FOIA Document Indicates Why CA Factory-Farm Lost Organic Certification
CORNUCOPIA, WI: Pursuant to a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), The Cornucopia Institute recently secured the Letter of Noncompliance issued by the country’s largest organic certifier, Quality Assurance International (QAI), prior to the decertification of a giant California dairy producing organic milk.
“After years of doggedly pursuing this scofflaw operation we are pleased to document for the organic industry why this 10,000-cow feedlot dairy lost their legal right to represent and market their milk as organic,” said Mark Kastel cofounder of The Cornucopia Institute.
The Letter of Noncompliance has been posted for public inspection and can be viewed at www.cornucopia.org/VanderEyk/LetterFromCertifier.pdf. (This is a large document and may take several minutes to download if you have a dial-up connection.)
Among the problems identified in the letter are the lack of an audit trail tracking animals in the organic herd ‘fundamental for being able to prove that your cows actually qualify as organic (the Vander Eyk dairy milked both conventional and organic cows)’ pasturing of the herd, animal health records, and pasture management practices.
Cornucopia and others in the dairy community have long been critical of a handful of industrial dairies that they have alleged were operating outside of the laws governing organic production. Starting in 2005 Cornucopia, subsequent to well-documented investigations, issued a series of formal legal complaints requesting that the USDA crack down on factory-farms they said were “gaming the system.” (Click here to view a photo gallery of the Vander Eyk operation.)
In addition to the recently decertified Vander Eyk dairy which had been shipping milk to Dean Foods (Horizon) and Stremicks ( Heritage Foods) the Institute has filed complaints against Aurora Organic Dairy, which operates five industrial milking operations in Texas and Colorado, and Dean/Horizon itself, which operates an 8000-head industrial dairy in semi-arid Idaho.
“If it was not for an industry informant and dedicated public servants that tipped us off, no one in the organic industry would have known that the enforcement action had taken place,” Kastel added. “Vander Eyk did not issue a press release. QAI, who never should have certified this operation in the first place, did not issue a press release. And the USDA did not report this to the public.”
The Cornucopia Institute has also learned that the enforcement action against Vander Eyk did not originate with QAI, as had been earlier surmised, but rather was ordered by the USDA. Some organic certifiers have been suspect of QAI’s “industry-friendly” oversight for years and suggest that all operations they oversee should be more closely scrutinized.
“The letter of noncompliance totally confirms the scope of the intelligence we received in June when we made the decertification action known to the public,” said Will Fantle, Cornucopia’s research director. “The FOIA documents we have obtained and have now publicly released, I think, demonstrate to the organic community that our investigative research, sources, and communication on these issues are solid and credible.”
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Based in Colorado, the Aurora Organic Dairy is the largest private-label producer of organic milk and supplies many of the nations leading grocery and big-box retailers including Wal-Mart, Costco, Wild Oats, Trader Joe’s, and Safeway.
On August 14, The Cornucopia Institute announced that it had received information from informants inside the USDA that the Agency was ready to revoke Aurora’s organic certification. The USDA has been investigating the dairy in response to formal complaints filed with the Agency regarding its organic livestock management practices.
Aurora, whose principal owner is the Harvard Endowment Fund/Charlesbank, has since been fighting back through their public-relations firm and with the help of trade-industry press.
“Aurora’s news release claimed that their dairies were “100% valid and up to date” in terms of their certification,” said Kastel. “That’s never been in doubt. What is in doubt is whether cheating is taking place, and the question of whether the state of Colorado and QAI, either through incompetency or collusion, have inappropriately issued a certificate to this giant operation.”
In a public statement Aurora acknowledged that they had been in negotiations with the USDA for the past 18 months to resolve the USDA’s investigation stemming from the Cornucopia legal complaints.
There has been some pointed discussion on Odairy (a list-serve operated by the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance) since Cornucopia’s announcement. New York organic dairy farmer George Wright posted to the list: “I think all the small family farms should get an 18 month exemption from the rules like Aurora, and how many years has Horizon (Dean Foods) had to get their pasture? — I think they should all be shut down until they can fully comply with all the rules just like the rest of us.”
“In addition to the regulatory action by the USDA, corporate investors are learning an important lesson in organic marketing: the entire industry is based on consumer trust and meeting the ethical expectations of the consumer,” opined Kastel.
A recent report in Inc. magazine indicated that sales growth of the Horizon brand — associated in the media with organic factory-farms — has lagged far behind their competitors and that they actually lost almost 16% of their sales in the influential natural foods sector (Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and independent and cooperatively owned specialty stores) that make up about half the market for organic products.
“The good news for consumers is that in our survey of organic dairy brands a full 90% of name-brand products received very high ratings in our scorecard that critiqued the environmental and animal husbandry practices used in sourcing the organic milk for the dairy products,” an earlier statement from The Cornucopia Institute read. “With a small amount of research, consumers who care about maintaining the integrity of organics can easily find organic dairy products they can believe in.”
