Food Issues

It looks bad for our food system. High petro prices is having a negative impact on how grains are farmed either conventionally or organically. the price for flour I buy, Kroger certified organic, has remained steady but I suspect in the next few days the price will go up 50% or so (if it hasn't already, I have not bought flour in about 10 days). This happened with King Arthur flour which I can no longer afford when there are cheaper options that are also certified organic.

I was in TSC buying dog food and looked at the price of chicken feed. It was going for 27¢ a pound if you got it 5 pound bags. It was lower for larger amounts. 27¢ per pound is what I was paying last year for certified organic chicken feed. This year it is well over 35¢ a pound and thus too expensive for us to buy to feed meat chickens. So, for the first time in 12 or so years, we will not be raising chickens for sale or for ourselves (we may still get 30 or so for our own freezer even though they will be expensive birds, we have not yet decided.). I will say local organic feed prices are not rising nearly as fast as conventional and likely would have stayed pretty steady had the Filbruns soybean crop not crapped out on them last year causing them to have to buy in semi loads of organic soy from other parts of the country. Dale told me the soy cost him $22K, double what it cost last year

If we were to raise birds, with the increase in feed, gas and likely processing, we would have to charge at least $7 a pound for a whole chicken. Though at $7 a pound we would profit just $150 for 7 weeks of work. Not our highest profit margin by any means and chickens are a lot more work than produce (which is a lot of work in and of itself).

Already I hear there is some rationing going on in the country. Wal-Mart/Sam's Club is limiting how much rice a person can buy. This will probably get worse. I am wondering if this will be an issue with local foods. People not being able to grow enough for what I think will be a sharply increased demand. though in all likelihood the non-locavores will be slow to realize that if they want to eat they are going to have to find local sources for their food and also will have to grow some of what they eat themselves.

I was thinking about this last night after reading a thread on the SSE forum about food and farming and famine (I have been reading a lot about this over the past 10 years or so and even more in the past month as the mainstream is beginning to realize that our agriculture system is broken and food is important, maybe as important as money) that my county, while rural and a big agricultural county, cannot feed itself because most the acreage is planted in commodity crops-corn, soy with a bit of wheat and other grains and livestock. There are very few produce farms and most of the produce land will be put into sweet corn. I can think of maybe 10 farms in the county producing (non commodity) food on any kind of commercial scale. I think (hope) there are more than that. The Eaton farmers market has mostly very small producers and the biggest "farm" grows nothing at all, they resell what they don't grow (and I suspect they will will be just about out of business after this season).

So how is Preble County gonna feed itself? We cannot eat corn and soy grown for the industrial trades like ethanol (which is the worst idea humans have come up with, perhaps ever.), There is a lot of cattle and hogs raise in PC. But a meat based diet just ain't healthy and a lot of that cattle is grain fed so soon enough will no longer be raised because the price of corn and soy are getting too high. A lot of people have deluded themselves into thinking that we have the best agriculture system in the history of the world but now the gild is off the lily and we can see that the Green Revolution Ag system so dependent on cheap oil has been feeding us bad food and also has been destabilizing the planet for 50 years now. Before the green revolution more people farmed and overall the diet was better (more whole foods and less processed food). In developing countries before they were told told to get modern with their farming people were in great poverty but the family system/culture was intact and people were able to feed and cloth themselves very well. now that they grow for the commodity system they are still desperately poor but because of money they are now taxed by the government, do not have enough to eat and the family system has been broken. But the the people in charge of business are making a lot of money off of the labor of these poor third worlders and of course we in the first world even if we are not rich and powerful get to drink cheap coffee and eat inexpensive bananas.

Change is here folks, cause by a combination of climate change, bad Ag. policies and most importantly greed. I suggest you learn as much as you can as quickly as you can about food, where it comes from, what is in it and how to make your own. if you continue to depend on the corporate tit to feed you will go hungry.

The Selling of Organic

THE SELLING OF ORGANIC
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3066
Newsletter 38

Organic farms have historically been small, family-run mixed farms
producing for local markets, but this story is starting to change as
conventional agribusiness and the supermarkets move in. Organic
shops, too, are expanding, or being bought up, and increasingly
resembling their non-organic counterparts.

ORGANIC POT NOODLE ANYONE?
Multinational food corporations have developed organic versions of
their best selling brands, some have been pushed into it by WalMart;
which has put pressure on the big food corporations to produce
organic versions of their big brands. The big food companies with
organic ranges include: Heinz, General Mills, Kellogg's, Groupe
Danone, Nestle, Unilever Bestfoods, RHM, Mars/Masterfoods, Kraft,
Premier Foods, Northern Foods and Pepsi-Co. You can now get all your
favourite processed foods in organic versions: ketchup, baked beans,
rice crispies, creamed rice,custard, ready meals and, for a brief
while, an organic version of Pot Noodle (though that's now been
discontinued) What started out as a method of producing healthy and
nutritious food is now turning out highly-industrialised multi-
ingredient (but organic) products.

The large food manufacturers are careful not to make their non-
organic foods look unhealthy. Organic foods are instead being 'niche'
marketed along with vitamin-enriched products and functional foods,
in the eyes of General Mills [a US food corporation], 'organic is
not a revolution so much as a market niche'.

ORGANIC SALAD MIX GOES INDUSTRIAL
In the late 1980s organic salad mix (a mix of baby lettuce and other
salad leaves) was a niche product served in upmarket restaurants in
San Francisco and produced by small local farmers like the Goodmans
at Earthbound Farms. The Goodmans hit on the idea of bagging the
salad mix in resealable bags, this innovation allowed them to sell
their salad to supermarkets throughout the US. They bought more
land, as well as produce, from other smaller producers. Demand for salad
mix grew, prices rose and that drew in new converts to organic
farming, prices then fell squeezing the smaller growers out. New
post- harvest washing and sorting processes were also developed which
required capital, again squeezing out the smaller growers. But
Earthbound Farms formed a partnership with Tanimura and Antle (the
biggest conventional lettuce grower in the US) and continued to grow.

But as one critic says, 'Earthbound's compost is trucked in, the
farms are models of West Coast monoculture, laser-levelled fields
facilitate awesomely efficient mechanical harvesting and the whole
supply chain from California to Manhattan is only 4% less gluttonous
a consumer of fossil fuel than that of a conventionally grown head
of iceberg'. Earthbound Farms is now the largest organic vegetable
producer in the US, controlling 26 thousand acres of organic land
and producing and distributing 22 million servings of organic salad
across the US each week. Some of this Californian salad even reaches
the UK, when UK organic salad is in short supply.

RACHEL'S DAIRY SELLS OUT
The dairy set up by Rachel Rowland's grandmother was the first
certified organic dairy farm in the UK, and has always promoted
itself as a family firm based in rural Wales. To maintain this image
there is no mention on product labels or on Rachel's website that
the company is now owned by Dean Foods, the largest dairy corporation in
the US. Dean Foods operates more than 120 processing plants and
employs 28,000 people. Dean Foods' main shareholders include some of
the biggest corporations in the world: Microsoft, General Electric,
Philip Morris, Citigroup, Pfizer, Exxon/Mobil, Coca Cola, WalMart
and PepsiCo. Dean is busy increasing its share of the organic dairy
market with their brand - Horizon, dubbed the 'Microsoft of organic
milk', already controlling over 55% of the US retail organic milk
market. To increase this further, it has teamed up with WalMart to
sell Horizon products in large volumes at low prices, pushing
smaller cooperative and family-owned organic dairies out of business.

