organic dairy farms

[Kulapavana]

Source: / chicago tribune online

Published: January 10, 2005 Author: Andrew Martin

 

Mark Retzloff is considered a visionary in the booming organic industry.

 

But his latest venture, an expansive dairy at the base of the Rocky Mountains, is causing a rift in the small circle of entrepreneurs -- one-time hippies and anti-war protesters-turned-business magnates -- who created the organic milk business from scratch a little more than a decade ago.

 

Retzloff is president and chief organic officer of Aurora Organic Dairy, a year-and-a-half-old company that operates with 5,300 cows on a sloping plain about 40 miles north of Denver and has a new milk bottling plant right beside it.

 

What makes Retzloff's organic dairy, and a half dozen others like it, so controversial is a provision buried in the federal code that requires that organic livestock have "access to pasture." Some argue that the pasture rule dictates that the cows spend their days munching grass in open fields, rather than being fed organic grain in pens as they are at Aurora Organic.

 

The issue underscores a much broader debate about the mission of the organic industry as it expands beyond its modest, granola roots into a multibillion-dollar business that has attracted investors with less altruistic goals.

 

Some leaders in the organic milk business contend a core value of the industry is to support family farmers. Organic dairy farming often is touted as a way for dairy farmers to survive--and even thrive--at a time when small family farms are being forced out of business by megadairies with thousands of cows.

 

"We need to be an alternative to the 100-year trend of eliminating farmers," said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive officer of Stonyfield Farm yogurt, noting that organic farmers are paid substantially more for their milk than conventional dairy farmers. "By keeping people in agriculture, you are much more certain of the [product] quality and the care of the animals."

 

Retzloff and some others counter that, while supporting family farms is important, so too is converting as much land as possible to organic--to preserve the environment--and making organic milk more affordable for American consumers. A gallon of organic milk typically costs about $5; a gallon of regular milk about $3.50.

 

Steve Demos, who oversees Horizon Organic and Silk soy milk for Dean Foods, said that unless the organic industry tries to accommodate consumer demand, "you'll have an elitist industry selling niche products at three times what the average person can afford."

 

Demos, who founded White Wave, the company that first produced Silk soy milk, said his strategy is to support family farms while promoting higher standards for larger, corporate-style operations like those run by Horizon and Aurora Organic.

 

Meeting `organic' criteria

 

By law, only products that meet specific federal criteria can be labeled "organic," and the National Organic Standards Board, appointed by the federal secretary of agriculture, determines those standards. Organic dairy cows, for instance, must eat grain that isn't genetically modified or treated with pesticides or fertilizers, and the herds cannot be given growth hormones or antibiotics.

 

Furthermore, "the producer must provide access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, and direct sunlight suitable to the species, its stage of production, the climate and the environment," according to the rules. "This requirement includes access to pasture for ruminant animals."

 

The dispute over what constitutes an organic cow is rooted in a decision Retzloff made a decade ago, when as an executive and co-founder of Horizon Organic he converted a conventional megadairy in Idaho into the first large-scale organic dairy. And it has pitted some of the earliest pioneers in the organic industry against one another.

 

Pushing for strict enforcement of the pasture rule are Hirshberg, a staunch environmentalist who was making windmills and solar-powered aquariums before he joined Stonyfield Farm in 1983, and George Siemon, chief executive officer of Organic Valley, an organic dairy cooperative.

 

Siemon started an organic farm in 1977 as part of the back-to-the-land movement that eschewed consumerism and was the first to sell organic milk on a commercial basis starting in 1988.

 

Their primary opponents are Retzloff, who opened an organic cooperative in 1968 while a student and anti-war protester at the University of Michigan, and Demos, who after traveling in India and meditating, began making tofu in a bucket in 1977 and delivering it to local stores.

 

The pasture debate has intensified in recent years as the organic industry has taken off, attracting the interest of major corporations and venture capitalists.

 

Heinz now sells organic ketchup, Tyson markets organic chicken and Dean Foods owns Horizon Organic.

 

Organic food sales have increased each year since 1997 by 17- to 21-percent, while total U.S. food sales during this period have grown by 2- to 4-percent, according to the Organic Trade Association.

 

In 2003, organic food sales increased by 20 percent to $10.8 billion. Sales of organic milk and cream in 2003 rose by 20 percent and are expected to grow at 17 percent annually through 2008, the association reported.

 

The result of the rapid growth has been more questions about what it means to be legitimately organic, particularly when it comes to livestock.

 

There has been a debate about what "access to pasture" means for organic chicken producers, and some Alaska fishermen are now pushing for a definition of organic fish.

 

"This is no longer a niche," said Hirshberg, who recently launched Stonyfield Farm's line of organic milk. "As the stakes increase, the debate gets tougher."

 

Mark Kastel, the director of the Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy think tank, said a dairy farm shouldn't qualify as organic simply because its owners "cram organic feed down the throats of [their] high-producing cattle."

 

"A factory farm is a factory farm," Kastel said, using the term critics employ for massive industrial-style farms.

 

Siemon, who was one of the founders of Organic Valley, said the rules are clear but the USDA isn't being tough enough in enforcing them. Organic Valley is a cooperative of 665 organic farms.

 

"Clearly these people aren't doing pasture as they should be," he said, adding that the issue isn't as much about size as standards. "We feel like they are violating the rules. . . . You can't have these animals on a little piece of land and call it pasture."

