Sunrise Organic Dairy in Paul, Idaho (certified by Oregon Tilth)

Multiple Incidents of Fraud Said to Have Been Ignored by Past Administrations

LA FARGE, WIS: The country’s preeminent organic industry watchdog, OrganicEye, filed formal legal complaints against two industrial-scale Idaho dairies as “test cases” for the incoming Trump administration to adjudicate. Despite voluminous documentary evidence submitted to the USDA, regulators under both Democratic and Republican leadership have refused to take action to protect ethical industry participants and US citizens who pay a premium for organic food.

OrganicEye, a farm policy research group based in Wisconsin, filed complaints against two large Idaho dairies, Sunrise and Deelstra, both of which operate Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) certified as organic.

“Hundreds of legitimate organic family-scale dairy farms have been forced out of business because of the unjust market conditions that result from these practices,” stated Jim Gerritsen, a certified organic farmer in Maine since 1982 and president of the OrganicEye Board of Directors.

He continued, “When we commercialized organic farming and food production in the 1980s and lobbied for passage of the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in which Congress gave the USDA the authority to regulate organics, it was, in part, an economic-justice vehicle to save family farms that were going out of business on a wholesale basis. That worked well until corporate agribusiness started profiting by gaming the system.”

The two Idaho operations named in OrganicEye’s complaint, Sunrise Organic Dairy in Paul (5500 cows) and Deelstra Dairy in Wendell, are certified by Oregon Tilth and the Idaho Department of Agriculture, respectively — both accredited by the USDA. These two certifiers recently appeared in a study published by OrganicEye spotlighting “ethically challenged” certifiers that, in the vernacular of the researchers, have “betrayed the interests of organic farmers.”

“Our goal was to determine which certifiers had favored corporate agribusiness by deviating from the clear statutory and regulatory language that most organic farmers understand and subscribe to, making it virtually impossible to operate large CAFOs in compliance with the spirit and letter of the law,” said Mark Kastel, OrganicEye Executive Director and 35-year veteran in dairy policy and regulatory analysis.

OrganicEye’s guide also showcases ten of the 45 domestic accredited certifiers which it recognizes as being exemplary in their approach to protecting industry participants and their customers, organic eaters. They are now in the midst of a campaign supporting farmers shifting their certification funding to certifiers who “share their values.”

“It’s an end run around the USDA, made necessary by their friendliness with the corporate lobby and lack of fortitude in terms of aggressive enforcement,” Kastel added.

Between “factory” livestock production and copious imports of organic commodities, including proven large-scale fraud, US farmers are being squeezed out of the market and off the land. Hundreds of organic dairy farmers have been forced out of business.

Similarly, many of the same certifiers the OrganicEye study pans are approving giant, sealed, controlled environment greenhouses that grow produce hydroponically in a liquid fertilizer solution (without soil). The farm policy group, along with many industry leaders, also cites statutory language requiring careful organic soil stewardship as a requisite for securing organic certification.

The majority of organic milk in the US is now marketed by “private label” brands owned by large grocery retailers and big-box stores such as Walmart, Costco, and Target. Most of this milk is produced by large CAFOs west of the Mississippi which are represented by lobbyists with the Western Organic Dairy Producers Alliance and the Organic Trade Association.

Despite the preposterous proposition by the USDA that the Organic Systems Plans for certified farming operations should be viewed as proprietary and treated as confidential business information, researchers at OrganicEye have generally been able to secure state regulatory documents through Freedom of Information requests in the states where these dairies operate. These documents confirm how cattle are grazed and how land is managed (including the spreading of copious amounts of manure).

 “We have made the same argument with the USDA — there’s nothing new under the sun. Virtually all dairies in this country use the same genetics, milking equipment, and feed sources. The position Idaho and the USDA are taking deprives the public of the ability to scrutinize the way corporate agribusiness is producing our food or exploiting the environment,” Kastel continued.

OrganicEye is now filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the US Environmental Protection Agency to access any regulatory documents they hold relating to the two named dairies.

Based on satellite imagery of the Sunrise and Deelstra dairies, OrganicEye has requested the USDA’s National Organic Program to use its investigative powers to determine whether the operations are in violation of federal law, as alleged, as well as whether the certifiers involved have failed to perform adequate oversight. OrganicEye contends that overgrazing has occurred at both of these livestock facilities and that the required acreage adequate for grazing these very large herds is not available.

“Many CAFOs have moved from doing no grazing at all — in blatant violation of the law — to now creating the illusion of grazing cattle on an amount of land that is inadequate to produce organic milk in a humane and healthful manner, as the law requires,” Kastel concluded.

This is, in fact, the third complaint that Kastel has filed against the dairy in Paul, Idaho. The first two were filed when it was owned and operated by Dean Foods for their Horizon label. With their massive economic power and lobby presence in Washington, the dairy was effectively shielded from actions by federal regulators.

OrganicEye has long contended that these massive dairy operations do not afford animals the opportunity to exhibit their natural instinctive behaviors, as mandated. “These cows live most of their short, stressful lives in feedlots, pushed for high milk production with a ‘hot’ unnatural diet before they are slaughtered, just like livestock in conventional livestock factories,” lamented Kastel.

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SIDEBAR:

Sunrise Organic Dairy in Paul, Idaho, was originally a conventional facility owned by one of the two founders of the Horizon Organic Brand. At the time, they converted half of their 4,500 cows to organic feed and became one of the first two CAFOs in the country to be certified as organic (by the certifier Quality Assurance International/QAI). The organic milkers were managed in total confinement, while the conventional half of the herd continued being fed conventional feed and injected with Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH).

OrganicEye’s Kastel filed two previous legal complaints against the dairy when it was operated by its second owner, Dean Foods, which at the time was the largest conventional milk bottler in the United States. The first complaint was filed in 2006 and the second was filed in 2014.

Although one of the other Horizon dairies targeted by Kastel was decertified (an operation with 10,000-cows in Pixley, California), subsequent freedom of information requests revealed no evidence that the USDA ever investigated the Paul, Idaho dairy when it was operated by Dean Foods.

Amid mounting public pressure exerted by Kastel and others in the organic dairy community, Dean Foods announced it would build a new milking facility more conducive to grazing and with a reduced herd size. They operated that for some time but as market demand rapidly grew and the milk supply became short, they repopulated the original milking facility. The two facilities combined are now milking 5500 cows.