Many media outlets, from the New York Times to the blogosphere, have tracked what has been dubbed the “corporate takeover” of organic farming. One of the hottest controversies in this rapidly growing $20 billion industry has been giant factory farms milking thousands of cows each in feedlots and masquerading as organic. Some of these industrial dairies are controlled by the nation’s largest agribusinesses.

Since the organic community first appealed to the USDA for better clarification and enforcement of regulations requiring organic dairy producers to graze their cattle, nearly 9 years ago, the number of giant industrial dairy operations, with as many as 10,000 cows, has grown from two to approximately 15. After years of delay, the USDA has finally responded with a new proposed rule that they said would crack down on abuses.

“The birds have come home to roost,” said Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst for The Cornucopia Institute. The Wisconsin-based farm policy research group estimates there are 35,000 to 45,000 cows on giant CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) operating in the United States producing as much as 40% of the nation’s organic milk supply.

“These CAFOs are producing so much milk that they have depressed pricing and profit margins for organic family farmers, and now some are being forced out of business by this distressing situation,” Kastel said. “Organics was supposed to be the antidote to family farmers being forced off the land.”

The Cornucopia Institute has filed formal legal complaints with the USDA aimed at compelling the agency to enforce organic livestock and management rules. These actions have led to the shut down or penalizing of some of what they call “organic scofflaws.” But many in the industry criticized the agency for failing to fully investigate many other alleged violations on giant farms, including several that supply milk to the nation’s largest dairy processor, Dallas-based Dean Foods.

The new USDA rule proposal and its analysis total 26 pages, as published in the Federal Register. The draft rule complies with organic community requests to close specific loopholes being exploited by factory farms confining their cattle. But it also represents the broadest rewrite of federal organic regulations in the $20 billion industry’s relatively short history.

Some farm advocates believe that the new rules, if enacted, would put out of business the majority of organic livestock farmers—including hundreds who are operating ethically.

“At first we were delighted that the USDA had stopped their delaying tactics and finally published a rule cracking down on the large factory farms that have been ‘scamming’ organic consumers and placing ethical family farmers at a competitive disadvantage,” stated Bill Welch, former chairman of the National Organic Standards Board and an Iowa livestock producer. “Many in the industry have spent the past weeks carefully examining this dense document, and it has become painfully clear that it would not only crack down on certain factory farm abuses, but it’s also so restrictive that it would likely put the majority of family farmers producing organic milk and meat out of business.”

“It’s inexcusable,” noted Ronnie Cummins, Director of the Organic Consumers Association, “that the USDA’s rule would allow conventional cattle to be brought onto organic farms, and milked, on a continuous basis,” said Ronnie Cummins, Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

In response to the USDA’s sweeping livestock/pasture proposal, a consortium of organizations representing organic family farmers has crafted an “alternative” rule proposal. Led by FOOD Farmers, with support from The Cornucopia Institute, organic certifiers, and other policy experts, the revisions they have drafted would carry out what is said to be the will of the organic community, farmers and consumers.

“You don’t have to take the word of The Cornucopia Institute alone that the Department has ‘Katrina-ed’ the organic industry,” Kastel stated. “The USDA rule proposal is just the latest salvo in this fight,” added Kastel. He noted that audits by the American National standard Institute (ANSI) and the Inspector General’s office were both highly critical of the USDA’s execution of its Congressional mandate to oversee the organic industry.

The community’s alternative proposal, which is now being circulated among organic farmers and consumer groups, would require that all organic dairy, sheep, goat, and beef producers graze their animals for the entire grazing season and sets a minimum percentage of feed from pasture.

A growing body of scientific literature illustrates the nutritional superiority of milk and meat from organic animals that are grazed on fresh grass, including higher levels of antioxidants and beneficial fats, like omega-3 fatty acids, that protect against cancer and heart disease.

“The good news continues to be that the vast majority of all organic dairy brands available in the marketplace use milk produced by family farmers,” observed Cummins. “These farmers truly uphold the high expectations that their customers have,” Cummins said.

The Cornucopia Institute just updated their path-breaking research study of the organic dairy sector. The group’s scorecard reveals that 85% of the nation’s 110 organic dairy brands are meeting the letter and spirit of current organic federal law. “Out of 1800 organic dairy farms in this country, the very few factory farms are a bad aberration, although they are producing huge quantities of milk,” explained Cornucopia’s Kastel.

Because of the broad scope of the USDA’s proposed rule making, Cornucopia, the Organic Consumers Association, and some the largest organic certifiers and other groups representing farmers and consumers are formally asking the USDA to extend the public comment period for an additional 30 days to January 23, 2009.

MORE:

New, major policies proposed by the USDA livestock/pasture rule (never reviewed or recommended by the National Organic Standards Board) include:

• Eliminating the fattening of beef cattle on grain, in feedlots, for the last few months of their lives. Although many might view this proposal as meritorious it would radically change the industry and could force some operators out of business. Full analysis and discussion by the organic community is vitally necessary.

• Requiring animals to be outside year-round, without exemptions for extreme weather conditions, would put the lives and well-being of livestock at risk and economically injure farmers.

• Setting aside part of a farmer’s land in a “sacrifice” pasture for when weather conditions make grazing unsuitable. This might be a provision that some current operators cannot meet and might violate certain state and federal environmental standards. This may have positive application, but its overall impacts have never been fully analyzed.

• Classifying bees and fish as livestock will likely garner positive and negative response from that industry sector depending on its perceived present and future regulatory impact.

