Page 85 - Summer2018

A Campaign for Real Milk

ORGANIC DAIRY WAS A GREEN NICHE. . .

THEN CAME CAFOs AND LAWYERS
By Mark McAfee, Chairman, Raw Milk Institute
CEO, Organic Pastures Dairy Corporation, Fresno, California

When I first started our organic dairy their organic milk. Here in California, Horizon
twenty years ago, I was mentored by Tony has cancelled 80 percent of all of their organic
Azevedo. He operated an organic dairy near dairy contracts and told the dairymen that their
Merced, California, and had been in the dairy organic milk was no longer needed because
business his entire life. He was also a member cheaper milk could be bought from dairies
of the CROPP Co-op at Organic Valley and was in Texas and Colorado. Organic processors
on a mission to get more organic milk for the in Wisconsin are now obtaining their organic
emerging organic market. It was 1999 and he milk from Colorado and paying five dollars
mentored me on ways to start and run an organic per hundred weight just to ship it in, which dis-
dairy, and it was Tony who provided me with an places local organic dairies. Wallaby Yogurt in
Organic Valley CROPP co-op contract. We were Northern California cancelled its organic milk
so excited. I listened to and leaned on his every dairy contracts and moved out of state because A Campaign
word. There was one sentence that he repeated it was cheaper to buy organic milk elsewhere. for Real Milk
to me several times when we walked through his The surviving and remaining Horizon organic is a project of
pastures. He said, “Mark, if there ever comes a milk contracts in California have been reduced the Weston A.
day when the USDA does not enforce the one to receive prices below cost of organic produc- Price
hundred twenty-day pasture rule, organic dair- tion. We all know what that means; that some
ies will be done and the niche will be lost. The organic dairymen will start cheating to survive Foundation.
pasture is the only thing that stands between or go out of business. That could be cheating by To obtain
organic dairies and the fifteen thousand-cow reducing the amount of time feeding their cows some of our
CAFO [confinement animal feeding operation] on pasture or feeding conventional GMO feeds informative
next door.” at cheaper prices. Real Milk
Tony explained that the pasture is nature’s brochures,
acreage-stocking-rate ratio; it acts as a natural CAFOs WIN OUT
quota and limits production. If there is no pas- So what is going on? Years ago, back in contact the
ture rule that requires pasturing of the cows, 2005-2007, Cornucopia Institute, the consumer Foundation at
then anyone can buy organic feed and confine a watchdog group, sued several large CAFOs (202)
huge number of cows and call it organic! Well, because they had discovered that these large 363-4394.
that day has come. It is here, and it is now. operations were cheating under the organic Check out our
Since Christmas 2017, California has lost regulations. These CAFOs confined up to fifteen
12 percent of its one hundred nineteen organic thousand cows each and also held organic cer- website,
dairies, and more are being lost every week. tifications. The lawsuit alleged that the CAFO RealMilk.com
Wisconsin has lost untold numbers of family operations did not comply with the USDA- for additional
organic dairies and so has Pennsylvania. A mandated one hundred-day pasture grazing information
friend of mine shared with me the sad news that rule (following the 30 percent dry matter intake and sources
in one Mennonite church alone, six Horizon standard), and that they failed to follow many of of Real Milk
organic contracts had been cancelled, leav- the other USDA organic standards. The judge
ing the organic dairymen with no place to sell agreed and mandated that the operations change products.

SUMMER 2018 Wise Traditions 83