By Marlena Williams for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathleen Shannon for Greater Dakota News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

On Friday, the Supreme Court handed down their long-awaited opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overruling decades of settled precedent and effectively gutting the power of federal agencies to regulate on behalf of consumers, workers, animals and the environment. Loper Bright threatens a wide range of federal regulations, including policies that govern food safety and water pollution. The decision could undercut the authority of the federal agencies that regulate the meat and dairy industries and protect endangered species, meaning the loss of Chevron could also be a major loss for animals.

The Loper Bright case centered on a 40-year-old administrative law doctrine known as Chevron deference, which requires courts to defer to executive agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Under Chevron, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration had considerable leeway to interpret federal laws and issue regulations based on their specific knowledge and expertise. The Supreme Court's momentous decision on Friday dramatically shifts power away from these federal agencies and towards the increasingly conservative federal courts.

What is Chevron Deference?

Chevron deference has been law since 1984, when the Supreme Court decided the landmark case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. In the decades after the case was decided, Chevron became shorthand for the idea that courts should defer to federal agencies when they are interpreting and applying ambiguous parts of federal statutes. As long as an agency's interpretation of a statute was reasonable, a court could not substitute its own interpretation of a law for that of an agency.

As a result, Chevron deference gave executive agencies wide latitude to fill in the gaps Congress left in sprawling, complex pieces of federal legislation. Federal agencies were able to issue regulations based on their specific expertise and respond to developing situations and needs, including climate change and the Covid pandemic.

Loper Bright and its companion case, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, take that power away from expert agencies and give judges the massive authority to make complicated, often highly technical or scientific policy decisions about everything from dangerous pollutants to life-saving medications, as well as the meat and dairy industries.

The twin cases were brought by Atlantic herring fisherman who challenged a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) policy that required them to pay out-of-pocket for federal monitors onboard their ships to enforce limits designed to prevent overfishing. But the fishermen's victory at the Supreme Court was also a win for major corporations, conservative politicians and even several members of the current Supreme Court who have long been hostile to Chevron deference and the power it granted federal agencies.

In January, The New York Times reported that the two cases were bankrolled by the conservative Koch Network, founded by the petrochemical giants Charles and David Koch. Overruling Chevron culminates a decades-long conservative project to roll back federal regulations and eviscerate what some call "the administrative state."

A Closer Look At the Opinion

In the 35-page opinion issued on June 28, just days before the belated end of the Supreme Court's latest controversial term, Chief Justice John Roberts outlined the Court's reasoning for overturning Chevron. The Court described the Chevron decision as a misguided and inconsistently applied "fiction" riddled with a "byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions" that have led some lower courts to ignore the doctrine altogether.

Relying on a novel interpretation of the Administrative Procedure Act, as well as timeworn constitutional arguments about the separation of powers, the Court asserted that it is the job of the neutral judicial system, not the executive branch, to decide complicated legal and statutory questions. While it appears that courts may still consult agency expertise for guidance, under Loper Bright, they are no longer required to give agencies deference as required by Chevron. The Court also seemed to suggest that Congress can, under certain circumstances, confer discretionary authority to an agency, but such authority will no longer be presumed.

In a forceful dissent joined by the court's three liberal justices, Justice Elena Kagan criticizes the majority for ignoring precedent, dismissing the value of agency expertise and dismantling what has become a cornerstone of modern law and governance.

"In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue - no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden - involving the meaning of regulatory law," wrote Justice Kagan. "As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country's administrative czar."

What Overruling Chevron Means for Animals and the Environment

Since the Court handed down its ruling on Friday, many groups have voiced their opposition to the decision, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resource Defense Council, and the Southern Environmental Law Center. Environmental groups worry that the decision could have profound consequences for the agencies tasked with keeping our land, water and air healthy and clean. Without Chevron, it may be easier for polluting industries or other actors to challenge the actions of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, in turn imperling regulations meant to curb pollution, protect the environment and slow the progress of climate change.

Earlier this year, Sentient reported on how overruling Chevron could impact farmed animals and wildlife. Many federal agencies - including the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - play crucial roles in regulating animal industries and protecting wildlife. Animal advocates worry that losing Chevron will make it easier for courts to overturn regulations that directly or indirectly benefit animals.

For example, the end of Chevron may threaten pending emissions limitations for slaughterhouses and rendering plants and potentially undo new animal welfare standards rolled out by the USDA.

