Organic dairy farms being crushed by factory operations

Family farmers who produce organic milk are petitioning for the swift adoption of new strict rule-making that would rein in the abuses of a handful of factory farms, which are violating both the spirit and letter of the federal organic law.

The pending rewrite of the organic livestock standards, with an emphasis on assuring compliance with provisions that require grazing for dairy cows, is under review at the Office of Management and Budget, where the administration is being heavily lobbied by industrial farming interests to water down the rules.

To meet the explosive growth in the organic industry, over the last five years a number of large industrial dairies, milking as many as 7,200 cows, have exploited the stellar reputation that organic dairy products have earned in the eyes of consumers who are looking for safer and more nutritious food for their families.

With the flattening of demand for organic food, these giant dairies have flooded the market with cheap milk that is now crushing the family farmers who have built this industry. These CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are anathema to organic consumers investing in a more environmentally sensitive approach to food production and humane animal husbandry. Ironically, one of the reasons they are willing to pay extra for organic milk is they think that the farmers who produce it are being fairly treated.

The current surplus of organic milk, caused by factory farms, has forced prices down for family farmers. Sadly, there have been reports around the country of a number of suicides of both conventional and organic dairy producers. Some organic farmers are now facing foreclosure, a stark contrast to the economic promise of organics over the past two decades of growth.

Organic farmers are particularly resentful of two corporate players that heavily lobbied the USDA during both the Bush and Obama administrations, attempting to weaken regulatory language that requires dairy cows to be managed in a way that promotes their natural instinctive behaviors, including grazing on open pastures rather than spending most of their lives confined in barns and feedlots.

The largest villain, in the eyes of dairy farmers, is Aurora Dairy. The $100 million corporation owns five “factory farms,” each with thousands of cows, in arid regions of Texas and Colorado. Owning its own manufacturing plant, Aurora packages and ships milk for sale as store-brand products at Walmart and a number of leading supermarket chains. Aurora’s factory farm milk reaches every corner of this country, undercutting ethical farmers and their marketing partners.

Although the president of Aurora Dairy, Mark Retzloff, has heavily contributed to the Democratic Party, President Obama, and Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who is now USDA secretary, we trust that the current administration will focus on the suspect practices of his company rather than its past financial and political support.

In what has been described as the largest scandal in the history of the organic industry, in 2007 the USDA found that Aurora had “willfully” violated 14 tenets of the federal organic law, including confining its animals instead of grazing, and bringing illegal conventional cows into its factory farm operations.

The Bush administration let Aurora off without a cent in fines, instead placing the company on a one-year probation. Since then, 19 class-action lawsuits by consumers, charging Aurora with consumer fraud, have been working their way through the federal court system.

Bruce Drinkman, an organic dairy farmer from Glenwood City, Wis., who milks 55 cows, is right when he says:

“It would be a national scandal, as some of us face losing our farms due to the industrial dairy scofflaws, if the Obama administration sides with the ‘bad actors’ in our industry. We are in dire financial straits because of the same kind of unethical competition from factory farms that put so many of our conventional neighbors out of business. We need the president and the USDA on our side!”

By Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst for the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute.

Russia Bans Imports of USA Chicken

Industrial meat is taking a pounding (no pun intended) in overseas markets.


Russia banned imports of U.S. poultry from Jan. 1. Imports cleared by customs before Jan. 19 are permitted.

Russia cites the use of chlorine as the reason for the ban. Consumer protection watchdog Rospotrebnadzor says the presence of chlorine in water used to cool poultry results in "the accumulation of by-products dangerous to human health" in and on the surface of the meat.

U.S. meat firms routinely use chlorine to kill bacteria that cause food poisoning. The country says the process is safe.

Russia restricts the use of chlorine in poultry plants to 0.5 parts per million.

E. Coli Beef Recall in California 864,000 Pounds

January 18, 2010

A Montebello company is recalling 864,000 pounds of beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today.

Inspectors from the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service found a potential problem while conducting a safety assessment of Huntington Meat Packing Inc. The investigation is continuing.

In the meantime, several products produced between Jan. 5 and 15 are being recalled. And after further review of the company’s records, the same products produced between Feb. 19 and May 15, 2008, are also being recalled.

