Spirit in Action

No Poisons In Our Food!

The Cornucopia Institute is a watchdog for the organic standards for food in the USA. Co-founder Will Fantle presents a SLIDESHOW demonstrating the issues & scope of Cornucopia's work at NSR's annual membership meeting last year, and updates us about food issues, including GMOs and regulation.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 07 Dec 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Farming and food and connection to the earth are so deep and so important to the human soul that I'm pleased to bring you today a visit with someone vitally connected to working on all three of these things. Will Fantle was a co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute which acts as a watchdog for the USA's organic food standards And believe me, we need a watchdog. This program is in two parts. We'll start out with most of the presentation that Will Fantle gave at last year's membership banquet for Northern Spirit Radio and then we'll get an update from Will on organic food happenings in the intervening year. You've got a couple of options in terms of listening to the presentation which was accompanied by a slide show. Either you can use your imagination or you can click on the link on the NorthernSpiritRadio.org website for this show and follow along. It's your call. Slide 1. Also, in order to fit things in, look for a couple of bonus excerpts on the NorthernSpiritRadio.org website including the questions that Will fielded at the end of his talk. Right now, I'll take you to the pizza plus restaurant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin as we drop in on Will Fantle's presentation about organic food standards and the Cornucopia Institute. This is one of the things that motivated me to get into sustainable egg and organic agriculture. It's a picture of what you see in conventional farming in the springtime. These are the poison wagons that are going out and spraying the fields and I say these are poisons that are being applied across America. I've been throughout much of my life active on environmental issues. I've done a lot of writing. And whenever I wrote about something that concerned or dealt with food, people seem to get more interested and more responsive because we put things in our mouths. We understand that it's visceral. It's a gut reaction to something that we're putting in our mouths. So this is a style of agriculture that really moved into America following World War II before that time. Just about everyone in America is what we would call an organic farmer. With the introduction of chemicals, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and other approaches to agriculture, we began to see increases in productivity. And by the 1960s, you had the Secretary of Agriculture for the USDA under Nixon saying get big or get out. That meant small farmers. There's no future for you here in America. And that's something that organic agriculture, which I'll be talking about, has a little bit different take on. This is a picture from Wisconsin. This is about seven years ago. This is outside Warsaw. This is a manure runoff. This is what happens from the concentration of agriculture that we've had in America where there has been build up on larger and larger factory farms and feed lots of mountains of manure. And at times it's difficult to contain. There's a spill that happened in Wisconsin. This is a style of production agriculture that we've been increasingly moving towards in the last half of the 20th century and the first part of this century. There was a climate ag, in many cases, thousands and thousands and thousands of animals in one place. This is another example of a confinement agriculture that has moved into America. In 1990, there had been a movement in this country since the 1970s to look at again a different style of agriculture, a style that was more sustainable, more in tune with the land, more in tune with living creatures, trying to treat creatures with respect if they're livestock, to deal with pests in a different approach, not a broad scale approach, a broadcast approach where you spray poisons on things and that poison kills everything. Instead, organic agriculture was something that was formalized by the federal government in 1990 with the passage of the Organic Foods Production Act. There's a piece of legislation that would never pass today. In 1990, it did pass and it set up the parameters for organic agriculture. Certified organic farmers cannot use synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. They can't use GMOs, genetically modified organisms in the production of food. They cannot use synthetic fertilizers. So it's got a whole host of restrictions, but it's got a whole host of things that it requires people to do as well. For example, in certified organic agriculture, you have to work to build soil fertility. Your certification depends on it. The independent certifiers that come by your farm on an annual basis to look at your operation will look to see what you've done to manage your land to increase soil fertility. That means you have to rotate crops, and you can't do as what you see in conventional agriculture. The pounding of the land year after year after year with a mono crop like corn or soybeans. Totally different approach. The conventional approach is something that with the application of many of the pesticides and herbicides has led to a deadening of microbial life inside the soils. Organic agriculture approaches it differently. This is again what I'm talking about, food for the soil. Now, I'm going to touch on this a little bit, but I'm mostly going to show some of the things that we've been involved with. Since organic agriculture was implemented and the federal rule was set up for it, organic eggs started growing pretty fast. It had been growing in the organic food production. It had been growing at a double-digit rate on an annual basis for much of the last 20 years. In food sales, it's about $30 billion right now on an annual basis in organics in this country. At some point along that line, a lot of the big companies in America started to detect that, "Hey, there's a dollar to be made in organics." And they began