Every fall, Mary Bull prepares for the olive harvest at her small-scale permaculture farm, Chalice Farm, in Sonoma County, California. She expects this year to be their biggest harvest yet, with more than 50 volunteers coming to help harvest over a thousand pounds of olives to make premium olive oil.
Along with olives, Chalice Farm also grows perennial vegetables, fruit and nuts on their sunshine-drenched land surrounded by creeks and forested ridge. It’s the kind of farm that many think of when Sonoma County comes to mind, along with organic wine, freshly grown produce and artisanal cheese.
But not all of the region's farms are as idyllic as Bull's, and the county has grown fiercely divided over a ballot measure that would challenge some of Sonoma's biggest agricultural interests. On Nov. 5, residents will vote on Measure J, a novel bill that would cap the number of animals allowed on-farm, forcing all facilities that exceed that number of animals to phase out over the next three years. In other words, the bill would ban factory farms. If it passes, it could be a blueprint for the rest of the country to do the same.
Across the U.S., there are thousands of factory farms — also known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) — where thousands of animals are confined in large buildings or open feedlots, sometimes put in crates or cages without the space to move freely. Together, farms like these confine over 1.7 billion farm animals in large buildings or feedlots and produce 941 billion pounds of manure, according to a report by Food and Water Watch.
While California isn’t known for the mega-farms that dominate states like Iowa, Wisconsin and North Carolina, there are still over 1,000 CAFOs across the state, according to data from the Environmental Working Group. Farms of this size not only harm the animals inside them, but they also impact the surrounding environment and waterways, and dominate the dairy, beef and poultry markets, making it difficult for small-scale farmers to compete
“As we've seen over the last few decades, as we've seen elsewhere in the country, the largest farms have consolidated and started to take over the market,” said Kristina Garfinkel, a Sonoma County resident and leader of Coalition to End Factory Farming. Garfinkel has spent the last year leading “Yes on J,” the campaign that collected 37,000 signatures to get the bill on the ballot.
“Yes on Measure J” compiled a list of 21 farms in Sonoma County that meet the size and definition of a CAFO, all of which would be forced to downsize or shut down entirely should Measure J pass. The county’s remaining 700 animal farms would not be impacted by the measure.
“The sad reality is small farms are not protected, and we can see that as each year, more and more small farms are leaving and closing down, and the CAFOs are just getting bigger and bigger,” Garfinkel said.
Like many regions across the United States, Sonoma County has seen consolidation in the agriculture industry in recent years. In the 1940s, Sonoma County had more than 4,000 egg producers. Today, there are 157, with just two farms, Sunrise Farms and Petaluma Egg Farm, dominating the market. Perdue, one of the country’s largest poultry producers, now owns Sonoma County's famous Petaluma Poultry, and Colombian agri-business Alpine Foods owns 70 percent of Clover Sonoma.
Despite this corporate consolidation, these are the farms that have defined Sonoma County for decades. Their economic dominance is in part why Measure J has faced such fierce opposition. Nearly $1.8 million has been spent lobbying against the bill through the campaign “No on J," which is funded by some of the region’s largest agricultural interests. An immense amount of political and financial power has been used to lobby against Measure J, including TV ads, social media campaigns and direct mail initiatives that frame the bill as an attack on family farms by an "animal extremist group." They also claim the bill will be detrimental to the region's economy and affordable food supply.
Dayna Ghirardelli, the executive director of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, told Salon that Measure J would be detrimental to all of Sonoma County's farms and the region's food affordability. “All it does is it prohibits farms based on animal numbers without any merit or understanding of how that farm works, what its standards are in terms of if they're organic or third party animal welfare certified,” said Dayna Ghirardelli, which has been one of Measure J’s fiercest opponents.
The Sonoma County Democratic party has also opposed the measure, illustrating just how much political power agriculture has in the region. “Good intentions may have produced Measure J, but the proposed policy was not crafted with our county’s needs, problems, or benefit in mind,” it said in a statement.
Both Bull and Garfinkel said these fear-mongering tactics and misinformation have scared people out of supporting, all because industrial agriculture feels threatened. “It’s Big Ag wanting to do business as usual, pollute, exploit and degrade human health, all for profit,” she said.
Misinformation and confusion have been one of the biggest challenges in garnering support for Measure J, which actually only impacts 0.03 percent of Sonoma County's farms.
"I can't blame the small farms if what they're hearing is that a measure is going to put them out of business, and they're hearing that from people that they're supposed to trust, and that's supposed to have their best interests," she said.
The goal of Measure J is not to punish farmers or make meat and eggs more expensive, but rather to push farming away from corporations and ultimately break down the consolidation that has led to a reliance on industrial animal agriculture, Garfinkel explained. If it passes, Sonoma County's factory farm ban will be a novel experiment in transitioning to a more sustainable food system, laying the groundwork for other parts of the country to do the same. But even if it doesn't pass, Garfinkel said the awareness alone that's come from the campaign will make a difference going forward.
"We've had conversations with hundreds of thousands of residents, many who have no idea factory farms even operated here, and the fact that we brought that to the forefront is invaluable," she said.
Throughout the campaign, Garfinkel has received thousands of emails from people across the country who want to push for a similar ballot measure in their state. She hopes to build a template for others that includes everything she's learned from the campaign, including Big Ag's lobbying tactics.
"Creating a playbook for other people to try in their own jurisdiction would be amazing," she said. "And Sonoma County residents will, of course, not stop fighting to end factory farming here."
