agriculture. “The Governor has persistently advocated for and carried out packages that guarantee agriculture advantages the setting whereas remaining worthwhile,” the assertion reads, and factors to Walz’s help for conservation funding and a rule that units some limits on fertilizer software.
What Walz within the White Home may imply for the way forward for farming
If Harris wins the presidency, Walz could possibly be influential in setting the administration’s agricultural agenda. That may doubtless imply extra of the identical bipartisan, pro-factory farming consensus.
Then again, Harris has a surprisingly sturdy monitor report on the setting and animal welfare, having defended California’s bans on foie gras and confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages throughout her time because the state’s lawyer basic.
Walz’s rural bona fides may make him an efficient messenger for reforms {that a} Harris administration may pursue — if he’s keen to buck Massive Ag. However there’s little proof to this point that he can be able to take that function.
To name out the meat business for its misdeeds and advocate for significant rules would require braveness few farm state politicians have been keen to indicate. Doing so in the midst of a tightly contested presidential marketing campaign, the place a number of of the battleground states have main agricultural sectors, could possibly be politically disastrous.
So, as an alternative, we get images of candidates with cute piglets and child calves caught up within the manufacturing unit farm system — pictures that fortify the very mythologies that make it so troublesome for elected officers to face as much as Massive Ag. However that political calculation has gotten us to the place we’re at this time: poisoned waters, injured employees, and abused animals.
Whereas a second Trump time period would doubtless be even friendlier to Massive Ag than a Harris-Walz administration, there’s much less daylight between Republicans and Democrats on agricultural coverage than you may suppose.
“We’re not going again” has turn out to be the de facto Harris-Walz marketing campaign slogan. However within the struggle in opposition to manufacturing unit farming, their administration most likely wouldn’t transfer us ahead, both.