• The USDA draft rule ignores the NOSB recommendation to eliminate the “continual transition” of conventional cattle, brought onto organic dairy operations. The industry has universally agreed that all animals brought onto a farm, after its initial transition to organics, must be managed organically from the last third of gestation. Animals raised for meat already have to meet this higher standard. Many industry experts feel that the USDA has misinterpreted the law, for years, allowing giant factory farms to “burn out” their cattle and prematurely sending them to slaughter, then replace them with cheap conventional cattle on an ongoing basis. This new rulemaking proposes that the Department’s “misinterpretations” become institutionalized as law.

“This 26-page document put forth by the USDA may so muddy the water that we could be facing years of additional delays until the widely agreed-upon provisions for dairy are enacted,” said Kastel.

Certain industry players, including the dairy giant Dean Foods and Aurora Dairy, the nation’s largest private-label producer of organic milk (Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Safeway, etc.) have based their business model on exploiting the trust of the organic consumer and violating both the spirit and letter of the organic law (full documentation available).

The USDA’s proposed pasture rule, along with the “alternative” proposal endorsed by organic farmers and consumers, can be viewed at:

http://www.cornucopia.org/usda-proposed-organic-pasture-livestock-rule/

The sessions are scheduled for:

Tuesday, December 2
1:30-4:30 p.m.
Organic Valley Family of Farms Headquarters
One Organic Way
LaFarge, WI 54639

Thursday, December 4
1:30-4:30 p.m.
California State University – Chico
University Farm Pavillion
311 Nicholas C. Schouten Lane
Chico, CA 95928

Monday, December 8
1:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Extension Research Facility
6500 Amarillo Boulevard West
Amarillo, TX

Thursday Dec. 11
9:30AM - 12:30 PM
The Family Center of Gap
835 Houston Run Drive, Suite 200
Gap PA 17527

And the state of Montana is also holding a listening session. That will be held:

Friday, December 5
6:30 PM.
Holiday Inn
5 E Baxter Ln
Bozeman, MT 59715

The USDA is also accepting comments by mail and through the internet at www.regulations.gov.

The official public comment period is set to close on December 23. The Cornucopia Institute and numerous other stakeholders in the organic community are seeking a 30 day extension to allow for fuller and more informed comment on the complex rewrite of organic livestock standards.

After eight years of political debate, legal wrangling and protests within the organic community the USDA on October 23 finally published a draft rule intended to clamp down on giant factory farms milking thousands of cows that have been abusing the spirit and letter of federal organic law by primarily confining their cattle to feedlots.

The USDA could have made minor regulatory language changes to the current rule that would have clarified and forced the grazing of cattle. Instead, the USDA completely rewrote the complicated organic livestock standards without input from the organic community or the National Organic Standards Board. And they have given the organic community—farmers, consumers, retailers and processors—just 60 days to digest the sweeping changes and submit comments to government regulators.

Unfortunately, it has taken the groups that represent organic farmers over 30 days just to understand the true meaning of the complex USDA draft rule and to develop the many needed and major revisions. While the draft rule that the USDA presented would effectively clamp down on factory farm scofflaws, it would also probably put out of business the majority of all family-scale livestock farmers in the United States. This is unacceptable.

The groups Cornucopia has collaborated with will seek additional input and distribute a number of suggested changes to the entire organic community shortly. But with the election, the end of fall harvest, Thanksgiving, and the build-up to Christmas, all falling within the 60-day time window for public comment, we believe we simply need more time to share these changes with all organic stakeholders.

A high percentage of organic farmers in the country, maybe 30% (including Amish families), do not typically use e-mail. It is imperative that all stakeholders have a chance to have a voice.

Please send a message to USDA Secretary Ed Schafer (agsec@usda.gov) asking him to extend the public comment period by 30 days!

Your message does not have to be long or complicated. Merely saying that in order to protect the rights of all organic stakeholders we respectfully request a 30 day extension to the public comment period relating to organic livestock. In your message, be sure to note the docket number for this proposal: Docket No. AMS–TM–06–0198; TM–05–14.

The Cornucopia Institute will soon supply all of our members and others in the community with a full analysis and recommendations that will help stakeholders submit informed and focused comments in support of family farmers and organic integrity. We hope to send this out by early December—but the crush of holiday mail will slow the receipt of this critical information for many. The current deadline for comments is December 23. The recommended 30-day extension would move that date to January 23.

In the meantime, the following documents are available on our website at the USDA Pasture/Livestock Rulemaking link. On this page you will find:

1. A sample letter asking the USDA to extend of the public comment period from 60 to 90 days.

2. The official USDA announcement of rulemaking including analysis as printed in the Federal Register.

3. The proposed USDA draft pasture/livestock rule.

4. A preliminary draft of the recommended livestock rule language from a consortium of public interest groups representing organic farmers and consumers, including The Cornucopia Institute and FOOD Farmers (available within the next day).

In addition, there are four public listening sessions being sponsored by the USDA to gather input on the proposed new rule. They are scheduled for:

• Tuesday, December 2
  1:30-4:30 p.m.
  Organic Valley Family of Farms Headquarters
  One Organic Way
  LaFarge, WI 54639

• Thursday, December 4
  1:30-4:30 p.m.
  California State University – Chico
  University Farm Pavillion
  311 Nicholas C. Schouten Lane
  Chico, CA 95928

• Monday, December 8
  1:30 – 4:30 p.m.
  Extension Research Facility, 6500 Amarillo Boulevard West
  Amarillo, TX

• Thursday Dec. 11
  9:30AM - 12:30 PM
  The Family Center of Gap
  835 Houston Run Drive, Suite 200
  Gap PA 17527

And the state of Montana is also holding a listening session. That will be held:

• Friday, December 5
  6:30 PM.
  Holiday Inn
  5 E Baxter Ln
  Bozeman, MT 59715

Please stay tuned for more information from us. It is incredibly important that we get this rule right as the future of so many ethical organic livestock producers, and access to legitimately produced organic food products, are at stake.

