It is obvious to everyone that due to the economic advantages of cheating, there needs to be some kind of inspection and certification program. Not that everyone is a cheater, but there will be cheaters, and it will put pressure on the non-cheaters to cheat too.
The same people who bitch about big government will strangle inspection programs via budget cuts, and then when something like this story comes out, use it as proof that government inspection programs don't work and that even more defunding is in order.
Inspection and certification programs don't need to be government run to be effective. Kosher certification programs are the first example that comes to mind.
I'm just trying to say you can argue for more, better inspections without having to argue for "big government".
Kosher certification has a bunch of complexities. There are several big national certification authorities, but they have different standards, with Tablet-K accepting some things in the realm of cheese production others don't. Some small local hechshers provide more supervision then the national chains, but piggyback for the tough halachic questions.
And then there is the whole milk thing, where kashrut organizations have largely said that the FDA is enforcing the rule better then they can, so they won't bother, but some consumers don't think this is good enough.
There is also a controversy over slaughterhouse conditions brought to light when a kosher slaughterhouse was raided by the agriculture department for health violations.
I think country-wide, there need to be, usually, 3-bodied system of inspection/certification (whether it is financial organizations, law firms, doctors, educational or food suppliers.. ).
one organization should be multi-state collaboration of supervision & certification.
The other should be industry collaboration of supervision & certification.
And 3rd -- is academia-powered.
Any business claiming to have certificate in something needs to strive to get it from all 3. 2 out 3 may be acceptable, and 1 out of 3 is not.
This model would prevent corruption that more likely occurred in single-bodied systems.
The industry org will hollow the others into facades. Proxies for public relations in service of the heads of industry. Happens every time. But kudos for going full anti-democracy from the start.
How do you inspect grain for "organic?" The label is meaningless and honestly this is kind of an intended side effect — charging people more for the same product. This guy just got even greedier than the original creators of the term and the government agreed was acceptable.
According to the article, there’s no way to distinguish organic grain from standard grain. So if by all accounts “organic” is a marketing ploy, why should the government spend money on an inspection program to facilitate that? Let the farmers pay a private certifying authority.
They do. It is not wise to infer controversial information from ambiguous journalistic language. I typed "us organic certification cost" into google, and it helpfully quoted this at the top of the page [1] :
> Certification costs vary depending on the size of your production operation and on the accredited agency you choose to use. In general, organic certification costs run between $200 – $1500. Your costs will include an application fee, site inspection fee, and an annual certification fee.
I humbly suggest you might have taken a moment to check if your hunch was correct rather than leaving that to others.
Also its not possible for tests to confirm if produce is organic, but it possible to confirm it is not - if it contains traces of prohibited pesticides which are routine in non-organic produce then its not organic.[2]
If you're going to be condescending, please actually engage with my point.
I wasn't claiming that nobody pays for certification. I was specifically questioning why it's a government agency that they are paying. "Organic" is clearly a marketing term (as discussed in the first link you provided). It's not a safety-related term as (at least in theory) all produce that's sold should be safe to eat. I don't see the reason for a government agency to be involved there.
Here you complained that farmers were not paying for certification, because you had not checked the facts. Your gov is involved because it has authority to enforce accuracy of labeling. Organic standards are "safety-related", not in everyone's "theory" but to those who believe much stricter pesticide regulation than government standards is better for health and environment. We are all entitled to accurate labeling.
He scammed out a couple dozen million dollars each year and is fined 128 million, which ruined him and he'd never be able to pay it back. This is the kind of punishment That needs to happen to a lot of industries, really any of the crimes people commit should cost them more than they gained. But he must have been too small potatoes, so he got an appropriate sentence.
They are more than punishment. You are punished for living in a place, you are punished for earning money, the excuse is that taxes are a payment for services but taxes are the only "service" where you pay a percent of your proerty value or income and not a fixed amount. Just imagine you pay groceries a percentage of income, not a fixed dollar amount per product and you can see why taxes are not what they say they are.
