Organic Valley in the News

Here are some tips on eating locally from four Tacomans who’ve been doing it for a while: Rob and Natalie McNair-Huff, and Katie and Andrew McNeely.

• You don’t have to change your whole lifestyle. Just do one thing. Then do one more thing.

• Learn to cook. Learn to adapt recipes. Plan your meals around what’s in season.

• Take a class on canning and preserving to avoid food poisoning.

• Cultivate farmers as friends, especially at the market. You’ll get better food, better deals, better service.

• Don’t get disappointed. It’s hard at first – then it becomes a habit.

Let's be clear, we know farmers are heroes without any help. But, the new Farmers Can Be Heroes program is helping farmers step it up a notch by offering resources to help conventional farmers transitional to organic. The Rodale Institute initiated the free online course and resources calling on their 80-odd years of experience with organic farming and gardening research.

OK, so how can you help?

It looks like more and more companies are starting to get the hang of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. Through trial and error and learning from each other’s mistakes, companies are finding new ways to engage people in online communities rather than just bombarding them with unwanted advertising.

Betty Crocker has its own networking site where users can watch instructional cooking videos, save recipes, and ask each other questions about how to keep their cookies from being too flat. Cafes and co-ops are sending out their daily lunch specials through Twitter. And before it was shut down for privacy reasons, the infamous Burger King “Whopper Sacrifice” application on Facebook drew tens of thousands of users.

According to Nielsen Online, people now spend more time on social networking sites than they do on email. Restaurants and food companies are eager to jump into these communities and find ways to promote their brands. A few are lucky enough to inspire groups like the “Addicted to Starbucks” Facebook community, but for most companies, it’s not so easy.

Social media are increasingly in the mix as General Mills, Target and Organic Valley blog and tweet to reach consumers.

It's not just a dream. Your supermarket really is talking to you. And its says it's time for vitamins.

Another example started up last month when Organic Valley, the LaFarge, Wis., dairy cooperative, unveiled its own social networking site. The cooperative hopes customers meet up there -- www.organicrising.com -- to talk about sustainable food.

"We've got hundreds of people who have posted videos, poems, songs," said Sarah Bratnober, marketing director at Organic Valley.

(originally published in Summer 2000)

But between scooping feed and hauling straw bedding, he takes a moment to point out to a visitor a tangled pile of metal and concrete heaped behind a shed. This is all that's left of a system of confinement hog production he and his wife, Irene, used for 14 years.

“Those days are gone,” says Frantzen without a hint of regret.

Those days consisted of raising hogs in closed buildings with concrete floors. The floors had special slots in them so that urine and feces could drain down into a pit below. All this liquid manure had to be pumped out and disposed of. Such a system was bad for the stressed-out animals (they fought each other and required lots of antibiotics) and the environment (liquid manure often finds its way into waterways), as well as members of the Frantzen family (they had to work in facilities full of dust and toxic gases). In short, says Frantzen, this system treated animals as machines, manure as waste, and farmers as barnyard janitors.

But three years ago the Frantzens junked the trappings of confinement and started raising hogs in deep-straw bedding in open-ended, Quonset-hut like structures called hoop houses. The family was already raising hogs on carefully managed pastures in the summer, but producing pork during harsh midwestern winters meant the hogs had to be confined – or so the Frantzens thought until they visited Sweden. There they saw pigs being raised under natural conditions using deep straw bedding.

When I was growing up, I knew nothing of store-bought butter - those smooth, rectangular sticks stacked four to a box. But we certainly ate butter.

The butter that graced our table was something special. Not only was it creamy and delicious, it was handcrafted. My mother knew the simple secret of turning fresh, liquid cream into a delicately salted spread that would make your mouth water. I guess you could say I was born into butter, so I never questioned whether or not it was good for me. But of course it was. Even a smidgen of butter was a whole slice of heaven.

When looking to buy top-notch butter, consider Organic Valley (organicvalley.coop) or Pastureland (pasture land.coop). Both offer pastured organic butter, and Organic Valley also offers cultured butter, which is slowly ripened to sweetness using live cultures (those good-for-you probiotics also found in yogurt). Of course, nothing beats homemade butter; so if you have access to a happy, pastured cow, try this easy recipe straight from Mama Butters' breakfast table.

Not so long ago, consumers demanding superior design, eco-friendly products, organic food and the like were hailed as harbingers of a new 21st-century spending savvy. This explained why retailers like Whole Foods and Target were thriving. And it created a great environment for clever, virtuous little companies like Recycline: its Preserve line of colorful kitchen and bathroom products made entirely from recycled plastic synched up perfectly with the wishes of this powerful consumer tribe. Accordingly, Preserve sales, selection and distribution grew steadily.

Today, of course, savvy is measured in pennies pinched — or at least, that’s the consensus of many trend observers (who seem to have forgotten the earlier assessment). Organic-food sales are suffering. Some people are flat-out bragging about shunning cool design. And both Target and Whole Foods, which happen to be Preserve’s biggest retail distributors, are struggling. So what does this new environment mean for a brand like Preserve? Its products aren’t terribly expensive — $2 for a toothbrush, $6 for a set of tumblers, $10 for a cutting board. But shoppers who value frugal over eco can clearly find cheaper alternatives.

"If we weren't an organic dairy farm, we wouldn't survive," said Craig Dahm, while sitting in the kitchen of the farmhouse where his grandparents once lived.

He and his wife Sharon have managed a small dairy herd for 30 years on a 160-acre farm near Dodge Center. Two years ago, after a three-year transition process, they were certified organic.

"Being certified organic, we get a good, stable price for our milk," Dahm said. He sells his milk to Organic Valley. The milk is delivered either to the Twin Cities for bottling or to Wisconsin for cheese.

A neighboring organic farmer convinced Dahm to go organic and mentored him through the transition.

A deep, dark scary recession hasn’t cowed the turnout for the 20th annual Organic Farming Conference held here this weekend. Registrants mostly from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa topped 2,300, up from 1,900 last year. Several hundred walk-ins Friday and Saturday are expected to push the number higher.

But what’s most revealing about Organic Valley -- and the yearly organic conference here -- is how explicitly organic idealism has been married to the organic industry.

No better example is Organic Valley’s longtime CEO George Siemon, a onetime back-to-the-earth counter-culturalist who has proved a remarkably shrewd if idiosyncratic corporate leader. When we talked Thursday, Siemon made the case that the rise of the green-oriented millennial generation and the deepening recession could have a salutary effect on American life.

Organic Valley is looking to help its farmers increase profits. The organic cooperative awarded $40,000 in grant money to the Research Foundation at California State University (CSU), Chico through its Farmers Advocating for Organics grant program. The money will help fund a two-year study focused on improving net profit by improving pasture management. The money is also being used to help the school quantify the economic costs and benefits of amending soil using organic methods to improve output, according to Organic Valley.

“The goal is to provide producers with options to lower their feed costs by reducing grain inputs under intensive grazing management,” says Cynthia Daley, a professor in the College of Agriculture at CSU, Chico.

By using intensive pasture management techniques, grain inputs can be reduced, leading to less expenditures for feed, Daley says. Some models show that ranchers could save between $1.50 and $2 per cow per day in feed costs.