The release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October proves what too many Americans already have learned the hard way: input costs for food processors are way down but the prices they charge grocery shoppers continue to climb. Prices for virtually everything consumers buy – gasoline, airline tickets, clothing – dropped in October, except food prices.

According to a report, “Why Aren’t Food Companies Reducing Prices?,“ released by the Renewable Fuels Association, the excuse for these prices hikes given by big food companies does not pass the smell test. Particularly when you consider that these price hikes are not necessary. Wegmans, a prominent East Coast grocery store chain, recently said no to rising prices charged by big food processors. By imposing price cuts throughout its stores, Wegmans estimates it will save their shoppers’ families between $40 and $60 per month. If such savings could be realized by every American family, they could collectively save up to $7 billion a month.

“Big food and livestock processors, led by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, have spent many months and countless dollars trying to convince Americans that ethanol is the reason their food bills are higher,“ said RFA Vice President of Research Geoff Cooper, who also authored the study. “Despite their elaborate ruse, they cannot hide the facts. Prices for virtually all inputs in food production have fallen dramatically while US ethanol production has risen. Yet, despite the drop in price for corn, wheat, soybeans, oil, natural gas and other inputs, the retail price of food continues to rise. At a time when Americans are counting every penny, the last thing they want is food companies trying desperately to shift the blame while raking in higher profits.“

The report details the dramatic drop in prices, noting:

“But now, five months after the “commodity bubble“ began to deflate, food prices remain at levels much higher than normal. The price for corn – the would–be scapegoat of food price hikes – has fallen more than 50 percent since peaking in late June. Wheat prices have plunged 55 percent from their peak, while soybean prices are down nearly 50 percent. And oil prices have fallen dramatically from their highs, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in retail gasoline prices and a 40 percent drop in diesel prices. This has all occurred at the same time US ethanol production has continued to expand.“

These “sticky“ food prices are rationalized, according to big food executives, because of the lag time that exists between when input costs fall and the retail prices follow suit. Yet, as the report demonstrates, the same “lag time“ is not present when input costs go up. This “rockets and feathers“ approach to pricing is very similar to what Americans have seen all too often at the gasoline pump.

“It’s time for some truth in advertising from big food companies about the real reasons for rising food prices,“ said Cooper.

For the first time, a federal advisory board has approved criteria that clear the way for farmed fish to be labeled “organic,” a move that pleased aquaculture producers even as it angered environmentalists and consumer advocates.

The question of whether farmed fish could be labeled organic — especially carnivorous species such as salmon that live in open-ocean net pens and consume vast amounts of smaller fish — has vexed scientists and federal regulators for years. The standards approved yesterday by the National Organic Standards Board would allow organic fish farmers to use wild fish as part of their feed mix provided it did not exceed 25 percent of the total and did not come from forage species, such as menhaden, that have declined sharply as the demand for farmed fish has skyrocketed.

“Finally, maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of defining what’s organic,” said Wally Stevens, executive director of the Global Aquaculture Alliance. “The challenge is to figure out how we can produce a healthy protein product with a proper regard to where the feed comes from.”

Environmentalists and consumer advocates blasted the recommendations, which would serve as the basis for regulations to be issued by the Agriculture Department. Activists questioned why up to 25 percent of fish feed could be made up of non-organic material, while all other animals certified as organic must eat 100 percent organic feed. They also noted that open-net pens can harm the environment by allowing fish waste and disease to pollute the ocean.

“What we think is at stake is not just the integrity of a standard for fish but the whole organic standard and consumer confidence in it,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of the advocacy group Food & Water Watch. “A huge part of the growth in organic is driven by people looking for food that comes with assurance. When you start bending the rules, that’s a big risk.”

George Leonard, a marine ecologist and aquaculture director for the Ocean Conservancy, said the board sought to accomplish the “extraordinarily complicated” task of establishing a sustainable farming practice that does not yet exist. He noted that requiring organic operations to use feed made of trimmings from sustainable wild-caught fish, such as pollock, or from organically farmed fish would be better than relying on the small, wild fish that farmers currently use.

“This is a good example in which the devil is in the details,” Leonard said. “There is a very real risk that the decision could undermine consumers’ confidence in the organic label if the goal of sustainable and environmentally friendly fish does not play out in practice.”

Federal officials and advisers have devoted enormous time and effort to developing an organic fish standard, reflecting the dramatic growth of the industry in recent years. U.S. sales of organic food and beverages have grown from $1 billion in 1990 to an estimated $20 billion in 2007 and are projected to reach nearly $23.6 billion this year, according to the Organic Trade Association. Fueled at least in part by fears about food safety, sales of organic meat increased tenfold, from $33 million in 2002 to $364 million in 2007, according to the market research firm Mintel.

Surveys show that most consumers have little sense of what it would mean to produce organic fish and expect that these animals would come under much stricter environmental controls than those the National Organic Standards Board approved.

Consumers Union released a poll last week in which 93 percent of respondents said fish labeled organic should be produced with 100 percent organic feed; 90 percent said organic fish farms should be required to recover waste and not pollute the environment.

At the Whole Foods Market near 14th and P streets NW this week, most shoppers were largely unaware of the battle over organic fish standards.

Ashley Erickson, a 24-year-old D.C. resident, said that an organic standard for farm-raised fish should include nothing artificial and that the fish should be raised sustainably.

“I think it should be sustainable, though I don’t know exactly what that means for fish. I guess that’s something I should know more about,” Erickson said.