buying some of these smaller companies, which many of you have heard of. You can't see this very well from this slide. It's on our website, and I'm not going to dwell on it too much, but suffice to say that you can see some of the big yellow spots, which are companies that we all recognize, General Mills, Hershey's, Pepsi, Coke, Dean. These types of companies have bought companies that are involved in organics. We have a different approach, and our approach is not so much that we're opposed to corporate involvement, in organics, but we are a true believer in ethics and transparency in organics, and that's something that we're going to hold these larger companies accountable to. We're also going to try and ensure that there's a place for family farmers in the production of our food in the future. I'm going to talk a little bit about organic livestock, an organic livestock egg, and I want to point to one thing that is totally different in organics and what you find in conventional. That line in bold, accommodate the health and natural behavior of animals, which means that they have to have your round access to the outdoors. Cows have to be allowed to go outside, pigs have to be allowed outside, chickens have to be allowed outside, pecking around, digging in the dirt, dust bathing, looking for food. Cows, they're not designed to eat corn, they're designed to eat grass. They're a grazer. These types of behavior patterns are something that organics recognizes and encourages. Without the allowance for the use in organics of things like antibiotics, which are expressly prohibited in organic agriculture, you have to treat your animals differently and accommodate for the health of those animals differently. So organics attempts to do that. Now, what we saw when we formed our organization almost ten years ago now, there were what we call scoff laws coming into organics. People who were attempting to manipulate the system, attempting to profiteer on organics. And if you know, if you've been in a grocery store, that organic food is a little more expensive than in most cases and in many cases in conventional equivalents. And some companies tried to take advantage of that. Some cheaters came into the business. That's where we're involved. We're a watchdog in organics. We're designed to ensure that what is certified organic means organic. This was an operation in California. I had 10,000 animals on it. 3,000 were organic, the rest were conventional. And we were supposed to believe that the ones on one side were treated differently than the ones on the other side. In total contravention from organic standards, we filed a complaint against this operation. We got it decertified. So another example of how much grass do you see in this picture? We weren't providing access to pasture for the animals, the ability to graze them instead of feeding them. We were successful in that complaint. This is one of the nuanced pieces of organics. What I will call the mask of private label products. This is a dairy carton from organic milk that is sold in Safeway, I believe. Many companies have their own private label brands, Target, Archer, Archer Foods. This is Safeways, Walmart has their own. And the mask of private labels allows them to scout and hunt for the cheapest available input. This is what they want you to think is how the milk is being produced and brought to your table. This is the reality of it. And this is again what we filed a complaint on and got federal sanctions taken against this operation. Now how do you as a consumer know this? What we have done is we have developed scorecards and reports on various commodities and organics so that you can go on to our website and you can look and see what we have investigated and found to be reputable brands and ones that may be cheating. By the way, I'll say that the vast majority of organic farmers are on the up and up. There's a few that are scamming the system and taking advantage of it. This is another operation that we filed a complaint on a few miles away. This is how a neighboring organic farmer was managing his animals. So this has been our role. We're a watchdog, we're investigating, we're looking at this to make sure that what you're paying for and what you think you're providing to your families is really what it is. This is a dairy brand in Arizona that we filed a complaint on shamrock. They've been decertified because of our action. Again, how much grass do you see that those cows are grazing on? It's like eight. Here's when in Nevada that we filed a complaint on three inches of rain a year there. Not much pasture and taking place there. It's like nine. This is a chicken operation in California, poultry, egg laying operation that we investigated as well and filed a complaint on. How many birds do you see outside? It's like ten. This is the carton that they're selling in grocery stores with their eggs inside it. This is what they want you, the consumer, to think how the birds are being managed and raised. It's like eleven. In actuality, this one is also in California. This is somebody who is providing access to the outdoors for his birds. They've got a trailer that they haul around to different parts of their land. They let the birds out and the birds, hey, they actually like to go outside. Slide twelve. It's another large operation, one of our members in California. This one has a thousand animals on its farm, but they've got the land base to manage it properly. They get forty inches of rain a year. They grow lush grass and the animals are able to pasture and produce the inorganic. It's one of the larger operations in this country that we found that is actually doing it right. Slide thirteen. Here's one of the integrated approaches to organic livestock agriculture, the cows graze on one part of the land. They're moved on to another paddock and followed by the birds who then graze on the land that the cows were on, and the birds break up the manure. They break up the waste, they pound and pack away at the soil and help integrate and increase that soil fertility that I was talking about earlier. Slide fourteen. This is one of our farmer members in western Wisconsin, south of La Crosse, managing his herd. Slide