Rachel's says it is passionate about natural and nutritious food.
Dean Foods has repeatedly been criticised for using genetically
engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which increases milk
production, but also causes mastitis in cows. Though it has recently
converted to rBGH-free production on some of its farms. Horizon's
organic milk is ultra-pasteurised, a high-heat treatment that kills
the enzymes and many vitamins, reducing the milk's nutritional
value, but allows the company to deliver its milk all over the US.

Rachel's may assure consumers that all its milk is from UK farms,
certified by the Soil Association, but the same high standards do
not apply to Dean's organic brands in the US, which in a recent survey
were found to be 'ethically challenged' and scored zero points.
Horizon still buys half of its milk from small family organic dairy
farms, but the rest comes from huge factory farms. US organic
standards, created under pressure from US big agribusiness, are
'scale neutral' - there is nothing in the standards that prevents
the operation of organic dairies with thousands of cows in confined
feedlots. While animals must have 'access to pasture', how much is
not spelled out. Dean Foods of course has no commitment to organic foods per se, only
to the profits that adding a portfolio of successful organic
companies to its business can bring. Rachel's grandmother is lucky
that so far the more stringent UK organic standards are still
protecting her ideals.

BERNARD BUYS THE BIRDS
Cherryridge Poultry, a struggling organic turkey farm in Norfolk,
was bought by Bernard Matthews, the UK's biggest turkey producer, in
December 2006. It is not alone: other conventional poultry companies
like Lloyd Maunder have also gone into organic. Undercover
investigations at Bernard Matthews' plants have shown crowded, dirty
conditions with severely injured, diseased and dead birds. During a
major bird flu outbreak in 2007 government investigators found
serious bio-security shortfalls, including holes in the turkey sheds
where birds, rats and mice could get in, leaking roofs, and
uncovered bins where seagulls were seen carrying off meat waste. Many
consumers will never know they are buying their organic turkey from Bernard
Matthews, however, as it will be sold behind a supermarket own label.

NOT SO WHOLESOME FOODS
From one store in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods Market has grown
through a series of acquisitions and mergers to become the largest
natural food supermarket in the US, with 250 stores. Recently the
company won a legal battle with the US competition watchdog over its
planned merger with its biggest rival Wild Oats. The watchdog tried
to block the merger arguing that consumer choice in the natural and
organic sector would be undermined if the deal went through.

Whole Foods Market has also come to the UK, first buying up the
Fresh and Wild chain in 2004, and in 2007 opening the first Whole Foods
Market store in London's Kensington. Company blurb talks about
offering 'an engaging shopping experience', but many say it's too
glitzy, there's also not much organic produce in evidence and its
difficult to tell how local it is. Prices are also high; in the US
the company has earned the nickname 'Whole Paycheck'. With respect
to UK expansion, Whole Foods has implied that it may try to open as
many as 45 stores.

Despite its humble beginnings, Whole Foods Market has bought into
the capitalist agribusiness model and has played an important part in
the industrialisation of organic food production in the US. While US
Whole Foods Market stores may buy some fresh produce locally, many
of the largest organic farms (Earthbound Farms and Cal-Organic) supply
it and hence much produce is shipped to its stores from these big
producers in California. As Michael Pollan says, 'whilst growing the
rocket is organic, everything else is capitalist agribusiness as
usual'.

John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market is an admirer of
WalMart and says 'What a great, great company! WalMart has single
handedly driven down retail prices across America.' He also approves
of WalMart's policy of 'crushing the parasitical unions'. Despite
being in Fortune's '100 Best Companies to Work For in America', Whole

Foods Market is as anti union as WalMart, and has been criticised
for firing two workers involved in unionising the Madison, Wisconsin
store. With respect to its suppliers, Whole Foods stores in the US
stock tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop
producers and has ignored an appeal from the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for these tomatoes.

Wholefood's expansion plans in the UK and its business practices
essentially mirror those in the conventional retail sector, so we
can expect more small organic suppliers and wholefood retailers and
distributors disappearing as big organic takes over.

See our forthcoming publication Eating up the Alternatives for more
information on corporations and organic food.

Wake Up America

This is written by a cyber friend and fellow farmer Alan Bishop who has a diversified farm in Southern Indiana. You can respond directly to him (and visit one of the better farm/garden forums on the world wide web at Home Grown Goodness

Wake up America!
Your local farmer, produce suppliers, and mom and pop stores need you more than ever, and chances are your going to need them!

A call to end “Big Box” mentality in America!
Written by: Alan Reed Bishop of Bishop's Homegrown and Hip-Gnosis seed development.
February 28, 2008


Hey America, it’s time to wake up! Your dollar value is dropping, your waists are expanding and you’re a generally unhappy bunch of folks from what I have seen. And that my friend is from the mouth of an American himself. Alan Reed Bishop.

I’m not here to berate anyone, surely what I’m about to say even applies to myself and I’ve got a lot to learn so that I too don’t sound like a hypocrite. What I’m here to say is something that probably won’t set so well with many blue collard American folks, but it is the truth. A hard truth that if not faced will bare the consequences of an even more uncertain future.

What I’m here to ask, is just exactly how long will it take the fact that we are destroying our own culture, food supply, and future by shopping at the corporate owned big box stores, to set in? You may not realize it, but every time you drive to your local Wal-Mart, Meijers, K-mart, Home Depot or whatever and drop one of those dirty dollars on the counter, you are further eroding the very culture and substance of the American way of life. How many news reports about poisonous toys and unsafe food do you have to hear before you get it? It seems so obvious. Many of you may think that loosing the mom and pop owned five and dimes is of little consequence to your bread and butter, but look what happened to their bread and butter when you took your dollar elsewhere, and guess what, other consumers suffer due to your bad decisions as well, being forced to pay higher prices for lower quality products and food. A damn shame if I do say so myself.

In my profession I’ve seen it time and again. The local produce business can be quite fickle at times, particularly when it comes to un-informed customers. Now, don’t get me wrong, people will have to eat regardless, and I will be able to stay in this business on that fact alone, however the hurt is really being put on the local farmers and co-ops by the Wal-Marts and Jay-C-Food stores of the world and their supposedly “organic” produce, and perhaps more importantly, you the consumer are feeling the burn as well. Prices on organic food keep on sky-rocketing while quality keeps sinking. Perhaps you believe that the much coveted “organic” label actually means something to the big companies who use different names to market “organic“ versions of their products? If so, you‘d be dead wrong. You see, the USDA and the Corporations of the world don‘t care about what the word “organic“ means as long as it equals money in the pocket. That‘s why there are 35 non-organic substances allowed in the production of USDA “Certified Organic“ food production. Thirty five substances which may or may not be any better for you than conventional products. Thirty Five substances which may or may not have been outlawed in other countries around the world due to their links with rates of cancer and environmental damage. Thirty five substances that mono-culture farms half the world away and in your own backyards would rather you never know about.

I’m not here to bash “Organic farming” at all, as a matter of fact I consider myself to be an Organic farmer in the truest sense of the word. In that my produce and products are produced and protected using only the most natural of methods and minus gas to local venues and diesel for my tractor, my carbon foot print on this farm is pretty small. The USDA, big box stores, and corporate agriculture however don’t see “Organic” in this way, as a matter of fact their measure of the word “Organic” would be much easier summed up in monetarily inspired numbers. As anybody knows, self sustainable, nutritious, and organic food is right up my alley and I try my hardest everyday of my life to further improve my systems of delivery, production, and self sustainability in an attempt to treat the earth and it’s inhabitants with the utmost respect and dignity while also providing a premium product LOCALLY, and therein lies the problem.