I am happy for anyone proposing a better option to finance a modern society than taxes. As long as this is not the case, I find it hard to understand to see anyone, surely enjoying the benefits of a working modern society, describing the means to finance those benefits as a punishment.
>But he must have been too small potatoes, so he got an appropriate sentence.
The "appropriate sentence" is coming for the bigger guys too, but it may not be paid by them, but definitely their ancestors… and definitely not by some court diktat…
I wouldn’t be surprised if during the next few years you saw a number of stories like this come out. From my talks with folks there isn’t as much oversight in the organic sector as we’re led to believe. That’s all hearsay so take it with a grain of salt.
Being from Ohio I knew quite a few farmers, or people that grew up on farms. They all laugh at organic and say it’s bullshit. There is typically no way to tell after the fact if something is or isn’t organic. Same with rBGH free dairy products.
Farmers have known for years that the label is only as good as the word of farmer, and with economic pressures to cheat, it’s not surprising to find cheaters.
> There is typically no way to tell after the fact
Consumer Reports (and others) did studies that showed non-organic food have lots more pesticide residue than organic food. That of course doesn't mean they are better for you or that they are tastier.
No, non-organic has more residue of expected pesticides.
The often unspoken truth however is that many chemicals aren't tested for. For example copper sulfate, used as organic fungicide.
In other words conventional agriculture uses far more substances that the USDA tests for, a vast majority of them, whereas organic agriculture uses substances that aren't covered by USDA tests. Which should be obvious.
This doesn't mean that:
1. Organic agriculture uses less pesticides (bullshit, unless you're talking about GMOs, another hot subject)
2. Organic produce is in any way healthier
Both of these statements lack credible evidence. And we might actually find instances in which the substances used in organic agriculture are more unhealthy than their conventional equivalents.
I think grouping all pesticides together and thinking about who uses "less pesticides" or "more pesticides" will lead to incorrect evaluations of pesticide safety.
Scientists should evaluate chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis. I found a study that talks about how using certain chemicals on the farm can lead to cancer for farm workers: "In summary, the epidemiologic evidence from a number of different studies now more convincingly shows that prostate cancer is related to pesticide use." This makes me think that, at the very least, organic produce is healthier for farm workers.
Its not bullshit in the UK at least. Here is a mainstream article which cites government testing [1] Quote : "A Maximum Residue Level (MRL) for pesticides in foods is set by law and is below the safety level. In the most recent study, 3 percent of conventionally farmed food samples contained over the MRL for an individual pesticide compared with 0.4 percent of organic, while 44 percent contained residues at or below the MRL compared with 3 percent of organic."
Do you have any decent sources for your declamations ?
No, it's like saying eating trace amounts of copper is safe as proven by the fact humans have been doing that since forever, and by the fact that health authorities endorse it (hospitals have copper piping).
Trading Standards in the UK are able to detect organic products, and will periodically take samples from farms and manufacturers for lab testing. There have been samples taken from stores, and prosecutions -- not enough, but the ability is there.
That's over and above the Soil Association regulations and inspections. SA is the organic standards body in the UK.
So it sounds like the US problem is lack of oversight. Of course thanks to the deliberate under funding of the state, particularly of local councils, by recent Tory governments the UK is rapidly catching up to that lack of oversight -- Trading Standards are severely underfunded currently as councils are forced to fund more urgent needs first.
If you are passing off one product as another, deliberately defrauding your buyers, you are running serious risks. It wont be the feds taking the farm. It will be Whole Foods' lawyers coming to recover the cost of pulling your product off shelves. And insurance doesn't cover fraud.
In some states, you're not allowed to label milk as rBGH-free, because all milk is rBGH free. They have to label it as being made from cows that the farmers promise not to feed rBGH to.