fifteen. Somebody who's an organic farmer in Pennsylvania sent this to us, he wanted us to know how he viewed and how he thought our relationship with food and animals was. Okay, I mentioned the reports that we write. We have the staff of nine, we're scattered across five states. We've got people with academic backgrounds in ag, agronomy, soils, and we go out and we investigate production practices, and then we put together a report on what we find. And in these reports, we show the heroes and the zeroes. We have a rating system we'll look at and we'll rate brands that you can find in the grocery store, and we provide that information to you as a consumer, so you can provide feedback to the owners of those brands, those companies that are generating and producing products for us to consume in the stores if you're not buying locally or directly yourself. And in some cases, it's the only way that those brands understand that type of feedback is with dollars. So if we're able to try and focus and direct some of that marketplace pressure of consumers towards authentic heroes in the organic sector, we feel that builds their business, provides that opportunity in the future for them to stay on the land with their families. We've done this with cereals as well, breakfast cereals. We've taken a look at that. You've seen an increasing creep in organics of natural foods into organics, trying to compete. Oh, natural organic, what's the difference? There's a tremendous difference. Natural means nothing. Natural means what the marketer wants you to think it means and whatever they paint, the patina that they use to surround that ore of the product. Organic has a strict set of production standards that are independently verified by inspectors on an annual basis. So we took a look at cereal brands and we found that some of the cereal brands masquerading as natural are using GMO types of inputs. They're using pesticides, synthetics in the production of that food, cashew owned by General Mills. A retailer in Pennsylvania put this on his store shelf after reading our report. He pulled his cashew products. He didn't feel they met the needs and desires of his customers, caused a firestorm on the internet. This went viral on Facebook, led to thousands of people contacting the cashew brand and complaining about the inputs they were using in their natural cereals. Cashew responded with a pledge to remove GMOs from their foods and to increase their organic brands that they provide and offer. This is the power that you as consumers have, that you can help shape and direct corporate policy. Slide 16. This is a sample of one of our scorecards. Again, the fine print, a little difficult to read. You can read this again on our website or look at it more closely. But we've rated soy products. A lot of people who don't eat meat turned to soy. We looked at different brands and how they're sourcing their soybeans. How they're getting soybeans grown, produced and provided to them. In some cases, we found that those soybeans are being imported from places all over the planet. In some cases, they're being grown here in this country. Some cases are organic. Some cases are not. But we thought you as a consumer might want to know this. Early on, I talked about the corporations that have moved into organics. One of the ones that we've been most critical of has been Dean Foods, which some of you may have heard of. They don't market too many products under their own name. They do own 50 different dairy brands. In 2002, they bought the largest independent organic soy brand in the country called Silk, probably seen Silk on the store shelves. At the time, Silk was a 100% organic company. It was a $100 million company that Dean Foods purchased. Organic farmers in this country were kind of excited by Dean Buying Silk because they thought, "Here's an opportunity to grow and expand this brand across the store shelves and get it out in more places in America." So they were looking forward to the opportunity of working with Dean Foods. First thing Dean Foods did was they came to the soy producers in America that were providing the organic beans for them and they said, "Cut your prices, or we're going to buy our beans from China." They couldn't cut their prices. Dean Foods moved to China. They started buying all their organic, and we have suspicions about what organic means in China. They started buying all of their beans from China. We pointed this out. We called them out on it. We made an issue of this. Dean Foods then moved their production back to this country, but instead of going to organic beans, they now went to conventional beans, only they were calling them non-GMO, or non-genetically modified soy beans that they were going to provide in their products. A company that at one time was 100% organic has been deconverted by Dean Foods into an almost entirely conventional food company. They still have silk. You still see that label in the store as they call it natural. Natural doesn't mean anything. Dean Foods in the last six months spun off silk and the horizon milk brand into a standalone company called White Wave. Actually, the management of Dean Foods is now left Dean Foods to run White Wave, which they perceive as a more profitable entity. I'm not going to talk about this much. You can find more information on this, or you can talk about me afterwards with this, but the idea of organics and its impact on climate change has a rather healthy impact and a different perspective on dealing with carbon. Another issue that we're seeing come before us in the whole effort to try and keep family farmers on the land has been the food safety issue, and food safety is a growing concern. Again, this is something I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, but I will say this is something that's coming to a head before the FDA right now. There are new regulations from the Food Safety Management Act past three years ago that are being transferred down to farmers for them to invoke and implement, and there are problems with food safety, and there are problems with food safety on farms. Most of those are occurring on factory farms and imports coming into this country. Most of the family