You see, when you walk into Wal-Mart and see those big blue organic labels, your looking at a lie. Your looking at a money grubbing scheme to both take your money for a sub-par product, run local farmers out of business, and further erode the meaning of the “organic” label, while at the same time making you feel all warm and fuzzy inside because you just bought something “organic”. So, what’s the problem with that organic food? Well there are a lot of problems with it. Much of that “organic” food comes from other counties around the world, particularly third world countries where “organic” standards are much less observed and regulated. Another problem is that there are several organically approved, yet none the less dangerous chemicals that are allowed to pass as suitable for “organic” production systems and in the preparation and processing of those foods, mostly because the USDA Organic law is catered to large mono-culture farms. And last but not least, most of the “organic” food that your buying on those nasty, dollar inflated Wall-Mart shelves that is actually grown in the USA is grown by large corporate farms, owned by multi-million dollar companies that you already know well by their more common brand names, in systems that would make a septic sludge pond look organic, by folks who have little to no respect for local farmers and business and the local economy,environmental concerns and health of the consumer, and to boot the food is then shipped hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away to those big ugly boxes, effectively leaving a carbon foot print so large it should immediately affect the value of that food as “organic” to any clearly thinking human being. And yet many people continue to shop in these huge emporiums of low-grad crap.

Do you know how many times that market farmers hear the phrase, “well, I’ll go to town and buy that at Wal-Mart cheaper.” ? Does that even make sense to anyone? You’d rather eat poisonous food from 1,000 miles away than to pay an extra $0.25 for quality, local products that you know support the local economy and that you can trust? Not to mention the fact that you are only lowering the value of the dollar and putting wealth and power in the hands of countries which are not exactly on friendly terms with us? I mean to me it doesn't make any sense, you would rather buy food from someone you don't know from a thousand miles away than to actually talk to and see the face of the very person who grew the food? This country is a long strange trip indeed!

I can understand now why so many little mom and pop stores have shut down. People stop supporting them and drive to town, paying more for gas, inflating the economy of the rich corporate stockholders and countries with horrible track records like China, while depleting our own country of natural resources, a healthy lifestyle, community, and yes even culture. For as much as a mom and pop store, a farmers market, or a local feed mill is a source for material goods it is also a source of knowledge and local and regionalized culture. Not only that, but I get a distinct impression that the materialism of this country drives one even more so to go out and buy the latest fashions and gas guzzling vehicles, so one can be trendy and “fit in” while at the same time pretending to “know“ and “care“ about global warming, politics, and the economy. Well America you go ahead and keep drowning our economy, keep pumping yourself full of dangerous chemicals, keep saying that the big box stores are good for us, keep thinking that you need all that crap that you waste your money on, keep playing into the game, keep destroying your history and culture, just keep right on conforming. Soon we can just go ahead and close down all the mom and pop stores, replace everything with “organic” McDonald’s and Taco Bells, put a big Wal-Mart on every street corner and change the name of the United States of America to The Amalgamated states of Conformity. Me, well, I’m going to do the best I can to inform myself and those around me to make the right decisions while meanwhile continuing the god given work that I am doing and not pretending to be anything I am not. I’ll be your valuable market farmer, the source for your healthy food and lifestyle, your alternative to “New America”, I’ll just keep right on being the plant breeding, worm ranching, truly organic, seed saving, hill-Billy, ridge running farmer that I have been, and when the shit hits the fan, I’ll be sure to plant a little more for the extra needy and pray that those of you that have caused this can take the crash course in survivalism to protect yourselves and your families from the terrorism that you have inflicted on your own country.

So, here is my question, who are you going to turn to when things take the deep downturn we are headed towards? Is it going to be the mom and pop stores you put out of business? The farmer that couldn’t afford the tools he needed to get the job done?

Really, we have no one to blame for our health, our economy, our loss of morals and our horrible leaders other than ourselves. We have lost sight of what made this country great. Local culture and ideas. Self sustainable family owned business that care as much about the community as they do the money that they make. Independent people with independent ideas who stand up for what they believe in! When the last family farm falls, will you be there to say, this is our fault?


P.S. If you don’t believe that this country is in a sad state then take the time to rationalize that instead of working on national issues, congress is currently more interested in holding hearings regarding steroids in sports. You tell me, where are the priorities?

Industrial Organic Fraud

*12/13/07*
*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*

*Contact: Mark Kastel, 608-625-2042*



*Nation's Largest Retailers Accused of Organic Fraud* *Class Action Suits
Seek Damages from Wal-Mart, Target, others*



*SEATTLE, WA/ DENVER, CO/MINNEAPOLIS, MN* – In a scandal now ensnaring some
of the nations leading retailers, a series of lawsuits have been filed accusing Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway, and Wild Oats of consumer fraud for marketing suspect organic milk.

The legal filings in federal courts in Seattle, Denver, and in Minneapolis, against the retailers, come on the heels of class action lawsuits against Aurora Dairy Corporation, based in Boulder, Colorado. The suits against Aurora and the grocery chains allege consumer fraud, negligence, and unjust enrichment concerning the sale of organic milk. This past April, Aurora officials received a notice from the USDA detailing multiple and "willful" violations of federal organic law that were found by federal investigators.

"This is the largest scandal in the history of the organic industry," said Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group. Cornucopia's own investigation and formal legal complaint, in 2005, first alerted USDA investigators to the improprieties occurring at Aurora. "Aurora was taking advantage of the consumer's good will in the marketplace toward organics, and the USDA has allowed this scofflaw-corporation to continue to operate," Kastel added.

Law firms based in Seattle, St. Louis, and New York, in addition to other cities, have filed at least eight lawsuits against Aurora, representing plaintiffs in over 30 states. Five lawsuits against the retailers have been filed so far.

Attorneys are seeking damages to reimburse consumers harmed by the company's actions. Some of the lawsuits request that the U.S. District Courts put an injunction in place to halt the ongoing sale of Aurora's organic milk in the nation's grocery stores until it can be demonstrated that the company is complying with federal organic regulations.

Aurora, with $100 million in annual sales, provides milk that is sold as organic and packaged as private label, store-brand products for many of the nation's biggest chains. In addition to Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Safeway, and Wild Oats, Aurora serves as supplier to 15 other national and regional chains.

Independent investigators at the USDA concluded earlier this year that Aurora—with five dairy facilities in Colorado and Texas, each milking thousands of cows—had 14 "willful" violations of federal organic regulations. One of the most egregious of the findings was that from December 5, 2003, to April 16, 2007, the Aurora Dairy "labeled and represented milk as organically produced, when such milk was not produced and handled in accordance with the National Organic Program regulations."

Cornucopia's own research, since confirmed by the two-year investigation by federal law enforcement agents, found that Aurora was confining their cows to pens and sheds in feedlots rather than grazing the animals as the federal law requires. Furthermore, Aurora brought conventional animals into their organic milking operation in a manner prohibited by the Organic Food Production Act, a law passed by Congress in 1990 and implemented in 2002 by
the USDA.

The stores sell Aurora's milk under their own in-house brand names, such as Costco's Kirkland and Target's Archer Farms, in cartons marked "USDA organic," typically with pictures of pastures or other bucolic scenes.

"That's not even close to the reality of where this milk was coming from," said Steve Berman, a Seattle lawyer whose firm is among those suing. "These cows are all penned in factory-confinement conditions."

"This is the perfect example of modern-day Agri-business bullies literally stealing the milk money from an unsuspecting public," said Washington state consumer Rachael Doyle. "We have been willfully deceived by corporations motivated solely by greed."

