The large-scale Organic dairy cooperative, “Organic Valley” has just sunk to a new low in the practice of “I will market against my farmer neighbors by stoking consumer’s fears.” They announced that they have launched an on-line calculator that is supposed to show you how much pesticide and fertilizer use is avoided when you buy their products.  The news release essentially boils down to the message, “buy our products or you will probably die!”  It also essentially accuses the 97.5% of us who don’t buy Organic of destroying the planet.

When talking about pesticides the press report says: “For adults, exposure through diet has been linked to infertility, Parkinson’s, testicular cancer, birth defects and much more. More than one million children in America age five and under ingest at least 15 pesticides daily. Early exposures are suspected in the sharp rise in health problems including autism, obesity, asthma, brain cancer and other childhood cancers.”  This broad-brush assertion is misleading on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start.  I’m not saying that there have never been any health issues with any pesticide anywhere, but we also have sufficient food in part because of pesticides.  Though many people don’t know it, there are pesticides used on organic crops as well.  Actually, the EPA has done a very good job of regulating pesticide use over the years so that people don’t need to be frightened about their food.

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Have you noticed how all sorts of high end resorts and hotels have started converting their chlorine pools to salt water? And it’s not just the health and hospitality industry that wants to figure out a way to purify their water without resorting to chemicals. Other industries, including the food and beverage, dairy, aquaculture and municipal drinking water providers need to ensure that the water they use contain no micro-organisms or pathogens of any kind. A company based in Israel, Atlantium has developed what may be one of the first industrial-grade solutions to water micro-organism purification without chemicals.

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Whenever folks learn that I don’t eat dairy products, there are certain questions they seem to always ask. One of the most common is:

But don’t you miss chocolate?

The assumption is that chocolate has to contain milk, and that’s just not true at all. What makes chocolate….chocolate…is cocoa butter which despite its name is a plant ingredient. There are tons of companies making great dark chocolate that is 100% vegan and 100% delicious! Finding vegan chocolate is as easy as taking the time to do a bit of label-reading. While you might not be able to just grab a Hershey bar, you don’t have to live a chocolate-free existence, either. Here are just a few tasty options:

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“Old-fashioned dairy, the new-fashioned way!  CyClone is the first major dairy to raise a herd of clones and clone offspring.  You could say cloning is our passion - where we combine DNA with TLC.”

That is what Cyclone dairy says on their website’s mission page.

Thank goodness it’s not for real…not yet anyway.

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Soon, however, there may not be meat at farmers markets, or meat raised by small farmers, at all. That’s because of the roll out of the National Animal ID System (NAIS), requiring farmers to attach radio frequency identification ear tags on cattle, dairy cows, pigs and chickens.

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A German study found that cows are major contributors to global warming, and it doesn’t matter if they’re raised on a conventional or an organic farm.

[Creative Commons photo by Jelle]

I’m with Stephanie Ernst over at change.org on this one, though: let’s not blame the poor cows. The culprit here is humans’ taste for meat and dairy and the sheer number of cows we have to raise to put beef on all of those plates.

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Anyone who has ever had the unfortunate experience of even being near one will tell you the smell alone is enough to make you instantly nauseated.

Aside from that, what are some of the other hazards of raising animals this way?

Here is a interesting list I’ve compiled of various pieces of information about this vile practice, and the impact it has on us and the environment:

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With milk prices plummeting and dairy farmers facing increased feeding costs, many are culling their herds in record numbers. It seems that the value of a dairy cow is not what it once was in the industry. Other dairy farmers are not buying. Selling cows that have become too expensive to feed to the beef industry has become the only viable option for the struggling dairy farmer trying to raise cash.

In a further effort to reduce costs, male calves are being subjected to even more callous treatment and cruelty as evidenced by the recent dumping of 30 dead calves at the side of the road in San Joaquin County, California.

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Dairy products are part of most American diets on a daily basis, but what is the health and environmental impact of this high demand for milk?

The production of much of the milk in this country is done in large scale-operations, some having thousands of cows.

That’s a lot of manure to be dealt with, this reduces the air quality (especially for people living near the dairy operation), and consistently finds its way into our rivers, streams, and groundwater.

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This national leading Catholic hospital system is now leading the nation in more ways than one.

CHW has made the decision to use food suppliers who have agreed to seek out alternatives to foods made with genetically engineered (GE) ingredients or cloned animals.

Included in CHW’s new food policy is GE sugar beets, which just recently have been introduced into the nation’s food supply, as well as meat and dairy products from cloned animals, which the FDA has decided to allow.

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When it comes to organic dairy, make friends at the supermarket. A short conversation will leave you in the know regarding markdowns. I learned that our market slashes prices when dairy is five days prior to its sell by date. I also learned that these markdowns occur around 2pm daily. Now I hit the store in the late afternoon and check for future dates while I’m there so I know in advance when the new markdowns will arrive. Also, watch in store nutrition magazines and circular for coupons. I just found a $2.00 off 2 organic dairy items, when combined with our store markdowns, I can get two gallons of milk for $1.79 each!

(Image from Angela Vetu at Dreamstime under RF-LL)

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Researchers at the University of Newcastle in the UK have reported, in the scientific journal Anthrozoos, that cows on farms where they are called by name yielded 258 litres a year more milk than those who were not called by name. Given that the average milk production in the UK is around 6 900 litres a year this represents an increase of almost 4%. This zero cost intervention can increase output and in reality reduce the herd size.

