It's been a long time coming, but the Office of Management and Budget is now reviewing new rules that would clarify exactly how much time dairy cows must spend on pasture to be certified organic, according to the New York Times.

The document "has the power to either destroy the nation's 1,800 family-operated organic dairy farms or come to their rescue," writes Barry Estabrook on his Politics of the Plate blog. Estabrook wrote an excellent post explaining how organic dairy got to this point, and how enormous CAFOs managed to get organic certification in the first place.

"Beginning in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it became evident that the green “USDA Organic” label translated into bigger profits, huge Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with herds of up to 10,000 cows located in western states got into the organic milk business."

Some factory farmers went as far as to refer to "a dirt feedlot with hay bale feeders" as "pasture," according to the Cornucopia Institute. The loose definition of pasture is part of what has enabled big dairy producers to produce cheap "organic" milk, which has in turn created a surplus of organic milk and driven many smaller organic dairy producers out of business.

Nobody is exactly sure what the new regulations are that OMB has drafted, because they haven't been released to the public yet, but there's concern that Big Dairy interests have the ear of the White House. Powerful factory farm interests "have privately met with OMB officials and are seeking to weaken the new rule," according to a Cornucopia Institute action alert, which urges people to write the White House and demand meaningful pasture grazing. 

-Mark