Cornucopia points out that Aurora is a "horrible aberration," and that the vast majority of all organic dairy products are produced with high integrity. In a scorecard published last year, and available on their web site, Cornucopia rates over 90% of organic name-brand dairy products as truly subscribing to the letter and spirit of the law (available at www.cornucopia.org).

"Aurora's actions have injured the reputation of the more than 1500 legitimate organic dairy farmers who are faithfully following federal organic rules and regulations," noted Kastel. "We cannot allow these families to be placed at a competitive disadvantage."

Mark Pepperzak, Aurora CEO, said, "The allegations in this smear campaign against AOD are based on false information and, therefore, completely unfounded." The company has said that their business has yet to be affected by the high-profile controversy. However, some of Aurora's largest customers have now switched to alternative suppliers.

"We have learned that Wild Oats and the Publix supermarket chain in Florida are no longer buying milk from Aurora," stated Kastel. "In addition, the nation's largest distributor of natural and organic products, United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) has also secured an alternative source for their Woodstock Farms brand." Kastel also said that although he was unable to publicly disclose the names of retailers at this point in time, a number of others have contacted Cornucopia for their listing of six other private-label organic milk processors.

Many industry observers feel that the USDA's enforcement mechanism broke down in the Aurora case. After career USDA staff drafted a Letter of Proposed Revocation, seeking to prevent Aurora from engaging in organic commerce, political appointees at the agency intervened, crafting an agreement allowing the politically connected company to remain in business.

"It is unconscionable that the USDA allowed Aurora to continue, after making millions of dollars, in this 'ethics-based' industry, when they had concluded that Aurora willfully violated the law," Kastel added. "However, there is a higher authority in terms of organic integrity than the USDA—that's the organic consumer. And they are about to make their voices
heard through the courts."


*MORE: *

"I feel cheated by Aurora's organic misrepresentations," said Sandie Regan, an organic consumer from Crown Point, Indiana, and one of the parties to the lawsuits. "I am willing to pay more at the grocery store for organic milk because I believe the milk is healthier for me. But it doesn't look like I was getting what I paid for," Regan added.

"Although the USDA did not strip Aurora of their right to engage in organic commerce, between the consumer fraud lawsuits, and the exodus of a growing number of their customers, it looks like consumers and retailers might strip them of their ability to continue in the marketplace," Kastel observed. "

Copies of the lawsuits are available upon request. A photo gallery of the Aurora factory-farm operation can be viewed at the Cornucopia web page at www.cornucopia.org.

*The Cornucopia Institute, **a nonprofit farm policy research group, is dedicated to the fight for economic justice for the family-scale farming community. Their Organic Integrity Project acts as a corporate and governmental watchdog assuring that no compromises to the credibility of organic farming methods and the food it produces are made in the pursuit of
profit.*

OCA Threatened with Lawsuit

This I guess this can go under money talks and all the whistle blowers need to shut up of face the consequences. I am soo damned glad the USDA NOP is looking out for the consumer (she says with dripping sarcasm).

ALERT OF THE WEEK:
AURORA THREATENS ORGANIC CONSUMERS ASSOCIATION WITH LAWSUIT
Just when we thought it couldn't get any hotter (or any more mind-boggling), the "organic" dairy factory farm controversy reached a new level of intensity over the past week. The USDA announced, to the disappointment of the organic community, that they were not going to take further disciplinary measures against Aurora Organic Dairy, a company that just a few weeks ago had a portion of its organic certification suspended by the USDA for "willfully" violating National Organic Standards since 2003 by failing to pasture its animals and by bringing conventional calves onto its feedlots and then declaring them organic. But caving in to pressure from Aurora and other big corporate players in the organic sector , the USDA now says the #1 organic private label dairy processor in the U.S. can continue selling milk produced on its factory farms as "organic" to its longstanding customers including Target, Wal-Mart, Costco, Safeway, and Woodstock Farms.

In a mind-twisting manipulation of logic, the new acting Secretary of Agriculture, Chuck Connors, a notorious cheerleader for biotech and corporate agribusiness, announced last week that this issue, regarding Aurora's violation of the USDA National Organic Standards, falls outside the scope of the USDA National Organic Standards. "I know there is controversy out there on a number of issues that really fall outside the bounds, if you will, of what constitutes that organic standard that is necessary in order for the product to have our seal," said Connors.

Now that they have the USDA in their pocket, Aurora is threatening to sue the Organic Consumers Association and Cornucopia Institute for educating and mobilizing consumers to oppose Aurora's blatant violations of organic integrity. In related news, the recent issue of Fortune Magazine reports Aurora's factory farms generated a record 100 million dollars in "organic" dairy sales to consumers this year. In other words, when it comes to suing the OCA, Aurora has plenty of money, from selling its cheap "organic" factory farm milk to Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, and Safeway . So given this David versus Goliath situation, OCA needs your financial support today, more than ever, to defend ourselves from this attack by Aurora and to expose the ongoing negligence of the USDA.

TerraCycle Sued by Miracle Gro

If you do not already know Scott's, a multi-billion dollar company with ties to Monsanto, is suing a small company called TerraCycle that makes tea from worm castings and packages the tea in recycled 2 litre bottles.

They have a blog http://www.suedbyscotts.com/ that explains where Terracycle is coming from.

Many people have been going out to Wal-Mart and buying Terracycle even if they would not normally use the product. As well as boycotting all Scott's products. This is a good thing but this boycott probably is not doing a lot of good (especially if no one is contacting Scott's Miracle Gro and elling hem they are being boycotted) because people who would be supporting Terracycle's cause likely do not buy Miracle Gro et. al.. So this does nothing to Scott's bottom line.

I was talking about this with my husband and another organic grower at a farmers market about. My Husband (who used to work for the K-mart Corp) said if you really want to hurt Scott's (and Wal-Mart) go buy some Miracle Gro (best if on sale) and return 30 days after purchase (the elapsed time will make these corps assume hey have made real sales). Be sure to buy some Terracycle and use it, it's a good product.

What this action does is artificially boosts MG sales so Wal-Mart starts ordering more MG (thinking sales are up). When the MG you bought is returned, that will go back on the shelf, causing an overstock. Soon Wal-Mart (if enough people do this) will start ordering a lot less MG because of all the returns and slow sales and Scott's bottom line will be impacted.

Imagine what could happen if just 1,000 people did this or better yet 100,000 people buying, say, $1,000,000 ($10 per person) of MG product or even $10,000,000 ($100 per person) or 1,000,000 people buying $100,000,000 of MG and returning it all around the same time for a refund.

Wal-Mart is hurt by the restocking costs it must absorb and slower MG sales (which if sales got slow enough MG could be removed from Wal-Mart shelves altogether).

Imagine what could happen if just 1,000 people did this. 1,000 people buying $10 worth of MG and returning it nationwide (or world wide). Better yet, 100,000 people buying, say, $1,000,000 ($10 per person) of MG product or 10,000,000 people buying $100,000,000 of MG and returning it all around the same time for a refund. And "spending" ten bucks is good but what if we all "bought" $100, or more, of MG products and returned them a month later. The more we "spend" the greater the impact

If we all do this and got just one other person to also do this the impact would be noticed. And if our friends get their friends to join in it would be come a movement and we would soon have the TerraCycle massacree (with a nod to Arlo Guhrie). And maybe, just maybe, Scott's Miracle Gro will drop it's suit and let this wonderful grassroots company alone.