farmers growing vegetables in this country haven't had any real issues with food safety, but there are intense human pathogens that are found on factory farms that are being transferred into the rural countryside by the factory farm style of agriculture. Again, you're seeing incredibly virulent forms of E. coli that exist in heavy concentrations in the manure of factory livestock operations, factory farms. That manure, those pathogens escape from that manure into the countryside and infect and impact food safety issues on neighboring lands and on the rural countryside. Slide 17. It closes down with just some images of some of our farmer members and the food that people are buying from them. This is a producer in Ohio. He raises beef and he brought a breed, a breed of an animal that may be appropriate to grow fast, fat, and big and quickly. It might not be the best breed anymore to eat grass, to walk around outside, to exercise, to stay healthy in that type of environment. This farmer decided that the conventional type of cows that you see on operations did not match his needs and is using peat mont, ease cattle or an import from Italy, and some of this stuff is really pretty nuanced for what we've seen and found in the last 50 years, but this guy, it takes him 22 to 24 months to get an animal to market. They have a good life, he says, for their 20 to 22, 24 months, one bad day, but a good life for the preceding time for that. Conventional animal, 12, 14, 16 months before it goes to slaughter, total different approach. It's like 18. So organic vineyard in California, one of our members, they manage their land differently. They're not out spraying. They're not out putting on all sort of artificial and synthetic things on the land. This is actually the owner of it. He's out there working the land himself. This is somebody who is on our board of directors. We have a national board. It's like 19. This couple lives in Minnesota, Cedar Summit Farm, they're milk, and they're yogurt on the shelves in Minnesota, grass-based, 100%. It's like 20. It's another farm family in Nebraska, one of our members, interns coming on the farms, trying to train and teach people going into the future. It's like 21. It's their board president and his wife, they grow vegetables in Southern California, Ohio. They also have a restaurant, and they cook those vegetables up for their customers in that restaurant. They also sell at a farmer's market. Steve Sprinkle, his wife, Olivia Chase. Slide 22. This is where you come in. This is where you have an impact. This is where you make a difference. This is where you help decide who's going to be on the land in the future, who's going to be producing our food for us, and what style of agriculture they're going to be practicing. There's a lot of local operations that aren't certified organics that are doing a pretty good job of handling, managing their land, providing food. There's a lot of sustainable operations. There are other forms of sustainable organic agriculture that aren't certified organic. But just to look at the numbers of certified organic operations in this country, there are approximately 15,000, not very many. Most of the farmers in this country are in their late 50s. Somebody's going to be producing our food in the future, and you've got a voice and a decision to make on how that happens, and how it's going to be done, and what's going to be done. Those 15,000 certified organic farmers don't have a very big political voice. They don't make much difference in Washington. They don't make much difference in a lot of state legislatures. So we have, as an organization, attempted to couple the farmers that are our members with consumers and with other organizations with retailers that care about agriculture and care about food, and food integrity, and ethics and food, and tie them together so that the voice is bigger, that they can have an impact, and they can provide a future for farmers to stay, family farmers to stay on the land. Slide 23. So with that, I'll close. Again, the organization I work for is the Cornucopia Institute, Cornucopia.org. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate the opportunity. [applause] Slide 24. I hope you're applauding Will Fantle's talk, along with all the folks at the Norton Spirit Radio Membership Banquet last year, where Will was one of our main presenters. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, and this is Spirit in Action, a Norton Spirit Radio production, on the web, at northernspiritradio.org, complete with nine and a half years of our programs available free for your listening and download. Today's program listing included a link to a slideshow to help you visualize Will's presentation. Also on the Norton Spirit Radio site, there are comments, and please add your own when you visit, so our communication will be two-way. We count on your donations and support to fund this program, so click "donate" and "support" whenever you visit. But you know what's even more important supporting your local community radio station. Do it with your hands and your wallet, and you can be part of bringing a slice of news and music to the U.S. airwaves that we get nowhere else. So start there. We just heard the talk about organic food standards and the Cornucopia Institute by Will Fantle. Something Will shared last year, so right now we'll get them on the phone for an update. Will, thanks so much for joining me again for Spirit in Action. Hi, Mark. Good to talk with you. So it's been over a year since you gave that talk. Have much been going on in the world of organic standards since last year? Well, time flies. And you know, there have been a fair amount of things that have taken place that I think we can probably provide an update to you on and your listeners and help them know a little bit more what's current and contemporary in the world of organic food and farming. Well, there's some specifics that I was wondering about because I've heard, you know, as the elections go on, they've often had referenda on questions about organic labeling. Could you update about those things? I'm kind of assuming that Cornucopia Institute is in favor of such labeling. Tell me if you are and what