Organic Dairy Farmers Rally in Protest

Courtesy of iStock photo

A glut of organic milk, fueled by giant factory farms, threatens to wash family farmers off their land. Farmers and their advocates participated in an emergency rally July 16 in an effort to demonstrate their plight to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Vilsack was in West Salem, Wis., as part of a national tour.

Under the Bush administration, the USDA was accused of “looking the other way” as large corporate agribusinesses invested in organics while allegedly violating federal standards.

In the dairy sector, there are now estimated to be 20 large industrial dairies, each milking thousands of cows, producing as much as 40 percent of the nation’s organic milk supply.

“With the slowdown in the economy, the market is no longer able to absorb the growing supply of organic milk,” stated Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst with The Cornucopia Institute. “Processors have now cut the price of milk for farmers, and imposed production caps. Many family farmers are now in danger of losing their farms.”

Billed as the “Save the Organic Family Dairy Farm Rally,” the event was held at La Crosse Interstate Fair in West Salem, Wis. It immediately preceded a town hall meeting on rural issues with Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Secretary Vilsack was invited to say a few words to the farmers prior to the town hall session.

“His acknowledgment of the dilemma that faces organic dairy producers will be a big morale boost,” said Kastel before the meeting with Vilsack.

Besides The Cornucopia Institute, the emergency organic dairy rally is cosponsored by Family Farm Defenders, Center for Rural Affairs, Missouri Rural Crisis Center, Midwest Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, Church’s Center for Land and People, National Family Farm Coalition and the Interfaith Program Action Council.

In addition to the serious financial losses some farmers are experiencing, two of the largest organic milk processors and handlers, Dean Foods (marketing Horizon milk) and HP Hood, which owns Kemps dairy in the Midwest (marketing Stonyfield milk) have informed some of their farmers that they will not renew their contracts. “These corporations have, in essence, signed a financial death warrant for these farmers,” said Kastel.

Many organic producers borrowed tens of thousands of dollars, some well over $100,000, to convert to organics and modernize their farms. Without contracts to sell organic milk, many of these operators face bankruptcy and risk losing the farms that have been in their families for multiple generations.

“The only way we have been able to continue in business is to cash in our retirement IRA, our life savings,” says Bruce Drinkman, who milks 50 cows with his wife Mari outside of Glenwood City, Wis. “If the secretary of agriculture and others in power don’t recognize our plight, soon we will lose everything.”

For years, members in the organic community and the National Organic Standards Board, the expert panel set up by Congress, have appealed to the USDA to crack down on “scofflaws” bending the organic regulations on giant factory dairies, mostly in the desert-West.

“We are asking Secretary Vilsack to view this as a legitimate emergency and take immediate action, to shut down the giant farms that are violating federal organic law,” Kastel added. “Otherwise many of the ethical, hard-working farmers who built this industry will be driven out of business by cheaters.”

In addition to immediate enforcement action against factory farms allegedly “gaming the system,” Cornucopia has asked Vilsack to request the Justice Department to look into possible antitrust violations by the nation’s largest conventional and organic milk bottler and marketer, Dean Foods.

“I intend to tell the Secretary that there has been a sweetheart relationship between Dean Foods, and other giant agribusinesses, and the USDA for too long,” said John Kinsman, a LaValle, Wisconsin organic dairy farmer. “We need new management at the National Organic Program, the kind of change that President Obama promised during his campaign,” Kinsman added.

While the dustup over the large factory farms producing organic milk is infuriating to many organic farmers and consumers alike, there is no shortage of organic milk that is widely perceived to meet both the letter and spirit of the organic regulations.

The Cornucopia Institute completed an in-depth study last year rating the country’s 110 organic dairy brands based on their ethical approach to milk production. Nearly 90 percent of all namebrand organic dairy products were highly rated in the scorecard.

“In every market in this country, in every product category—cheese, butter, ice cream and milk—it is easy for consumers to find organic dairy products that truly meet their expectations,” said Will Fantle, research director at Cornucopia. “In general, consumers can really trust the organic label. These giant corporate dairies are just bad aberrations.”

Kastel says they were glad to have Secretary Vilsack come to Wisconsin, America’s Dairyland, where there are more organic dairy farmers than any other state.

“We know he understands the promise of organic agriculture for rural America,” Kastel says, “We just want to make sure he understands that families producing milk, conventional and organic, have their backs to the wall and desperately need his help.”

iStock photo These streetlights may become a thing of the past with Eco Alternative Solutions new solar/LED streetlight.

Are the streetlights in your city smart?

Streetlights are among a city’s most important and expensive assets, accounting for almost 40 percent of its electricity bill.

Using some of the latest technology being developed, Eco Alternative Solutions has developed a Solar/LED streetlight product smarter than existing systems.

Using Eco Alternative Solutions’ ISS series with Echelon, the cost per day is still less than using just LED lighting technology.

Plus, cities will now have complete, real time control over their street lighting infrastructure with features that allow users to dim, completely turn off, pre-program times, assess current ambient weather conditions and adjust accordingly along with many other customizable features.

Imagine a resident has an emergency, and a 911 call is placed. The streetlights closest to the resident’s home will begin flashing to notify emergency response units that they are in the correct vicinity. This intelligent networked system can even be completely controlled with an iPhone, as Mayor Gavin demonstrated in San Francisco on March 25 at the launch of their LED test pilot.

Echelon’s technology is currently used in streetlight systems in Oslo, Norway; Ville de Quebec, Canada; numerous cities in France and Germany; and demonstration sites in Anchorage, Alaska, San Francisco and San Jose, California. More information is available at www.echelon.com.