Adventures in Conservation

Because there is a pending winter storm we went out shopping for storm supplies and went to Wal-Mart because we thought maybe they would have some cheap sleds (one of the supplies we felt we needed to be able to survive the pending storm-right now our sleds consist of a sheet of heavy plastic that can hold two people). We found a toboggan-like plastic sled and Eugene check with an associate and she said the sled was marked down to $8 and change. So we loaded the sled into the shopping cart where it instantly blocked our view making dealing with the shopping cart a real PITA.

We continued to shop blindly and found there was a real great deal on compact florescent light bulbs-6 for $10 and so we bought them and a few other items such as cheap sunglasses and some butter. Checked out the paltry organic selection in the prioduce section and headed for the checkout. Got to the register and found that the sled that made shopping at Wal-mart more of a PITA than usual was not marked down to $8 and change but was $28. So we said "No Thanks" to that and left the store. We continued to do the rest of our shopping at TSC (dog food) and Kroger (all food items we did not buy at Wal-Mart) and headed home.

Got home and Eugene opened the compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB) and started replacing incandescent bulbs. We had one in the living room that burned out 2 days ago so that was switched to a CFB (the rest of the lights in the living room were already CFB's) and than he changed all the lights in the bathroom to CFB and than found we own a wasteful medicine cabinet/Vanity. It seems, the the CFB are too big. The CFB's fit in the sockets but the bulbs themselves are too big to open the cabinet doors. So today he is going to try and rectify this situation by either moving the light fixtures so the bulbs are a bit higher or lower the doors.

It's not easy being green

Wal-Mart Still Misrepresenting Organic

http ://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_3836.cfm

More on Wal-Mart Defrauding Organic Consumers & OCA Boycott

• Press Release
• By MarK Kastel
• The Cornucopia Institute, Jan 17, 2007

Organic Fraud: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Accused of Widespread Distortion
Nonorganic Food Products Misidentified as "Organic"

CORNUCOPIA, Wisconsin - January 17 - When the staff at The Cornucopia Institute surveyed Wal-Mart stores around the country last September, analyzing the giant retailer's pronouncement that they would begin selling a wide variety of organic food at just a 10% mark-up over similar conventional products, they were surprised to discover widespread problems with signage misrepresenting nonorganic food as "organic."

Now, Cornucopia, one of the country's most prominent organic watchdogs is even more surprised that more than four months after informing the company of the problems, which could be interpreted as consumer fraud, and two months after filing a formal legal complaint with the USDA, the federal agency regulating organic labeling, many of the deceptive signs at Wal-Mart stores are still in place.

"It is unconscionable that rather than correct these problems, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. instead responded to our concerns by attacking our comparatively modest public interest group in an effort to discredit our organization in the media," said Mark Kastel, codirector of the Wisconsin-based Institute. "It is not as if a product recall or store remodeling would have been required to correct Wal-Mart's deceptive consumer practices. They could have simply sent out an e-mail to store managers and corrected the problem instantly."

New store inspections throughout Wisconsin have found that Wal-Mart stores are still selling nonorganic yogurt and sugar identified as organic, and designated organic produce sections continue displaying many nonorganic items, among other widespread abuses. The Cornucopia Institute again contacted the USDA about the ongoing problem but the agency could not confirm that any enforcement action was imminent on the federal level. Cornucopia then filed a consumer fraud complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection on January 13.

"We were very impressed with the immediate and professional response we received from the Wisconsin regulators," stated Will Fantle, Cornucopia's research director. "Within hours officials from the state contacted us to confirm some of the information we submitted and we verified our past interactions with the USDA for them."

The USDA's organic program has been widely criticized for, among other management problems, not attending to questions of improprieties in a timely manner. In one case a certifier decertified a Florida orange grower who could not document that the oranges and orange juice he was selling were produced organically. More than two years later, pending USDA action, the products were still on the market and being purchased by unsuspecting consumers.

"The vast majority of all organic farmers and food marketers operate with a high degree of organic integrity. These abuses, and the lack of responsible enforcement by the USDA, endangers the credibility of the organic label for all of us, said Tom Willey of T & D Willey Farms of Madera, California, an organic fresh market vegetable producer.

"Wal-Mart cannot be allowed to sell organic food 'on the cheap' because they lack the commitment to recruit qualified management or are unwilling to properly train their store personnel. This places ethical retailers, their suppliers, and organic farmers at a competitive disadvantage," Kastel said.

A number of other organic food retailers throughout the country, including Whole Foods Markets and many of the nation's member-owned grocery cooperatives, have gone to the effort to become certified organic in terms of the handling of their products and have invested heavily in staff training to help them understand organic food production and merchandising concerns.

"Our management and our employees know what organic means," said Lindy Bannister, general manager at The Wedge Cooperative in Minneapolis, Minnesota. "If Wal-Mart intends to get into organics, they can't be allowed to misidentify 'natural' foods as organic to unsuspecting consumers." The Wedge, the largest single store food cooperative in the nation, was one of the first retailers to go through the USDA organic certification process.

Cornucopia's complaints ask the USDA and Wisconsin regulators to fully investigate the allegations of organic food misrepresentation. The farm policy organization has shared their evidence, including photographs and notes, from multiple stores in Wisconsin and in many other states, with the agency's investigators. Fines of up to $10,000 per violation for proven incidents of organic food misrepresentation are provided for in federal organic regulations.

"The business practices at Wal-Mart are quite disturbing and certainly incompatible with the values that have transformed the organic food industry into a lucrative marketplace," said Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association ( www.organicconsumers.org). "We have called today for a boycott of Wal-Mart by organic shoppers until such time as the integrity of their merchandising and product line can be ascertained."

This past September, The Cornucopia Institute also accused Wal-Mart of cheapening the value of the organic label by sourcing products from industrial-scale factory-farms and Third World countries, such as China.

The Institute released a white paper, Wal-Mart Rolls Out Organic Products‹Market Expansion or Market Delusion?, that concluded that Wal-Mart was poised to drive down the price of organic food in the marketplace by inventing a "new" organic‹food from corporate agribusiness, factory-farms, and cheap imports of questionable quality (available at www.cornucopia.org).

"If unchecked, Wal-Mart's alleged misrepresentation of organic food, along with their procurement practices, and cheapening the meaning behind the organic label, could endanger the livelihoods of many farmers and family business owners who have labored to build organics into a lucrative $16 billion a year industry," Kastel lamented.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Cornucopia Institute's White Paper, Wal-Mart Rolls Out Organic Products: Market Expansion or Market Delusion?, along with a photo gallery containing images of some of the violations observed and of organic items now being offered for sale at Wal-Mart stores, can be found on the organization's web page at http://www.cornucopia.org as can Cornucopia's legal complaint filed with the USDA regarding Wal-Mart's alleged organic product misrepresentation.

High-resolution files of these photographs and/or a head shot of Mr. Kastel are available electronically upon request.

Lucy & Eugene get a DVD Player (finally)

I got package full of interesting DVD's from my brother for the Christmas/solstice season, 5 in all.

But we did not have a DVD player with which to view them so we went to Richmond and got a Coby™ DVD player from REX for under $31 (including tax).

Long time readers of this blog may remember that in November 2005 we had a visit from my brother Scott and during that visit, among other things, we bought a DVD player from the local Wal-Mart box store. It turned out to be a very evil DVD player (See My weekend... & Purging the Evil for the story about the last DVD player and all the ensued) so it was returned (partly because the TV we had at the time was too old for DVD players, partly because the damned thing seemed to be cursed).

now that we have a much newer TV we can now use DVD player technology and we had been discussing buying a DVD player for a couple of months (since we got Fran's TV). When we got the package of DVD's in the mail we figured it was a sign to go out and purchase one.