Dr Catherine Douglas said

By placing more importance on the individual, such as calling a cow by her name or interacting with the animal more as it grows up, we can not only improve the animal’s welfare and her perception of humans, but also increase milk production.

 

Photo credit: LFL16 on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.        

In public schools all over the United States children are at the mercy of the National School Lunch Program.  The NSLP was started back in 1946, with the purpose of providing affordable nutritious meals to kids.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful that this program provides lunches to children no matter what their family’s financial situation is, but the quality of the food being served is very questionable.  (In the 1980’s the Reagan Administration declared ketchup a vegetable for use in school lunches.)  According to a 1993 survey, the USDA found the nutritional quality of most school lunches to be mediocre at best.  In this day and age, with childhood obesity at an all time high, and overly processed foods being the norm, is “mediocre” good enough for our children?

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Milk powder contaminated with melamine in China has killed six children and sickened nearly 300,000 children.  Now, those families are being offered pitifully small payouts from dairies to compensate for their children’s pain and suffering.

The affected Chinese families have rejected the compensation and are attempting to sue for a greater settlement.

Although the payouts total 1.1 billion yuan (US$160 million) for the melamine contamination, they are sickeningly low per child. A child who suffered kidney stones would get only 2,000 yuan ($290). Sicker children would get a higher compensation of 30,000 yuan ($4,380), and the death of a child would be compensated with $29,000.  Tian Xiaowei, an apple farmer and part-time truck driver, whose one-year-old child died from drinking melamine-tainted milk powder, explains is disgust:

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5 million people in the United States have heart failure.

550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.

More than 287,000 people in the United States die each year with heart failure.

The estimated direct cost for heart failure each year is $29.6 billion in the US alone.

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The Cornucopia Institute’s Organic Dairy Products Scorecard pulls no punches in its ratings of organic milk producers.

Which brands are at the bottom?

The factory farms of Horizon, Aurora, Woodstock, Natural Prairie, and Shamrock.

The recently updated Organic Dairy Scorecard rates 107 organic dairy producers based on their answers to an in-depth survey asking about:

• the milk supply source (farmstead or open market)
• the amount of pasture time for the herd
• the use of hormones and antibiotics
• the health and longevity of the cows (cull rate)
• the source of replacement animals (organic or conventional farms)
• their organic farm certifier

“Consumers who pay premium prices for organic products do so believing that they are produced with a different kind of environmental ethic, a different kind of animal husbandry ethic, and social justice for family farmers. But not all organic dairy products are alike.” - Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst, Cornucopia Institute

In an exposé of factory farm dairy producers and the brands that threaten to take over the organic dairy industry, Cornucopia’s scorecard helps consumers all over the country to select foods best representing their values.

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Cook, along with her husband, Wayne, currently milk a herd of 25 cows, selling their milk to Organic Valley Family of Farms, the largest farmer-owned organic cooperative in the country. She represents the rural renaissance of farming women today: smart, sassy, steadfastly committed to educating about the importance of sustainable agriculture — and still the kind of gal who would warmly welcome you into her farmhouse kitchen for coffee, cheesecake and conversation.

Farming organically for over twenty-five years, the Cooks represent a small but dedicated group of farmers who have operated under these principles for their entire agriculture career. “Wayne’s family always farmed organically, thanks to his independent grandparents who didn’t want any part in what they saw as the government pushing chemicals,” says Cook with a smile. “I grew up an army brat in Germany and never experienced conventional American agriculture. When you’re never exposed to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the concept logically doesn’t make sense. We ourselves didn’t want to eat food laced with that stuff; why would we ever sell it to anyone else?”

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On the other front, cruise any supermarket aisle and you’ll be deluged with fat-free, chemical-laden attempts at guilt-free desserts. Neither option appealed to my dessert palette or what a dessert represents in my book: a sweet indulgence, a finale to a relished meal, something real.

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In a letter sent to Strickland today, the petitioners warned that, “If the emergency rule remains unchanged, it will negatively impact Ohioans’ ability to make an informed decision about the dairy products they buy. It interferes with farmers and dairies’ rights to free speech, and with consumer right-to-know. In this era of increased concern about what’s in our food and how it is produced, Ohio should be making more information available not less.”

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It comes as rather a shock to see New Zealanders in the news, arguing amongst themselves about the missing chapter of a report - questioning their very own green credentials. The chapter in question is unfortunately number 13.

(Not overly unfortunate that it was chapter 13, granted, but it allows me to clumsily shoehorn the word triskaidekaphobia into a piece of writing for the first - and hopefully - last time.)

Included in a statement by the country’s Green Party is the following:

“Chapter 13 states some inconvenient truths about the causes of environmental decline in New Zealand – causes such as dairy intensification, increased car use, and consumption. And it makes some inconvenient recommendations for action such as national environmental regulation and more public transport. Moreover it warns our economy is threatened by our poor environmental performance.”

The Green Party’s reaction has been thorough as the accompanying YouTube video shows.

But I’d like to just concentrate for now on dairy farming. It isn’t perhaps at the forefront of many people’s minds when we think of environmental decline. Conjure up the word “cattle” and more often, it is intensively reared beef rather than milk production that causes a reaction.

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