You can get certification from an auditing organization that you are following organic practices, so for farms willing to spend the extra money on that, it's a little better than someone's word. I know someone who works as an auditor in this space for a living, and they are pretty busy.
It's indeed likely more of this is happening due to poor government oversight. Though I suspect the demand for oversight and the desire for organic food will motivate this market to respond. If people are willing to pay money for this method they will likely pay to have it guaranteed in a rigorous inspection.
From the article: “They can test for GMO (genetically modified organisms) … but corn that’s not GMO, you can’t tell whether it’s been sprayed or not sprayed.”
"Technically, you can, but you’re not likely to get a positive result unless the inspector hits it just right and collects a plant sample before the residues wash away."
Yes. See this Forbes article. By the time it reaches retail, you can't tell.[1]
Non-organic food is probably healthier. Less insect residue. Also cheaper.
I buy organic fruit and vegetables, but not because I care about pesticides too much.
Mainstream vegetables and fruit are optimized for looks and for shelf life (which measures in many months for much of produce). Taste takes the back seat.
Organic produce is expected to have a shorter shelf life, smaller size, and some visual imperfections, because of how it's marketed. It can compete on taste, though. And noticeably tastier it is.
Organic produce does cost a bit more (sometimes quite a bit). But eating untasty vegetables and plastic-feeling fruit is unpleasant, so I just avoid it, missing all the health benefits. Tasty organic produce does not have this problem :)
You certainly can test for some non-organic foods at retail.
For example, non-organic oats are often sprayed with roundup at harvest time, so cereals made from them routinely have unsafe levels of carcinogens in them:
Note the use of glyphosate as a dessicant is highly regional -- it's common in the Dakotas, Saskatchewan and UK because they have growing seasons that are too short for the crops being grown, but nearly unheard of in places like Iowa and Indiana, because the growing season is long enough for grains to mature and dry before the weather turns.
There is also no way to test your shoes to see if they were made by child labor... does that mean it is totally fine to not worry about the labor practices of companies making shoes?
The appeal of organic is (at least in part) that it is better for the environment and the farm workers... that isn't something that shows up directly in the end product, because they are externalities. That doesn't mean it isn't important.
The point of organic food was never for it to be healthier though right? From my understanding, it was pretty much always about reducing the use of synthetic fertilizers and -pesticides in order to increase (or at least not reduce) biodiversity in farmland wildlife.
> Non-organic food is probably healthier. Less insect residue.
Not a foregone conclusion.
Reading the Forbes article, I wonder if the studies took organic food fraud into account, possibly even from Randy Constant.
Also, there are a lot of interests - very well funded interests - downplaying glyphosate and other herbicides/insecticides. The net effect would be to make non-organic food seem costly with fewer benefits.
> Non-organic food is probably healthier. Less insect residue.
Sorry, is "insect residue" a term of art? Any why would a bug's "residue" be unhealthy, exactly? (In particular in a way that would survive routine washing in a way that a pesticide would not?) I'd ask for a citation, but... yeah. You just made that up, right?
None of that should be taken as a particular defense of the US organic food regulation regime, which is indeed a big mess. But what you wrote was just silly.
> ... is fed to cattle and chickens, whose meat is also sold at a premium [...] because a growing number of consumers are willing to pay more for protein that comes from animals raised on a natural, organic diet.
Consumers have been misled - cattle's natural diet is grass, not grains.
Chickens will opportunistically eat grains and seeds, but if given the opportunity will eagerly eat a blend of greens and insects & worms.
In either case, forcing an exclusively grain-based diet on either of these animals is anything but natural and consequently, unsurprisingly, extremely bad for their health.
It's only that they're typically slaughtered before the effects of these decisions properly manifest that growers get away with this.
When I was at UC Davis I took an Animal Science class called “Ruminant Digestion and Nutrition.” We learned you can feed cows grains, hay, even sawdust. They can live and thrive on all those things as long as they also get trace minerals. That is the magic of having a rumen.