In a conference call with reporters, Lovera, of Food & Water Watch, said the panel was acting as “a promotion board” that “promotes organics at any cost” rather than establishing consistent standards.

The National Organic Program, which will take up the recommendations, is part of the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service.

The marketing service “doesn’t deal with nutrition or food safety,” said spokeswoman Joan Shaffer. “When you buy a steak that’s labeled choice or prime, that’s us. Is it healthy? Is it safe? That’s dealt with somewhere else.”

MINNEAPOLIS — A long struggle over what kind of milk counts as organic is coming to a head.

The Department of Agriculture has issued draft rules for organic milk that would require that the cows be on pasture at least half the year and get plenty of fresh grass. The proposals are meant to close a loophole that has allowed some huge feedlots to sell their milk as organic, even though their cows rarely grazed on fresh grass.

Advocates for family dairy farms and organic consumers say that’s not what shoppers think they’re buying when they pay a premium for organic milk.

“Pretty much the entire organic community welcomes the long-overdue closing of loopholes for pasture and feed in the organic dairy regulations,” said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association.

“The controversy has dragged on so long,” agreed George Siemon, a Wisconsin dairy farmer and chief executive officer of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest farmer-owned organic dairy cooperative.
The public comment period on the draft rules runs through Dec. 23.

The issue started to boil over a few years ago when it emerged that a handful of large dairy farms with thousands of cows, mostly in arid western states, were feeding their cows organic grain but keeping them largely confined to feedlots while selling the milk as organic.

The Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute helped lead the charge, mainly against two companies: Aurora Organic Dairy, which produces private-label organic milk for national and local retailers including Wal-Mart, Costco and Safeway; and Horizon Organic, the largest national organic dairy brand. The Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Association called for boycotts and spread the word to its hundreds of thousands of supporters via the Internet. Consumers filed class-action lawsuits.

“We have literally millions of consumers who give a damn and are highly passionate and willing to stand up and protect the integrity of their food supply,” said Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst at Cornucopia.

Organic dairy products are a $2.7 billion industry, about 4 percent of all dairy products sold in 2006, according to the Organic Trade Association. Organic dairy is growing faster than the organic sector as a whole, and is an important entry point for consumers who are new to organics, said Holly Givens, a spokeswoman for the association.

Kastel’s watchdog group said the number of big industrial organic dairies has grown from just two in 2000 to 14 or 15 today, and they are producing about 40 percent of the organic milk supply. That’s depressing prices and forcing legitimate family farms out of business, he said.

Organic advocates are happy that the draft rules would require that organic cows be on pasture for at least 120 days out of the year, and that the animals get at least 30 percent of their dry matter intake from grazing during the growing season.

But they’ve got some concerns.

“It’s too prescriptive,” Siemon said. It will be a burden for small and midsize dairy farms like Organic Valley’s to comply with all the detailed requirements, he said. Just one example, he said, is a requirement specifying that drinking water equipment must be cleaned weekly.

Cummins objected to a provision that would let organic dairies bring in conventionally raised heifers and sell their milk as organic. His group says only cows raised organically from birth should be added to organic herds.

Read this in The Chicago Tribune

Consumers Union

(Yonkers, NY) — Amid continuing questions as to the safety of both imported and domestically produced food, a new national food safety and labeling poll conducted by Consumer Reports National Research Center reveals that, by a huge margin, consumers are concerned about food safety, and they want the government to inspect the food supply more frequently and to publicly disclose where food safety problems arise.

“The Consumer Reports poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly expect the government to do much more to protect the public from contaminated food,” said Urvashi Rangan, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Policy Analyst at Consumers Union.

“Consumers want to know that the food they buy meets the standards they expect—our poll shows that right now, that is not the case. Whether that means that ‘organic’ fish eat 100% organic feed without contamination, or that people know which meat and dairy products come from cloned or genetically engineered animals—consumers want the government to ensure safety, quality and meaning in the food marketplace. The American public wants to know more about their food, where it comes from, how safe it is, and will vote with their dollars to support highly meaningful labels.”

Consumers expect more from the government in monitoring the food supply

While 73 percent polled currently regard the overall food supply as safe, nearly half (48%) said their confidence in the safety of the nation’s food supply has decreased. A bare majority of Americans feel the government is doing all it can to ensure food safety (54%). Eighty-three percent of respondents are concerned with harmful bacteria or chemicals in food and 81 percent are concerned with the safety of imported food.

At present, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects domestic food production facilities once every 5 to 10 years, and foreign facilities even less frequently. And while U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must inspect meat plants daily, the FDA has no such requirement for other food processing plants. The American public, however, expects the FDA to conduct hands-on reviews of food-processing plants far more often. In fact, two-thirds of respondents said the FDA should inspect domestic and foreign food-processing facilities at least once a month.

More than 8 in 10 consumers strongly agree that when food safety problems arise, the FDA should disclose to the public the location of retailers who sold the potentially harmful food, including fish, produce, and processed foods, as the USDA is currently required to do for meat. Over 80 percent of consumers also want the government to able to require a recall, quickly and accurately trace food from production to sale, and strongly agree that the USDA should disclose to the public information about schools, healthcare facilities, and other public and private institutions that receive recalled meat.

Country of Origin Labeling (COOL)—Americans want to close loopholes for processed food, butcher shops and fish markets

Mandatory country of origin labeling (also known as “COOL”) for meats, fish, produce and peanuts was finally implemented on September 30, 2008 but there are large loopholes that the majority of consumers want closed.

