Organic Dairy Farms Feeling the Pinch: A boon for local food, and raw milk

Here is a fascinating article that appeared in the New York Times about a week ago. I meant to blog about it sooner, but it slipped off my radar.

Organic dairy farmers in New England have been hit hard by the recession. No surprise here. When people need to cut back on spending, it seems obvious that an easy sacrifice would be to buy conventional milk instead of organic. Because people are indeed making this sacrifice, the demand for organic milk has plummeted since the recession hit. Large organic milk processors, like Horizon Organic and Organic Valley, are canceling their contracts with organic dairy farms resulting in New England dairy farmers with lots of organic milk and no processor to sell it to.

The article details some ironies in the whole "industrial organic" food system--for example, New England dairy farmers purchase organic feed from the Midwest. The feed is then trucked to New England and fed to the cows whose milk is then trucked back to central processing plants, packaged, and then trucked out again to various stores around the nation. However, I find the most interesting aspect of the article toward the end when it reports that farmers are now looking to sell raw and unpasteurized milk directly to the public. And that the Vermont House of Representatives passed a bill to allow farmers to sell an increased amount of raw milk to the public. Apparently, farmers are now looking at, "Tap[ing] into the the locavore movement, [and] marketing their milk as local food."

Interesting...

Food for thought, anyway...I suggest you check out the article.