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Senate committee moves bill allowing on‑farm composting of routine livestock mortalities with BMPs and notification requirements
Summary
AB 411 would permit ranchers to compost routine livestock carcasses on their farms under CDFA-developed best management practices and notification to local enforcement agencies. Supporters cited UC research showing safe composting; renderers and labor unions opposed unless amendments add enforceable oversight, caps and training requirements.
Assemblymember Pappin presented AB 411 to the Senate Agriculture Committee, saying the bill would allow ranchers to compost routine livestock mortalities on-farm as an alternative to burial, rendering or bone piles.
Laura Snell, a University of California Cooperative Extension livestock and natural resources advisor in Modoc County, described multi-year research conducted under exemptions that monitored over 30 composting cycles in two Northern California locations. Snell said their research showed whole-carcass composting could be completed safely in 90 days (45 days for butcher waste), produced a cured compost product that “does not accumulate heavy metals or pathogens,” and reduced predator interactions compared with bone piles.
Kirk Wilbur of the California Cattlemen’s Association, a co-sponsor, said the bill includes a prohibition on composting carcasses exposed to CDFA’s list of reportable infectious diseases and that it requires notification to local enforcement agencies. Wilbur said 49 other states allow mortality composting and that CDFA has previously authorized composting in emergency scenarios.
Opponents included Teamsters Local 150 and Sacramento Rendering Company, which said rendering plants use time-and-temperature processing and routine testing to protect animal and human health and ensure traceability; they urged amendments to add training, oversight, enforcement and limits on on-farm composting. Sacamento Rendering described statewide servicing areas that can span long distances and argued the bill’s best-management-practice approach lacks an enforceable oversight mechanism.
The author said she had proposed an amendment to cap the number of carcasses that could be composted at one time and said she had received industry proposals, including threshold approaches keyed to herd size (for example a proposed 700-head cap), and that she would continue to review and negotiate those amendments.
The committee voted to pass AB 411 to the Environmental Quality Committee; the recorded vote was favorable and the bill was reported out of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