Ninety-four percent of Americans want specialty meat and fish stores to label their products by country of origin. Meat and poultry sold in butcher shops and fish sold in fish markets—some 11% percent of all meat and fish—are currently exempt from country of origin labeling.

Ninety-five percent of consumers polled believe that processed or packaged food should be labeled by their country of origin and that country of origin labeling for products should always be available at point of purchase. Processed (i.e., roasted, salted, smoked) and mixed ingredient foods are currently exempt. CU has developed an online guide to the new rules: http://www.consumersunion.org/pdf/CU-Cool-Tool.pdf.

Americans want meaningful “organic” fish label; Recommendation for federal proposed standard to be decided next week falls significantly short of consumer expectations

Next week, the USDA National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will meet to decide what the USDA “organic” label should mean for fish. The NOSB will vote on their recommendations for “organic” fish production that currently allows the use of fishmeal from wild fish—which has the potential to carry mercury and PCBs—and open net cages, which flushes pollution, disease, and parasites from fish farms directly into the ocean, adversely impacting wild fish supply, sustainability, and health of the oceans. Currently, fish is allowed to carry an organic claim as long as it isn’t a USDA “organic” label.

An overwhelming majority of Americans—93 percent—polled agree that fish labeled as “organic” should be produced by 100 percent organic feed, like all other organic animals. Ninety percent agreed that “organic” fish farms should be required to recover waste and not pollute the environment and 57 percent are concerned about ocean pollution caused by “organic” fish farms. More than 4 in 10 polled are concerned about the health problems associated with eating wild fish.

Americans want cloned or genetically engineered animals to be labeled; Most would not buy such meat or milk

Nearly 7 in 10 consumers Americans believe that cloning of food animals should be prohibited and nearly 6 in 10 consumers polled are concerned about meat or milk products from cloned or genetically engineered animals. FDA recently proposed allowing these foods to be sold without labels. An overwhelming majority of Americans feel otherwise:

95 percent agree that food products made from genetically engineered animals should be labeled as such.

94 percent agree that meat and dairy products from cloned animals should be labeled as such.

More than 6 in 10 of Americans would not buy meat or milk products from genetically engineered animals or milk/milk products from cloned animals or their offspring.

Americans expect more from “naturally raised” meat standards being proposed by the government

After soliciting public comments for more than three months, USDA is finalizing its standard for meat that could carry a “naturally raised” claim. The government proposes a very limited definition—only that the meat should come from an animal not given antibiotics, artificial hormones, or animal byproducts. According to the survey results, American consumers want the “naturally raised” meat claim to mean much more, including that it came from an animal that:

Had a diet free of chemicals, drugs and animal byproducts (86%)

• Was raised in a natural environment (85%)
• Ate a natural diet (85%)
• Was not cloned or genetically engineered (78%)
• Had access to the outdoors (77%)
• Was treated humanely (76%)
• Was not confined (68%).
• The majority of survey respondents (69%) also did not want salt water to be added to the cut of meat.

The Consumer Reports Poll also finds:

Other Meat & Dairy Labels

Ninety-six percent of Americans agree that meat companies should be allowed to test and label meat products as “tested for mad cow disease.” Nearly half of consumers would pay more for meat products labeled as such. (USDA currently prohibits private testing of slaughtered cattle for mad cow disease.)

Ninety-three percent of consumers agree that meat treated with carbon monoxide should be labeled as such. In addition, more than two-thirds of Americans are concerned about the safety of meat treated with carbon monoxide to preserve red color.

Nine out of 10 Americans agree that meat that contains any irradiated components should be labeled as such. (USDA is considering exempting irradiation of whole carcasses from labeling.)

Ninety-three percent of consumers agree that dairies that produce milk and milk products without artificial growth hormones should be allowed to label their products as being free of these hormones. Fifty-seven percent of Americans are willing to pay more for milk/milk products produced without artificial growth hormones. (Several states have proposed banning “no artificial growth hormone” labels on milk.)

Less than 1 in 5 consumers are willing to pay more for organic milk from cows confined indoors and without access to pasture.

Consumer Reports Poll Methodology
The Consumer Reports National Research Center conducted a telephone survey of a nationally representative probability sample of telephone households. 1,001 interviews were completed among adults aged 18+. Interviewing took place over October 23-26, 2008. The margin of error is +/- 3.2% at a 95% confidence level. A copy of the Poll can be found on www.GreenerChoices.org.

Vienna - Feeding mice with genetically engineered maize developed by the US-based Monsanto corporation led to lower fertility and body weight, according to a study conducted by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna presented Tuesday.

In the study, mice fed with the NK603 x MON810 sweetcorn variety over a period of 20 weeks showed a smaller litter size and lighter offspring than mice fed with non-engineered maize.

The differences “were statistically significant in the third and fourth litters,” according to an abstract of the study led by Professor Juergen Zentek and commissioned by Austria’s Environment Ministry.

Although in an alternative set-up of the study the differences between the groups of mice were found to be less pronounced and statistically not significant, the environmental organization Global 2000 said this meant that further long-term tests were needed.

Austria has long resisted calls by the European Commission to allow the use of genetically modified food, but it finally had to lift its ban on MON810 maize as animal feed last year.

However, Austrian feed companies have so far agreed to a self- imposed ban on MON810.

The tested corn breed is a cross of MON810 and another variety and is designed to be resistant against herbicides and insects.

An expert panel of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) found in 2005 that the hybrid was “safe for human and animal health.”

Following the release of the study at a conference in Vienna, Global 2000 and Greenpeace criticized EFSA’s approval of the variety and called for a ban of genetically engineered maize.

“It is now vital to keep animal feed in Austria free of genetically engineered maize, and an immediate ban on the use of genetically engineered maize MON810 in Austria is the order of the day,” Global 2000 spokesman Jens Karp said.

