EXCLUSIVE - Top U.S. Dairy Bans Milk From Clones

The top U.S. dairy company, Dean Foods, has adopted a policy statment banning milk from cloned cows, a copy obtained by Chews Wise shows.

This is a potentially significant step, since the Food and Drug Administration in December released its recommendation to allow food from cloned animals. The FDA has an open comment period on this issue that runs through April 2.

Dean Foods, with more than $10 billion in sales, is by far the largest dairy company in the nation. So even if the FDA allows cloning to go ahead, this policy may put the brakes on the development of clones, at least in the dairy industry.

The company also owns Horizon Organic, the top organic milk company. Other organic milk companies, such as Stonyfield Farms, Organic Valley, and Straus Family Creamery, have pledged not to take milk from any cloned cows. Non-profit organizations, such as the Center for Food Safety, have also been waging a campaign against cloning.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat, has introduced legislation to require labeling on packages of cloned foods: "This product is from a cloned animal or its progeny.''

Dean Foods "Position Statement: Milk From Cloned Cows" reads:

Based on the desire of our customers and consumers, Dean Foods will not accept milk from cows that have been cloned. If the FDA does approve the sale of milk from cloned cows, we will work with our dairy farmers to implement protocols to ensure that the milk they supply to Dean Foods does not come from cloned cows.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to conclude that milk from cloned cows is safe. Our decision not to accept this milk is based on meeting our consumers’ expectations. We see no consumer benefit from this technology.

Numerous surveys have shown that Americans are not interested in buying dairy products that contain milk from cloned cows and Dean Foods is responding to the needs of our consumers.

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Whole Foods Eats Oats

Whole Foods decided to have Wild Oats for its latest meal, gobbling up its distant rival in a bid to stave off competition from the Safeways, Giants and Wal-Marts of the world.

Short story: Organics and natural foods are hot, Wild Oats has been adrfit, and another player could have swallowed it up and created more formidible competition for Whole Foods.

What none of the news stories note, however, is that there was a traditional antipathy between these two companies, more than a competitive rivalry and something closer to extreme distaste. One could imagine that this very smart merger could have happened years earlier, without it.

The October 2006 exit of former Wild Oats CEO Perry Odak (who came from Ben & Jerry's in 2001) cleared the way for Whole Foods to make a merger overture - something that was aided by Wild Oats continued inability to gain significant traction.

Although Wild Oats had remodled stores and opened new ones - including, finally, a large store to compete with Whole Foods in its home turf of Boulder, Colorado - growth never really kicked the way it had at Whole Foods. It was always a distant second.

Wild Oats's sales per square foot - a typical industry measurement - are only 49 percent of Whole Food's. That means the typical customers visiting Whole Foods are buying twice as much stuff.

Downsides? Merging the culture of two companies who have a history of bad blood. But then again, "it's just bizness" and I imagine the Oaties will get along fine in Whole Foods.

Who Sucks Energy: Conventional or Organic Farming?

The London Telegraph dutifully reported the results of a study by the Manchester Business School, comparing energy use in organic and conventional farming systems. In a life cycle assessment - farm to fork - it found that many organic crops use more energy.

The energy needed to grow organic tomatoes is 1.9 times that of conventional methods, the study found. Organic milk requires 80 per cent more land to produce than conventional milk and creates 20 per cent more carbon dioxide, it says.

One note of caution: this was a government commissioned study, not one published in a peer reviewed journal. One of the longest-running studies comparing conventional and organic ag methods was published in Science in 2002. This Swiss study compared organic and conventional farming systems over 22 years and it found that organic farming used dramatically less energy. Why? Because one-third of the energy in agriculture goes into the production of pesticides and fertilzers.

The Research Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL) found that while organic systems tend to use slightly more energy in tractors and fuel, they use dramatically less energy overall.

Since crop yields were considerably higher in the conventional systems, the difference in energy needed to produce a crop unit was only 19 percent lower in the organic systems. Per area unit this difference accounted for 30–50 percent. Most of the difference was due to external production factors.

Organic farming needs only slightly more energy for infrastructure and machinery as well as for fuel, whilst markedly lower energy input for the production of fertilizers and pesticides.

Here's a graph of energy use, with K2 referring to conventional systems and O2 to organic.

<img src="http://www.fibl.org/english/research/soil-sciences/dok/img/direct-indirect_energy.jpg" width="315" height="287"

That said, once shipping and distance is taken into account, the picture gets muddy quickly. Do heated hothouses and local transport use more energy than unheated greenhouses in the south where the food is shipped longer distances? There's no easy answer to these questions.

What the Manchester study appears to do is to look at the entire lifecyle, but even the executive summary is filled with qualifiers about the actual lack of studies on life cycle assessment. Secondly, it admits that the analysis does not take into account benefits of organic farming such as biodiversity.

