SO WHY ARE WE PAYING MORE? Milked
We investigated organic milk in Ontario, tracking its journey from cow to carton, and found the product is no different than cheaper conventional milk.
Chantelle Lewis stops her shopping cart in the dairy aisle of a west-end grocery and pretzels around her giggling toddler to swipe up two frothy bottles of organic milk.
At $3.99 a litre, it can be double the price of a litre of regular milk. But like bread and diapers, it’s non-discretionary for Lewis and her growing family.
“I just believe in it,” she says of organic milk. “It’s better for animals, more humane. And nothing’s added to it.”
Lewis, 42, is one of an estimated 1.2 million Canadians who in the last six months have scooped up milk brands stamped with the country’s certified organic symbol. While fewer people are drinking milk overall, organic milk is holding steady in Canada’s $5-billion organic industry, with estimated 2017 sales totalling $77 million.
Its popularity stems from consumers’ perception that organic milk is purer and more natural, not only because it’s made the old-fashioned way from happier cows on cleaner farms but because it is free from unhealthy additives, such as antibiotics and hormones.
The Star investigated organic milk in Ontario, tracking the staple’s journey from cow to carton, and found the product is no different than cheaper regular milk: the nutritional content, the synthetic vitamin D added after pasteurization, the levels of pesticides and metals and heart-healthy fats — all the same. And Canadian law forbids antibiotics and added growth hormones in any kind of milk.
We visited organic and conventional farms, tested milk in labs, and interviewed industry experts, dietitians, scientists and professors, and found that consumers’ belief is cultivated by mischaracterizations about conventional milk and a 100-year-old, mystical farming philosophy that denounces regular milk producers as too reliant on chemicals.
The organic seal of approval is awarded to farmers for meeting bureaucratic standards that emphasize note-taking and give points to farmers who try but fail to meet them.
While Canada’s organic dairy farmers do some things differently from their conventional colleagues — like sending their cows to pasture and using only chemicals that are considered natural — it’s not reflected in the end product.
“The milks are the same — they are identical with respect to the testing and quality standards. There’s no added hormones. No antibiotics,” says Graham Lloyd, of the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, the quasigovernmental organization that controls the organic and regular milk supply.
Aline Dimitri, the food regulator’s deputy chief of food safety, says: “When it comes to the safety of the product, there is no difference. People may feel that one is safer to consume than the other, but that is not supported by science.”
Organic farmer Thorsten Arnold wrestles with this disconnection between what the science says and what he knows about the farming system that makes the milk.
Arnold, a board member of The Organic Council of Ontario, a lobby group, acknowledges the milks may be similar and that the organic milk processing system “is very much like the conventional system.” He says that some of the benefits of organics are “hard to trace in food” and that “today’s analytical methods of science are inadequate” to do so. He says reducing organic agriculture to an end product is a mistake that misses the point of this “holistic system.”
Organic milk “brings health, animal welfare and environmental benefits,” says the Ottawa-based Canada Organic Trade Association (COTA), another lobby group. “Choosing organic milk means consumers are supporting the reduction of toxic synthetic pesticide use on pastures and cropland among many other benefits,” COTA executive director Tia Loftsgard said in a statement. “Choosing organic dairy products is not only about the final product, nor the farm it was made on. It is about supporting a system that is trying to do better across the supply chain.”
Organic cows are happier cows, says John Brunsveld, who operates Lizton Acres, his hilly patch of land near Hamilton.
Brunsveld says that fresh air and forage make all the difference. “I think God made an animal to walk around on grass,” he says. “They’re better off.”
They may also be healthier, according to Martin de Groot, 64, owner of Mapleton’s Organic, an organic milk producer and ice-cream maker in Moorefield, Ont. He says organic farming reduces an animal’s “stress level.” That lowers their risk of disease, he says. “Organic farmers pay more attention to animal welfare issues because they really care about the animals.”
And they work more in concert with nature, says Gerald Poechman, a long-time voice of the industry. Regular farmers use chemicals as a “crutch” to keep crops weed-free and pests at bay, while organic farmers work the land to try to head off such problems before chemicals are needed.
This extra work is part of what justifies the extra 30 cents per litre that organic milk producers get when their product leaves for the processing plants, Poechman says.
Bill Van Nes, an organic dairy farmer in Brussels, Ont., says he is always looking for natural methods. He was recently considering stuffing old cow horns with manure and burying them over a solstice. “When you dig it up it’s got this incredible fungi, living stuff.” He says it could increase his soil’s fertility once sprayed over his land.
This practice, used by a handful of Ontario’s organic producers, originates with biodynamic agriculture, an early 20th-century farming philosophy that influenced the founders of the province’s organic dairy industry.
It began in Germany during the 1920s with the teachings of philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
The movement’s pioneers felt emerging industrial farming, with its reliance on synthetic chemicals, was harmful to the planet, says food economics professor Andreas Boecker of the University of Guelph.
Biodynamic farmers, Boecker says, believed they could harness cosmic rays, redirecting them to heal the soil, by planting according to lunar phases or spraying crops with the brew created by burying cow horns filled with manure.