Eco Alternative Solutions is accepting applications for a free 90-day trial process of their newly developed ISS Solar/ LED streetlight.

C.E.O. Shane Chapin says, ‘I believe it will be an exciting process for both the end user and our staff. During this 90-day trial period we will have the ability, in real time, to compare our lighting capabilities with direct competition running pilots on the same section of the grid.’

To participate in the 90-day free trial, contact the corporate office at 217-303-8255, ext. 200 or e-mail at applications@ecoalternativesolutions.com. (The company’s website is currently being redesigned to facilitate real time results for the public to see as the test is taking place).

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Courtesy USDA/Scott Bauer Potatoes infected with late blight are shrunken on the outside, corky and rotted inside.

The disease that caused the 1840s Irish Potato Famine now threatens Pennsylvania’s home-gardening explosion, and a plant-disease expert in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences says hobbyists must work with commercial growers to protect the state’s tomato and potato crops.

The disease Phytophthora infestans is commonly known as “late blight,” and it’s potentially fatal to all tomato and potato plants grown in home gardens and in commercial fields.

Commercial growers know that spraying fungicides can help manage and prevent its spread. But homeowners unaware of this contagious disease may not take timely corrective actions, and their home patches can propagate the disease for miles, according to Beth Gugino, vegetable pathologist in Penn State’s Department of Plant Pathology.

“Tough economic times have many families taking up vegetable gardening, and tomato is often the most important crop in gardens,” Gugino said. “Late blight is a common disease in Pennsylvania and the Northeast since it likes the cool temperatures and frequent rains of our summers. If it gets entrenched in a backyard vegetable patch, it can create a serious problem for neighbors and for commercial growers because the disease spores are easily carried in wind currents to infect susceptible plants in even the most remote areas in our region.”

This year’s battle with late blight is further complicated by other factors: a moist spring has brought the disease at the earliest it’s been reported over such a broad region of the country. And a tragic mistake has large retail stores from Ohio to Maine unwittingly selling blight-infected plants.

“Last season in Pennsylvania, there was only one report of late blight on tomato and two on potatoes, and those developed later in the season,” Gugino said. “And never before has such an extensive distribution of infected plants occurred.

The exceptionally contagious spores can spread from plant to tomato plant on garden center shelves, and late blight has been confirmed on tomato plants in home and garden centers in several counties in the state — and the number is increasing daily.

“State Agriculture Department inspectors currently are visiting ‘big box’ garden centers across Pennsylvania and other affected states, working with the original supplier to remove and destroy any infected plants on store shelves.”

By the start of July, late blight on tomato and/or potato plants from home gardens and in commercial fields has been confirmed in Bedford, Blair, Centre, Washington and Lancaster counties, and more reports are expected. Outbreaks also have been confirmed in states as far south as South Carolina, and north to Montreal and Quebec. Petunias also can be infected by late blight and show similar symptoms.

“Given this scenario, we must assume that many infected tomato plants have been planted across the entire region, if they originated from so called ‘big-box’ stores,” Gugino said. “In Pennsylvania, several cases of infected plants in home gardens have been traced back to these stores.”

While it’s a problem for home hobbyists, she explained, the bigger threat is to commercial growers. Under the right conditions, blight spores thriving in backyard gardens can infect entire fields of tomatoes and potatoes several miles away. So, what starts as a minor disappointment for amateur gardeners can turn into a huge expense for commercial growers in the region.

“Growers have access to several very effective fungicides, so if they monitor their fields regularly and maintain a fungicide program, we hope they will be able to harvest a crop,” Gugino said. “But identifying and reducing the sources of inoculums is key. We are collecting isolates of the pathogen from each confirmed sample that comes to us, so that they can be genotyped. This will help identify where the inoculum is coming from.”

The lesions that develop on tomato leaves, stems and fruit are very obvious to the naked eye. The edge of the water-soaked lesion, on either the top or bottom of the leaf surface, will be covered with white fungal growth that contains the spores. On the stems, late blight lesions appear brown to almost black. The same lesions also will develop on the fruit, either directly on the infected plant, or after a few days sitting on your kitchen counter.

“Lesions are not a danger to humans, so most of the fruit can be used if the affected area is removed,” she said. “The good news is that the late blight pathogen is not seedborne in tomato, so tomato plants started from seed locally are most likely to be free of the disease, at least for now.”

Gugino urges gardeners to inspect their tomato plants daily, and to take quick, decisive action when they see symptoms.

“Any plants with symptoms should be removed, placed in a sealed plastic bag and left in the sun for several hours to kill the spores before disposing of them in the garbage,” she said. “Don’t put the infected plants in a compost pile as the spores will continue to spread. Your neighbors, not to mention nearby commercial growers, will appreciate your taking this action immediately.”

Homeowners can buy a few products that are effective if used before the disease appears and reapplied every few days if wet weather persists. The common name of cholorothalonil, a protectant fungicide, should appear on the label. Be sure to read and follow all directions and safety precautions on the label, handle the fungicides carefully and store them in their original, labeled containers out of the reach of children and pets.

“If you suspect late blight, please contact your local county Penn State Cooperative Extension office. They can help confirm the diagnosis and help you submit a sample to the plant disease diagnostic clinic.”

Additional information and updates on the late blight outbreak in the Northeast are available online at https://www.ppath.cas.psu.edu/ and https://blogs.cornell.edu/hort/.