The Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute has just filed a complaint with the USDA against two dairy farms in Idaho and California. It alleges that massive factory farms are labeling their products organic even though their thousands of cows are not pasture-fed, as required by USDA guidelines. Last month the institute — which is devoted to “the fight for economic justice for the family-scale farming community” (and also taking pictures out the car window) — filed a complaint against a similar operation in Colorado. This led the USDA to start ruminating on what “access to pasture” really means, anyway.
While the folks at Cornucopia are doing their best to help the little guys get herd — er, heard — larger-scale farmers say they’re doing right by cows and consumers. “Our reason for doing it is we’d like to see agriculture change,” Mark Retzloff, who runs the Colorado farm, told the Chicago Tribune. “If we’re really going to change agriculture, we have to do it on all scales.”