Absolutely -- though it's the benefit of all four stomachs that comes into play there. Anything with some lignen in it, along with a salt block (or urea block) gets them pretty much everything they need, because they can manufacture their own amino acids.
This doesn't detract from the fact that feeding them as much grains as they can eat -- not too dissimilar from the pate gooses -- is highly questionable.
Just to add a little clarity, beef cattle all start eating grass and generally continue for a large portion of their life. It’s just whether or not they are “finished” on grass or grain. I’m not aware of farms using an “exclusively grain-based diet”
I thought all feed lots were exclusively grain only? When driving past one in Colorado I didn't see any grass anywhere the animals could access, just a ton of muddy ground.
Speaking of dairy farms with muddy lots and no grass in sight, they feed TMR (total mixed ration). It's a mixture of ground hay (dried grass!), corn silage (chopped fermented grass!), grain, and trace minerals and vitamins, adjusted on a regular basis by a nutritionist.
Beef cattle historically have started on milk, and then moved to pasture.
In industrialised countries, beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives. Perhaps for marketing reasons, I'm not sure, in some places, for some percentage of the herd, they're finished on pasture.
Most CAFOs, as others have noted, are primarily started and completed with grain.
Just to underscore the reason I felt the need to clarify, I don’t think it’s accurate to claim there are any cattle fed grain for “all” of their life. Like the previous statement about “exclusively grain fed diets”, it’s either needlessly hyperbolic or misleading.
" ... beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives."
AIUI, CAFO-destined cattle are moved into feeding lots as soon as they're weaned -- say at a couple of months old. They're mostly on milk, with some grass, up to that point. But from that point on they're on grain-only.
You said:
> I’m not aware of farms using an “exclusively grain-based diet”
and subsequently
> My understanding is that these feedlots are where cattle are housed for the last few months to gain weight before slaughter.
This doesn't align with my understanding.
Once within a CAFO, the cattle stay there until slaughter -- say at age 18 months or less. During that time they're fed exclusively grain, as this ensures maximum growth / minimum time / best ratio of input cost to sale price / etc.
Some may be finished on pasture, as this is an increasingly profitable market, plus it drastically reduces pathogens within the animal, and improves the flavour (so I'm told).
I think I understand where you’re coming from and I’m willing to bet you understand the nuance but my concern was mainly for the uninitiated reading and drawing too drastic of a conclusion.
I think the USDA info I read was that the “typical” cattle are pasture raised for around 4 months before going to a feedlot. Once there, the feed may be as high as 90-95% grain. At that point it almost feels pedantic to claim they are anything but grain fed, but a purely grain diet can cause them to founder like horses on grass as another commenter said.
Sure, and reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma -- which is where I first really got a good insight into these factories -- you'll discover that while corn may not be precisely 100% of the feed, chicken sweepings (manure, feather), peanut shells, fat from other slaughtered cows, etc make up a portion too.
CAFOs are objectively horrendous, and I don't want an 'uninitiated reader' thinking they're anything less than a woeful embarrassment for our species.
I’m not trying to defend feedlots. Unfortunately I think if we aren’t careful about being accurate people are more likely to write off those opinions as pushing a narrative at the expense of truth, ultimately making good points lose relevance
Okay, so let's agree that cattle that end up in feedlots spend the vast majority of their time in feedlots ... they may have some milk and grass for the first few months of their life, but once they're in feedlots they're on primarily (90%+) grain, with some even more obviously dubious additions making up the other 10%.
These are animals that have evolved to digest various grasses, and get sick (to various degrees) when they eat any amount of grains.
Feeding them almost (is that okay?) exclusively grains makes them extremely sick - but happily (?) the high-grain diet ensures they put on fat (the bad kind, btw) fast enough that we can slaughter them before they have the opportunity to die from this diet.
People that find this acceptable only because they dispute a few percentile of grain quotient in the feed are unlikely to be swayed in any case, I suspect.
