Horizon, Aurora, and Woodstock Organic Milk get the Smackdown from Cornucopia

Derek Markham — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:11:38 +0000

What’s the integrity of your organic milk?

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.

Light LEED Opens at Arterra SF

Keith Rockmael — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:55:17 +0000

With new owners set to move into the the LEED light Arterra we throughout that we’d pay a visit to San Fran’s newest LEED certified condo. Arriving on bikes, we discovered that no bike racks exist for those wishing to inspect the demo models. Thus we had to pull out bikes into into the sales office. Walking though the corridors to the demo unit, we couldn’t help but smell the VOCs rising though the air. Kind of disappointing for a LEED-NC building.

Once we arrived at the demo unit, we felt sad to see granite countertops in both the 1 and 2 bedroom units. We asked the salesperson about the “Green” aspects of the condo and he didn’t know much about the Green aspects but he thought that most of the Green attributes (aka LEED points) weren’t located in the condos but we more part of the overall building. Give that man an organic cigar as most of the LEED points came about in the low hanging fruit (landscape, location and other interior elements) as the green aspects hardly appear in the living spaces. We noticed the dual flush toilets and triple pained windows but aside from that we didn’t note many green offerings.