When I was in New York I had the option of buying milk from cows I knew, as they were on the farms of relatives who ran dairies the old fashioned Swiss way – grow your own feed on your own land fertilized by your own cows. That was as organic as it comes. They used crop rotation and kept their seed from year to year. The number of cows was determined by the acreage, the size of the barn and the number of kids in the family.

These days you can’t make a living doing that, but you can live. The milk processors don’t want to buy your milk if you can’t fill a tank in a day, and that is too many cows for a farm.

Labels tend to be meaningless in the corporate reality of the US. That’s why you should buy local if at all possible, so you know what people are doing to your food.

What? Oh. I thought at first you meant in Washington, DC.

GeeDubya’s USDA rewrote the regulations for the “USDA Organic” designation, and AFAIK Obama has done nothing to correct the rewrite, so you can buy USDA Organic milk at a premium price and still have no idea what you’re really getting… they aren’t required to tell you everything.

My recommendation: buy organics only from farms you know and trust from the good old days; those that were USDA Organic back when the phrase meant something are less likely to have changed their practices.

The worst of it is that the smaller, organic dairies will be hit sooner, and harder than the factory operations than feed grain and don’t have pastures for their cows.

Dry milk is probably out of the question.

We have detected it in Florida, and you know we don’t spend a lot of time looking.

Farmers do their best, and a lot of them are proud of not mucking things up with chemicals, and incompetents thousands of miles away negate all of their efforts.