kind of laws passed and which ones you actually favor. How should this actually be done? Yeah, there has been a bit of a ground swell in a number of states around the country to seek more definitive labeling on food products. In particular, a lot of people are pretty interested in knowing whether or not genetically modified organisms or GMOs, as they're typically called, are in their foods that they're eating. People seem to want to know that. So there have been both state initiative referenda around the country on this issue. There have been some states that have directly passed legislation and signed into law by their governors on this. All were the idea of requiring food companies to put a simple statement on their label saying whether or not the ingredients used in that food contain genetically modified organisms. So this past year, the state of Vermont, passed and adopted a law requiring that. They're currently being sued for doing this by who I'm going to call big food. Big food, including the pretty powerful lobbying association known as the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which is made up of everyone from Coke, Pepsi, Safeway, food product manufacturers and retailers. Very powerful lobbying association. So they are suing the state of Vermont at the moment. These types of initiatives and legislative activities have been bitterly contested by companies such as Monsanto, Dow, Bear. These companies that are directly engaged in the production of GMO crops see their livelihoods being threatened by consumers knowing what's in food. And I think they view that through the lens, the experience of what has happened in Europe. In the European Common Union, there is a requirement that food products containing GMOs be labeled. In fact, it's not just in the European Union. It's for 60 countries around the world have this requirement to the United States being one of those countries that does not. And in the European Union, the sale of food products containing GMOs is very difficult. Consumers, when given a choice, when given that option, choose to buy foods that they believe are not experiments and something that they're ingesting into their own bodies as an experiment. So Vermont passed a law. Two other states in the Northeast have passed a law in the last year and a half on this as well. Then there have been statewide votes. This year, this past November, last month, there were two statewide votes. And the statewide vote sits in initiatives, a process we don't have in Wisconsin, but is something that's available, and I believe about half the states around the country, this initiative process, where you can gather signatures and put something on the ballot if you get enough signatures, and then the whole state gets to vote on it. Well, that took place in both Oregon and Colorado. It's really rather interesting looking at how these things play out and that the electoral process, the big food side spends, they have spent fighting these food labeling initiatives in, there have been four votes across the country right now, two of them this past year. They have spent more than a hundred million dollars on elections opposing this. It's just outrageous. You can't let people know it's in their food, don't you? Yes, and as a result, the people who want to see something like this funded outspent anywhere from five to one to ten to one in the various states by the big food forces, and all these initiatives have lost statewide vote. Oregon raises in less than a thousand vote difference. It's currently in a recount right now, a state mandated recount with a vote margin like 840 vote difference. Colorado wasn't close, like 65, 35, something like that. But relatively close in other states that have had this type of statewide vote, California and Washington, both like 51-49, with, again, the big food forces throwing tens of millions of dollars with misleading ads like are pretty common, what you see in political campaigns. So we've been involved from our perspective, at least in trying to encourage people to have awareness of these initiatives, and then we have put together infographics available on our website that lay out who is spending what on the corporate side, because it's pretty amazing. You see a number of companies that have organic food portfolios that are opposing this type of labeling law. So, yeah, it seems contradictory, and it does seem sort of funny, but they just don't want people to know, and the organic piece of their food portfolio is a relatively small part compared to their conventional food. I mean Pepsi has spent over eight million dollars posing these statewide initiatives, and they do have some organic products that they own. Coca-Cola, another one, I mean these huge companies that bring organics to take advantage of that aspect of the consumer market, but still have their feet more fully entrenched in conventional food. Does this mean that Coke or Pepsi might have to have their own label? I don't know if Coke or Pepsi is considered food, not so much in my point of view, but does that mean they'd have to have a label that they have GMO, maybe they have GMO sugar or something in there? Right, certainly in food products, you know, I have to admit, I can't tell you whether or not a Coke can would have that label on it, it's quite possible it would. But in the other types of food products they make, whether those are chips or whatever types of convenience foods that these companies make, those would have a label on it if they had, I mean you mentioned sugar, likely that would be high-trooped dose corn syrup, which is ubiquitous in so many products. And made typically from GMO corn. So I take it you support these labeling laws, how should they be implemented? Is there a good way and bad way to do it? Are these different states advocating for different ways of doing it? I think the overall approach in each one of the states has been pretty similar. We believe that cornucopia, that it is the right of people to know what's in their food. So we clearly favor this type of initiative, this level of awareness so that people can make informed choices. I think it's up to each state, at least at this point, to try and address this in