Wednesday, July 12, 2006
 
"Level" Means The Finger of Government Is On Your Scale
Somehow, I'm not sure whether the government should be in the business of determining whether cows are happy enough:
    Fears that big operations will muscle out family farms have produced a backlash, including a boycott by the Organic Consumers Association against the country's biggest organic milk brand, Horizon Organic.

    Organic farmers and consumer groups hope the Agriculture Department will level the field. The agency is considering whether to mandate that milk bearing the "USDA Organic" seal come from cows that have significant access to pasture, a move smaller producers say would give them the protection they need.
The whole marketing story used to be that organic junk was better for the consumer, healthier and all that. One would think that corporate economies of scale applied to organics, yielding more healthy consumers, would be a good thing. But not if corporations are involved; then the marketing story switches to more green, cow happiness (which corporations cannot/do not provide):
    Chris Hoffman drank Horizon milk until she learned about the dispute and switched brands. The resident of Sherburne, N.Y., said she'd thought she was buying milk from "family farms with happy cows." To her, feedlot milk does not follow the spirit of organic farming. "I just think it's patently dishonest. And it just really ticked me off," she said.
The spirit of organic farming, apparently, is protectionism, anti-marketism and anti-consumerism, and creation of artificial price floors to support people who thought that working in a niche market with a pricing minimum would pay off and later discovered, to their own financial (greed!) horror, that when their niche became mainstream, it proved to be less lucrative.

It's not about the cows, it's about the cash cows.


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:59 AM
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