I agree with everything you said until the last sentence. I think the issue is it's a lot to ask of someone to change their lifestyle, especially within areas that have a lot of contradictory (mis)information.
The easy choice is for someone to side with their confirmation bias ("what I'm doing is already ok"). As soon as they sniff out some misinformation in the counterargument, I think the arguing party loses credibility and any hope of convincing them otherwise. ("If you're willing to fudge the facts on that, what else are you misrepresenting?") It's not a matter of being pedantic, it's a matter of trust.
You see this with all kinds of controversial topics. Agriculture, nutrition, climate science etc. People will latch on to any misrepresented information as use it to discredit an otherwise well-reasoned argument. I just think it's best to clean up the point to avoid that risk.
I'm enchanted by your suggestion that if we can just give everyone enough facts they'll start to act thoughtfully.
I'll continue to blend my understanding of reality with my opinion of same. If it's insufficiently compelling in comparison to someone's desire to believe something demonstrably wrong or bad, as I said earlier, I'm doubtful those last few eggshells will make a difference.
>I'm enchanted by your suggestion that if we can just give everyone enough facts they'll start to act thoughtfully
That's not really what I said though. I know there's some people who think this (ahem Peter Attia) but it flies in the face of my own experience and what limited reading I've done in behavioral psychology.
I don't think people act as rational agents objectively assessing each piece of information. Which is all the more reason to believe they will dismiss any of your points if you give them reason to maintain their confirmation bias. When we aren't accurate with our statements of "fact", it opens the door to exactly that.
There's lots of people who do that. While it may fuel their feelings of self-righteousness, I have doubts as to whether it actually changes anyone's mind. To the contrary, I tend to believe it just makes the other side more entrenched in their own ideas.
Not sure about beef but I can guarantee you that there's a ton of difference between the eggs produced by my parents' chicken (they raise them "organically", so to speak, i.e. they do subsistence agriculture) and the eggs that I can purchase from the supermarket closest to me. And the difference is in favour of my parents' chicken. The same discussion is valid for the chicken meat.
Two of my neighbors raise chickens. They both regularly drop off eggs as their supply exceeds demand.
They are visually distinctive (they tend to be smaller than a supermarket “large egg” and dirtier for sure) but after cooking are entirely indistinguishable from the eggs at the store.
Of course I’m very grateful for the eggs, but even they will admit it’s not for quality and quantity, but mostly a fun hobby and something to help get the kids involved with.
It’s common for people to feed chickens the same basic diet as industrial chicken farmers do. Otherwise you need quite a bit more land per chicken. A good rule of thumb is unless their walking on grass they need feed.
I raised chickens and they had the run of my 40 acres. I could not tell the difference in the eggs except for the shell color and yolk color. Free-range chickens tend to have a darker, orange yolk.
> but after cooking are entirely indistinguishable from the eggs at the store.
I can personally feel the difference both when cooking schnitzels (I use the same meat, but the "crust" tastes different depending on the eggs used) and when making pancakes (I use the same milk and flour).
Free range chickens will produce eggs with varying colour throughout the year.
Some consumers have been told that dark orange equates to healthy / free-range chickens -- so some farmers use colour additives to the feed to adjust the colour of the yolks.
I wonder why that's okay for farmers to do? Let people believe that the color of the yolk is a tell for health and purchase eggs from companies they believe to have good eggs. (To my knowledge, just one example, a lot of the egg yolks I've seen from Japan are typically very orange and are said to be high quality). These farmers using color additives are in effect fooling customers and are presenting a product that isn't what it appears to be.
Organic, chemical free, natural, non-gm... are all marketing jargon that has no connection at all to what those words mean in the English language. Pretty much anything with carbon in it is organic, nothing is chemical free, natural is entirely a matter of opinion (is any agriculture “natural”?), and selective breeding is selective genetic modification (and very unnatural to boot). People claim that the new definitions for these words align with a supposedly simply guiding philosophy, but that’s not true either, the ones that are regulated simply align with lengthy, arbitrarily defined, and often inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another, regulations.
