Interview: organic consumers association's ronnie cummins tells thetruth about organic milk that is

The situation has become so alarming that the Organic Consumers Association ultimately called for a boycott, and many knowledgeable consumers are now avoiding the Horizon brand entirely. The organic milk controversy extends to organic soy milk as well. Horizon Organic's parent company, Dean Foods , also bought out Silk , the leading organic soy milk brand in the United States . Dean Foods has pushed for lower organic standards in the United States and to allow industrial-style production tobe called "organic." Meanwhile, major grocery chains import cheap, so-called "organic" soybeans from China, where the workers are treated much like slaves andorganic standards are dubious.

They are also imported from Brazilwhere the Amazon rainforest is being bulldozed in order to create more acreage forgrowing soybeans. To gain more insight on the details of this emerging battle overorganic standards, NaturalNews editor Mike Adams sat down with Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association for some straight talk onorganic milk. What follows is the full interview. Mike: I am here today talking with Ronnie Cummins, National Director ofthe Organic Consumers Association.

That is at . What's the overview of the situation on organic milk, Ronnie? Ronnie: Well, the good news is, there is such a huge demand for organic products across the United States and North America that there is a serious shortage of supply. One of the types of products that are in serious short supply is organic milk. This is alreadymore than a $1-billion-a-year industry in the United States, out of the $15 billion in organic food sales last year. The problem is that our government - specifically the U.

S. Department of Agriculture - takes about$90 billion of our tax money every year, and they give subsidies to all of these factory farms to go organic, but they give nosubsidies to help family-scale dairies make the transition toorganic. We literally do not have enough family farmers with the wherewithal to achieve organic certification and make theproduct. At the same time, we have these giant retail giants like Wal-Mart who have noticed that the public wants organic food and they are willing to pay a premium price for it, so they andthe other retail chain stores have moved with a vengeance todominate the organic market.

Wal-Mart is now the number-one sellerof organic milk in the country. The problem is that the milk theyare selling - Horizon Organic - is not really organic. It is comingfrom the factory-style dairy farms where the animals are kept in intensive confinement and have been imported fromconventional farms as calves. They simply label it organic, and the USDA lets them get away with it.

Mike: Let us get into more detail on that, because I want people tounderstand how they do an end-run around this organic label. First,do you agree that there is some degree of success in the fact thatconsumer demand for organic products is now so strong? Is that nota success by itself? Ronnie: It is a tremendous success. It is attributed to the fact that alot of us spent the last 30 years building up an alternative foodand farming system in the United States. This alternative systemhas proved to be much better than industrial agriculture , and so now the latest polls show 75 percent of Americans say theyare shopping for healthier food. If you look at the statistics,about 12 cents of every grocery store dollar are going for foods that are labeled as either natural or organic.

Mike: Well, that is a substantial sum. That is growing at, what, about20 percent a year or something? Ronnie: Growing at 20 percent a year, whereas conventional food sales tendto grow about 2 percent a year. This 20 percent-a-year growth hasbeen steady ever since 1991. It appears that it will continuethrough the end of this decade, so by then most food sold ingrocery stores will have a label that says 'natural' or 'organic'.

The question is: If we let these gigantic corporations like Horizon and Wal-Mart take over the industry, will it reallybe organic? How the USDA enables big business to corrupt organic standards for profit Mike: Let's talk about the definition of organic, then. What shouldorganic really mean in terms of, not only the treatment of the cows , but also what chemicals are not in the milk, for example? What isthe real definition? Ronnie: There are organic farmers all over the world - in about 100 countries - who are certifiedorganic nowadays. Traditionally, organic has always meant that youraise crops without chemical pesticides or chemical fertilizers and that youraise animals without drugging them up with hormones or antibiotics . You cannot take sewage sludge and put it on farmlands. You cannotfeed animals things like blood, slaughterhouse waste, manure and municipal garbage, and you cannot use untestedand hazardous technologies like genetic engineering or fruitirradiation.