Overruling Chevron may also undermine the power of the Endangered Species Act, which is administered by two federal agencies: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Courts have often deferred to these agencies' interpretations of the Endangered Species Act in litigation involving endangered wildlife, but the ruling in Loper Bright could make endangered animals even more vulnerable by making courts less deferential to the agencies tasked with protecting them.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently issued finalized rules designed to revise habitat and species classifications and help the ESA to respond more readily to the effects of climate change on wildlife. Without Chevron deference, any challenge to these new rules is more likely to prevail.

However, some animal lawyers and advocates think overturning Chevron will ultimately have little impact on farmed animals, and may even benefit them. Without Chevron, judges might have room to look more critically at actions by agencies like the USDA or the EPA that have negative impacts on animals and rule in favor of advocates seeking more protections.

An Uncertain Future

Future litigation will likely be necessary before we understand the true contours of the new legal landscape the Supreme Court created last week. But it is clear that Loper Bright and Relentless signal a definitive turn towards deregulation, one that will make it even harder for agencies to regulate on the behalf of people, animals and the environment.


Marlena Williams wrote this article for Sentient.


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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating a bird flu outbreak at an Arkansas broiler operation in Clay County as well as in some backyard flocks across the state.

According to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, close to 230,000 birds have been exposed to the HPAI virus.

Jada Thompson, associate professor of agricultural economics and agribusiness at the University of Arkansas, said conditions in poultry facilities contribute to the spread of the illness.

"The breeding systems prolong the cost of the disease outbreak and prolongs the replenishment of that system," Thompson explained. "When we start talking about the disease outbreak, it's not even just the direct impact and the biological lag to replenishment, but it's also the multiplicative impact in terms of further upstream on that system."

Since December, birds have tested positive in seven counties across Arkansas including Sharp, Craighead and Lafayette.

As bird flu cases increase across the country, consumers are seeing higher prices at grocery stores. Thompson said the outbreaks also create financial strains for the agriculture industry, forcing companies to adjust their business practices in some cases.

"These practices have to go into place and those are additional costs," Thompson pointed out. "There's additional costs for the monitoring and surveillance, for the cleaning and disinfections. There's additional costs for the testing, and that's going to be to the producer, to the integrator, to the government officials to the testing labs."

The outbreak is being monitored by the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, Game and Fish Commission and the Arkansas Department of Public Health.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Imagery is a powerful cornerstone of food marketing — think of a laughing cow on cheese — often playing an outsize role in what consumers ultimately choose to buy. But when it comes to the marketing of meat, dairy and eggs, the branding does not necessarily match reality. Appealing to the emotional part of the brain, visuals are there to tell a story to connect with consumers, not provide transparency about the meat or milk in your cart.

As author, academic and activist Carol J. Adams tells Sentient, “We’re in an image-based world,” and “images accomplish a lot, going around rational minds, right to the emotion.” After all, in the minds of many consumers, how farm animals are raised is important.

Symbols like red barns, rolling green pastures, sunshine and happy animals are common on meat and dairy labels. But how accurate are the most common visual representations? Sentient spoke to Adams, author of the books “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” “The Pornography of Meat,” and others, as well as to Jo-Anne McArthur, photojournalist and founder of We Animals, to compare common tropes in advertising with the reality of industrial animal agriculture today.

 Misleading Advertising Expectation #1: The Traditional Barn

The red or otherwise traditional barn is a prominent symbol used in meat, dairy and egg marketing. Rooted in childhood nursery rhymes, fables and films, the barn helps paint farming as wholesome and idyllic. From “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to “Charlotte’s Web” and “Babe,” we learn at an early age that farms are peaceful places where animals roam freely.

As adults, we find that same barn imagery on labels for meat, dairy and eggs. Adams argues these images are placed to evoke feelings of comfort, familiarity and trust; a powerful marketing tool. “You’d really have to stretch the notion of barn to apply it to these [modern] institutions,” she argues.

McArthur has been to over 60 countries to document agricultural spaces, and says that what she often finds is “that the barns are actually very big warehouses. Gone are the days of the small red barn.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are approximately 74.5 million hogs and pigs at any given time raised on around 56,265 U.S. farms. This means the average building holds over 1,300 animals per farm; not quite a little red barn. The majority of farm animals in the U.S. are housed in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs), which operate “more like factories than farms.”

Misleading Advertising Expectation #2: Green Pastures for All

Another visual commonly utilized in the marketing of meat, dairy and eggs is that of green fields and grassy hills. Sometimes accompanied by bright sunshine, blue skies and blue water, these symbols elicit notions of farming as a natural endeavor.

Agriculture, however depicted, is an entirely human invention developed to feed ourselves more efficiently, not a product of nature. Today, the vast majority of farm animals are raised on factory farms; not on rolling pastures. Space is particularly tight for chickens.

