Ruminants should eat grass

And so, today I’m going to ask that you take action (and it won’t cost anything).  But first, let me make the case (and let others do it as well).

Who wants to head over to the confined animal feeding operation?

It’s an open secret that organic doesn’t quite mean what it used to.  As is always the danger, once you make a standard over a serious business government-enforced, it’s now political. The plus side is that you now know exactly what that means.  Or do you? Organic has certain definite meanings (e.g. no pesticides or herbicides), but there are some serious loopholes that industrial organic producers have used to cut corners on costs and on our health. Time Magazine ran a story on this issue (for an interesting comparison of organic and buying local, see this Time story or this from Treehugger).

One of these loopholes has to do with standards for pasture grazing livestock.  Cows are ruminants, and ruminants are supposed to eat grass.  If they don’t then they have health problems and get sick and are frequently raised in crowded feeding operations which cause huge pollution and ultimately bad health.

It turns out that current organic standards require “access to pasture” but no guidelines on what this means.  So, in practice, industrial organic producers often feed their cattle with grain just like non-organic farmers do in confined feeding .  This probably makes your organic milk or meat not quite what you thought it was.

Movements then, have been under way to make organically raised livestock mean something more.  New proposed rules would require that 30 percent of dry nutrition for livestock come from pasture grazing and that the livestock would spend at least 120 days in said pasture.

Now for the action you can take.  Not only were the organic standards on livestock grazing changed, but the overall organic standards are proposed to be overhauled.  The Cornucopia Institute, which raised this rucus in the first place, has called for the USDA to extend the period for comments from 60 to 90 days to allow farmers and consumers to really digest the huge range of changes and give informed comment.  If you care about this issue, it would be well-worth taking a moment to SUPPORT THEM BY CLICKING HERE AND FOLLOWING THE LINKS to ask that the comment period be extended.

In the meantime, a great way to make yourself heard in this debate is to check out Cornucopia’s report card on various dairies before you buy more dairy products (five cows is the best rating).