 

Siemon's vision of what an organic farm should be comes to life about 30 miles northwest of Madison, Wis., where John Kiefer and his girlfriend, Carrie Branovan, live on a restored, 100-year-old dairy farm in the Wisconsin River valley.

 

Contrasting operations

 

Kiefer, a 47-year-old with a ponytail and salt-and-pepper beard, ran Honest John's Repair before buying the abandoned farm and 20 cows in 1990. He now has 71 cows--including one named "Layla" after the Eric Clapton song--that he leads across a road and through the woods twice a day to hills covered with red clover and orchard grass.

 

"The cows are so healthy," Kiefer said on a brilliant day in November as the cows lolled in the grass and bald eagles soared overhead. "Look at them: they are laying down, chewing cud, hanging out. They love it.

 

"Organic Valley is the hope for the small family farmer, it really is," he said, adding that the cows are able to graze 10 months out of the year.

 

Aurora Organic Dairy in Colorado doesn't look much like Kiefer's farm, but it doesn't look much like a huge conventional dairy farm either. Rather than a large confinement building and a lagoon filled with manure, Aurora dairy has large, clean pens and sheds covered with fresh straw for its cows. The manure is used in nearby fields as fertilizer.

 

Aurora, which produces private-label milk for national grocery chains and natural foods stores, purchases wind-generated electricity and is converting its diesel engines to bio-fuel. Cows are bred the old-fashioned way, using bulls, rather than by artificial insemination.

 

Retzloff, 56, takes offense at the notion that his farm isn't really organic because it doesn't operate like most organic farms in the Northeast and Midwest. He said his cows are always outside, but they can't feed off pasture grasses because there simply isn't enough rain in the area to support it.

 

"It's not how large you are, it's how you made it large," said Retzloff, noting that 50,000 acres of crops are used to feed his cows.

 

He is planning to open a second, 4,700-cow organic dairy in Texas next year. "Our reason for doing it is we'd like to see agriculture change. If we're really going to change agriculture, we have to do it on all scales."

 

 

[Gauracandra]

Some time back I was reading that in Vermont the average dairy farm has under 100 cows. This sounds like a manageable size for a small farm. However, many milk cooperatives were getting angry at one individual who just moved into the state, as I recall, and was setting up a mega-dairy farm with several thousand.

 

This is what Distributism was against - the mass accumulation of wealth, driving the small owner out of business. The fundamental idea was that everyone had a right to earn a decent living.

 

If lets say 50 cows can earn a family dairy $60,000 a year (just a made up number), why should some mega-dairy be created with 5000 cows, effectively giving one individual say $6 million per year. It would be better to have 100 family farms with 50 cows each, where each family could earn a decent living, and be their own boss. A mega dairy, like mega shopping malls, or mega-agribusiness, drives out independent entrepreneurs, so that one man may earn multiple livlihoods. Distributism is not socialism. It doesn't take from the wealthy and give to the poor, it doesn't have government run the companies. What it says is that there is a limit to how much a person can have, because if they consume more and more, it is only natural that the small person will lose out to the big corporation. One man will earn multiple livelihoods at the expense of independent businessmen. There are several changes this causes, a major one being a change in the culture. You go from a culture of small owners, who have pride in their small business, to being a culture of dependent workers who can't wait to get off of work so they don't have to take orders from their boss. Not everyone will be independent, but a determinant amount will be and that is enough to radically change the underlying culture.

[Gauracandra]

Here is a listing of the farm subsidies in the U.S. Total for 2003 was approximately $17 billion, slightly more than NASA's budget.

 

What concerns me is this. We are told that we need large scale farming because it is so efficient. But that is part of the problem. Because it is so efficient, they have run the profit margins down. So then they need the government to subsidize the farms. For instance, the U.S. purchases huge quantities of milk, and then destroys the milk to keep it off the market. This is done because if they didn't do this then the cost of milk would be so low that the large corporate farms couldn't stay in business. So we end up paying twice. First we pay more for milk, and then we pay taxes to keep the milk prices high.

 

How many of these are small time farmer? Check out these names: Riceland Foods Inc. (half-billion dollars from 1995-2003 in subsidies), Producers Rice Mill Inc., Farmers Rice Coop, Cenex Harvest States Cooperative, Tyler Farms, Dnrc Trust Land Management, 1st National Bank Sioux Falls etc… Sounds very neighborly doesn't it? Why are we subsidizing 1st National Bank of Sioux Falls? Check the links, they are pretty interesting.

 

Quote from the site:

“Sixty percent of all farmers and ranchers do not collect government subsidy payments, according to USDA, mostly because the crops and livestock they produce do not qualify for subsidy programs (see state breakdown). Among subsidy recipients, large farms collect almost all the money. Nationwide, ten percent of the biggest (and often most profitable) subsidized crop producers collected 72 percent of all subsidies, averaging $34,424 in annual payments between 1995 and 2003. The bottom 80 percent of the recipients saw only $768 on average per year.”

 

Top Recipients

http://www.ewg.org/farm/top_recips.php?fips=00000&progcode=total

 

2003 Subsidies

http://www.ewg.org/farm/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&yr=2003

 

“For the $131 billion spent on commodity and disaster subsidies between 1995 and 2003, taxpayers could have bought 25 percent or more of all the farms in 302 counties—land, barns, farmhouses and all.”

 

http://www.ewg.org/farm/buythefarm.php