The animals have to be raised on pasture - which istheir natural behavior - where every day of the growing season , weather permitting, they are out on pasture eating grass andforaging as they have evolved to do. What has happened recently is that Wal-Mart was buying theirorganic milk from genuine organic dairy farmers that pastured their animals, and then they turned aroundto that company - Organic Valley - and they said, "Hey, we want alower price," just as Wal-Mart always does. Organic Valley said no,so Wal-Mart then turned to Dean Foods, the largest dairyconglomerate in the world - which had bought out Horizon Organic -and said, "Would you sell to us?" To which Horizon said, "We willsell you the cheapest organic milk you have ever seen." Horizon conveniently took advantage of the fact that FederalOrganic Standards say the cows must have access to pasture, andthey said, "Oh well, I guess theoretical access to pasture is goodenough. We are going to chain up our cows and milk them three timesa day, and they will never get out pasturing unless there is a newsorganization coming to the farm that day. We will still call itorganic." They have been doing this for four years, and there havebeen complaints from the Organic Consumers Association and organicfarmers all over the country.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has completely ignored thesecomplaints for four years. However, now this controversy hasreached such a state, with the mass media covering it and retailstores across the country starting to drop Horizon and AuroraOrganic, that the USDA is finally making noises that they will clear up this situationand promulgate federal regulations that actually require theanimals to be pastured. They will make sure that the animals were not imported from someconventional dairy farm where they were weaned on blood , fed antibiotics, slaughterhouse waste and chicken manure and then called "organic." The animals must be raised frombirth as organic, and they must be pastured every day during t hegrowing season - a minimum of 120 days a year.

This is what organichas always meant in terms of raising cows, and it is what it shouldmean now. Mike: Now, these are pretty serious accusations of Horizon Milk or DeanFoods' behavior. How are you able to support this? Do you have aninsider taking pictures, or how did you become aware of thisbehavior on their part? Ronnie: It was called to our attention by a watchdog organization called The Cornucopia Institute , which actually visited some of these factory-style dairy farmsthat Horizon and Aurora call organic. They witnessed first-handthings like a farm where there are 4,000 animals, but only a fewhundred acres of pasture. You cannot possibly pasture animals onthat little pasture, especially when they are in semi-arid parts ofIdaho, Colorado and West Texas.

Then beyond that, workers on these farms started coming forth as whistleblowers . There was a story in the Chicago Tribune about one of these whistleblowers who pointed out that these cowsare not put out to pasture. The only time they are put out topasture is when there is a media organization or an importantperson coming out. Yes, it is first-hand information.

It is a look at the terrain that these factory-style dairyfeedlots are set on. Look at the size of their pasture, and thenthe fact that there was a national survey of organic dairy farmsthat came out March 22 - which the unethical dairies did notrespond to or they got really low ranks - whereas, the ethicalproducers were happy to be transparent about their practices. The good news is, almost all the organic farmers in the country areactually practicing real organic standards. The bad news is thatthe market leader, Horizon Organic, and their junior partner,Aurora Organic, are flagrantly violating organic standards to thepoint where we, the Organic Consumers Association, had to call fora boycott. We have never called for a boycott against an organicproduct before.

This was going too far, so starting in early April,we called on consumers across the country to start boycotting theproducts of Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic, and to boycott thebrand names that the leading retailers are selling from Horizon andAurora at Wal-Mart, Costco, Safeway, Giant, Publix and Wild Oats. Mike: Well, this seems like a clear case in which big business is nowseeing dollar signs whenever the word "organic" appears, so theyare doing the minimum necessary or even just blatantly violatingthe rules in order to put that word on their products, regardlessof the spirit of the law or the original intent of organics. Isthis just corporate greed? Ronnie: This is, and the sad thing is, how easy it would be to help 5,000or 10,000 conventional family farmers make the transition in their dairies to organic. It wouldnot be that hard. It would not cost that much money, and this waywe could still have organic standards that were real, animalstreated humanely and not damage the environment.

Of course, we have not even mentioned that one of the reasons youwant organic animals to be outdoors and pastured is because thequality of the meat and milk is much higher if the animals are raised naturally ongrass. The other organic requirements mean that the end product isgoing to be healthier as well. They are not going to haveantibiotic residues or genetically engineered hormones. They are not going to be spreading mad cow disease andso on. We, right now in the United States, have an excess of milkbeing produced by family-scale dairy farmers who are not yetorganic.

It would be very simple to help those who want to make thetransition do so if we were to force the government to give us afair share of our subsidies to help these farmers do that. Lax standards of corporate manufacturers and retailers affect bothorganic milk and soymilk products Mike: Now, you mentioned that pasture-fed cows are healthier cows. Thisgets back to something you mentioned earlier that needs to beemphasized, because most people simply do not believe this ishappening. Conventional cows, in fact, are being fed chicken litter and other animals.