The practice arrived in western Ontario in the late 1970s and early 1980s when a trickle of biodynamic farmers immigrated to Canada. Lawrence Andres, owner of Harmony Organic, was one of the first in the province. He, on behalf of a group of five farmers, including Michael Schmidt, the raw-milk activist, lobbied the milk marketing board — now the Dairy Farmers of Ontario — to segregate their milk into a separate stream.
Seeing the organic movement take hold in Quebec, B.C. and stateside, the board approved the request. On June 14, 1994, a tanker carrying milk from five organic farms trundled down a dirt road in Kincardine, Ont., to a tiny dairy, where it was turned into the province’s first official batch of organic cheese.
When the pilot project ended, the milk marketing board allowed the industry to continue selling its milk. Things picked up once organic producers set up booths in urban supermarkets, coming face to face with consumers, who were delighted to meet the callused and sunstained farmers. “We made an organic connection,” Poechman says.
Today, the province’s organic dairy industry — there are 82 organic dairy farms compared to 3,483 conventional farms — still touts its superiority.
Harmony Organic’s website warns consumers that some conventional milk packaging can “distort the facts” and “make you believe that what’s being purchased is better and healthier for you. The contrary is true. Conventional milk in any form is just that, conventional.”
Dave Loewith, a farmer who produces regular milk, bristles at suggestions his milk is inferior. “The marketing just drives me crazy,” he says. “It’s misleading because it’s just not true.”
The B.C. Dairy Association, the marketing arm of the province’s milk industry, says on its website: “There is no statistically significant evidence to support that organic dairy milk is more nutritious than regular milk” and that “both conventional and organic dairy farmers have environmentally friendly practices.”
Information published on a website run by The Dairy Farmers of Canada, which represents organic and conventional dairies, says “there is no evidence to suggest that organic products, including milk, provide health benefits that are different from conventionally produced foods.”
“It’s a myth,” professor Tim Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, says about organic milk. Caulfield says the organic industry’s marketing creates a “health halo” that endows its product with benefits that don’t exist. “The evidence just isn’t there.”
A 2016 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition showed that organic milk had a “more desirable” fatty acid composition because organic cows grazed and ate more grass than conventional cows. The meta-analysis drew its research from 170 studies conducted mainly in Europe.
To test the levels of these heart-healthy fatty acids, the Star used a bag each of Loblaw PC Organics and regular Neilson milk. Results showed the same proportions of Omega 3 and Omega 6 fats in all the samples, indicating the cows producing Ontario’s organic milk are likely not grazing any more than conventional cows.
Dietitian Wendy Benson says that even if the province’s organic milk did contain the same amounts of Omega 3 fats found by the 2016 meta-analysis, we would have to drink eight and a half glasses of full-fat milk “each day, every day, forever” to get the benefit. “Even then, the minute benefit would be subtle.”
The Canada Organic Trade Association says that time of year is an important variable for testing because “fatty acid composition is higher in dairy collected on organic farms during spring, summer and fall when cows are grazing.” The milk used for the Star’s test was bought in February, and COTA says organic milk sold in winter “might not show higher fatty acid levels.”
Canada’s organic rules say that during grazing season, dairy cows must get at least 30 per cent of their “forage” diet, including grass, from pasture.
On a winter’s day at Mapleton’s Organic dairy, 75 cows lolled around in a closed barn. Like many of Ontario’s dairy cows, they don’t go out for around six months from late fall to early spring. When temperatures fall, there is no green grass.
Cows don’t like the cold. “Or the heat,” Martin de Groot says. On a sweltering afternoon last year, he said he fought with an inspector who insisted the cows be turned out. He refused. “It’s an animal welfare issue,” he said, adding that in the summer he puts the cows out at night.
John Brunsveld, 54, became an organic farmer 10 years ago after hearing of an American child who died after pesticides were dumped accidentally into his drinking water.
One of the hardest parts of switching, he says, was resisting the urge to reach for antibiotics, which he believes are used too frequently on conventional farms.
“I had to get used to not grabbing a bottle of penicillin when a cow gets ill,” he says.
These days, when he notices a cow developing a urinary tract infection, he puts a homemade mixture of garlic and aloe vera down her throat. It’s not a cure, he says. “But they don’t get sick.” If all else fails, he will turn to modern medicine.
Organic rules say that animals should not be denied treatment when alternative methods don’t work. Any cow given drugs must be withdrawn from the milk supply for 30 days — after two courses of medicine in one year, they lose their organic status, the rules say. The cows can reacquire their organic status after a year, though some head to conventional dairies or become hamburger.
When conventional cows are treated with antibiotics, they are kept out of the supply chain until the antibiotic has left their system. The impact on the consumer is the same: no milk in Canada can contain antibiotics.
Every tanker of organic and regular is tested. If even a minute trace of antibiotic is detected, the entire load, which can be as large as 35,000 litres, is dumped, and the responsible farmer is fined.
To test for pesticides, the Star
drew its samples from a carton of Organic Meadow, the first organic dairy brand in the province, and bags of Sealtest, processed by dairy giant Agropur.