By Mark Eisen, The Progressive

Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.

Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.

Pollan has taken Wendell Berry’s memorable phrase “eating is an agricultural act” one step further. “It’s a political act as well,” Pollan advises.

A lot of people agree. The alternative food movement—organic farming, local food systems, sustainable agriculture, and more—is burgeoning today because, one family at a time, consumers are backing away from the global food network. Instead, they patronize farmers’ markets, buy food shares from CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, and favor grocers who sell local meat and produce.

Pollan’s books are essential reading in this movement. He details the importance of grazing to a sustainable farm’s operation and the problems of corn as the cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. But most of all he gracefully chronicles his own journey of discovery in a food world where, amidst $32 billion in advertising, baleful health consequences are carefully obscured.

Pollan’s topics include a thorough demolition of “nutritionism,” the reigning health ideology that offers dizzying and ever-changing advice on polyunsaturated this and low-fat that, often in the cause of selling highly processed food products.

A good diet is really pretty simple, Pollan declares: Avoid “edible foodlike substances.” Instead, eat real food. “Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

I caught up with Pollan two days after he returned from a book tour in New Zealand and Australia. At fifty-three, he looked fit but tired from the travel. He lives on a leafy avenue in Berkeley with his wife, painter Judith Belzer, and their fifteen-year-old son. He teaches journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, after a ten-year stint as an editor at Harper’s Magazine. We talked over cups of Darjeeling tea in his kitchen. Here is the edited and condensed interview.

Q: You argue that consumer ignorance is essential for maintaining the industrial agriculture system.

Michael Pollan: If people could see how their food is produced, they would change how they eat. My interest in the topic traces to two moments, in 2000, when I learned how our food is produced.

One was driving down Route 5 in California and passing the Harris ranch, which is a huge feedlot right on the highway. It’s a stunning landscape. I had never seen anything quite like that.

Miles of manure-encrusted land teeming with thousands of animals and a giant mountain of corn and a giant mountain of manure. And a stench you can smell two miles before you get there.

Most feedlots are hidden away on the High Plains. This one happens to be very accessible. Then I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn’t eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.

These two things changed the way I ate. I don’t buy industrial potatoes, and I don’t eat feedlot meat.

It’s only our ignorance of how our food is grown that permits this to go on. Most people, if they went to the feedlot or to the slaughterhouse and saw how the animals are raised and killed, would lose their appetite for that food.

The industry knows this. It works so hard not to label where the food comes from, how it’s made, and whether or not there are GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in it, because they know very well from their own research that people don’t want food grown that way.

Q: The national organic rules, which took effect in 2002, are credited with creating the boom in organic food sales. Yet you seem skeptical.

Pollan: Something was gained and something was lost when the federal government defined what “organic” meant. The rules were drawn in a way to make organic friendly to large corporations looking to do organic as cheaply as possible and on as large a scale as possible.

For example, the fight over whether you should really require pasturing for dairy so the cows can eat grass: They drew those rules so broadly that companies like Aurora and Horizon could slip through with very large industrial feedlots.

An “organic feedlot” should be a contradiction in terms, but it’s not under the rules. They really wanted to make it possible to have a mirrored food supply. So you could take everything in the supermarket and make its organic doppelganger. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It’s a mixed thing.

The Chinese organic is a real question. First, how organic is it? You hear stories that make you wonder. The other issue is what you can do within the organic rules and still be sending contaminated product. Because the soil is so badly contaminated in China, even if they don’t put chemicals on their fields for three years [as U.S. organic rules require for certification], the heavy metals are still there.

So what the consumer thinks they’re buying—organic food—may not be what they’re really getting from China.

Q: The case is made that Wal-Mart’s entry into organic sales won’t hurt organic farmers, but will help the movement by creating more customers for co-ops and natural food stores.

Pollan: I hope that’s true. But Wal-Mart is one of the reasons we grow beef the way we do in this country, which is to say with brutal efficiency and lots of pharmaceuticals. Wal-Mart’s focus on low price tended to mean squeezing their suppliers very, very hard.

Wal-Mart isn’t doing that yet with organic. But long term, that’s what I would worry about: that they would force organic prices down not by being more efficient in distribution but through pressuring suppliers.

Q: The organic folks I talk with say that Wal-Mart sells only the most popular organic items and doesn’t offer the wide selection that serious organic shoppers want.

Pollan: Wal-Mart feeds the bottom third of the population. So they’re not competing with Whole Foods or the corner co-op. It is bringing more people into organic.

The other virtue of Wal-Mart getting into organic is the education factor. There are lots of people in this country who don’t know what organic is, and they will learn about it from Wal-Mart.

When I first started talking about the industrialization of organics, there really was a sense that “big organic” would crush “little organic.” But I don’t think that’s what is happening.

They are very separate worlds. There is overlap, but “little organic” is like these smart independent bookstores. They figured out a way to be in a different business. They do events and hand-sell books and have a whole conversation about books that Barnes & Noble and Amazon can’t do.

In the same way, you see the really entrepreneurial farmers figuring out they don’t have to compete with Whole Foods and certainly not Wal-Mart. They can offer a higher level of quality and more personal attention through the whole CSA relationship and by selling at farmers’ markets now.

Q: Newsweek ran a story arguing that the organic market was leveling off because it’s just too expensive in an era of higher food prices. Do you agree?

Pollan: No, I think it’s still growing quickly. The demand is still there.

What’s slowing the growth is that there is less incentive for farmers to convert to organic because conventional prices are so high. If you’re a wheat or corn grower you’re getting a real good price. Why would you endure the economic hardship of converting to organic farming?