The full study is here:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/science/project_data/DocumentLibrary/EV02007/EV02007_4601_FRP.pdf

Organics up 9000 percent in Africa

Here's an argument local-food activists might consider: that demand for organic food in the developed world is aiding farmers in Africa. According to this Reuters article, African farmers are growing organic food for export.

"In Europe farms which have used chemicals on their land have to wait for three years while their land is cleansed before they get organic certification," said Amarjit Sahota of consultants Organic Monitor.

"As Third World farmers do not use agricultural chemicals they can get certification almost immediately."

African farmers were gaining from the trend.

"We are seeing the switch across the board with a range of crops in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Egypt," he said. "This is almost entirely being produced for export."

"I estimate there has been a 9,000 percent increase in organic farming in Africa in the last four years and a 1,000 percent increase in Latin America."

What the article doesn't explain, and which needs further investigation, is whether the farmers are actually benefiting from this trade in premium agricultural goods.

But this raises questions: Does an emphasis on buying local, to reduce food miles, stamp out just the sort of trade the developing world is seeking? Should it? Can a desire to support local farmers be balanced with trade that helps those in the Third World? And if so, How?

The Transparent Banana?

Dole revealed a shape of things to come in the food market - Transparency! - by allowing customers to see where their bananas come from.

Visit its Dole Organic web site and punch in the number on your banana SKU sticker. (Not the SKU code, which is 94011 for organic bananas but a three-number code that identifies the farm.) The web site shows you where this code is located.

I ran to my bananas downstairs and found the code and punched it into the web site.

Here's what I found.

DOLE PRODUCER CODE: 759 Farm Name: MarPlantis, S.A.

MarPlantis is formed by three farms, Colon, San Vicente and Matanegro. The three farms are located in Balao, El Oro, 3 hours away from Guayaquil. MarPlantis is the newest organic banana supplier for Dole Ecuador. It was first certified in 2005.
The Molina family is the owner of MarPlantis They are organic certified under EU and USDA NOP Rules.

While it showed pictures of the family - I presume they were the family - it didn't tell me much about them. Obviously that's the next step.

This reflects the entire direction the food system is moving in, toward more transparency. It's a good first step, as far as organic certifications go, but I'd like to see more, say, about worker conditions.

Mowing Down GMO Seed

A significant ruling in San Francisco mowed down the prospects for geneticially engineered alfalfa. U.S. Agency Violated Law in Seed Case, Judge Rules, the New York Times reports.

Cracking Down on GMO Opponents

Here's a map revealing states that ban local counties from enacting seed legislation. This lobbying move occurred after Mendocino and Marin counties in California successfully legislated bans on GMO seeds in 2004. Agbribusiness got to work to prevent further such actions around the country. Here's a map laying out the activity (in red), from Enviromental Commons.

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Click to enlarge map

Environmental commons also details the status of these laws.

Not surprisingly, the laws have been passed in key agriculture states where the planting of GMO corn and soybeans are prevalent. An attempt to pass such a bill failed in California in 2006.

Organic Sexuality

"PASA includes farmers who see the growing of nutritious food as an end in itself, not just a way to eke a living from a patch of dirt." - Kim Miller, PASA president 2000-2007

This past weekend, I was in State College, Pennsylvania, for the annual Farming for the Future Conference, the largest sustainable agriculture gathering on the East Coast and among the biggest in the country, with about 1,700 attending.

The conference was organized by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and drew all sorts of farmers and artisans out of the hills and gulleys: from Amish draft-horsesmen to biodiesel proponents, from grass-fed beef ranchers to organic herb farmers, from bee keepers and mushroom culitvators to back-woods denizens of hand hoes and makers of tomato sauce, organic flour and artisanal cheese.

There wasn't an agribusinesses in sight.

I participated in a couple of panels, on the growth of organics and where this movement is headed. As might be expected, there were misgivings about the onward corporatization of organics and concern that the label would be devalued. At the same time, farmers expressed a strong desire to protect the "meaning" of organic, fight to maintain the integrity of the organic label, and welcome corporate players, if they played by the rules. Well, that last point might be overstating it - there was a clear distrust of the mainstream food companies.

One of the more enlighting talks of the conference came from Michael Ableman,who delivered a keynote on the need to elevate the recognition of farmers and draw new ones into the fold. He also talked about ways to better faciliate the farmer & consumer connection (one thing this blog aims to do as well).

His solution - don't hit people over the head with a sense of all that's gone wrong, rather entice them with what can go right. For consumers, that might come through the food and an understanding of how it was grown and who grew it.

He also talked about the need to attract younger farmers to the land, perhaps with a sexual enticement. Ummm, not actual, but building on the idea - as one bumper sticker from the 60's put it - that "organic farmers are more fertile." Sexuality is humming through the farm, not just among the animals, but among the bugs, the seeds, in the soil itself at a microbrial level. He drew out this metaphore to many laughs, but made the point that there was a richness, even, at the extreme, an eroticism in this relationship with the land. Isn't this what marketers have known all along? Sell the sizzle? Actually, I've met quite a lot of young farm interns who matched up during their apprentice years and went on to start farms of their own.

