Will Coggin, Meat Industry PR VP, Discovers Mail Merge and Calls It Federalism
The Courier-Journal's New Editorial Standard: If You Can Swap the State Name, It Must Be Local
Will Coggin wants Kentucky to panic about California bacon, but he forgot to swap out the template. The exact same column he published in the Courier-Journal has already run in Utah, Alaska, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Maine. Same quotes, same statistics, same plea for Congress to save local farmers from California voters (Bienkowski, 2026). The only difference is the state name.
Coggin lists himself as research director at the Center for the Environment and Welfare. What he does not mention is that this group was created in 2023 by Berman and Company, a Washington public relations firm that specializes in “changing the debate” for corporate clients. Berman’s founder, Rick Berman, was caught on tape telling energy executives that he runs campaigns through nonprofit front groups so there is “total anonymity” and nobody knows who is paying the bills. Berman’s previous clients include Philip Morris tobacco, and his other nonprofit creations have attacked the Humane Society, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and minimum wage laws (Center for Organizational Research and Education, n.d.). When Coggin says he wants to protect Kentucky families, he is reading from a script written by a PR firm that defends factory farms the same way it once defended cigarettes.
Show Me the Receipts
Coggin claims Proposition 12 costs farmers “roughly $4,000 extra per animal” and that small family farms will disappear. That number comes from the National Pork Producers Council and Representative Randy Feenstra, the Iowa Republican who introduced the “Save Our Bacon Act” to kill Prop 12 (Feenstra, 2026). In other words, the people who gave Coggin his scary price tag are the exact same lobbyists trying to overturn the law.
Independent research tells a different story. Scientists at Iowa State University compared gestation crates to group housing in deep-bedded hoop barns and found that group housing produced pigs at a cost 10% lower than individual stalls. The hoop barn facilities cost 70% less to build than typical confinement buildings with gestation crates (Lammers et al., 2007). Those are not animal rights talking points. That is agricultural economics from the heart of pork country. Major producers like Smithfield Foods, which owns roughly 885,000 sows, have already spent years transitioning to group housing that meets Proposition 12 standards (McCracken & Felder, 2024). The industry is adapting just fine. The only thing not adapting is the lobbyists’ scare campaign.
Federalism Is Not a Team Sport
Coggin says Proposition 12 “runs afoul of the federalist system” because it regulates farmers in Kentucky who sell food in California. He wants Rand Paul to “vote his principles” by supporting the 2026 Farm Bill provision that would block California’s law. Let us be clear about what that means. Rand Paul, who has built his entire brand on state autonomy and limited federal government, would be voting for a federal law that tells California voters they are not allowed to decide what products can be sold in their own state. That is not federalism. That is Washington overriding a state election because corporate donors lost at the ballot box.
The Supreme Court already settled this question. In National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (2023), the Court upheld Proposition 12 by a 5-4 margin. Justice Gorsuch, joined by conservative Justices Thomas and Barrett, wrote that the Constitution does not give federal courts a “roving license” to second-guess state laws just because they raise costs for some out-of-state businesses. The Court said that if Congress wants a uniform national rule for pork, Congress can pass one. So far, it has not (National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 2023).
Here is what federalism actually looks like. California voters passed a law about products sold in California. Kentucky farmers remain free to raise pigs however they want and sell them in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, or any other state. If a Kentucky farmer chooses to ship pork to Sacramento, that farmer must meet California’s rules. That is not tyranny. That is the same deal Kentucky offers to every business that sells bourbon or cars or corn inside our borders. Rights always depend on where you are standing.
Follow the Money, Not the Pig
Coggin warns that Proposition 12 will destroy small family farms and drive consolidation. He has the cause backwards. The real force wiping out independent hog farmers is the meatpacking monopoly. Four companies control roughly 70% of U.S. pork processing and 85% of beef processing (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2022). When a farmer has only one or two buyers, those buyers dictate prices, contract terms, and housing standards. Independent producers have been squeezed for decades by vertical integration and opaque pricing, not by animal welfare rules requiring a pig to have space to turn around.
Coggin says Kentuckians want “a resilient economy made up of many small- to medium-sized businesses.” He is right about that. But Proposition 12 is not what is crushing those businesses. Smithfield, Tyson, and JBS are. Smithfield already complies with California’s standards. The small farmer trying to sell a few hundred hogs is not the one complaining about Prop 12. The complaint is coming from an industry lobby that wants one cheap national standard so it does not have to track which pigs go where.
The Bottom Line
Kentucky has real problems. Rural hospitals are closing, overdose deaths are devastating communities, and broadband still does not reach half the counties that need it. California did not cause those problems, and a California ballot initiative about pig cages will not fix them.
Will Coggin is not writing about Kentucky. He is running a national PR campaign for undisclosed meat industry donors, using the same Mad Libs column in a dozen states, hoping one of them will panic Congress into overriding a voter-approved law. Kentuckians deserve better than copy-paste propaganda. We deserve arguments that actually match the facts on the ground, not the talking points in a lobbyist’s brief.
If you want to see what a Berman and Company press release looks like after it gets a byline and a Kentucky dateline, read the original Mad Lib here: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2026/06/11/california-proposition-12-kentucky-farm-bill-farmers-senate-rand-paul/90278223007/
Works Cited
American Veterinary Medical Association. (2024, May 20). [Letter to House Committee on Agriculture]. National Pork Producers Council. https://nppc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AVMA.2024FBSupportLetter.pdf
Bienkowski, B. (2026, June 10). Another industry-led campaign targets California’s animal welfare law. The New Lede. https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/06/california-proposition-12-fight-cafos-farm-bill/
Center for Organizational Research and Education. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 28, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Organizational_Research_and_Education
Coggin, W. (2026, June 11). California is imposing its restrictive law on KY farmers. The Courier-Journal. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2026/06/11/california-proposition-12-kentucky-farm-bill-farmers-senate-rand-paul/90278223007/
Feenstra, R. (2026, March 11). My weekly column: Ending the harmful Prop 12 mandate. U.S. House of Representatives. https://feenstra.house.gov/media/my-weekly-column/my-weekly-column-ending-harmful-prop-12-mandate
Lammers, P. J., Honeyman, M. S., Kliebenstein, J. B., & Harmon, J. D. (2007). Impact of gestation housing system on weaned pig production cost. Applied Engineering in Agriculture, 24(2). https://doi.org/10.13031/2013.24264
McCracken, J., & Felder, B. (2024, March 11). With California’s Prop 12 now law, pork producers adapt while lobbying groups continue to fight. Missouri Independent. https://missouriindependent.com/2024/03/11/with-californias-prop-12-now-law-pork-producers-adapt-while-lobbying-groups-continue-to-fight/
National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 598 U.S. ___ (2023). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-468_5if6.pdf
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. (2026, April 30). Roll call 154, Bill Number: H.R. 7567. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2026154
Prop 12 fix: Trump, Rollins, Vilsack, Vaden and more back NPPC. (2026, April 24). National Hog Farmer. https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/farming-business-management/prop-12-fix-trump-rollins-vilsack-vaden-and-more-back-nppc
U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2022). Competition and meat supply chain investments. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Competition-RFI-Anecdotes-010322.pdf