| Like many families when our children are home, we have long conversation filled dinners. We may spend two hours or more eating and talking, food that we grew ourselves, sometimes with a few additions from other vendors at the farmers market we sell at. We can put a name with every item on our table and there is a real comfort in that, "if this isn't nice I don't know what is".
While organic food is a good choice one needs to consider miles traveled, inputs, seasonality and a host of issues that may make locally grown a better choice than organic. In season locally grown is generally cheaper than any supermarket food and there are no avoided costs in fuel, labor or environmental issues. If you know your farmer you can influence how they farm.
The organic label is really nothing more than an assurance that you are paying for food raised under a specific set of verified production practices. No pesticides, no GM, no chemical fertilizers, but no guarantees on miles traveled or working conditions for farm laborers.
With meat, eggs and dairy, a whole new set of questions surround organic production. Most people who have been involved in the organic community for any length of time seem to agree that when USDA wrote the current organic regulations they left a lot of gray area in the livestock area.
Poultry must be "allowed access" to outdoors. What does that mean? Could just be a door left open on their shed I guess. One would be hard pressed to tell the difference between an organic poultry operation and a conventional one, because in many cases the only difference appears to be the feed. Large barns, thousands of birds allowed only a few square feet of room to move around, perhaps never getting outside.
Organic beef can be fattened on grain, (organic grain of course), basically in a feed lot with "access to pasture" what ever that means. Of course antibiotics and growth hormones are out.
Organic dairy, herds could be thousands of cows, again raised on a feedlot with out any real pasture, not enough grass to live on, only the requirement of "access to pasture". High grain diets, questionable pasture, I don't think most buyers of organic milk and cheese would ever imagine organic dairy cows could be raised so much like conventional cattle.
The good news is, You Can Do Something About It! The National Organic Program is taking comments on the new proposed organic pasture rule until December 23 at this website www.regulations.gov..
What kind of pasture standards should USDA be enforcing? Cows need pasture, it is part of their natural behavior and necessary for good health. USDA needs to require cows to get nutrition from pasture, the majority of their diet should be pasture during the growing season.
The current USDA rule would require cows to get 30% of their feed from pasture, not as strict as it could be, but probably as good as we can hope for if we want any rule stating actual amounts of feed required to be from pasture.
The biggest loophole that needs to be closed however is the one that allows farms to bring (through purchase) non-organic dairy heifers into an organic dairy herd. The organic conversion process has always allowed for the transition of non-organic animals into organic status as the farm transitions from conventional to organic, but after that no transitioning of animals should be allowed. Once your herd is certified organic, (other than animals from your own herd), only purchased certified organic animals should be allowed to be added to the herd.
This loophole is especially beneficial to very large herds whose organic integrity is suspect at best, small herds typically rely on raising their own replacement animals or buying certified organic animals. Large herds, since they generally need to purchase more animals, are putting lots of pressure on USDA to continue to allow them to bring in the cheaper and more plentiful non-organic animals. A clear violation of the trust consumers place in what they assume are organic dairy farms.
So, take time to weigh in on organic integrity, our government will only be as effective and as responsive as we force them to be. |
