Organic turkeys going the way of raw milk in Ontario? — Turkeys Wars 2009

The powers that be seem to be working together to make it impossible to legally raise certified organic turkeys in Ontario. In other words raw milk could have some company on the black market for illegal foods. You might be wondering what healthy food is going to be “outlawed” next. The following is an excerpt is from yesterday’s story on theStar.com

Endangered species? -- the pasture-raised organic turkey. Photo: Andrew Wallace/Toronto Star

“If you’re eating organic turkey this weekend, savour it, because by next Thanksgiving it may be easier to buy crack cocaine in Ontario than a drug-free bird.

Here’s why: While the turkey industry marketing board tells growers to confine their turkeys indoors to reduce the chance of transmission of viruses from wild birds, new organics standards administered by the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency mandate raising organic birds outdoors.

Caught in this Catch-22 are turkey farmers Matthew and Janice Dick – organic farmers who wanted their birds to roam free outside. They recently took on the Turkey Farmers of Ontario at an appeals tribunal in what amounted to a battle between antibiotic-free, open-air, small-scale farming and drug-intensive, confinement, factory farming. The organic farmers lost.

David eats Goliath’s lunch in California raw milk dustup… ignorant consumers?

It’s always interesting to watch what goes on with raw milk in bellwether states like California. Here’s an excerpt from a recent story on David E. Gumpert’s “The Complete Patient” blog:

California Dairies is a huge company. And yet they are losing market share to tiny Organic Pastures. Photo from California Dairies website.

“Whenever you hear business executives blame poor profits and sales on their customers’ lack of intelligence, you know there’s a serious underlying management problem. In fact, you tend not to hear too many knowledgeable business people do it these days–they know better.

But that’s exactly what California’s largest dairy cooperative is doing. In its September newsletter, the cooperative publishes a long article (actually, tirade may be a more apt description) about the growing popularity, and dangers, of raw milk.

“There are an unbelievably high number of ignorant consumers in our world. Many college educated people that you would think should know better, in fact don’t know better…It’s always been a good idea to cook our food because it does contain bacteria and some in the right amounts could make your really sick. That should be all that needs to be said but apparently it isn’t for some folks and the number is surprisingly large!”

The tirade goes on to cite various government and other data suggesting that raw milk is a public health hazard. We know, of course, that that isn’t true. Yes, people occasionally become ill from raw milk, just as they become ill from hamburgers and raw spinach. Educated consumers know all that and factor it into their decisions about whether to drink raw milk, and clearly, lots are willing to take the risk.

650 posts, 150,000 hits, 13 months

Sometime in the past couple days, the Bovine passed the 150,000 visitor mark and posted its 650th post. A big Bovine thank you to our many readers and writers who’ve helped make all this happen!

Graph of daily traffic on the Bovine from a couple days ago

Just for fun, we thought we’d post some of the search terms people have used to find us on the web through search engines like Google (in approximate order of popularity):

Some of the most popular search terms of all time:

Manna Storehouse Raid — our most popular story ever, 2000 hits in one day

Josie Maran Milk

Michael Schmidt raw milk

A1 A2 milk

Some popular search terms from the past month:

Swine Flu

Milk Protein Concentrate

Zinniker Farm