It takes three years. You have to follow organic practices without getting the benefit of the organic label for your effort. It’s a big investment to make the switch.

That’s what’s slowing down organic growth.

Q: In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you detail the rise of U.S. corn production and the use of high fructose corn syrup as the ubiquitous sweetener in so much processed food. But your discussion of cheap corn gave no sense that corn prices would soon go through the roof.

Pollan: As a journalist, I was describing what was. I don’t think I made any predictions. But the story has changed a lot. How it’s going to play out is very hard to predict.

A good deal of The Omnivore’s Dilemma dealt with how we took making food out of the solar basis and put it on a fossil-fuel basis. This is what the industrialization of food is essentially. It’s introducing cheap fossil fuel in what had been a strictly solar process of using photosynthesis to grow food.

When you do that, suddenly your food economy is dependent on your energy. And that’s why prices have gone up. When oil went up, that was the shock. That, and using corn to produce ethanol.

At this very moment, there are executives sitting around the table at Coca-Cola, saying the price of high fructose corn syrup is spiking and will probably stay there for a while. “Do we shrink the portion size, or do we raise the price? Do we to go back to the days before supersizing and sell eight-ounce Coca-Colas instead of twenty-ounce Coca-Colas?”

I hope they shrink the portion size. That would be good for public health.

Q: Does the world have a food shortage now, or is it more a problem of distribution and changing diets?

Pollan: The spot shortages around the world are really not so much about supply as the price. There are really high prices, and that’s driven by ethanol, high oil prices, and the growing demand for grain in Asia.

The whole free trade regime around grains is trembling right now. Countries are recognizing that you don’t want to lose control of your ability to feed your population. You don’t want the price of food in your country to be dependent on decisions made in Wall Street or the White House.

Trade globalization has forced cheap American and Brazilian grains into all of these countries. As a consequence, they’ve lost the ability to grow their own grain.

Now they wish those farmers were there.

Q: You seemed to struggle with the concept of vegetarianism and arguments against meat eating.

Pollan: I’m a pretty harsh critic of 99 percent of America’s meat system, but there is that 1 percent I think is important to defend, because first there are good environmental reasons to eat meat in a limited way.

If you believe strongly in building up local food economies, there are places where meat is the best way to get protein off of the land. It’s too hilly, too dry. Having animals is very important for sustainable agriculture. If you’re going to have animals on the farm, they’re going to die eventually, and you’re going to eat them.

But I have enormous respect for vegetarians. They’re further ahead than most of us. They’ve gone through the thought process in making their eating choices. They’ve just come out in a different place than I have.

I think we’re going to focus on meat-eaters the way we have on SUV drivers. There will be a lot of pressure and education to show that a heavy meat diet is a big contributor to climate change, and that there are many good reasons to eat less meat.

Q: How is meat consumption tied to climate change?

Pollan: In several ways. First, it’s fossil-fuel intensive. If you are feeding animals grain on feedlots you are growing that grain with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides. You are moving that grain around the country to feedlots. You’re moving the meat around the country.

It’s a very inefficient way to feed ourselves. It takes ten pounds of grain to get one pound of beef, seven pounds of grain to get one pound of pork, and two pounds of grain to get one pound of chicken.

There is an equity issue, too. If we really have a limited amount of grain to feed the world, and we’re feeding 60 percent of it to animals, and another 10 percent to our cars, that’s going to be hard to defend in the future.

Q: To a striking degree, you argue that individuals in their daily lives can make a difference.

Pollan: I really have a lot of faith—and I know that it’s considered naive by some people on the left—that consumers can change things. I have seen too many cases of what happens when consumers decide to inflect their buying decisions with their moral and political values. It brings about change.

The food industry is remarkably skittish. They’re terrified of food scares and food fads, both of which can cost them billions overnight. So they’re actually more responsive than you would think.

It’s just a matter of consumers voting with their forks for things like grass-fed meat and producers hearing that market signal. But I don’t think you can completely reform the food system by just voting with your fork.

There are policy issues, too. The Farm Bill matters greatly. So I’m not naive in thinking all of our answers lie in changes in personal behavior. The same is true of global warming. Individuals have a lot to do, but we also need public solutions. You can’t have one without the other.

Q: How is climate change a crisis of lifestyle and character?

Pollan: Look, 70 percent of economic activity in this country is consumer—it’s our purchasing decisions. That is the economy. We are implicated in these problems, and we have to recognize that. It’s our lifestyles; it’s how we’ve organized our cities and the countryside. It’s the size of our houses and how we heat our houses. It’s all these things. This is global warming.

We can look at supranational institutions to create a new set of rules for this economy. But I don’t think that will happen in the absence of people discovering that they can change their lives.

I really believe in what Wendell Berry said in the ’70s—that the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live.

Q: Are people getting it?

Pollan: On food I have a lot of optimism. I see evidence that people are changing the way they consume. I don’t foresee the industrial food system going away. I see it shrinking.

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you’re going to put in your body—and what you refuse to put in your body. That’s politics at its most basic.

Marc Eisen writes about food, political, and business topics from Madison, Wisconsin.

Critics of genetically modified crops have warned about “frankenfood” and “superweeds” for years. But today, more than four-fifths of the nation’s corn, cotton and soybean crops are altered to resist pesticides and insects.

Now Frank Morton, a 53-year-old organic seed farmer in Philomath, and other activists are plowing new legal ground in the battle, charging that genetically modified crops will spread and contaminate organic crops.

Morton’s beef is with sugar beet seeds that scientists with agricultural giant Monsanto have tweaked to resist Roundup, the company’s most popular weed killer.

