What’s at stake
Roughly nine billion land animals are slaughtered annually in U.S. food production. Most live in conditions that, twenty years ago, the public would have rejected if they’d seen them — which is why ag-gag laws exist.
The single largest lever is the federal farm bill, which reauthorizes every five years and dictates roughly a trillion dollars in agricultural policy. The 2024 reauthorization passed without serious animal-welfare provisions; the next opens in 2028.
Outside the farm-bill cycle, the meaningful work is state-level confinement bans (California’s Prop 12 survived Supreme Court review in 2023; Massachusetts has Question 3), ag-gag rollback (federal courts have struck down ag-gag statutes in Iowa, Idaho, and Kansas), and corporate-sourcing accountability — the work that ratchets cage-free and gestation-crate-free commitments forward at major buyers.
What we fund within this issue
- Coalition staff working the farm-bill cycle from now through reauthorization.
- State-level confinement bans and the implementation work after they pass.
- Ag-gag defense and reversal litigation.
- Corporate-accountability campaigns that move buyer commitments forward.
- Research that translates animal-welfare science into policy that’s actually enforceable.
Current focus
Building toward the next farm-bill cycle: coalition capacity, member-of-Congress education, and the policy-research backbone that turns committee hearings into bill language.