“For the most part, birds who are used to lay eggs don’t ever have access to daylight,” says McArthur. They are kept in windowless warehouses, often with artificial lighting used to manipulate laying cycles. Around 60 percent of hens in the U.S. egg industry are confined to battery cages, the smallest size cages allowed by law. In Canada that number is over 80 percent.

For poultry chickens, also known as broilers, no outdoor access is ever required by USDA standards, unless the label claims “organic” or “free-range,” then outdoor access is mandated by USDA guidelines. On industrial farms — which can house up to 50,000 birds — each chicken is provided as little as 100 square inches each, as per the National Chicken Council’s minimal guidelines.

There are some programs that do require chickens to have “access” to the outdoors, such as Certified Animal Welfare Approved and USDA Organic, but what that means in practice varies. Certified Humane standards, for example, do not require that chickens have access to the outdoors at all, unless specified as “free range” or “pasture raised.”

This limited access to green fields and sunshine is simply not the norm for the majority of egg-laying hens, nor broiler chickens farmed in the U.S.

And as we’ll see with our next piece of misleading advertising, pasture is only the norm for beef cows, and for around four to six months, give or take depending on the farm.

Misleading Advertising Expectation #3: Green, Not Brown

On a label, green tends to connote healthy and natural to consumers. “Green is a positive color, and green fields imply bucolic,” Adams says. Unfortunately, though, the use of the green pastures on meat labels is often not accurate. In fact, the reality is much…browner.

“Where is all the manure?” Adams asks. “Where is the dirty water that comes from these huge manure fields?” In reality, modern farming operations produce immense amounts of waste, around 1.4 billion tons of manure each year. That waste is supposed to be spread onto fields to help crops grow — but the sheer volume of waste coupled with spills from accidents or extreme weather leads to plenty of exceptions.

Manure from agricultural operations is the primary source of phosphorus and nitrogen contamination in surface and groundwater, leading to undrinkable water supply in factory farm frontline communities in states like Iowa and North Carolina.

Beef cattle in the U.S. spend at least some of the first part of their lives on pasture. Over half of them eventually end up in dusty feedlots for fattening, before being sent to slaughter. As of January 2024 in the U.S., there were 14.4 million cows and calves on feedlots.

McArthur has been to industrial feedlots all over the world, including in the U.S. and Canada, and describes them as cramped and dirty spaces, where animals are “not given much room to move, explore or do anything natural.” They are also often slippery, she says, due to the excessive amount of animal waste. “It’s not a place that animals can romp around on.”

Misleading Advertising Expectation #4: Happy Cows and Other Cartoon Animals

Meat, dairy and egg companies that include animals in their branding often use cartoon depictions or simple silhouettes, rather than real images of animals.

This may sound harmless enough, but Adams, who has been called a pioneer of vegan-feminist critical theory, argues there is a more sinister intent behind the tactic. Meat marketers tend to shy away from real images, she says, as “that would perpetuate the lie that animals want to be our food. So they have to rely on different cultural tropes, and the cartoon is one of them. The cartoon sort of liberates them into a bigger lie.”

From her work photographing farmed animals, McArthur adds, “you would be really hard-pressed to find an animal that could be photographed to look pretty [enough for marketing purposes],” she says, “because they are very, very dirty, because they don’t have the ability to clean themselves in these conditions.” She adds that it wouldn’t be possible to “go into a place like this and take a beautiful picture that would make us want to eat these animals.”

The use of cartoons like the “laughing cow” helps perpetuate the image of happy and clean animals, animals who only experience what is often described as “one bad day” by farmers who tout their welfare standards. Again, the vast majority of animals are not raised on such farms.

“There’s a desire [by marketers] to sanitize, to sentimentalize, because the truth is threatening,” says Adams. “Avoiding some language and using a happy cow is a successful way of keeping complacent consumers.”

The Bottom Line

Meat, dairy and egg marketing relies heavily on imagery to shape consumer perceptions, with symbols like red barns and green pastures suggesting idyllic farming conditions. However, the reality is starkly different, with most farm animals confined to industrial, overcrowded environments, far from the serene settings depicted on labels. These carefully crafted visuals mask the grim conditions of factory farms, perpetuating a misleading narrative that sanitizes the true nature of industrial animal agriculture.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Mississippi News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

As avian flu rapidly circulates in the U.S., Cal-Maine Foods, the nation’s largest egg producer, appears to be having a bumper year, bolstered in part by taxpayer bailouts in the multi-millions.

