The U.S. Industrial Organic Milk Swindle
February 4th, 2010Via: Politics of the Plate:
On some bureaucrat’s desk in President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sits a document that has the power to either destroy the nation’s 1,800 family-operated organic dairy farms or come to their rescue.
In the early 2000s, virtually all of the nation’s organic dairy farmers—not to mention the millions of consumers willing to pay a premium for organic products—agreed that milk certified as organic by the United States Department of Agriculture had to come from cows that had access to pasture.
As government regulations go, it sounds pretty straightforward: room to roam, clean air to breathe, fresh grass to eat. And that was the general consensus on what the National Organic Standards required.
But beginning in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it became evident that the green “USDA Organic” label translated into bigger profits, huge Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with herds of up to 10,000 cows located in western states got into the organic milk business.
There was one obvious problem. How do you provide pasture for thousands of hungry cows in a semi-arid landscape that would, at best, produce enough feed for a few dozen animals?
Research Credit: SW
while i doubt that the nz organic dairy standards are anything like the scam in the US, there is the small matter of nz being the world’s largest importer of palm kernel (a waste product from palm oil production in Malaysia and Indonesia). It’s used to feed dairy cows. So apart from destroying rain forests and poisoning people who buy processed foods, the palm oil industry together with nz’s industrial dairy crowd (Fonterra) is putting potentially toxic muck into the feed of nz dairy cows AND putting nz feed grain growers out of business.
http://www.nzfarmersweekly.co.nz/article/6834.html
http://www.nzfarmersweekly.co.nz/article/7640.html
I’ve started to view some of these large NZ dairy operations as akin to a boy racer event. A bunch of idiots modify systems to perform in ways that they were never designed to perform. The engines rev higher and run much hotter. For a time, the car may actually seem to be performing like a real sports car—until, finally, the engine explodes, or the driver miscalculates and sends his rice rocket into the ditch.
NZ dairying, as it is now, is just about 100% dependent on massive amounts of foreign inputs. The palm kernel is just the latest attempt to get a few more revs out of the engine before it explodes.
On the other hand, there are some outstanding examples of organic dairying in NZ. But who wants to use expensive, locally and sustainably produced seaweed emulsions and have lower stocking rates to prevent soil erosion? New Zealand farmers are locked in a death grip of interest payments to Australian and Dutch banks. That’s what’s driving a lot of this.
Like a lot of things in New Zealand, there’s one percent of people setting a good example while the other 99 percent of them are trying to see who can flush the most topsoil out to sea in the shortest amount of time.
They’re trying to set up industrial dairy operations now. Even this boneheaded government saw it as a dire move and “called in” the matter:
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/cubicle-cow-applications-called-minister-117644
I don’t have a lot of confidence that this will be stopped for long. The maniac urge to destroy this beautiful country is very strong. I hope I’m wrong.
It’s not all grim! Genetically engineered nonsense isn’t allowed to be grown here—for now.
thanks for your thoughts Kevin.
before my uncle died about 15 years ago (he lived and worked on one dairy farm his entire life) he said to me (and i paraphrase from memory):
“don’t let the corporate barrow boys get hold of the dairy industry–farms, co-ops, dairy board–and use it for their own profits. it’ll destroy nz as we know it”. how prescient he was.
re nz organic dairy, i have seen one “country calendar” documentary, which was amazing, about one family in the Waikato who converted and showed how it was much more profitable and productive and protected the long-term viability of the herd and land. i also saw one article about another organic dairy farmer in the Wairarapa. they used seaweed-based fertilisers (developed by permaculturists) and homeopathic medicines on the cows. the thing is, by eliminating all the synthetic fertilisers, the cows got sick at a rate 90% lower than when they farmed conventionally. anyway, them cows are such suckers for placebos!
btw, imo the “boy racer” dairy engine is blowing up in slow motion already.
This is so much the norm in our modern culture — anything ‘revolutionary’ that actually is taken up by the masses gets co-opted by big business. It’s also why they hate and attack things that can’t be co-opted, like raw milk or local currencies or file sharing…
I live in the land of Organic Valley, and there’s a definite backlash against them here. “OV” (as it’s called here locally) started out just 20 years ago as about 8 guys trying to figure out how to sell organically grown veggies. It’s now skyrocketed into a 1/2-billion dollar food co-op. And with that growth they’ve attracted a host of leaders who don’t value the ethics so much as the opportunities. What’s fascinating to me is that they consciously recognize this slow perversion of their corporate culture – and have sincerely been trying to struggle against it – but they lose ground in this struggle every year. The simple fact is you cannot buck the system by working within the system.
If anyone’s interested, our local free press paper just did a cover story on Mark Kastel, head of the Organic Industry watchdog group Cornucopia Institute: http://www.kickapoofreepress.com/news.php?viewStory=603 Basically, OV used to support and fund Kastel — until he blew the whistle on one of their Texas dairies for its obviously non-organic procedures. Now they’ve done a 180, withdrawing any funding and vilifying Cornucopia for “casting doubt” on the organics movement! It’s a disgrace, clearly — and yet I know these people who are involved and they honestly believe they’re justified in trying to disgrace the Cornucopia Institute.
My own belief is that at some certain size, any corporate (or non-profit) concern can simply no longer maintain any authentic values-system, and will gradually become a denying force in the world. We could transform the World overnight if there was a strict code that would limit the size of corporate entities (and the inter-alliances between them as well).
that reminds me of a time quite a few years ago when i met a lot of people in Japan who were involved in growing and selling organic produce but who were mainly opposed to the introduction of domestic “organic standards” and a Japanese “organic mark”. i couldn’t understand at the time why they would be against something that i thought would promote the spread of organic production and consumption. it didn’t make sense to me: why would you be against a system that verified something was produced using proper standards? later i realised that the reason was the people i met had understood what lagavulin has pointed out above. the big corporates would pervert the whole thing for profit without giving a f__k about the principles of the organic movement. the people i talked to preferred to build relationships between producers and consumers, usually mediated by small shops or co-ops. their idea is that if you personally know and trust the producer, you don’t need the “organic mark”. ideally, the consumers go and help out on the farm a few times a year. this is the original idea behind the Japanese “teikei” organic movement that began in the late 1960s.