The other interesting thing - aside from the workshops on how to butcher an animal, make your own sauerkraut, start a farmers' market - was the absolute buzz around biodiesel.

Recall, this meeting is the epitome of the do-it-yourself set and finally, in energy, biodiesel gives these farmers one more opportunity to cut their ties with The Man - Big Oil. Long live the french fry!

One farmer, though, who picks up gallons of the stuff every week, said he's around the fry oil so much, belching out of his tractors and trucks, that he has sworn off fries. "I won't eat 'em," he said. But that's probably not a bad thing.

I suggested, for variety, he try fry oil from a Chinese restaurant.

"That's a good idea, except when you get frying oil from a Chinese restaurant the trucks never seem to get full," he replied.

Ba-Da-Boom.

This kind of summed up the ethos of the conference: a "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" Toyota Prius.-

Clones Can't be Organic

The FDA's rush toward cloned livestock will bypass the organic food industry - at least according to the USDA's National Organic Program.

The folks over at the NOP issued a statement in the form of a Q&A today saying cloned animals were incompatible with organic food production. (This addressed some of the issues raised in a front page article in the Washington Post this week).

Q. Is cloning as a livestock production practice allowed under the NOP regulations?

A. No. Cloning as a production method is incompatible with the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) and is prohibited under the NOP regulations.

Q. May animals produced using cloning technology, or clones, be considered organic under the NOP regulations?

A. No. Animals produced using cloning technology are incompatible with OFPA and cannot be considered organic under the NOP regulations.

The last question though left open the possibility that offspring of organic animals might become organic.

Q. What about the progeny of animals produced using cloning technology, or clones – can they be organic under the NOP regulations in organic livestock production?

A. AMS intends to work with the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) to develop a rulemaking proposal to determine the organic status of the progeny of animals derived using cloning technology, or clones.

Why? Because right now some organic farms can bring in conventional animals and there is no tracking of the cloned livestock. It's a huge problem but won't be solved unless we call a clone what it is - A CLONE! - and label and track it so everyone knows.

Republican Environmental Buzz

What can a Republican political strategist tell us about the environment? Quite a bit, if you read this engaging column over at Grist.

Amanda Griscom Little gets GOP strategist Frank Luntz to give his quick comments on creating an environmental communications strategy. Three points stand to me.

One, that for a message to work, it's gotta have a symbol: he points to the Polar Bears as this decade's Bald Eagles.

Secondly, that a story needs to be told visually to have impact, so kudos to Al Gore's video.

Third, it's got to connect with other issues, whether energy security, energy independence - these are all bigger than environmentalism persee because they reach other interest groups.

But what I found most curious was that this GOP heavy considers himself sympathetic to the cause, which goes to show you how much this issue has crossed over. The big failure, he maintains, has been the inability of environmentalists to capitalize on sentiment out there.

Why?

Because they're too mean ... or so he says.

The column seems to follow in the spirit of keep your friends close, but your enemies closer...

Echoes at Eco-Farm

At the Eco-Farm conference last week in Asilomar, on the coast of California in Monterey, the sun was shining. For one day at least, then it began drizzling and I didn’t mind being indoors listening to a host of engaging speakers and panelists.

A theme kept arising - where are we headed? It’s a pertinent question for organic and sustainable agriculture, looking back over 30 years of progress with both pride and misgivings. Common themes were voiced and common quesions about whether the movement was being corrupted by the mainstreaming of organic food.

Michael Sligh of Rural Advancement Foundation International, a longtime participant in this movement, talked up the concept of “multistreaming” as opposed to “mainstreaming.” It’s a good concept, since that’s where we’re headed - food with various values and characteristics sold in a variety of ways and channels. There’s no mainstream these days, just ever more segmented markets which is why the be-all-things-to-all-people retailers are struggling. Small and focused is beautiful, and profitable.

My message - or the one I tried to convey in a plenary - was that a lot of energy gets expended on anxieties about bigness. I think more work needs to be put into “What’s Next?” Whether it’s a more vibrant local scene, social justice, fair trade - whatever it is. But judging by the number of people on hand, I’d have to say those issues are being discussed in a way that will create the next wave in this movement.

Wal-Mart Unmoved

Wal-Mart has issued a response to the Cornucopia complaint about its labeling practices. "Wal-Mart officials say that the company has done nothing wrong," according to Business Week.

The company notes it has has more than 2,000 locations that offer up to 200 organic selections, in addition to thousands of nonorganic offerings. It called the mislabeling an "isolated incident."

But many retailers sell far more than 200 organic offerings but seem to get the labeling right. Why doesn't Wal-Mart simply admit it made a mistake and plege to correct it? Instead, they are facing two potential investigations on mislabeling by the state of Wisconsin and the USDA.