Vermont farmers struggle as demand sours for organic milk - The Boston Globe
I can't say I'm surprised, but I am sad.
I am afraid that we have not yet come far enough in our national understanding of the horrors being wrecked upon our children's growing bodies by un-tested chemistry and additives to recognize the long term vs. short term costs of what we are consuming.
Personally, I am more concerned for small dairy than organic conglomerate, but the reality is that on a large scale the trendy movement towards organic was a radical improvement over the blind purchasing of milk heavily treated and laden with artificial hormones and unnecesary antibiotics.
Now that local large dairies like Hood and Garelick are pledging to keep those additives out of their products it is easy to see why a belt-tightening consumer would choose those products over an organic one.
I am concerned, and saddened. We will always make three steps forward to fall back two, it is in our nature. So I will continue to beat the local drum- please buy your milk from small farms. Spend a little more to ensure the continuation of practices that are easier on the land, the animals and your body.
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2 comments:
The spotlight you shine is helpful, but for me, this is not a story about the American consumer making a poor choice, but of the entire food-production system that is stacked against us -- subsidized by our tax dollars to make it financially inevitable to feed herbivores (grass-eaters) dried soybean and corn instead. This not only necessitates antibiotic use and causes direct health problems (MRSA superbugs, e coli and other pathogens), but many indirect problems ("externalities") such as accelerated petrochemical use, land erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, untreated animal feedlot waste, etc.
Federal subsidies and farm policies, not to mention abuse of human workers and animals, make it possible to buy a value-meal burger for less than the cost of a single head of broccolli. The reverse should be true, and federal policy should be altered to make it so. But the large firms that make their profits from the current system they brought into existence through lobbying would never allow that to happen.
The entire system should be overhauled, and only by informing individual consumers will that ever have a hope of happening.
We need to vote with our dollars. So only buy healthy food, organic food, and in particular food that does not cause environmental damage, human or animal suffering. Industry will follow the dollars wherever we lead them.
It's about much more than some farmers in Vermont.
Another couple of points -- along the organic vs. local, etc. I used to buy Shaw Farm milk and still sometimes do. Shaw Farm is just a few miles from where I work (it's in Dracut). They have some beautiful green pastures but the cows, even their "organic herd" remain strangers to them. The cows mostly never leave the barn and they eat a diet of greenhouse fart producing corn -- organic corn in the case of organic cows. Even the small, local, organic dairy is driven by economics to keep the cows in the barn. Additionally, they are attended by Latin American immigrants, mostly working illegally and under who knows what conditions (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5626103 details this this story about Vermont's Mexican dairy workers). Milk is almost always produced under these unsustainable industrial conditions whether or not the cows/farms are organic or local. This leaves aside the issue that what's in milk that's harmful may come from the crap that lands on the food, be it corn or grass, from the atmosphere, not what is sprayed by feed farmers. The problems in the food system are deep, but industrial milk production smells sour to me whether it's local, organic or whatever. Vermont' organic dairy industry is collapsing because it was not sustainable.
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