… On April 18 and 19, you have the opportunity to stand for family farms and organic dairying produced with ethics and integrity. The USDA will hold a national symposium on pasture and organic dairying in State College, Pennsylvania. Your voice needs to be heard above the clamor from large corporations and factory-farm interests seeking to weaken organic standards and OK their suspect livestock management practices.
Please sign our letter (click here to download this pdf file) and send it back to us to hand deliver your message to the NOSB. (We will forward this to Washington if it comes in late). You can email us your signed letter ([email protected]) or mail it to PO Box 126, Cornucopia, WI 54827.
“We need your help to protect the economic future of organic farming, for family scale producers and the ethics behind its production which is so important to our loyal customers,” says Bill Welsh, a board member of The Cornucopia Institute and a former farmer member of the National Organic Standards Board.
The organic marketplace has offered family-scale farmers a fair wage and decent living standards based on a very special relationship with consumers.
How do you think the average organic consumers would feel if they knew the milk they were paying premium prices for was produced on a factory farm with thousands of cows and owned by a huge corporation? How do you think they would feel if these cows were confined to pens or sheds, in feedlots, with little or no access to pasture? Would they perceive this as organic?
What if we told them that the largest organic milk marketer or in the country, on their 4000- to 5000-cow industrial-scale farm in Idaho, sold all their calves at birth in order to save the cost of raising them on organic milk and feed during the first year of their life? If we told them that the same farm then purchased one-year-old conventional animals, who had likely consumed conventional milk replacer (which may include dried blood – a mad cow/BSE risk), genetically engineered feed and had been treated with antibiotics and other banned materials, do you think that consumers would feel that this corporation was upholding the highest ethics of organic production?
Not only are these practices repugnant to organic consumers, but they put ethical family-scale farmers at a distinct competitive disadvantage. One farmer recently wrote on a dairy listserv that he was spending $15,000 to 17,000 per year on the organic milk that he was feeding to his 40 calves. All this while the same factory farm we mentioned above made upwards of $700,000.00 per year by marketing the milk that they should have been feeding their calves. This is not fair, and together farmers and consumers need to put a stop to this abuse!
No matter where dairy farmers ship their milk to (Horizon, Organic Valley, Hood, Natural by Nature, Clover Storenetta, or the dozens of other highly reputable small- and medium-sized organic milk marketers), they need to stand together and join with the consumers who support them and demand enforcement of the organic regulations that require pasture and organic management from the last third of gestation.
The organic community has been asking the USDA to crack down on factory farms producing “organic” milk for five years now. When this process began, there was only one industrial farm operating in Idaho. Today, there are 10 to 12 farms the West shipping milk or in development. If that’s not enough, there are more new factory farms in transition, with tens of thousands of cows coming online in California, Texas, Kansas, Washington, and other states.
If we are not successful in curbing these abuses, consumers could become disenchanted, and surpluses in organic milk supplies could be right around the corner. Surpluses will likely erode the price farmers are paid and force some off the land. The cost to produce organic milk is high. Increases in feed and fuel costs are pushing these expenses even higher. Many smaller producers would not survive to support their families, if milk prices drop. Will most of the organic milk available to consumers end up coming from factory farms?
Factory-farm milk is already competing everywhere with family-farm milk – in your markets. The nation’s largest “organic” factory-farm operator is shipping private-label (store brand) milk all the way from its Colorado processing plant to grocery stores in the Northeast.
There are three ways you can get involved right now:
- 1. On April 18 and 19, you have the opportunity to stand for family farms and organic dairying produced with ethics and integrity. The USDA will hold a national symposium on pasture and organic dairying in State College, Pennsylvania. Your voice needs to be heard above the clamor from large corporations and factory-farm interests seeking to weaken organic standards and OK their suspect livestock management practices. Please sign our letter (click here to download this pdf file) and send it back to us to hand deliver your message to the NOSB. (We will forward this to Washington if it comes in late). You can email us your signed letter ([email protected]) or mail it to PO Box 126, Cornucopia, WI 54827.2. Whether or not you can make it to Pennsylvania, please sign the enclosed proxy and send it back in the stamped return envelope, ASAP! We will hand carry your proxy to Pennsylvania, along with correspondence from thousands of other organic farmers and consumers. This will make a powerful message. If you are reading this letter too late to meet the April 18 deadline please mail this back anyway. There is a formal comment period on this issue, and we will make sure your proxy gets to Washington.
3. If you are an organic milk producer, please consider sending a letter to your milk handler. Let them know that you are proud of the quality and integrity of your milk, and how your family produces it. Tell them that you respect the expectations of the organic consumer. You have the power! There is a national milk shortage right now, and no one purchasing organic milk wants to alienate their suppliers. Big or small, and corporate, family, or cooperatively owned, please make sure these milk marketers know how you feel!
So, now we are asking for your help again. Almost everyone receiving this letter has already contributed to this effort in one or more ways by signing petitions in support of strict pasture enforcement, traveling to Washington, D.C., to personally testify before the NOSB, sending in written comments, taking time to fill out one of our surveys or one from the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, or financially contributing to this campaign.
To the many of you who’ve taken the time and effort to get involved, we want to wholeheartedly say thank you.
Please consider joining a delegation of farmers in State College, Pennsylvania later this month. But if you can’t – and if you are a dairy farmer, that’s perfectly understandable at the start of spring planting – we want to ask you to support the dairy men and women who will make the trek to Pennsylvania by signing the enclosed proxy letter.
Consumers know that there is an extra margin of safety associated with organic products since they are produced without genetically engineered hormones, antibiotics, or other drugs. And the feed consumed by the cows is produced without highly toxic synthetic chemicals. But believe me, organic consumer are astute, and more and more are aware of the fact that organic milk contains elevated levels of beneficial antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, and CLAs – and that’s in organic milk produced on farms that pasture their animals. If we want to retain the respect and patronage of the organic consumer, we must deliver the quality products they expect – and produced in an ecologically sustainable manner that they assume is inherent in organic production. The continued confidence of the consumer is imperative.
Please sign the enclosed letter today and return it in the postage paid envelope provided. If enough farmers and consumers participate, the USDA will not be able to ignore the ongoing abuse by these large confinement dairies. And although completely voluntary, we hope you will enclose a check with your letter to help cover the cost of this campaign.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the results of our year-long research project, rating the ethical milk production practices of over 68 different organic dairy brands, is now posted on our Web site: www.cornucopia.org. This report, Maintaining the Integrity of Organic Milk, is intended to empower organic consumers, enabling them to make discerning purchasing decisions supporting the over 80% of name-brand marketers who procure their milk from family farmers. For you dairy producers, the ratings can help you choose an ethical partner who shares your values.
The Cornucopia Institute has been attacked by some of the largest corporations and their lobby/trade group for making this information available to the public. These powerful agribusiness concerns don’t like us exposing the practices we outlined above. They have suggested that by releasing our study we might damage the reputation of the organic label. Unfortunately, we think the greatest threat is to allow these factory farms to operate, eventually dooming everything organics stands for. If you have any questions concerning our work, we would encourage you to contact us.
Please join together with other farmers and consumers to protect the livelihood of family-farmers who are producing organic milk and dairy products with integrity.
Thank you very much for your efforts.
Sincerely yours,
Will Fantle
P.S. Our surveys, organizing work, mailings to thousands of farmers, traveling to speak in front of consumer and farm groups, and trekking to Washington have been an expensive proposition for our modest-scaled not-for-profit group. Won’t you please consider donating in support of this campaign if you are in a position to do so? By working together we will succeed in protecting the integrity of organic food and farming.
You can donate online by using our secure server at this link.
