The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [80]
Such a factory farm didn’t sound terribly organic to the smaller dairy farmers on the board, not to mention to the consumer representatives. Also, the OFPA had spelled out that the welfare of organic animals should take into account, and accommodate, their “natural behavior,” which in the case of cows—ruminants who have evolved to eat grass—surely meant grazing on pasture. You might say the whole pastoral idea was hardwired into these animals and stood squarely in the way of industrializing them. So how could the logic of industry ever hope to prevail?
The USDA listened to the arguments on both sides and finally ruled that dairy cows must have “access to pasture,” which sounds like more of a victory for the pastoral ideal than it turned out to be in practice. By itself “access to pasture” is an extremely vague standard (What constitutes “access”? How much pasture per animal? How often could it graze?), and it was weakened further by a provision stating that even access could be dispensed with at certain stages of the animal’s life. Some big organic dairies have decided that lactation constitutes one such stage, and thus far the USDA has not objected. Some of its organic certifiers have complained that “access to pasture” is so vague as to be meaningless—and therefore unenforceable. It’s hard to argue with them.
Along with the national list of permissible synthetics, “access to pasture,” and, for other organic animals, “access to the outdoors” indicate how the word “organic” has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique and an alternative. The final standards also demonstrate how, in Gene Kahn’s words, “everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.” And yet the pastoral values and imagery embodied in that word survive in the minds of many people, as the marketers of organic food well understand: Just look at a container of organic milk, with its happy cows and verdant pastures. Thus is a venerable ideal hollowed out, reduced to a sentimental conceit printed on the side of a milk carton: Supermarket Pastoral.
3. DOWN ON THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIC FARM
Get over it, Gene Kahn would say. The important thing, the real value of putting organic on an industrial scale, is the sheer amount of acreage it puts under organic management. Behind every organic TV dinner or chicken or carton of industrial organic milk stands a certain quantity of land that will no longer be doused with chemicals, an undeniable gain for the environment and the public health. I could see his point. So I decided to travel around California to see these farms for myself. Why California? Because the state’s industrial agriculture grows most of America’s produce, and organic has in large part become a subset, or brand, of that agriculture.
No farms I had ever visited before prepared me for the industrial organic farms I saw in California. When I think about organic farming, I think family farm, I think small scale, I think hedgerows and compost piles and battered pickups—the old agrarian idea (which in fact has never had much purchase in California). I don’t think migrant labor crews, combines the size of houses, mobile lettuce-packing factories marching across fields of romaine, twenty-thousand-broiler-chicken houses, or hundreds of acres of corn or broccoli or lettuce reaching clear to the horizon. To the eye, these farms look exactly like any other industrial farm in California—and in fact some of the biggest organic operations in the state are owned and operated by conventional megafarms. The same farmer who is applying toxic fumigants to sterilize the soil in one field is in the next field