And so we did.

We decided to buy at REX because it is a local company (based out of Dayton, OH) and also because it had cheap players whereas Wal-Mart had them for about $90 and HH Gregg was not much cheaper. All we wanted was the most basic unit we could find and REX had that unit. It was so basic we opted to pay five bucks more for one with an LED display. The sales guy answered all our questions but warned us that this unit played on DVD-/RW disks and DVD+/RW disks. But he also assured us that the DVD+/RW disks are almost never used.

So we drove home happy with our new purchase.

We get home and I find the DVD's my brother sent and damn it to hell, all but one was a DVD+/RW. So without reading the specs on the DVD player box we start planning the return of yet another DVD player. At least this time no pets were dead on the road or furnishings stuck where they ought not to be. but before we get too far in our return the DVD player plans I wander over to the box and read the specs and find out the unit will play DVD+/RW disks-Yay!

While I cook dinner, Eugene hooks up the player to the TV set and by 8pm we are watching one of the DVD my brother sent. we put in man on the Moon, about Andy Kauffman. We get the menu screen with sound and color and everything so we know we have the thing hooked up correctly. press play and get the movie itself but no sound. I figure out how to get English subtitles so for a while we can read along. but it ain't the same as listening. So we try this is Spinal Tap and with that we get a strange voice over of the band in recent years describing the "documentary", strange. I am curious to see what other surprises await us with the DVD's. Still have Heathers, the History of Violence (which I have not seen) and American Splendor (another one I have not seen and I hope is watchable because I have wanted to see this since it came oout about 18/24 months ago. It's about a guy named Harvey Pekar and I have a friend named Pekar but I do not believe they are any relation).

That is our most recent adventure involving electronics.

festivus time

While not making Christmas cookies I found myself surfing blogs and found a great festivus post over at Slowly She Turns..

I had forgotten all about Festivus despite several stories on NPR the past 2 weeks

My grievances are as follows:

Any and all news stories that involve puppies or kittens or small children or women riding mopeds who end up in wells or storm drains and are not from the area covered by local news should be banned from the airways

I am on the do not call list so telemarketers quit calling me

People who drive while talking need to have their vehicles taken away. either drive or talk but not both

The Ohio smoking ban is simply stupid and unenforceable. Not to mention it is prohibiting a legal substance from being used on private property.

Anything Bush has done in the past year pisses me off. Same with Cheney

I buy raw milk but why do I had to fill out a 14 page contract to buy it legally. Why do I have to do this for a pure product but milk that is factory farmed and pumped full of drugs is sold over the counter? Pisses me off!

This fear leading to hatred of Muslim Americans pisses me off. Hey we are all human beings here!

I have a real problem with Industrial organics. More so if they are being sold by Wal-Mart

Ads in movie theaters. I do not go to many movies (maybe 1 a year) and this trend of commercials in the previews is sick and wrong. I pay good money to see a movie ad free.

Now I do not have an unadorned alumunim pole set up not any dinner planned. And I probably will not do feats of strength (unless with Nate the dog).

But to those of you who will respect the entire ritual I bid you a Happy Festivus

So What's the Big Deal?

December 18, 2006

"A National Pattern of Disregard"
So What's the Big Deal, If Wal-Mart Makes a Mistake?
By JIM GOODMAN

That was the question asked by the host on a recent Public Radio
call-in show. Her question to her guest from the Cornucopia Institute
was in regard to recent charges that Wal-Mart was passing conventional
grocery items off as USDA certified organic.

A mistake? I doubt it. Seriously, think about it, you start a big push
in marketing a new line of high profit products and one of the first
things you do is mislabel your products, "accidentally"? As Jim
Hightower would say "Do they think we were born with sucker wrappers
around our heads?"

Ever since Wal-Mart announced earlier this year that they planned to
greatly increase their organic offerings at a cost of only ten percent
more than their conventional foods, those of us who grow organic food
have been skeptical.

Now it appears our skepticism was well placed. I personally felt the
worst we might expect would be imports of cheap "organic" food from
China, but hey, why not go for the gold, just sell conventional food as
organic.

There was much excitement about Wal-Mart expanding their organic sales
and how it would do so much to help organic farmers, huh? did Wal-Marts
entrance into the conventional grocery business help conventional
farmers, did their profits go up? Hardly, but it did put lots of small
grocery stores out of business and certainly added more black ink to
Wal-Marts multi-billion dollar bottom line.

In its short history as an organic retailer Wal-Mart is already under
scrutiny for sourcing its organic milk from a factory scale dairy that
is under investigation by the USDA for failing to comply with federal
organic regulations. It would also appear that they have no qualms
about selling organic produce from China as long as it's cheaper and
more profitable than sourcing from the U.S, but then Wal-Mart is an old
hand at offshore sourcing, just ask the U.S textile industry they
helped ruin.

I wonder if a Wal-Mart mistake was the reason 1.6 million women have
joined in a civil rights lawsuit against Wal-Mart? This action, now the
largest class-action lawsuit in history charges Wal-Mart with sex
discrimination in pay and promotions.

When an Oregon jury found Wal-Mart guilty of systematically forcing
workers to work overtime without pay, the evidence obviously pointed to
more than just a "mistake" on the part of Wal-Mart.

On ten separate occasions the National Labor Relations Board has ruled
that Wal-Mart broke the law when it fired union supporters. A mistake,
or are they just slow learners?

"A pattern of national disregard by Wal-Mart" was how Connecticut
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal described the company's adherence
to environmental protection laws. More mistakes, or just their way of
doing business?

In Wal-Marts tightly structured business model everything is controlled
down to the temperature and in-store music) from the head office in
Bentonville Arkansas. The home office knows exactly whats going on in
the stores and they certainly didn't become the worlds largest retailer
by making mistakes.

Everyday Low Prices, the Wal-Mart slogan, wins the hearts of many
because "poor people can afford to shop there". Those low prices are
kept low by the exploitation of international sweatshop laborers,
driving competitors out of business and paying their associates wages
so low they must turn to Medicaid for health insurance and often buy
their cloths at Goodwill.

Wal-Mart does have a history, a history of low wages, union busting,
sweatshop exploitation, discrimination and doing whatever it takes to
make a profit. So what's a little mislabeling? Like many of their
business practices, a big mistake, but their most consistent mistake is
thinking they can get away with it.

A caller to that same radio program asked the guest why he was picking
on Wal-Mart. While the guest correctly focused on examples of Wal-Marts
unethical and illegal behavior, in particular their flouting of organic
standards, my answer would have been shorter, we're not picking on
them, they're picking on us.

JIM GOODMAN is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc Wisconsin

Holiday Winter market

Did the December edition of the Oxford Farmers' Market Winter market and it was a fine one indeed!

Unlike last year, we had a lot of leafy green things to sell along with things that store well like winter squash, garlic, carrots. Plus the fact we are having a much warmer than normal late fall has meant we have lots of cold loving crops.

I wanted to take some pictures of the market to post but we were simply too busy selling for the two hours the market is open. We sold out of many items we brought and most everything else sold well. We opted to not open the store today because we don't have a whole lot of most things except garlic, dried herbs and some winter squash. It was an intense market.