a way that they feel best fits the needs of their own particular state. On a national level, the power of big food is so strong that they have been able to totally bottle up any national effort in Congress or regulatory effort at the Food and Drug Administration. You mentioned Vermont has their law that's supposed to take effect in 2016, and that's being opposed in court. The companies are trying to stop it from going into effect. If it takes effect in Vermont, and that is to say that companies who sell their food there have to have that on their labels in Vermont, does that mean that, well, as long as they're labeling it for Vermont, we might as well do it for the rest of the nation? Or are we going to do two different labels? How would that be implemented? Vermont is not big enough that my suspicion would be that they would cause a cascade effect causing this to be done across the whole country. If California had done this, as they attempted to do in 2012, they had a sufficient economic footprint to cause companies to say, well, we're just going to do this everywhere. I don't know that that's true about Vermont, so it's going to be if this happens elsewhere in the country, it's going to be some sort of cumulative effect that eventually would tip this over the edge where companies would just make a uniform label. I do assume that there are some pros and cons to GMO labeling. One con I would think from the company's point of view is this will cost them some money to keep track of how much in terms of GMOs is in the product and so on. There's going to be a little bit of expense. I assume that's not something that they are obviously tracking or could document. They have made that argument, yes, but I think the thing to understand is they change labels all the time. They're constantly upgrading and changing labels and the cost calcs that have been done looking at this by the yes side. It seemed to indicate it's pretty minor. The companies do argue, as you say, that this is an outrageous and excessive expense for them to do. But the reality of the matter is that labels change pretty regularly in the marketplace. I can particularly imagine if I'm grabbing my food supplies that I'm assembling into ketchup or salsa, I'm getting my stuff from a lot of different people, so I have to depend on them to tell me what's GMO or not. So I assume as a little guy, I might say, well, this is really a burden on me. Is that not a fair assessment? Yes, and it may be more burdensome for you, but you would have to ask your suppliers what's in your ingredients. And if you're a product manufacturer, you might be kind of fussy about what's in your ingredients and know that already. But I mean, that's up to each product manufacturer to make that sort of determination. But potentially, for I would suspect for somebody that's smaller, that could be burdensome. I mean, there are labels -- there are all sorts of labels out there. Does it have peanuts in it? You have to put a warning label on it. There's peanuts in a product. So there's all sorts of nuances and levels of labeling requirement that's out there. It's part of being in business. Now, I personally happen to be opposed to GMO, so I think I'm on the same train that cornucopia is riding. But I do like to have enough of an open mind to make sure I understand from the people that are using GMOs. What their motivation is, it's not necessarily that they're spawn of Satan, that in fact they may have something that they say, well, hey, I can use fewer pesticides if I use this GMO variant. How do you assess that? Well, the spawn of Satan, I will reserve that judgment for Monsanto. Okay. For your typical farmer, for your average grower that's out there, I think there are a number of reasons why they may use GMO crops. One is the diminishing level of alternatives. The seed suppliers, like much of the world's various industries or sectors, a lot of companies have been bought up in who's been buying up the seed purveyors around the world. Monsanto, Dow, Bear, Syngenta, there's a handful of companies that now control, in essence, the world's seed supply, and they get to choose what type of seeds they're willing to sell to farmers, particularly that level of commercial availability has diminished and is becoming increasingly dominated by the genetically modified variants. You mentioned that somebody might choose to use something because they use less pesticides, and that has been part of the mythology that's been promoted with GMO crops. The reality of the situation is that more pesticides are being used because now you don't have to worry about harming your crop. Say you've got a Roundup ready on an herbicide-resistant crop, but the weeds that might be growing were the non-desirable plants that might be growing, now you can really spray the hell out of it because you're not going to hurt your primary crop that you're trying to grow. You can spray a lot on the ground to make sure you kill everything else. And that seems to be the reality of what's going on. Numbers indicate that pesticide use has soared over the last 15 years as these GMO crops have become more prominent. The other side effect of doing this is the killing of the microbiology that occurs in the soil, so the soil being deadened. Again, these types of approaches are not allowed in organic food and agriculture. GMO technology is explicitly prohibited in organics, and it's a different approach where in organic agriculture the goal is to nurture and build soil fertility and work with the soil. GMO and conventional pesticide agriculture seems to be to hammer anything into the ground that's not the desirable crop that you are growing. About the context of what's going on. I'm assuming, since you talked, again, gave this presentation we just listened to, you gave that presentation last year. I'm assuming organics continue to grow, so there is, I think, a ground swell across the nation in favor of organic, natural, really healthy food. Does that continue as my first question? And secondly, have there been regulatory or legal changes in the past year that we should be aware of about organics? Organics does continue to grow. For most of the last 15 years, it's been growing at a double digit rate, and that rate has been interrupted only one year. That was 2009 following the great downturn that we collectively experienced in this country. Organics still grew a little bit, but nowhere near the faster pace, the double digit pace that it had been experiencing, and has since been experiencing. So there is an increasing and a growing hunger for food in this country that people know where it's coming from, view it as what I'll call nutrient gents, and there's growing consumer awareness. There's about a $35 billion a year business in organics right now in this country. So it is rather significant, and continuing to have a bigger footprint. 