Ronnie: Yes, they take it from birth. Cows were traditionally weaned ontheir mother's milk, but industrial agriculture figured out thatit's pretty expensive to wean the calves on milk, so they decidedto wean them on blood. That is common practice nowadays on aconventional dairy farm. Then, you feed them primarily grains that are genetically engineered, but mixed in with those grainsare things that make the animals grow faster and put on weight,like slaughterhouse waste - basically ground up pigs, chickens , dogs, cats and everything else are fed to them. They found out all these factory poultry farms around the countrywere producing billions of pounds of manure that pollute the environment.

What can we do with all this manure ? Presto, they feed it back to cows. They sweep up the manure, thefeathers and the dropped bits of cattle that are fed to chickens intheir feed. They sweep that all up, turn around and feed it back tocows. Most people in the United States are shocked when they hear that 80percent of the drugs and antibiotics made in this country are notfed to humans to cure them of some illness, but fed to animals intheir feed every day to make them grow faster. Scientists do nottotally understand why, but they do know that if you cram thousandsof animals together in unsanitary or unhygienic - not to mentioninhumane - conditions , they all get sick and die.

The only way to keep them alive is to constantly feed themantibiotics. Of course, what that means is you turn around anddrink a glass of dairy milk from a conventional farm, and you aregetting residues of antibiotics in every drink. They also figuredout, "We could use our genetically engineered hormone to shoot upthese cows with this hormone produced by Monsanto, even though itis banned in just about every industrialized country in the worldexcept for the United States." If you shoot up dairy cows with thishormone, you can force them to give more milk, and you can keepmilking them even past their lactation period. You can actuallymilk a cow not for a year, but for up to a thousand days. Ofcourse, the cow will drop dead after that, but they do not care.

For all these reasons, there is a huge movement on the part ofAmerican consumers and especially concerned parents and concerned grandparents - if they drink milk and if their kidsand grandparents drink - to switch to organic. Mike: Is it fair to say, Ronnie, that the organic-labeled Horizon Milkon the shelves in Wal-Mart right now comes, at least in part, fromcows that were at one point in their lives fed blood, manure,chicken litter and some other things you mentioned? Is thataccurate? Ronnie: Yes, half of Horizon Organic's milk today comes from these factorydairy feedlots. One hundred percent of Aurora Organic's milk comesfrom these factory dairy feedlots. It is cheaper to not buy organiccalves that have been raised from birth on an organic farm, but tobuy conventional calves that have been raised as cheaply aspossible on a conventional farm.

The routine practice today on aconventional farm is feeding the animals blood plasma as a milkreplacer. You feed them genetically engineered grains,slaughterhouse waste and chicken manure. That is industry standard.Why? You can make more money doing it that way. Mike: Okay, so for those reading this, take a closer look at that bowlof cereal next time.

If you are pouring cow's milk in there, youmight want to buy genuine organic and not the cheap stuff. Ronnie: Here is another point that you might think about: for those peoplewho do not drink dairy milk, but who buy organic soy milk, theleading organic soy milk brand in the United States is Silk. Manyconsumers have no idea that Silk - just like Horizon Organic Milk -was bought out by this giant conglomerate, Dean Foods. Silk used to buy their organic soybeans from U.S.

and Canadianorganic soybean farmers, and they paid them a decent price - $16 to$21 a bushel - for these organic soybeans. Well, now that DeanFoods has bought out Silk, they are starting to import cheap,so-called organic soybeans from China, where the workers aretreated like slaves and organic standards are dubious. Or, they areimporting soybeans from Brazil where there is a huge uproar overthe fact that people are whacking down the Amazon - the lungs ofthe planet - in order to plant export crops, specifically soybeans,to export. Even if we think this does not affect us, because we do not eatmeat or we do not eat dairy, we have to see the effect of these bigcorporations like Dean Foods coming into organic.

Wal-Mart wants tosell you stuff that is cheaper than their competitors, and the onlyway they can do that is to outsource it from overseas - places likeChina and Brazil - where worker rights and environmental standardsare routinely violated, or else lower standards in the UnitedStates and allow industrial-style production to call itselforganic. Mike: Now, this is obviously a very important story for consumers tofollow. How can they continue to get updates from you on thisstory? Ronnie: Every day on our news site, you will find updates. We have a whole section of our websitecalled "Safeguard Organic Standards," where you can take action.

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