And a fun market too, as we are now into Chanukah and it is of course the Christian Holiday season. So everyone was festive and happy. It did not hurt one bit that the weather was beautiful-sunny and around 50˚F. Unreasonably warm but a welcome thing if you are selling freezable produce outside in December. We got to see a lot of people got many hugs and even got some Solstice presents (I'd say Christmas presents but not everyone who gave us presents at market is Christian but we all celebrate the solstice and return of the sun). One woman who has been a long time customer told me my comments about Heifer International in the email newsletter I send out to anyone who signs up (this is more for local people) inspired her to donate to them. Need more people like her and that can be you by simply clicking on the box in the sidebar.

So we came home happy-we sold lots of food, meaning two things:1) we have some cash on hand and 2) we are not faced with what to do with too much kale, cabbage, broccoli, spring mix, etc., for a few days. What we have been doing with the bounty is eating a lot of greens every day which has got to be good for our bodies. I remember this time last year craving kale and chard and having to buy chard at the grocery. BTW Kroger has far and away higher quality produce than Wal-Mart, especially when it comes to kale. But if you have the choice of buying kale grown by Boulder Belt that is the far better choice. Kroger kale is edible but nothing to write home about the 2 times I bought Wal-Mart kale I ended up throwing out most of it as it was horrid. This year we have kale and Lucy is a happy camper.

I see my dough for snickerdoodles should chilled and so I end this entry on that note

Wal-Mart selling Non Organic as Organic

Thursday November 16, 2006, 12:39 pm
Wal-Mart Charged With Selling Non-Organic Food as "Organic"
By CounterPunch News Service

The Cornucopia Institute, the nation's most aggressive organic farming
watchdog, has filed a formal legal complaint with the USDA asking them to
investigate allegations of illegal "organic" food distribution by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Cornucopia has documented cases of nonorganic food products being sold as
organic in Wal-Mart's grocery departments.

"We first noticed that Wal-Mart was using in-store signage to misidentify
conventional, nonorganic food as organic in their upscale-market test store in
Plano, Texas," said Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute. Subsequently,
Cornucopia staff visited a number of other Wal-Mart stores in the Midwest and
documented similar improprieties in both produce and dairy sections.

Cornucopia notified Wal-Mart's CEO Lee Scott in a letter on September 13,
2006 alerting the company to the problem and asking that it address and correct
the situation on an immediate basis. But the same product misrepresentations
were again observed weeks later, throughout October, at separate Wal-Mart stores
in multiple states.

"This is disturbing and a serious problem," Kastel said. "Organic farmers
adopt and follow a rigorous range of management practices, with audit trails, to
ensure that the food they sell to processors and retailers is organic and
produced in accordance with federal organic regulations. Consumers, who are paying
premium prices in the marketplace for organic food, deserve to get what they
are paying for."

Earlier this year, Wal-Mart announced a sweeping organic foods initiative and
declared that they would greatly increase the number of organic offerings for
sale in their stores"at dramatically lower prices than the competition. The
move by the giant retailer has been under close scrutiny from members of the
organic community seeking to assess what impact Wal-Mart's decision will have on
organic food and farming concerns.

A number of other organic food retailers throughout the country, including
Whole Foods Markets and many of the nations member-owned grocery cooperatives,
have gone to the effort to become certified organic in terms of the handling of
their products and have invested heavily in staff training to help them
understand organic food production and sale concerns.

"Our management and our employees know what organic means," said Lindy
Bannister, General Manager at The Wedge Cooperative in Minneapolis, Minnesota. "If
Wal-Mart intends to get into organics, they can't be allowed to misidentify
natural' foods as organic to unsuspecting consumers." The Wedge, the largest
single store member-owned food cooperative in the nation, was one of the first
retailers to go through the USDA organic certification process.

"One can question whether Wal-Mart has the management and staff expertise
necessary to fully understand organics and the marketing requirements essential
to selling organic food," observed Kastel. "At this point, it seems they are
attracted by the profits generated from the booming organic food sector but are
not fully invested in organic integrity. Given their size, market power, and
market clout, this is very troubling."

Cornucopia's complaint asks the USDA to fully investigate the allegations of
organic food misrepresentation. The farm policy organization has indicated
that they will share their evidence, including photographs and notes, with the
agency's investigators. Fines of up to $10,000 per violation for proven
incidents of organic food misrepresentation are provided for in federal organic
regulations.

This past September, The Cornucopia Institute also accused Wal-Mart of
cheapening the value of the organic label by sourcing products from industrial-scale
factory-farms and Third World countries, such as China.

The Institute released a white paper, Wal-Mart Rolls Out Organic
Products"Market Expansion or Market Delusion?, that made the argument that Wal-Mart is
poised to drive down the price of organic food in the marketplace by inventing a
"new" organic"food from corporate agribusiness, factory-farms, and cheap
imports of questionable quality (available at www.cornucopia.org).

The Cornucopia Institute's White Paper, Wal-Mart Rolls Out Organic Products:
Market Expansion or Market Delusion?, along with a photo gallery containing
images of some of the organic items now being offered for sale at Wal-Mart
stores, can be found on the organization's web page at www.cornucopia.org as can
Cornucopia's legal complaint filed with the USDA regarding Wal-Mart's alleged
organic product misrepresentation.

The Cornucopia Institute is dedicated to the fight for economic justice for
the family-scale farming community. Through research, advocacy and economic
development our goal is to empower farmers both politically and through
marketplace initiatives. The Organic Integrity Project acts as a corporate watchdog
assuring that no compromises to the credibility of organic farming methods and
the food it produces are made in the pursuit of profit.

Wal-Mart and Organics

Organic delusions
Wal-Mart will be stunned to learn it can't market non-chem veggies like
widgets
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2006-06-08/news_feature.php

Like kids in a candy store, Wal-Mart executives may have eyes bigger than
their stomachs. Do they really think they can manage a major expansion of
organic food sales while driving organic prices down to within 10 per cent
of conventional foods?

The strategy now being attempted in U.S. stores and bound to appear soon
north of the border may have unintended consequences. By throwing its
weight around on the organic block, Wal-Mart may just provoke the
politicization of North America's organic food business.

This sector has so far remained aloof from politics and managed to keep the
tensions of a decade's exponential expansion both quiet and internal.

Everyday low prices for quality organics would certainly boost sales by
organic farmers. But it's not clear that the company can actually
accomplish this. Inside-the-box-store thinking may be leading Wal-Mart
officials to think they can duplicate successes in other areas without
taking into account the unique character of organic food production.

It's all food for Wal-Mart executive afterthought: organic food really is a
different beast.

Wal-Mart's classic methods are less likely to succeed in forcing down the
prices of organic food than they were in depressing the prices of
manufactured goods, including organic milk, which the company already leads
the world in selling.

Wal-Mart method 1. Special deep discounts exacted in return for high-volume
purchases work for widgets made in factories, where the per unit price goes
down with mass production.

But the per unit costs of goods grown on organic farms don't follow a
typical factory graph. More of the same organic crop on one farm field
doesn't lower per unit labour costs, but usually means more pest problems,
since monoculture, the precondition for mass production methods, is a
magnet for pets and parasites.

Wal-Mart method 2. Just-in-time logistics slash the costs and risks of
storing blue jeans, plastic toys and hard candies. But ripening crops and
unpredictable weather aren't always as amenable to a mega-corporation's
squeaky-tight schedule as factory owners are, and organic methods are even
more vulnerable to nature's whimsical timing than non-organic. Wal-Mart
could find itself holding the bag after a cold spell.

Wal-Mart method 3. Cheap retail labour and buildings don't do much harm to
dry goods or conventional foods whose additives help them perform like dry
goods. But unskilled labour and poorly equipped stores can wreak havoc on
goods that follow natural cycles and go bad on retail shelves.