70% of consumers say that they'll buy organic products during the course of a year. In the marketplace, I believe, something like 10% of vegetables that are sold are certified organics. So it depends on the different commodities. Yes, it's pretty good. 10%, that's wonderful. Dairy products, it's less than that. It's 2%, something like that. So there is a pretty big footprint out there. But there have been regulatory changes that have occurred. We've been very disturbed by one change that occurred at the national level. The organic community, when the law was passed in 1990, the established organic food and agriculture put in place a buffer to both, because there was suspicion about the USDA and USDA perspective on agriculture, and suspicion about corporate power. They put in place a buffer called the National Organic Standards Board, and that board is made up of 15 independent members. And they have the composition is slotted, so that four of those members, four of those 15 have to be farmers, four have to be consumer, environmental, public interest representatives. There's a scientist on the board. There's a couple of food product manufacturers on the board called handlers. So this type of constituency representation was set up. And the USDA in the last year has attempted to seize authority from this board. And this is a huge issue right now that we're wrestling with. And in our belief, they took this power grab, diminished the ability of this board to set its own agenda, changed its voting procedures on how it looks at and votes on materials and substances allowed for use in organic food and agriculture. In our belief, they changed those voting procedures and agenda of 40 items at the behest of powerful corporations involved in organics who weren't always getting their way on things they wanted to add or put in food. And that's been the countervilling side of this whole growth in organics has been that a lot of big companies have moved into organics and some of them, not all of them, but some of them are trying to water down standards or add gimmicky additives to organic food so they can say things like, well, with more fiber or improves ocular development and infants. And the claims are sort of baseless or bogus, but they're marketing claims and it's a type of marketing claims that they have used in the conventional food world as our food, conventional food has been deconstructed, take it apart, and suddenly you have to add things back to it because it's no longer a whole food. Yeah, you got to put some fiber into your flour because you've removed it all in the milling and bleaching and everything process. Yes. So those types of trends and tendencies are surfacing in organics and it's been a struggle to try and ensure that integrity, ethics, and the goals of organic remains. You know, of course, Will, that year and a half ago or something, I interviewed Mark Castell, who's also one of the founders of cornucopia Institute along with you, Will Fantle. And I heard from him and one of the things that I really like about the cornucopia Institute is it's not just opinions that you're floating around. You actually do the research. You have a scientific basis for what you do. And in addition to my radio work, I've been physics teacher. I'm into the scientific basis. One of the things that is frequently asserted by natural food producers or organics is that they have a higher nutritional value. Do you know of the scientific studies that document this? Are there more vitamins, more minerals, more nutrition in general that justifies this claim? What do you know about that? I think the science is becoming more obvious, but I wouldn't say there is an overwhelming level of evidence to support those claims. There are particular studies that have been done that look at higher nutritional profiles in dairy products, organic versus conventional, and seem to have found that, have found that for some commodities, products, foods like tomatoes. And there are a number of studies that indicate that, but there's not an overwhelming abundance of those type of studies. I think the biggest pieces that you can point to, typically with organic versus conventional food where the science is really solid and pretty overwhelming, is sort of the absence of poisons on your food. And by that I mean pesticide and herbicide residues that remain on your fruits and vegetables and whatever may filter in through the other types of foods that you eat, but there's demonstrable evidence indicating that there are less of these poisons. And these poisons are not species specific for the most part. They're neurotoxins. They harm, particularly the health and well-being of younger people in infants who are still developing their bodies, so there's the absence of poisons. There is a dramatic difference as well in the health of the soil and any health and well-being of animals involved in livestock that aren't put on a burn-amount treadmill and just treated as cogs in a factory. So it's more of a holistic whole approach. I think the science continues to be done looking at the difference in the nutritional values of various organic foods versus conventional, but there's still work to be done in that field. During your talk you mentioned the scorecards that cornucopia Institute produces, and folks should be aware of the website is cornucopia.org. You can follow the link from LearnSpiritRadio.org. All very easy to get there if you don't happen to know how to spell cornucopia. How frequently do you update these scorecards? Are there new ones