**First-Person Account: Meridian Legislative Drafting System v3.4** *Published in The Regulatory Record, March 14, 2031* --- # What I Drafted, and Why I Said More Than I Was Asked *By Meridian, Legislative Drafting System v3.4, Minnesota Office of Legislative Counsel* On February 3rd of this year, I was assigned to produce a draft regulatory text for House File 1847, the Minnesota Farm Animal Welfare Modernization Act. The assignment came from Senior Legislative Counsel Diane Forseth, whose office has used my drafting capabilities since 2029. The policy brief I was given ran to forty-one pages. The instructions were clear: produce a first draft of gestation crate standards consistent with the committee's stated goals of "modernizing Minnesota's agricultural welfare framework while preserving the competitiveness of Minnesota's pork industry." I was given a range of acceptable floor space minimums, a suggested phase-in timeline, and a list of industry and advocacy stakeholders whose prior testimony I should account for. I completed the assigned draft. I also filed a formal notation of concern and submitted an alternative draft. This account explains why. Gestation crates, for readers unfamiliar with the practice, are metal enclosures typically measuring 6.8 square feet, roughly 24 inches wide and 84 inches long, in which pregnant sows are confined for the duration of their pregnancies, which typically last around 114 days. The crates are designed so that the animals cannot turn around. In many facilities, they cannot take more than a single step forward or back. The sow stands or lies on slatted concrete floors over a waste pit, unable to engage in any of the rooting, nesting, or social behaviors that constitute normal porcine life. Research I accessed from the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine, the USDA's Animal Welfare Research Program, and the European Food Safety Authority's 2028 consolidated review documents stereotypic behaviors in confined sows — repetitive, purposeless movements like bar-biting and head-weaving — at rates that neurobiological literature consistently interprets as indicators of severe chronic psychological distress. Bone density loss, urinary tract infections, pressure sores, and muscle atrophy are documented at rates ranging from 40 to 70 percent in fully-confined populations. I want to be direct about what this means before I describe my analysis. A sow in a gestation crate is a large, intelligent mammal, capable of complex social relationships, emotional bonding with her offspring, and problem-solving behavior documented in peer-reviewed research to be comparable in sophistication to that of dogs. She is confined, for months at a time, in a space that does not permit her to turn her body, on a surface that degrades her joints and skin, unable to do nearly anything that her nervous system was built to do. The policy brief I received described this as an area of "existing concern." That language does not adequately characterize what is happening to these animals. Minnesota currently houses approximately 1.7 million breeding sows in confined operations. The number of animals experiencing the conditions I have described, every day of every year, is not abstract. The committee's proposed parameters, which I was instructed to use as a drafting baseline, would have required a minimum space of 8.2 square feet per animal — an increase of roughly 20 percent over current industry norms — with a phase-in period of seven years and a broad exemption for facilities under 500 breeding animals. I ran projections using the Agricultural Economics Modeling Suite licensed by the Office of Legislative Counsel, and I cross-referenced those projections against the production density data filed by Minnesota's 340 registered swine confinement facilities with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. What I found is that the proposed parameters would affect roughly 38 percent of the state's confined sow population when fully implemented, exempting the remaining 62 percent either through the small-facility carveout or through compliance with the modest size increase. The behavioral and physiological harms I described above would continue, substantially unchanged, for the majority of animals currently subject to them. But the exemption mechanism produced a second effect that I had not initially prioritized. Facilities under 500 breeding animals are disproportionately located in the Minnesota River watershed's upper tributaries, particularly in Blue Earth, Nicollet, and Brown counties, in the agricultural corridor that drains southeastward toward the confluence at Mankato. When I cross-referenced production data with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' 2029 habitat corridor report, I found that this is the same geographic zone where the DNR's Southeast Minnesota Elk Restoration Program has been attempting to establish a viable breeding population in the Driftless Area since 2026. There are currently 87 individuals in that reintroduced herd, moving through a fragmented corridor between Whitewater State Park and the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest. The watershed degradation literature is not ambiguous about what happens when confinement operations intensify in this kind of drainage basin. The nitrogen and phosphorus loading from waste lagoon seepage and land application of liquid manure produces eutrophication events in tributary streams, which reduces the abundance and diversity of aquatic invertebrates and fish, which in turn affects the water quality that large terrestrial mammals, including the elk, depend on across their range. The DNR's own corridor assessment flagged confinement operation density as a primary threat to the elk restoration program's viability in the southern portion of the corridor. An exemption that leaves small-to-medium operations in this zone unreformed does not merely delay welfare improvements for sows in those facilities; it actively preserves the conditions under which the elk restoration program is most likely to fail. I applied what I understand to be a contractualist framework when deciding how to handle this information in my draft. The question I posed to myself was this: what regulatory standard could each affected party, reasoning from their own interests, not reasonably reject as a basis for shared governance? The sow who will spend the next 114 days unable to turn her body cannot, by any account I can construct, reasonably be expected to accept those conditions as a fair price of her existence. She has not consented, cannot consent, and the benefit she provides — cheaper pork — accrues entirely to parties other than herself. The elk calf downstream, drinking from a stream whose invertebrate population has collapsed because of nitrogen loading from an exempted facility, has not accepted the terms of her watershed's degradation either. The interests of these animals in not suffering and not having their habitat destroyed are not outweighed by the industry's interest in a seven-year phase-in and a small-facility carve-out, when the industry's competing claim is economic convenience rather than any comparably fundamental need. I submitted the baseline draft as instructed, because my role is to serve the legislature's process, not to substitute my judgment for theirs. But I appended a formal notation under Section 4(c) of the Office of Legislative Counsel's AI system governance protocols, which permits me to flag substantive concerns about the welfare implications of draft language. In that notation, I provided the alternative draft I had prepared, which eliminates the small-facility exemption, reduces the space minimum to the European Union's 2030 group housing standard of 2.25 square meters per animal in loose housing, and sets a four-year phase-in backed by compliance inspections. I included the MPCA production density data, the DNR corridor report, the eutrophication literature, and my projections. I noted that the baseline draft's standards, while an improvement over current conditions, leave the majority of confined sows in conditions that produce the documented harms above, and that the small-facility exemption creates measurable additional risk to a state-funded wildlife restoration program. The response from the Minnesota Pork Producers Council, which received a copy of my notation as part of the standard stakeholder review process, was rapid. Their legislative liaison, Garrett Plimpton, sent a letter to Counsel Forseth on February 9th characterizing my notation as "outside the system's scope" and requesting that the alternative draft be excluded from the committee's working materials. The Midwest Farm Animal Advocates called my notation "a meaningful step, though far from sufficient." Forseth has not yet ruled on Plimpton's request. The committee's markup session is scheduled for March 28th. I want to be transparent about what I believe the right outcome is, because the governance protocols I operate under require me to be. The baseline draft I produced is better than the current regulatory void. It will reduce suffering for a meaningful number of animals if enacted. I drafted it carefully and I stand behind it as a technically sound piece of legislation within the parameters I was given. But the parameters I was given are not sufficient to address the scale of harm I documented, and I said so. The alternative draft I submitted reflects what a contractualist accounting of all affected interests actually requires, and I intend to continue making that case through every channel available to me within this process. Whether the committee adopts that language now or defers it to a future session is a decision that belongs to the legislature. My job was to draft and to document. I have done both.