[More Organic Food Labeling Debates. The big factory
farms are moving in it looks like. Rick. ]
'Organic' milk needs a pasture
Wed Mar 9, 6:45 AM ET
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By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
A decision in an obscure Department of Agriculture
committee has drawn a line in the mulch in the debate
over organic agriculture.
On one side of the divide are those who believe that
"organic" means small farms, often run by families. On
the other side are those who say the only way to
satisfy the nation's growing hunger for organic fruit,
vegetables and dairy products is by applying
industrial farming practices to organic production.
This time, the field of battle was milk and the cows
that make it. The question: To produce organic milk,
must the cows be allowed to graze in pastures much of
the year, or can they be confined to large feed lots?
The first round has gone to the grazers. Last week,
the National Organic Standards Board recommended to
the USDA that organic rules be revised to make it
clear that organic milk can come only from cows that
graze in pastures during the growing season.
"There are certain dairies where 10 months out of the
year the cows are confined and fed out of a trough,
and then two months of the year when they're just
about to give birth they're in the pasture," says Jim
Riddle, who chairs the standards board.
At the core, it's a question of whether organic is a
way of life or a means to an end. In the
back-to-the-land movement that began in the 1960s,
people who wanted organic food embraced an ethical
system. They shopped at tiny cooperative groceries,
and if the kale was wilted and the corn wormy, that
was OK.
Fast-forward: As baby boomers age and their children
start having children, they all want the healthiest
food they can get. But they also want to find organic
food at their local supermarkets and believe it should
be plentiful, available year-round and as pretty as
conventionally grown produce.
But "it's very difficult and expensive for small-scale
producers to produce the volume and consistency and
have the distribution that large-scale enterprises
need," says Michael Straus, who does marketing for
organic products. "These issues are philosophical with
massive economic repercussions."
Clark Driftmier, marketing director for Aurora Organic
Dairy of Boulder, Colo., agrees that the real question
is the scale of organic-farming operations rather than
cows' access to grass. "The argument is really about
scale, but it's being fought using pasture because
it's generally acknowledged that scale is not a way to
kick someone out of organic."
It was a formal complaint accusing Aurora Organic
Dairy of providing its cows insufficient pasture
access that helped bring the debate before the
livestock committee. The complaint was filed by the
Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute.
The institute's Organic Integrity Project "acts as a
corporate watchdog assuring that no compromises to the
credibility of organic farming methods and the food it
produces are made in the pursuit of profit," its Web
site says.
The advisory committee's decision represents a
"gelling of this vision of what organic livestock
production should be," the institute's Mark Kastel
says.
But it won't "really change the way anyone would
operate," Driftmier maintains.
He calls the complaint against Aurora a smokescreen by
"extremist groups" who believe that organic by
definition can't mean big farms.
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