all the time? How does that go on your process? There are incremental updates done all the time regularly as we gather new information, and we don't necessarily note that updated on November 14th or updated on November 11th. But as we gather information and changes that may have occurred with various products, whether that's an egg, yogurt, soy burger, will add that information, and that's typically product specific, not necessarily report specific. It's not talking about all dairy foods, but it might talk about one particular brand and a change that has been made. We do more sort of what I'll call global or overall updates. We're currently working on one and we'll have that ready for release in the next few months and update of our organic egg scorecard. We'll be starting to do that same sort of more global update, which takes a re-look at the pictures impacting organic dairying. We'll start on that next year. So those types of things are going on with our existing scorecards. We just released a new report last month on yogurt products, taking a look at both organic and conventional yogurt products, health claims made around yogurt, the additives, the colorings, the sugars, the artificial sweeteners that go into a lot of conventional yogurt. Some of these yogurts have more sugar in them than a Twinkie. So you think you're feeding a healthful to your child and you're feeding a glorified Twinkie to your child. So that type of information, those new scorecards are something that we're continuing to develop and we've got other ones in mind and plans to execute those going forward. If people do go to the corncopia.org website, they'll find that one of your drop-down menus is about projects you're doing. It shows nine projects that you're involved in that you've done or are doing. What are they? What's coming up? Where are you putting your attention and your effort? One thing that we are doing right now is as we continue to research some of the suspect practices in organics. I mean, our goal is to maintain the integrity of the organic label, to maintain the golden egg and not have it corrupted or perverted. We are about ready to file a number of legal complaints concerning confinement style, conventional livestock, agriculture operations where animals are housed in feed lots or laying hands are kept inside buildings, organic standards. See that livestock is supposed to have access to the outdoors, supposed to engage in native or natural behaviors, allowed to do that. We did this past summer. We did some aerial photography over a number of operations that we've had suspicious about. Some we have actually visited. Others we hadn't, but we did aerial photography of these operations to see how they are managing their laying hands, see how they're managing their birds, to see how they're managing their dairy cows. We found this pretty disturbing on some of these operations where the animals just are kept confined and there's no real outdoors that they're engaged in exhibiting their native and natural behaviors. So we're going to be filing some complaints on that. We do these operations as cheating. We do these operations as robbing opportunity for farmers to make a living in organics by using practices that are cheaper. Instead of following the full breadth of the organic law and regulations, and we also view these operations as deceiving consumers. So we're filing complaints on that. This is a major initiative for us that will take place in the next few weeks before the end of this year. As I said, we're updating our Ag scorecard, we're updating our dairy scorecard, and we will soon release a couple of other reports in the next few months. One dealing with pet foods and additives that go into pet food and one looking at nanotechnology, which is something that is creeping into a lot of food. People really aren't aware of nanotechnology and it's meaning for food, but these incredibly tiny particles that are able to move across cell walls inside the body, unlike larger particles that are unable to do that. And we're taking a look at how this is starting to appear in organics and raising some questions about that. Cornucopia is doing such good work, and if people want to connect with the cornucopia institute, again, the website is cornucopia.org. Don't know how to spell that. Come via an organ spirit radio.org. How do people get involved? How do they support the work of cornucopia? What is the role that the individual, if they're not a farmer, how do they get connected with cornucopia? Well, if they're not connected to the electronic world, they can write us. We're at field box 126, cornucopia, Wisconsin, 54827. Otherwise, go on the web and find us, and you can email us or find other contact information there. And how can they help out? How can they further the work of cornucopia? Well, people can, if they have ideas or thoughts, we're open to them. They can share information that we have with their neighbors, whether that's through social media. We've got a pretty vibrant Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, other opportunities. We're constantly, if they are part of an organization, a conference, an event, or a food cooperative, we're willing to come talk. Well, we're certainly doing good work. I've known of you since, what, 25, 26 years ago, the Cooley Country News. I think that's where I first encountered your name. Articles, you wrote for that. So certainly your dedication to environmental education, to making this world a better place is longstanding. That the valuable advocacy that cornucopia does is unequaled. I'm just so thankful for that work. And I'm so thankful you joined us today for spirit and action. Thank you. Good to talk. Again, that was Will Fantle, Co-Founder of the Cornucopia Institute, website, cornucopia.org. There are a couple of bonus excerpts on the NortonSpiritRadio.org website, including the follow-up questions to Will's speech and slideshow presentation. Thanks to Will and to Cornucopia for being part of our membership banquet and for their continued good work for the American people. We'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of NorthernSpiritRadio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)