On Wednesday, September 9, a group of Iowa hog and dairy farmers stood on a farm in Elkhart and asked a Republican congresswoman to stop protecting them.

The congresswoman is Ashley Hinson, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The bill is hers: the Save Our Bacon Act, H.R. 4673, which she introduced on July 23, 2025. It would block individual states from enforcing conditions on livestock products sold across state lines, as the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported from the farm that day.

Hinson sells the bill as a shield. Her own announcement called California's Proposition 12 and Massachusetts's Question 3 "a major threat to family farms and food security," and promised "there will be no bacon ban on my watch."

The family farmers who showed up in Elkhart do not want the shield. They say it takes away the only market where their work is worth more.

What the farmers actually said

Proposition 12 is the California law that says certain pork sold in the state has to come from hogs given at least 24 square feet of usable floor space. California voters passed it in 2018 with 62.7% of the vote, and it was not fully in force until 2024, after the Supreme Court upheld it.

Some Iowa farmers spent real money to meet that standard. Hinson's bill would make the standard unenforceable, and with it the market those farmers invested to reach.

John Gilbert, a Hardin County farmer whose operation runs on dairy and hogs, said the Save Our Bacon Act would "punish" producers who invested in upgrades to comply with the California law. Tony Thompson, a farmer and candidate for the Iowa Senate, said the bill would stop markets from rewarding farmers who "do something different":

"Small family farms aren't going to win a race against multinational, vertically integrated corporations on producing the cheapest pound of protein. Frankly, I don't want them to, because when lowest cost becomes the only goal, everything else starts to look like a cost to be eliminated."

That is the whole argument in two sentences. A small Iowa hog farmer cannot beat a corporate operation on price. Sometimes they can beat it on how the animals were raised — and only if a state is allowed to let its own shoppers ask for that.

Gilbert also raised something Hinson's press release does not mention. He is worried the bill would wipe out state laws that keep diseased animals out of the state. A legislative analysis from Harvard Law School identified 13 Iowa laws that the Save Our Bacon Act could affect.

And he named what bothered him most — not the money, the message:

"People like you and me, it's telling people you don't have a right … you're not entitled to have a say in what you eat."

Who is asking for this

Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, said the things that would actually help struggling Iowa livestock farmers are mandatory country-of-origin labeling, antitrust enforcement, support for local meat processing, and closer ties between farmers and the people who eat their food.

"We know how to make meaningful changes to help Iowa livestock farmers," Lehman said. "We just need the political will to demand that they be put in place. The Save Our Bacon Act won't get it done."

He also put a number on the squeeze: farmers receive less than 15 cents out of every food dollar spent in this country. That is why, as he put it, farmers can be struggling to make a living at the same time shoppers are paying more at the register.

The groups backing Hinson's bill are the other end of that arrangement. Her own announcement lists the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation among its endorsers. The Iowa Farm Bureau's political action committee has also endorsed Hinson in the Senate race.

Holly Bice, of a producers' alliance opposing the bill, told Food Tank it "would primarily benefit large China-owned pork corporations, not independent family farmers." Pork farmer Anna Pesek told Food Tank that if Prop 12 is preempted, "it is just another signal from our policymakers that what they care about are the interests of a handful of multinational companies" — and that profits would flow out of rural communities, states and even the country.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Hinson's record on who gets protected in Iowa agriculture is already on the record here.

Iowa has the fastest-rising cancer rate in America, and Hinson has taken $77,000 from pesticide and meat companies. When a company sought to seize Iowa farmland for a carbon pipeline, the man who founded it co-hosted a fundraiser for her. Now the bill she calls a defense of family farms is opposed by family farmers and endorsed by the trade associations of the industry's biggest players.

Her opponent in the Senate race, Democrat Josh Turek, has said he opposes the Save Our Bacon Act.

The bill was written into the farm bill the House passed. It is not in the Senate version, which is still in committee — so it is still live, and Hinson is still running on it. At the Iowa State Fair on August 21, she called Proposition 12 "an over-regulatory policy, Californians trying to tell Iowans what they know how to do already best".

Nineteen days later, Iowans who raise the animals stood in a field and told her she had it backwards.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson's Save Our Bacon Act would strip states of the power to set conditions on livestock products sold inside their borders, voiding a California standard 62.7% of that state's voters approved and putting 13 Iowa laws at risk. She describes it as protecting family farms. The Iowa Farmers Union, a Hardin County dairy and hog farmer, and a farmer running for the Iowa Senate all stood in a field on September 9 and said it does the opposite — while the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau, whose PAC has endorsed her, are the ones asking for it.

Source

Iowa Capital Dispatch, Iowa farmers argue Hinson's Save Our Bacon act would hurt small producers, by Cami Koons. Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch.