A little-known law could upend the dairy industry

an aerial view of tightly-contained calves in dark red sits beneath a vintage illustration of a calf

This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.

Deep-blue, regulation-happy California is not usually imagined as factory farm country. But the state leads the US in agricultural output, and it is, by a wide margin, America’s top producer of dairy, one of the most brutal sectors in our food system. And it turns out that one of the most foundational, most disturbing practices found in modern dairy farming may already be illegal under a California animal cruelty law — but state officials have shown little inclination to look into it.

At any given time, 9 to 10 million dairy cows populate farms across the US, and California is home to 1.7 million of them, the vast majority of whom are raised on mega dairies. Because cows, like other mammals, must give birth to produce milk, dairy farming is organized around continuous cycles of pregnancy, birth, and lactation. Dairy cows typically give birth around once a year; their calves are then promptly taken from them. Depending on their sex, the calves will eventually join a milking herd or be raised for beef.

But whatever their ultimate market destination, the overwhelming majority of baby cows born in the dairy industry, in California and nationwide, spend their first few months of life housed alone, in individual crates or enclosures. Many of them look like this:

Earlier this year, I wrote at length about that practice. These wooden crates provide each calf about 13 square feet of living space, less than one-tenth the size of a typical parking spot. “We’re talking roughly the size of a coffin,” Vanessa Shakib, a lawyer and co-founder of the Los Angeles-area nonprofit Advancing Law for Animals, told me. Confining calves in this manner is not dissimilar to the use of gestation crates in the pork industry — tiny metal enclosures where pigs barely have room to move. Gestation crates have sparked intense national controversy that’s reached the halls of Congress and the US Supreme Court. But the extreme confinement of dairy calves has not received anywhere close to as much legal and political scrutiny.

In California, there’s an obvious legal problem with calf crates. The state has a plain-English law, Section 597t of its criminal code, that mandates that confined animals be provided an “adequate exercise area.” Though it doesn’t define what constitutes such an area, Shakib and other farm animal advocates argue that it strains credulity to believe the minuscule, barren crates provide one. The practice “is squarely at odds with the plain meaning of the words,” Shakib said.

But California has never enforced that law against calf crates in the state’s powerful dairy industry, where millions of newborn calves have been kept in extreme confinement (nor, apparently, has the law been enforced against any factory farm). It’s a prime example of agricultural exceptionalism — the doctrine running through American legal and political culture, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella has written, that effectively absolves agribusiness from having to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Shakib and her organization are now hoping to change that.

They’re leading a lawsuit against Hettinga Dairy, a Southern California farm that has kept thousands of calves in individual crates, alleging that it’s violating Section 597t. If the case succeeds, it could create a blueprint for similar challenges statewide, and even spark a broader reckoning within America’s dairy industry.

The case that could transform how dairy calves are treated

Advancing Law for Animals just filed suit on behalf of the Caru Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a California animal protection nonprofit seeking a court ruling that the calf crates violate state law. The case names Hettinga Dairy and related defendants in connection with a San Jacinto, California, facility that specializes in raising calves. The most recent available records from California’s State Water Resources Control Board report the farm’s animal population as 4,200 calves.

Such facilities, often known as “calf ranches” or “calf nurseries,” have become increasingly central to the US dairy business — as we wrote earlier this year, they “raise calves on dairy farms’ behalf during the fragile infant stage in which they’re too young to bring in any revenue.”

Caru SPCA (which is formerly known as the Animal Legal Defense Fund Cruelty Prevention Unit) flew drone cameras over the Hettinga facility earlier this year to document the calf housing there, filming the small wooden crates that are common in California and the Southwest, typically providing less than 15 square feet of space per calf. Many dairy farms and calf ranches use a different, plastic hutch design that provides more space, but the smaller wooden hutches remain widespread.

Calves typically spend about two months in these hutches before being moved into larger group pens; the lawsuit alleges that Hettinga keeps them in crates for around nine weeks.

Aerial view of a long row of outdoor calf hutches with partial roofs, where black-and-white dairy calves are confined in individual pens. Feed buckets line the front of the enclosures, which are surrounded by bare, dry ground.

“Calves are trapped for months, even in summer heat, unable to stretch their limbs or move freely,” the lawsuit alleges. Under 597t, “animals have a statutory right to minimal movement, and Defendants systematically violate that right daily, creating immense and ongoing suffering.”

That San Jacinto farm is part of a broader network of dairy farms and calf-raising facilities linked to the Hettingas, a prominent dairy family whose farms collectively confine thousands of calves and cows across California, according to state public records. Most consumers have never heard of Hettinga, nor of the hundreds of other industrial dairies and calf-raising farms across California that operate largely out of public view. But the Hettingas also have a presence on grocery store shelves: According to the brand’s website, the family also owns Sarah Farms, a mass-market milk label in the Southwestern US.

Vox emailed a list of questions about the allegations in the lawsuit to multiple contacts associated with Hettinga businesses. An employee at GH Processing, a Hettinga family-associated dairy plant in Arizona, confirmed receiving the email and said she would pass it on to colleagues in California. No one responded to Vox’s questions by publication time.

A representative from the California water board told Vox that the 2024 annual report for the San Jacinto calf facility identified Hein and Ellen Hettinga as the farm’s operators. But state regulators have not received the 2025 report, which was due in January 2026, and could not verify the facility’s current ownership. Hein Hettinga, who built the family’s dairy empire, died in 2023; Ellen, his wife, is one of the defendants named in the lawsuit.

Dairy industry trade groups often defend calf crates, arguing that they allow farmers to provide each animal with individualized care and reduce their exposure to pathogens. Whether or not that’s true is contested — some industry veterinarians endorse that view, while others maintain that it’s based on a narrow view of calves’ well-being and that properly managed social housing need not harm their physical health. Even within the industry, there’s growing acknowledgement that isolation is harmful to calves, and that it would be better for dairy farms to transition to a different system.

A 2023 assessment of calf welfare from the European Food Safety Authority — the EU agency that provides scientific guidance on animal welfare — found “no locomotor play behavior possible” for calves given a space allowance of about 16 square feet each. A calf in such confinement “is expected to spend most of its time lying down because no other activities can be performed,” the review states. To fully express natural behaviors like galloping, jumping, and kicking, it recommends that calves housed alone be allotted 318 square feet each, and calves housed in groups be allotted 215 square feet each, though it notes that even smaller increases in space could meaningfully improve their welfare.

Guidelines from Calf Care and Quality Assurance, a US industry-created animal care program, state that “individually housed calves have a harder time coping with changes in housing and diet and may have cognitive and developmental disadvantages, including poor learning skills and deficient social skills.” Temple Grandin, the famed livestock scientist at Colorado State University, has written that “calves should be raised with other calves, not in isolation.” They are, after all, intensely social herd animals.

Regardless of the industry’s opinion on the practice, though, 597t makes no exception for livestock industry standard practices, the way some states’ animal cruelty laws do. “It doesn’t matter whether this defendant or whether the dairy industry believes solitary confinement of baby animals serves a useful purpose,” Shakib said. “California law here is crystal clear — it requires an adequate exercise area. Industry custom or convenience does not erase that requirement.”

Wide aerial view of a large dairy calf facility, with hundreds of black-and-white calves housed in individual wooden pens arranged in long, tightly packed rows across a dirt lot. A yellow front-end loader and several workers are visible among the rows. Close-up aerial view of black-and-white dairy calves confined in individual wooden pens, with their heads protruding through slatted barriers above rows of feed buckets.

California’s animal cruelty double standard

The ubiquitous confinement of dairy calves in tiny crates remains poorly understood by the general public, and even, to some extent, within the animal protection movement. That is because, for many years, animal advocates focused their campaigning against extreme confinement in the dairy industry on veal, the notorious specialty meat made from male dairy calves.

Those efforts helped bring about California’s Proposition 12, a landmark law passed in 2018 that bans certain forms of extreme confinement, including tiny crates that used to be the norm in veal production. Any veal raised or sold in California must now come from calves allotted at least 43 square feet of living space each. But the overwhelming share of California’s dairy calves are not raised for veal and thus get no protection under Prop 12, even as many members of the public may assume the problem of extreme confinement of calves has been solved.

In the last few years, however, a small wave of animal advocates have been drawing attention to the continued plight of dairy calves. The animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) over the last year has documented and mapped calf confinement across California, including at Grimmius Cattle Company, the largest calf raiser in the state and the subject of Vox’s earlier reporting. This fall, DxE investigator Lewis Bernier obtained footage showing calves from a dairy farm that the group said supplies to Land O’Lakes being transported to Grimmius, where the newborn animals are raised in the same standard, approximately 13-square-foot wooden hutches. Land O’Lakes did not respond to requests for comment.

The crates aren’t the only problem

Beyond extreme confinement in crates, DxE’s investigations have surfaced allegations of overt abuse of calves — including animals being kicked, punched, and pulled by their ears and tails — at calf ranches and dairy farms throughout California.

Drone footage taken earlier this year at a dairy farm that DxE linked to Leprino Foods — a major cheese supplier that reportedly sells to Domino’s, Papa John’s, and Pizza Hut, among others — shows calves being kicked, pushed, pulled by their ears, and thrown to the ground. In one clip, a calf appears to be kicked in the face. One of DxE’s investigators followed a milk truck from that farm to a Leprino plant, the group said. Leprino Foods did not respond to requests for comment.

DxE has also captured drone footage of calf and dairy facilities that California records list as operated by members of the Hettinga family, separate from the one that is being sued by Advancing Law for Animals. At one of the calf ranches, in San Bernardino County, Robert Drummond, a member of DxE’s Los Angeles chapter, filmed handlers who appear to be whipping frightened calves and pulling them by their tails. Hitting calves and pulling them this way are both considered “unacceptable” handling practices by the industry’s own calf-raising guidelines. DxE reported those findings to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which did not provide comment for this story.

An annual report filed with the California water board identifies Gerben Hettinga as the operator of that farm, a representative from the agency told Vox. Vox attempted to reach Hettinga using the email addresses and phone number listed for him in state records but received no response.

Advancing Law for Animals’ lawsuit is not the first time animal advocates have accused California’s dairy industry of violating 597t. “There’s a long history of animal activists and organizations trying unsuccessfully to enforce this law,” Will Lowrey, founder and legal counsel at animal advocacy legal nonprofit Animal Partisan, told me in an email. His organization has also sought enforcement of 597t in the dairy industry.

DxE has sent criminal complaints about calf crates, citing 597t, to eight law enforcement agencies throughout California; the group says that none of them have taken enforcement action. In March, the sheriff’s office of Tulare County, in the heart of the Central Valley’s dairy industry, rejected one of these complaints and stated in its reply to DxE that calf confinement did not violate the law because “the facilities reviewed do not raise calves for veal production.” But 597t doesn’t exclusively apply to veal; it applies to all confined animals. The sheriff’s office may have confused it with Prop 12. The office did not respond to a request for comment.

DxE has also met with California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office about calf confinement, and office staff asked the group questions about its investigative findings, DxE director of communications Cassie King told me. Responding to Vox’s request for comment about whether 13-square-foot crates are permissible under 597t, the attorney general’s press office said, “we cannot provide a comment at this time.” DxE plans to rally outside Bonta’s office in Sacramento this week calling for enforcement of that law against Grimmius Cattle Company. The group submitted a packet of documents to the attorney general, including a statement from more than a dozen veterinarians about the animal welfare harms of small calf crates.

“The California dairy industry seems inclined to act like [597t] doesn’t exist and no law enforcement officer, prosecutor, or judge that I have come across seems inclined to enforce the law as written,” Lowrey wrote to me. “It’s hard to imagine that this is for any other reason than deference to the state agriculture industry.”

The law enforcement officials that have rejected these complaints haven’t explained how calf crates could satisfy 597t’s requirement for an adequate exercise area; they largely sidestep the question altogether. For non-livestock animals, meanwhile, California has enforced the law more readily. A state appeals court recently upheld 597t convictions against two people who had continuously kept German shepherds in kennels measuring 48 to 50 square feet. For hundreds of thousands of calves kept in cages one-quarter of that size, though, the protections offered by California’s animal cruelty laws have proven illusory.

Police and prosecutors have broad discretion to decline to pursue criminal complaints, but a lawsuit like Caru SPCA’s may be harder to brush aside. The question will now be addressed by a judge, and California’s dairy industry could finally face an on-the-merits ruling on whether these crates are legal. “At some point, I believe a judge will find that the law says what it says and will decide that a California dairy keeping calves in hutches [is] in violation of Penal Code 597t,” Lowrey wrote. “It’s just a matter of time and maybe—hopefully—Caru v. Hettinga is that case.”

It’s understandable that state officials may hesitate to enforce a law that could upend a linchpin of the dairy industry, whose products are consumed by nearly every American and woven into virtually every corner of our food system. But animal agriculture has a long history of warning that animal welfare regulations will devastate its business, only to adapt when regulation takes effect.

And although California has earned its reputation for overly burdensome regulation in other domains, giving newborn calves enough room to move hardly seems like an unreasonable imposition (especially considering that dairy farming makes up only a tiny share of the state’s massive economy). Freeing them from this form of solitary confinement would amount to one of the most consequential animal welfare advances in California’s history. And it need not require passing any new laws — the state merely needs to hold the dairy industry to a standard already in place.

Author: Source Author

Source: Vox.