An employee works the egg processing machine at Sunrise Farms in Petaluma on Aug. 22. The farm is one of a group that is at risk of shutting down if Measure J, which would ban factory farming in Sonoma County, passes on Tuesday.
Organic eggs await processing at Sunrise Farms in Petaluma. The farm is one of a group that is at risk of shutting down if Measure J, which would ban factory farming in Sonoma County, passes on Tuesday.
Last week, while trying to vote during lunch, I pored over my mail-in ballot and my pile of Berkeley-specific voter guides, taking care not to get focaccia crumbs and organic tomato juice on everything. So I am the prime voter demographic for the proponents of Measure DD, which prohibits concentrated animal feeding operations — what some would call “factory farms” — in the city of Berkeley.
Barring two tiny community farms and however many backyard chicken coops, Berkeley doesn’t have livestock. Unsurprisingly, I have seen a total of two posters about this issue around the city because at this point the measure is basically as performative as an anti-racist warhead.
But in Sonoma County, it’s a different story. Voters will decide on Measure J, a nearly identical ballot initiative to the one in Berkeley that would ban concentrated animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs, from a region where agriculture is a major economic driver, generating $418 million yearly on top of providing 1,381 jobs directly and indirectly related to the industry, according to one analysis. So small and large farmers, local dairy companies like Straus Family Creamery and Clover, environmental nonprofits, multiple city councils, and even the county’s Republican and Democratic parties have joined forces to rally against a measure that they say will have devastating consequences for everyone.
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Measure J would phase out existing CAFOs of any size by 2027 and prohibit new ones from forming. Doing so would require the county to keep a registry of these operations and report on compliance with the measure. Farms that don’t comply would........