McDonalds Ammonia Enhanced Pink Slime Hamburgers

The question to McDonald's corporate website about what's in their hamburger was:

Does McDonalds use Beef Products Inc.'s, (a South Dakota company) hamburger filler product known by some in the meat industry as "pink slime"? The New York Times says you do.

NOTE that I did not say or ask anything about ammonia. Get your pink slime burger at McDonalds.
 
Their answer:

Hello Ron:

Thank you for contacting McDonald's and for sharing your concerns. I appreciate the opportunity to share the following information with you.

Please know that McDonald's food safety and quality assurance standards are among the highest in the industry. With extensive food safety measures in place throughout the entire supply chain process, McDonald's standards meet or exceed government requirements. McDonald's uses only 100 percent USDA-inspected ground beef in their hamburger patties.

Be assured that we do not add ammonia to our hamburger patties. In fact, ammonia is only used by our suppliers as a processing aid to kill harmful bacteria. This process is approved by the USDA and ensures safe, quality food.

Additionally, ammonia is a basic building block of protein and occurs naturally in beef, both raw and cooked. It is a key component of the flavor of cooked beef. Ammonia is a naturally occurring compound in meats and fish - (fish and shellfish have more than beef). Ammonia is a nitrogen containing compound and so are proteins.

As you may not know, lean beef trimmings are approved by the USDA and are a widely used and well-established industry practice. They are subject to the same stringent standards, and inspection and testing practices, required for all beef used in the production of our hamburger patties.

McDonald's continues to work with its suppliers, local, state and federal agencies, our industry and others, to ensure these standards are rigorously maintained. And, more importantly, that we serve safe, high quality products to every customer, every time they visit our restaurants.
Again, thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald's.

Lisa

McDonald's Customer Response Center

ref#:6578462

Factory Farmed Meat Can Trigger a Global Pandemic

By Kathy Freston, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2010.

The chicken and pork industries have wrought unprecedented changes in bird and swine flu. Billions could die in a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen.

I was intrigued (and disturbed) by a book I just read online -- http://www.birdflubook.org/ -- by Michael Greger, M.D. about the potential of a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen. Greger very clearly delineates how a virus begins, mutates, and becomes dangerous. As with so many problems we are seeing lately -- environmental or health -- factory farmed meat seems to be a big part of the cause. A graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine, Michael Greger, M.D., serves as Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at The Humane Society of the United States. An internationally recognized lecturer, he has presented at the Conference on World Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the International Bird Flu Summit, testified before Congress, and was an expert witness in defense of Oprah Winfrey at the infamous "meat defamation" trial. His recent scientific publications in American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, and the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition, and Public Health explore the public health implications of industrialized animal agriculture.

Read the interview here.

Visit the Kathy's website here.

Pink Slime Burgers Laced with Ammonia and E. Coli

Few who saw the documentary Food Inc. will forget the scene involving Beef Products Inc., a South Dakota company that makes a widely used hamburger filler product.  A Beef Products executive invited the Food Inc. crew to record his company’s inner workings. The man is clearly proud of his company’s product. “We think we can lessen the incidence of E. Coli 0157:H7,” he says.

Scraps of cow flesh, swept up from slaughterhouse floors and pulverized into a kind of paste, are moving through the tubes, subjected to a lashings of ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria. “This is our finished product,” the executive declares. He then claims that the product ends up in 70 percent of hamburgers served in the U.S. “In five years we’ll be in 100 percent,” he predicts.

Beef Products buys the cheapest, least desirable beef on offer—fatty sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor, which are notoriously rife with pathogens like E. coli 0157 and antibiotic-resistant salmonella. It sends the scraps through a series of machines, grinds them into a paste, separates out the fat, and laces the substance with ammonia to kill pathogens.

The result, known by some in the industry as “pink slime,” is marketed widely to hamburger makers. The product has three selling points, from what I can tell: 1) it’s really, really cheap; 2) unlike conventional ground beef, which routinely carries E. coli, etc, pink slime is sterilized by the addition of ammonia; and 3) it’s so full of ammonia that it will kill pathogens in the ground beef it’s mixed with.


With the U.S.D.A.‘s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-31-meat-wagon-ammonia-burger/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all