Healthy Land & Healthy Cows—"Real" Organic Farms
(photo courtesy of Cornucopia Institute)

After a 7-year battle between organic farmers and consumers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the first of a handful of industrial-scale dairies, producing what they claimed was organic milk, has been shut down by regulatory authorities. It was announced today by an organic industry watchdog group that a 10,000-cow feedlot dairy, near Fresno in central California, was found to be operating outside of the organic law and has had their certificate to produce organic milk suspended.

The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group based in Wisconsin, which acts as an organic industry watchdog, announced that the Case Vander Eyk Jr. Dairy in Pixley, California, has been forced to suspend selling organic milk. In early 2005, Cornucopia filed the first of a series of formal legal complaints with the USDA against large factory-farm operators, including Vander Eyk, alleging that the mammoth "factory farms" were violating the spirit and letter of the organic law by confining their animals to pens and sheds rather than grazing them.

“This is a big victory for the farm families around the country who work so hard to create milk and dairy products that meet a high ethical standard,” said Mark Kastel, Cornucopia's senior farm policy analyst. “Scofflaws, like the Vander Eyk dairy, place family farmers, who respect the organic law and the expectations of their customers, at a competitive disadvantage.”

Government regulators indicated that there were serious questions whether Vander Eyk's cows are actually managed organically (without antibiotics and hormones), fed organically produced feed (without toxic pesticides and herbicides), and are allowed to graze rather than being confined in a feedlot.

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