The Long Fight to Keep Organics Real

UPDATE: Grist has a new informative post citing other reports on this debate.

Milk is anything but milquetoast: It's a hard and highly competitive business. And organics are not immune. Right now organic producers Aurora Dairy and California's beloved Straus Creamery are leading a campaign to have Obama's Office of Management and Budget sell out their organic cohorts.

The story began in the 1980s, when many conventional farmers went organic out of disgust with industrial agriculture's seemingly inescapable drive to get big or get out. Organics began as no more than a set of best practices shared by word of mouth and trade publications. But, despite farmers' adversity to regulations, those who were practicing real organic agriculture didn't want their competitors to simply slap a label on their product and charge as much as they did, pocketing a much bigger profit. So they went along with a push to codify organics.

Enter the USDA and its highly bureaucratic rule-making processes and its big-business friendly leanings.

In 1990, a law passed requiring that the USDA establish organic standards twelve years later, those standards finally came out.

Yet, organic dairy farmers were surprised to see a couple of organic dairies balloon into CAFOs, while still calling themselves organic. The issue was, do the cows get to graze on pasture, or are they stuck in the pen all day? (You can't send thousands of cows in and out of the pen and still get any milking done.)

The USDA — which is known for promoting the interests of corporate monoculture farmers — claimed the organic dairy standards it had developed with the input of hundreds of farmers weren't clear enough to enforce; the agency initiated a long process of rewriting them. Critics of the CAFO operations thought the standards were quite clear that cows must be able to do some grazing. They sued, eventually forcing Bush 43's reluctant USDA to find one CAFO, Aurora Dairy in Colorado, in violation of the organic standards.

But the revision of the rules — which was headed in the direction of requiring pasture time — continued. And Aurora continued to fight them. Eventually, the company's CEO, Mark Retzloff, recruited Albert Straus, a long-time advocate of organic farming — real organic farming. Retzloff had the money, but Straus had the creds, and Straus began to say the stricter standards would put Western farmers, whose lands are arid, out of business.

According to Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute, an organic watchdog, there are 1,800 organic dairy farmer in the U.S., and only "a half a dozen" side with Straus and Retzloff. The rest feel "really betrayed," according to Kastel. One of Straus's neighbors made a trip to the OMB with Kastel to tell the bureaucrats that the arid-lands defense was baloney.

The final rules are now sitting on the desk of an unnamed Obama administration bureaucrat in the OMB awaiting final approval. But organics advocates worry that a recent meeting Retzloff and Straus had at the OMB may lead officials to make the standards more lenient for CAFO operations like Aurora: CEO Retzloff was a major campaign contributor first to Obama's Secretary of Agriculture and one-time presidential candidate Tom Vilsack, and then to Obama himself.

Let's make sure President Obama and his rulemakers at the OMB give real organic farmers what they want by refusing to weaken the organic diary standards.

Photo credit: Cornucopia Institute