HARDEE COUNTY, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Wednesday in Hardee County, where he signed sweeping agriculture bill meant in part to ban the sale of lab-grown meat in the state.
Surrounded by cattle ranchers at the Hardee County Cattleman’s Arena near Wauchula, the governor signed SB 1084 — “Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services” — calling the legislation necessary protection against what he claimed were forces determined to “eliminate meat production in the United States,” comparing said forces to historic agricultural threats such as storms and citrus greening.
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“Those are, though, natural disasters. Those are acts of God. What we’re protecting here is the industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants to finger agriculture as the problem, that views things like raising cattle as destroying our climate,” DeSantis said.
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The governor pinned “elites” as responsible for the perceived threats to Florida’s agriculture industry, more pointedly accusing the World Economic Forum as a source of that rhetoric, stating later in the conference that the bill-signing was not necessarily in response to actions “they” were already making, but as a way “to think forward and head off threats before they even come.”
“These will be people who will lecture the rest of us about things like global warming. They will say that, you know, you can’t drive an internal combustion engine vehicle, they’ll say that agriculture is bad. Meanwhile, they’re flying to Davos in their private jets and they’re living like they would ever want to live,” DeSantis said. “This is really a vision of imposing restrictions on freedoms for everyday people while these elites are effectively pulling the strings, calling the shots and doing whatever the hell they want to do in their own lives.”
In addition to prohibiting the sale of lab-grown meat in Florida, SB 1084 — which goes into effect July 1 — will also do the following, among its 81 pages of changes:
- Preempts regulation of electric vehicle charging stations to the state; prohibits local governmental entities from enacting or enforcing such regulations.
- Authorizes Class “G” licensees to qualify for multiple calibers of firearms in one requalification class under certain circumstances.
- Deletes definition of the term “museum” and renames the Florida Agricultural Museum as the Florida Agricultural Legacy Learning Center.
- Provides that a student’s participation in a 4-H or Future Farmers of America activity is an excused absence from school.
While at the news conference, DeSantis also presented a check for $6 million to Hardee County — a county with a population of some 25,327 people, according to the 2020 Decennial Census — which he said was money from the Florida Job Growth Grant Fund that the county requested for the development of an industrial site.
Watch the news conference again in the video player below:
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