Page 87 - Summer2018

organic movement clearly had this on their minds when they created the production prices. Several years ago, most
pasture rule in the first place. organic dairies received thirty-five to forty
It appears that the USDA pasture rules must be followed by everyone dollars or more per hundredweight for their
except for big CAFOs, resulting in a devastating and drastic loss of many milk. Now that price is dropping and in many
small organic dairy farms across the United States. The added eighty places is twenty-two dollars per hundredweight
thousand cows from the non-compliant CAFO operations have become with some areas left with no market or buyers
the cheap “one-stop shopping source” for Group Danone, which owns at all. Then the milk goes into the conventional
Horizon Organic Milk, Stonyfield and other big box brands. These eighty markets at less than fifteen dollars per hundred-
thousand CAFO cows are roughly equivalent to most of the California weight. The break-even cost for production of
organic dairies put together! It is no wonder that organic dairies are be- organic milk is roughly twenty-eight to thirty
ing shut down. There is a massive national oversupply of organic milk dollars per hundredweight if organic inputs are
and there are no supply limitations now that nature’s natural pasture rule used.
limits have been removed.
When the founders of the organic movement originally designed the REAL ORGANIC PROJECT
organic rules, the pasture rule ensured many benefits. Cows on green As a consumer of organic dairy products,
pastures made better milk with high CLA and good omega-3 fatty acid you are left wondering what to do and whom to
ratios. Cows on pastures sequester carbon and save our air from the support? Organics should be about fair rules and
ever-increasing burdens of carbon dioxide. Cows in CAFOs with their evenly enforced regulations. As it stands today,
huge manure lagoons are part of the problem, while cows on pastures it’s not fair and it’s not evenly enforced. When
are part of the solution. you have no enforcement of standards, you have
The pasture rule is also critical because of sustainable supply man- no organic market.
agement. If there are no limits to production of organic milk, then it will There is now a movement to place an
become over-supplied and prices will drop, just like in the conventional add-on label on organic products. One of the
dairy system with its chronic oversupply problem and below-cost-of- most popular is the Real Organic Project (re-

OUR GOAL: RAW MILK DISTRIBUTION LEGAL IN ALL FIFTY STATES
A long-term goal of the Weston A. Price Foundation has been the establishment of legal access to raw milk in all fifty
states. When the WAPF project, A Campaign for Real Milk, started in 1999, the sale or distribution of raw milk was legal
in twenty-seven states; today that number stands at forty-three. The only states that still prohibit any form of raw milk sales
or distribution are Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey and Rhode Island. Recognizing that the day of
legal access to raw milk is getting closer, WAPF has embarked on a drive to help legalize raw milk sales and distribution in
the remaining seven states.
A Campaign for Real Milk will be devoting more resources to legalization efforts; this could be through paying a lob-
byist, paying for experts to testify at hearings, paying for expenses of WAPF members working on legislation, consulting
on legislation, networking with other groups or organizations or helping with the drafting of raw milk bills. Legal raw milk
access can be established through regulation, court decision, legislation or policy. A Campaign for Real Milk will focus on
legalization primarily through legislative and policy work.
The main goal of A Campaign for Real Milk will be to legalize raw milk
sales or distribution in the remaining seven states, but the campaign will
also support efforts to expand raw milk access in the other forty-three
states; in some of those states, access is very limited. The campaign also
supports work to legalize access to other raw dairy products such as cream,
butter, yogurt, kefir and cheese. These products, other than raw cheese
aged sixty days, are legally available only in a minority of states. The drive
for expanded raw dairy access could include efforts to legalize the com-
mercial sale of raw butter and unaged raw cheese. Most states only allow
the sale of raw milk and raw milk products directly from the producer to
the consumer.
A Campaign for Real Milk has set a goal of legalizing raw milk access in
all fifty states by 2020. WAPF, long the leading raw milk advocacy group
in the country, is excited to step up efforts to make this happen.

SUMMER 2018 Wise Traditions 85