Oregon doesn’t grow many sugar beets, which supply half of the nation’s sugar. But it turns out the Willamette Valley is nearly the sole supplier of U.S. sugar beet seeds.

In the past two years, the humble commodity crop has quietly become the valley’s first to incorporate genetic engineering wholesale.

Morton worries that sugar beet pollen can cross-fertilize table beet and Swiss chard plants, both of which he grows for seed. Each sugar beet flower contains thousands of pollen granules, and researchers have found the windblown pollen miles in the air and miles away from its home field.

“Who’s responsible if it isn’t on a leash?” says Morton, sunburned, earnest and blunt. “I’m a certified organic seed grower, and if (his crops) were to get contaminated with any detectable amount of transgenic sugar beet pollen, my product becomes worthless.”

Earlier this year, activists including Morton filed suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop Roundup Ready sugar beets. A similar suit that included an eastern Oregon alfalfa grower among its plaintiffs has stopped Roundup Ready alfalfa in its tracks.

Morton began organic farming in the Willamette Valley 20 years ago, growing lettuce varieties for restaurants. He considers it a moral obligation to keep his seeds free of contamination from transgenic crops.

That’s why he was stunned to learn in December 2006 that sugar beet seeds with a protein inserted to resist Roundup were coming to the Willamette Valley.

The Department of Agriculture restricts the spread of genetically modified crops when they’re being tested. Oregon has witnessed that: The department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service fined The Scotts Co. $500,000 last November after Roundup Ready creeping bentgrass spread during field trials in Jefferson County.

Limited tracking

But once the service declares a transgenic crop safe, granting it “unregulated status,” it treats the crop as identical to any other plant. No one tracks whether it’s spreading into conventional or organic crops, said John Cordts, a biotechnologist with the inspection service who wrote the environmental assessment for deregulating Roundup Ready sugar beets in 2005.

Cordts noted that U.S. organic standards don’t require organic farmers to test for the presence of genetically modified strains — only to make good-faith efforts to avoid them.

The valley has long used “isolation distances” between crops to prevent cross-pollination, and Morton says testing indicates that his crops haven’t been contaminated yet.

But the contamination of organics and other nongenetically modified crops is a tough issue, Cordts said — one the service isn’t set up to address.

“Our regulatory authority focuses on plant pest risk or the potential for environmental damage,” he said. “We understand the issues associated with organic protection, but with our regulatory authority there’s not a whole lot we can do.”

Alfalfa case

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer was sympathetic to organic and conventional farmers’ arguments in the alfalfa case, whose plaintiffs included Geertson Seed Farms of Adrian. Last year, Breyer ordered the USDA to upgrade its environmental analysis.

Eliminating the ability to grow nontransgenic crops — or to eat them — is an “undesirable consequence,” Breyer wrote.

The USDA needs to analyze “whether there is some risk to engineering all of America’s crops to include the gene that confers resistance to glyphosate,” the active ingredient in Roundup, the judge said.

Monsanto and sugar beet farmers say the concerns are overwrought. The company tried a decade ago to market a Roundup Ready variety, but Hershey’s and other big customers balked, fearing a consumer backlash.

This time U.S. sugar refiners and their customers are on board, said Tom Schwartz, executive vice president of the Beet Sugar Development Foundation. (Monsanto referred questions to Schwartz.)

A change of heart

In part, the change of heart is because the sugar crystal itself contains no remnants of the genetically modified protein or DNA and poses no dietary risk, Schwartz said.

In part it’s because most U.S. consumers have put up little fuss as genetically modified crops have expanded. Critics blame that on weaker disclosure laws than in Europe and Japan, where concern about GMO crops is greater.

“Many of our customers’ products contain corn, soy or cotton oil,” Schwartz said. “They’ve already got a transgenic product in them.”

Roundup use soars on Roundup Ready crops, growers concede. But use of more environmentally damaging herbicides drops. And frequent crop rotation, including rotation to non-Roundup Ready crops, can help prevent weeds from developing resistance to Roundup.

Growers raised small amounts of Roundup Ready sugar beets in 2006 and 2007. But the big switchover came this year, when about 60 percent of sugar beet growers chose transgenic seed, said Luther Markwart, vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association.

No organic sugar beets are grown in the United States, and the two-year cycle of the plant, with the sugar beet root harvested before the plant flowers, makes contamination unlikely, supporters of GM crops say.

But preventing contamination is tougher when growing seeds. Some advocates say small amounts of contamination — less than 1 percent — are likely and organic standards should allow for that.

Schwartz said his group is “totally confident that GM and non-GM varieties can coexist in the Willamette Valley.” He declined to give specifics because of the lawsuit.

Opponents acknowledge short-term advantages of the modified crop. But they say experience with corn crops indicates that weeds will become more resistant as farmers rely more on Roundup, requiring heavier doses of herbicides to control the “superweeds.”

Roundup less harmful

In its application to deregulate Roundup Ready sugar beets, Monsanto said four glyphosate-resistant weeds had been identified. The company said it worked with local scientists to control them.

Roundup is less harmful to wildlife and fish than many other herbicides. But critics say farmers are using far more herbicides than in the past, and the long-term effects are unclear.

In 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted Monsanto’s request to increase allowable glyphosate residues 50-fold on sugar beet roots, to 10 parts per million. The agency said that was still well below unsafe levels.

Willamette Valley sugar beet seed growers contacted by The Oregonian declined to talk on the record. Bart Edwards, president of Specialty Seed Growers of Western Oregon, said the group has members on both sides of the issue: Regulators are “going to need the wisdom of Solomon to solve this problem.”