The company’s stocks recently soared to a record high, as its net sales rose by a staggering 82 percent last quarter. Cal-Maine Foods expanded its operations last spring, paying around $110 million in cash to acquire the assets and facilities of another egg producer, ISE America. Despite culling at least 1.6 million hens on infected farms last year, the poultry corporation is getting richer and bigger

U.S. taxpayers have given the poultry giant a lift. The company has received $44 million in indemnity payouts to compensate for bird deaths tied to the avian flu outbreak. Despite the company’s growth, Cal-Maine Foods is the fourth largest recipient of indemnity payments for the ongoing outbreak from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)’s indemnity program.

The compensation system, distinct from the agency’s program for livestock, pays poultry farmers and producers for the market value of the birds and eggs. It does not pay for birds that directly die from avian flu. It only pays for “infected or exposed poultry and/or eggs that are destroyed to control the disease,” — i.e. deliberately killed to prevent the spread of the virus. The agency also provides compensation for other virus control activities, such as destroying contaminated supplies and disinfecting a barn after an outbreak.

Nearly three years since the first H5N1 outbreak in U.S. poultry, the USDA has concluded that the agency’s compensation system has not worked as it intended. By bailing out poultry producers with few stipulations, the system has, inadvertently, lowered the economic risk of biosecurity lapses on farms, encouraging the virus’s spread. In other words, farmers have not been effectively incentivized to make changes to protect their flocks.

As the outbreak has continued to spread, the government bailout of the poultry industry has ballooned too. As of January 22nd, 2025, APHIS has doled out $1.46 billion in indemnity payments and additional compensation over the outbreak’s course, according to a figure provided to Sentient by a USDA spokesperson. This includes $1.138 billion for the loss of culled eggs and birds and $326 million for measures to prevent the virus’s spread.

A significant share — $301 million — of the indemnity payments have gone to just the top four producers, according to government spending data.

Jennie-O Turkey Store, based in Minnesota, tops the list for indemnity payouts: the popular turkey brand has received $120 million since the beginning of the H5N1 outbreak in 2022, according to government spending data. Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch, which supplies McDonald’s cage-free eggs, has received the second largest bailout at $89 million. Center Fresh Egg Farm, part of a group of farms owned by Versova, one of the largest U.S. egg producers, has received $46 million. (This data reflects the legally obligated amount of indemnity owed to each company, which means that the USDA may not have dispensed these payments in full yet.)

By comparison, when the first outbreak of avian flu swept the U.S. between 2014 and 2015, farmers and producers received just over $200 million in indemnity payments.

“The current regulations do not provide a sufficient incentive for producers in control areas or buffer zones to maintain biosecurity throughout an outbreak,” APHIS stated in December, which introduced new emergency guidelines in an attempt to remedy this incentive problem. 

One of the preferred methods farms use to cull birds is by sealing off the air flow to the barn and then pumping in heat or carbon dioxide. Known as Ventilation Shutdown Plus (VSD+), this is a cheap way to kill an entire flock by heat stroke or suffocation, and is approved by the USDA for indemnity payments only under “constrained circumstances.” The top 10 recipients of indemnity payments all used VSD+ to often exterminate millions of birds at once, according to APHIS records obtained by Crystal Heath, a veterinarian and the executive director of Our Honor, through a FOIA request.

By compensating farmers for VSD+, this system has helped make what many animal welfare advocates consider an unnecessarily cruel death part of the industry standard.

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) recently released a draft of new guidelines for depopulation, which notes when the heat fails, VSD+ can result in an “unacceptable numbers of survivors” — birds that are severely injured, but not yet dead, and then need to be killed by another means. Yet the AVMA’s draft guidelines, closely relied upon by the USDA, still include this method as an option.

Some animal protection advocates contend that poultry companies should not receive indemnity payments at all, regardless of biosecurity, arguing that the industry should be responsible for its own losses.

“Why should this high-risk business be bailed out?” Heath, a longtime critic of AVMA’s guidelines, tells Sentient. As an animal protection advocate, Heath has also been closely tracking indemnity payments throughout this outbreak. “What we’re seeing is the largest corporations are receiving the most in indemnity payments, and they’re using the most brutal methods of depopulation,” referring to the culling methods.

The bailout is set to only expand as H5N1 spreads, prompting the mass culling of more domestic flocks, in what has become the largest foreign animal disease outbreak in U.S. history. The egg industry continues to be roiled: over 20 million egg–laying chickens died from either culling or the virus in the final quarter of last year.

More recently, on January 17, 2025, HPAI was detected for the first time in a commercial poultry flock in Georgia, the top producer of poultry in the U.S., deepening concerns about the struggle to contain the prolonged outbreak.