Welcome to the factors that explain why food was one of the last of the
economic sectors to be industrialized, although it was one of the first to
be commercialized. Industrialized food may be the best thing since sliced
bread, but sliced bread wasn't perfected until the late 1920s.

Apart from cookies, jams, white bread and similar sweet nothings, food
production and processing weren't mechanized until the 1950s and 60s,
centuries after light industries such as clothing, and a half-century after
heavy industries like steel and auto.

Organic bookkeeping adds another slew of problems and introduces another
set of perpetual conflicts for industrial-scale retailers.

It's true, some of the high cost of organics relates to the sheer economics
of big demand and small supply. The lure of mass sales to Wal-Mart and
other retailers will certainly encourage large-scale farmers to switch over
to organics.

That new production may well swamp the market, as has happened occasionally
with milk and a few crops, such as garlic and onions. A few of these
over-produced organics are already being sold into pools of conventional
food, at regular prices.

But the main reasons for higher organic prices are structural and will
stick around for the long term or foment a huge ruckus when Wal-Mart
insists on diluting organic methods.

This is a sticking point for customers, especially the kind of customers
trained in Wal-Mart-style consumerism.

Relatively high prices for conventional pop, cookies, pastries, frozen
french fries, potato chips, ice cream, microwave meals, and similar
pseudo-foods are accepted without complaint because that's the price of
what's deemed a special treat.

But there's no excuse other than yuppie snobbery for charging extra for
plain organic potatoes, carrots, spinach and breads, many non-organic
customers complain.

Having long suffered from this double standard on food prices, those who
know and respect what organic food is about are pretty defensive about its
high prices. In contrast with the artificially low price of synthetic or
industrialized food, the relatively high price of organics captures
something like the full cost and value of growing and marketing real food
that meets environmental and human health needs.

Organic prices "internalize" these costs. By contrast, the low sticker
prices seen at Wal-Mart and other superstores come from "externalizing" the
full cost of cheap fertilizers and pesticides by dumping them in the
environment and on unsuspecting animals, including people.

Wal-Mart, an icon for such externalization practices, is increasingly
reviled for the everyday expensive pollution and exploitation linked to its
everyday low prices.

But organic producers can't externalize costs without losing their way.
They can't dump manure from factory barns into rivers and then buy chemical
fertilizers; they have to compost manure and return it to the soil, which
is more expensive. They can't grow miles of one crop and spray with
chemicals; to discourage pests, they have to grow a wide range of crops,
which is more labour-intensive and expensive.

They can't jam produce into a truck, then spray it with fungicides that
keep it from spoiling and gases that keep it from looking haggard;
post-harvest handling has to be quick, skilled and careful, which costs
money.

The only way to mess with organic prices is to mess with organic rules,
already under constant pressure in the U.S., where the Department of
Agriculture controls the organic label and has allowed standards to erode
to the point where factory-style cow and livestock barns are setting the
norm.

The same pressures will be applied to a Canadian government label, expected
sometime in the next year.

The impact of a cost-cutter like Wal-Mart on government-managed organic
standards will cause the organic manure to hit the fan. Wal-Mart execs may
be getting more than they bargained for when they try to mesh organic
processes with hyper-industrialized retail.

Purging the Evil

A few entries ago I wrote about going to evil Mal-Mart and buying things we did not need and coming back home to a dead cat, than having problems getting a bed in the house and other such bad karma.

So we returned the tainted items, got our money back and life got better. The day after returning the tainted items Eugene and I decided to go to an auction to maybe buy a couch and chair for the living room. That, and we were meeting a friend at the auction. Drove to the auction and beat a train into the fairgrounds and felt that was a good sign.

Long story short, did not buy a couch (it was way too white and nice for our lifestyle) but did get a $15 box lot of sterling silver items, a nice ivory Buddha and an even nicer carved elephant tusk (about 36" long, carved on both sides) for under $100. It's a beautiful specimen and apparently few people want ivory pieces in Preble county.

Now I must decide if I put these pieces up on E-bay. I feel no one can have too many Buddhas around (and it's happy Ho Toi with some really great man boobs), the tusk is way cool and I can use most of the silver pieces. Ah decisions.

I am hoping the purging of evil will continue as we have a tornado watch over us right now. The weather is warm humid and touchy so the possibility we will have a rodeo this evening is high. I doubt a tornado can touch this farm as we are on some funky geography and 'nados like flat lands but straight line winds can certainly do a lot of destruction.

Been battening down the hatches for the storms-brought in all light weight furniture from the porch and deck and other such things and now we just wait it out.

This is not the weather we should be having in November-tornados. But this seems to be the norm the past 8 years or so.

My Weekend: The good, The Bad, The Indifferent

Shiva helping on the farm
Boy, it has been an eventful past couple of days.

Some bad things have happened and some good things have happened in the past 48 hours.

The worst thing to happen was losing Shiva the cat on the highway last night while we were out eating with my brother, Scott, who is visiting from Brooklyn, NY. Shiva had been with us around 8 years. he was our gardening cat. He loved to follow us out to the gardens and hang out with us while we worked. if we worked too long or too hard he would distract us away from work and get us to play with him. He was unique and will be sorely missed. So the three of us spent the late evening in shock and toasting the cat. He was buried this morning and a sugar maple sapling was planted on top of his corpse.

Better is the fact we bought a new bed and box spring today. we have been sleeping on a futon on a board for our entire relationship (and I was sleeping on it for about 10 years before that). But of course we could not have the bed event go smoothly. The first trouble started at the mattress store when we could barely get the mattress in the van and had to tie the box spring to the top of the van. we got about 2 miles down the road and one of the ropes came loose. So stopped at the Lutheran Church on US 40 in Richmond, In and tied the thing back down and went on our way to Radio shack to buy an adaptor for a new DVD player (more on this in a sec). Got the adaptor and got home with no problems but a bit of stress.

Got the box spring in the house and wouldn't you know it, it would not fit up the stairwell. So as I write this Eugene and my brother are working on taking the lintel (plus a lot of plaster and most of the door frame) off of the door in hopes that this will give us enough room to get the box spring up the stairs.

Now the destruction is over and the BS is halfway up the stairs (yay!!!).

In better moments this weekend we went to our last regular farmers' market and did alright. It was a busy market traffic-wise but not a lot of buying going on. It seems it was Miami University's Parents weekend so we got a lot of parents coming to the market with their college aged kids. Hopefully this means we get more student customers next season now that they know there is a Saturday market.

The best thing to happen this weekend has been my brother visiting and seeing the new farm for the first time and plastering two walls that had gotten water damage this past spring. now we have some fine looking plastered walls with no mold or paint peeling off of them.

Finally, we bought a DVD player at the evil Wal-Mart Sooper Center and now find it will not work with our antiquated (read 6 year old) TeeVee. We can buy a $50 adaptor at Radio Shack but that is nearly twice what the DVD cost and it may be better to buy a new TeeVee (though the one we have works fine and does not need replacing) or may have to return the item to Wal-Mart and get our money back and remain a VHS family for awhile longer.

While were doing this the cat was being killed, yet another bad Wal-Mart memory. A favorite cat killed and a useless DVD player-Great...

The bed has made it upstairs, the house is full of dust and plaster, the lintel over the stair doorway looks like hell but, by Gawd, the deed is done and we will have a real bed to sleep upon for the first time in our marriage. It will be nice to wake up not stiff and in some pain and well rested.