When it’s picked up from the farms in Ontario, milk of one stream, such as organic or conventional, is pooled in the same giant, silver tanker before being distributed to processors that turn it into the brands we see on grocery shelves.
We tested for 36 pesticides, many of which, like DDT, are no longer used on Ontario’s fields, but have been identified by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency as being “persistent in the environment” and could still accumulate in milk.
Neither organic nor conventional milk contained any detectable trace of these pesticides.
To test for metals, the Star sampled three bags each of Loblaws’ PC Organics and conventional Nielson.
All samples had the same, expectedly low levels of the metals arsenic, cadmium and mercury, and the same levels of iron, which is expected in milk.
The Star didn’t test for hormones because all milk has them. Milk is a nutrient intended to grow newborn mammals, according to University of Guelph professor David Kelton, who holds a research chair in dairy cattle health, so it has estrogen, progesterone and growth hormone.
While it is illegal for dairy farmers in Canada to inject their cows with growth hormone to produce more milk, both organic and conventional dairy farmers are allowed to use hormones on their cows. The Canada Organic Trade Association says organic farmers use them therapeutically and that conventional farmers use hormones to make their cows go into heat. (Only lactating moms and moms-to-be give milk.) Adding hormones for this reason likely won’t alter the milk because the dose is minute, Kelton says, “like a drop of wa- ter in a lake.”
Canada’s organic rules say dairy cows must graze during grazing season (which differs across the country) and have access to open air when weather permits. They also say dairy cows can be housed in tie stalls, where cows can be chained by the neck to metal poles for sometimes 21 hours a day.
On a cold February day in Blackstock, Ont., along a wall of Ron Vice’s organic dairy barn, several cows are tied to their stalls.
“People’s perceptions is that this is cruel,” Vice says. “But this is better for them.” Vice explains that he sends his cows out, no matter what the weather, for a dose of fresh air.
There is a scientific marker for their animals’ happiness: somatic cell count (SCC). A stress test of sorts, it is a measure of the white blood cells in milk. The higher the SCC, the more stressed the cow and the lower the quality of the milk (the quicker it spoils, the shorter the shelf life).
What stresses out a cow? The same things that stress out humans, says Graham Lloyd, of the DFO: not having a clean, dry place to sleep or good food to eat.
Considered vital to animal welfare, SCC is measured every time milk is picked up at a farm and when a tanker of pooled milk arrives at the processing plant. If a herd’s SCC is too high, the farmer is fined.
Lloyd, who sees the SCC data, said there is “categorically no difference” in the count between cows on organic or conventional dairy farms.
Organic and conventional farmers are subject to thousands of rules and regulations that dictate everything from how clean hands must be when touching udders to the space cows need to live to the slope of barn floors. All dairy farmers face steep financial penalties if they fail to meet any of the regulations and rules.
Organic farmers must additionally abide by Canada’s Organic Standards, which include requirements that cows must eat field grass during grazing season, and that milk from cows given antibiotics must stay out of the consumer supply for 30 days.
What really distinguishes the organic system is the rigorous note-taking expected in the farmer’s log.
“It comes down to paperwork,” says organic dairy farmer Ron Vice, leafing through one of several binders in a cabinet in a corner of his barn. “This is how I earn my keep as an organic farmer.”
Organic farmer Brad Torrie must record that a chemical fertilizer he uses is “natural.” And if there is a supply shortage, Torrie has to write that down, too. He pulls out a “seed search affidavit” showing that he called two different seed manufacturers to find organic grain corn, before he ended up using a conventional variety that was not genetically modified.
His notes passed muster with the certification company. Being organic is about trying your best, he says, but at the end of the day, the cows need to be fed, the seed must be planted and “common sense does have to prevail.”
Hanging in the entrance to Dave Loewith’s barn, an airy building set back from a rural Ancaster road, is a mission statement declaring that he and his staff will “meet the needs of every cow every day” and “endeavour to protect and improve the environment for future generations.”
Loewith, a conventional farmer, lives by those words.
His 800-acre, family-owned and operated dairy — three generations have worked the farm — is similar to the organic dairy farms the Star visited.
On a recent morning, 450 cows quietly chew their cud on beds of white sand in open stalls in a cathedral-shaped barn. A light breeze travels end to end, cooling the interior.
A cow podiatrist visits once a month. Three times a day, the cows walk outside to another barn where employees attach their udders to milking machines that send information to Loewith’s computer. He can tell how much each cow has eaten, how much she’s milked, what more she needs — and if she is getting sick. He does not need the machinery. His keen eye spotted one new mom with a prolapsed uterus not too long ago. He sent her for surgery and now she’s in good health. “There’s a reason they call it animal husbandry,” he says. “You’re married to them.”
When he hears that his organic counterparts claim to treat their animals better by feeding them grass, sending them to pasture or giving them room to move, he grimaces. “The inference is that we’re not doing those things,” he says. “That’s not true or fair.”
“The inference is that we’re not doing those things. That’s not true or fair.” DAVE LOEWITH CONVENTIONAL MILK FARMER WHO BRISTLES AT ORGANIC COUNTERPARTS’ CLAIMS THEY TREAT THEIR COWS BETTER