[Editor’s Note: This is exactly why the OCA campaigns to keep organic standards high and to enforce the existing standards. Companies like Dean Foods are undermining public trust in the organic label. For more information please visit our Save Organic Standards Campaign page.]

Environmentalists, sustainable agriculture advocate and farmers have
all been stressing the same thing for years: Buy Organic. But earlier
this week, a fiasco involving one of the largest organic cattle
producers in the country proves that just looking for the ‘USDA
Organic’ label won’t protect you from foods manufactured with
questionable practices, pesticides, hormones, and other nasty stuff.

In a statement released yesterday by the Cornucopia Institute,
one of the agricultural industry’s most aggressive independent
watchdogs, it was revealed that Promiseland, a multimillion dollar
operation with facilities in Missouri and Nebraska, including over
13,000 acres of crop land, and managing 22,000 head of beef and dairy
cattle, has been accused of multiple improprieties in formal legal
complaints, including not feeding organic grain to cattle, selling
fraudulent organic feed and “laundering” conventional cattle as organic.

Promiseland
Livestock, LLC, was suspended from organic commerce, along with its
owner and key employees, for four years.  The penalty was part of an
order issued by administrative law judge Peter Davenport in Washington,
DC on November 25.

Many people think that because a product bears the USDA organic label,
it came from a sunny farm where the animals are all happy and well
cared for. But the recent decertification of one of the industry’s
largest companies demonstrates that all was not well at Promiseland.

The
Cornucopia investigation, which the Bush administration tried to squash
as early as 2005, found that Promiseland sold thousands of dairy cows
to giant factory dairy farms owned by Dean Foods (Horizon Organic),
Natural Prairie Dairy in Texas and Aurora Dairy based in Colorado. 
Aurora and Natural Prairie supply private-label, store-brand milk for
Wal-Mart, Costco, Target and major supermarket chains such as HEB,
Safeway and Harris Teeter.

“It appears that it was the
investigation into improprieties by Aurora that finally led to the
hammer coming down on Promiseland,” Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst
for the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute observed.

Aurora
operates five dairies in Texas and Colorado and was found by USDA
investigators to have “willfully” violated 14 tenets of federal organic
regulations in 2007.  However, Bush administration officials let the
$100 million corporate dairy continue in operation under a one-year
probation. 

It is important to realize that although the USDA sets the standards
for what makes a farm organic or not, they are very rarely involved in
the hands on parts of the certification process. More often,
independent domestic accredited certifying agents
are brought in by the companies to make sure that they are satisfying
all the necessary requirements. Consumers must take an active interest
in the companies that make their food, and choose small, local
producers whenever possible.