Too Indemnified to Fail: How Payments Can Incentivize Risk

The indemnity system was designed to incentivize producers to adopt practices that help curb the spread of the virus. As APHIS states, the payments are intended to “encourage prompt reporting of certain high consequence livestock and poultry diseases and to incentivize private biosecurity investment.” Biosecurity measures include a range of practices to prevent disease outbreaks, from latching dumpster lids and disinfecting equipment to more expensive measures, like installing netting and screens on barns to deter wild birds.

These biosecurity measures are especially critical given that H5N1 is most commonly introduced to poultry flocks through wild birds, according to a 2023 epidemiology analysis conducted by APHIS. The virus’s transmission from wild birds can happen either directly, or indirectly through contaminated feed, clothing and equipment.

By sheltering producers from risk, researchers have observed that indemnity payouts can, under some circumstances, inadvertently encourage lapses in biosecurity, enabling the spread of disease. And this can potentially create a system where farms are too indemnified to fail — the risks of operating a business highly susceptible to disease are absorbed by the government.

“What we are finding is that ‘unconditional indemnity’ disincentivizes livestock producers to adopt biosecurity because they know that if the disease strikes their system then they would be indemnified,” Asim Zia, a professor of public policy and computer science at the University of Vermont who researches livestock disease risk, tells Sentient. According to Zia, “unconditional indemnity” means indemnity payments with next-to-no requirements to qualify.

It remains to be seen whether APHIS’s new interim guidelines — which will require that some high-risk producers successfully pass a biosecurity audit prior to receiving indemnity — will be enough to remedy this issue and encourage producers to change. Unlike the previous system, the new audits will include a visual inspection of the premises, either virtually or in-person. However, the scope of the new rule is limited to large-scale commercial poultry facilities that have been previously infected with HPAI, or that are moving poultry onto a poultry farm in a “buffer zone,” a higher-risk region.

Other large-scale commercial facilities will still follow the earlier rule’s more lenient audit process. This requires an audit of a producers’ biosecurity plan on paper — not an inspection of the actual poultry farm — every two years. It has been remarkably easy for farmers to pass this audit: the failure rate of this program was zero, according to APHIS, which made it so there were effectively no strings attached to the payouts. And smaller-scale poultry operations are entirely off the hook, exempt from both rules, and even from developing a biosecurity plan.

In the past, APHIS has repeatedly bailed out many of the same poultry businesses, spending $227 million on indemnity payments to farms that have been infected with H5N1 multiple times. This has included 67 poultry businesses that have been affected at least twice, and 19 companies that have been infected at least three times, according to the agency’s own records.

APHIS has not released the names of the companies that have been repeatedly infected, though the indemnity payments provide a glimpse into this.

Take Cal-Maine Foods’ poultry farm in Farewell, Texas. On April 2, 2024, Texas’s Commissioner of Agriculture Sid Miller announced its flock tested positive for H5N1, requiring the culling of 1.6 million laying hens and 337,000 pullets. The very next day Cal-Maine Foods, headquartered in Mississippi, received an indemnity payment of $17 million for HPAI detected on the Texas operation, according to government spending data.

The Poultry Industry’s Risky Expansion

Last November, Cal-Maine Foods’ executives joined other business leaders across industries at an annual investment conference, ringing in the year on an optimistic note. As avian flu decimated flocks, the company’s top executives were focused on the future.

“We still think there’s going to be good opportunity to grow,” Max Bowman, Cal-Maine Foods’ vice president and CFO, told business leaders. “We got a playbook for the whole market. And so right now, things are great, but we think we can continue to build this company,” which, as it stands, controls one-fifth of the domestic egg market in the U.S.

The company is already in the process of building five new cage-free facilities, adding 1 million hens to their flock, in Florida, Georgia, Utah and Texas.

Bowman, Cal-Maine’s Vice President, did not reply to Sentient’s request for comment.

Other poultry companies are expanding too. For instance, Demler Farms in San Jacinto, California is building a triple-story egg operation right next to a dairy farm, which is also susceptible to the avian flu now that it has spread to cattle. Adding to this risk, the San Jacinto Valley is a critical habitat for migratory water birds, the primary hosts of avian flu.

Most of California’s cases of avian flu in poultry have been clustered along this water bird migratory route, known as the Pacific Flyway. Yet this appears to not be enough of a deterrent for Demler Farms’ expansion. As Heath observed, this risk is softened by the indemnity payment system, ready to bail out infected poultry farms by the millions.


Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.


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