Cornucopia, Wisconsin, May 12 - After a three-and-a-half year battle with Dean Foods regarding the legality of milk it labels as Horizon Organic, the country's most aggressive organic industry watchdog filed additional legal actions today. Dean, the nation's largest dairy processor, with nearly $12 billion in sales and controlling 50 different milk brands, has obtained a large percentage of its organic milk supply from giant factory farms milking thousands of cows each.
The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group and family farm advocate, filed a formal legal complaint with the USDA claiming that one of Dean's Horizon suppliers, a dairy with thousands of cows in Snelling, California, was skirting the law by confining the majority of their cows to a filthy feedlot rather than allowing them fresh grass and access to pasture as federal organic regulations require.
Cornucopia has also asked the Inspector General at the USDA to investigate appearances of favoritism at the agency that has benefited Dean Foods. Cornucopia charges that past enforcement of the Organic Foods Production Act, the law governing organic food labeling and production, has been unequally applied toward major corporate agribusiness by the USDA.
"We are asking the USDA, once again, to investigate serious alleged improprieties at dairies that produce Horizon organic milk," said Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst with the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute.
Although the USDA, based on Cornucopia research, sanctioned or decertified two independent factory farms supplying Horizon, the federal agency dismissed both legal complaints against Dean Foods itself. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Cornucopia, the USDA never investigated or even visited Dean's 8000-cow corporate-owned industrial dairy, in the desert-like conditions of central Idaho.
"It appears that Dean Foods has more political clout in Washington than the two independent factory farm operators that were found to have been abusing the trust of organic consumers," said Will Fantle, Cornucopia's Research Director.
In a letter to USDA Inspector General Phyllis K. Fong, Cornucopia asked her to investigate why the agency arbitrarily chose to adjudicate some of the formal legal complaints filed by Cornucopia but looked the other way when it came to the largest corporate dairy processor and marketer in the country for almost identical alleged offenses.