What animal species do you believe are relative newcomers?
I'm assuming here that you mean species that have come into being since humans stopped being hunter gatherers -- let's say 10k ya.
For me, natural means what they evolved to consume. So for cattle, and their genetic ancestors, it'd be grass, with perhaps some shrubby plants and trees.
“The most intriguing question of all may never be answered. Only Randy Constant knows why he did what he did, but at age 60 he took his own life last August. Three days earlier he’d been sentenced to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. He was ordered to forfeit $128 million, a fine that he almost certainly never would have been able to pay off.”
Intriguing? On what planet of pretend do I need to live on, in order for a statement like this to not sound like a dystopian sci-fi story where autistic serial killers who go to church, for the networking benefits, are the ones writing newspaper articles?
.... it gets worse
“I know Randy was deeply ashamed of his conduct,” his widow said soon after his passing.
Yeah. No kidding. Also sounds like your marriage to him was just splendid.
“Despite Constant’s faults, former business partner Glen Borgerding remains sympathetic and remembers him fondly.
“The reaction you get from people after hearing of his suicide is that he deserved what he got,” he said. “But I don’t feel that way. There was a lot of good in Randy and the real tragedy is that he went down this path.””
Most people think he deserved suicide... what world do we live in ?
Was his business partner the only human being with a functioning soul in the entire town?
> Constant scammed grain buyers, meat producers and millions of American consumers for a decade or more. The organic beef and poultry countless Americans were eating during those years wasn’t organic after all.
Uh, no - the only people scammed by him were consumers. All the middlemen and downstream producers unwittingly resold the product as organic. They didn't really lose anything.
Why buy organic at all? There’s no proof that the meat is any better for you from the article. And unless there is more regulation of what is considered organic, I would argue that there is little environmental or philosophical reason to buy organic either. At least in the US, the standards for being organic are absurdity low.
> tbf, the only significant difference between organic an not organic in food itself is basically the label.
I suggest you should have qualified with 'in my opinion', rather than 'tbf'.
There's significant behavioural and environmental differences upstream with many practices that come under the organic umbrella, even if you don't agree (for example) that pesticides are profoundly bad for bees, or residual pesticides in food are bad for us, etc.
I suspect many of his buyers weren't particularly concerned that he was 'defrauding' them. He probably sold at a discount and it gave them the label that they were consuming organic.
Also, the article is very hyperbolic. It's pretty standard in the industry to fudge when it comes to organic.
I suspect similar organic frauds are going on all over. I know someone who was fired for not going along with faking the statistics that a food service vendor was using for marketing. There need to be more regulations to verify something labeled as organic actually is.
Down here in Australia, we have had a few similar incidents with 'free range' eggs. It really needs the quotes as the more demand there is for free range eggs the more that are available. The farmers move them from batteries so pens that have similar area.
It's not a "few similar incidents", it's that "big poultry" has corrupted govt to the point that free range no longer means what laymen think it means. The label itself is now just a con.
Which is why small farmers who really care have taken to calling what they sell something else completely: pastured eggs.
I saw an article about a lady in Australia saying similar and how 'free range' rating was geared to suit big business so she started her own more genuine version.
Soil, environment and flora/fauna, insects and farm workers benefit from organic methods. It’s the failure of certification bodies in that they haven’t communicated that enough and only focused on the $ spending end consumer.
No, have a ridiculously handsome farmhand as an undercover agent, a hot daughter who is torn between loyalties, and a helicopter chase to stop the villain from escaping on his private jet.
"There’s no proof that the meat [from animals fed from fraudulently marked "organic" produce] is any better for you, but some people believe it is and others have philosophical or environmental reasons for preferring it."
Makes me wonder - who is the victim of this fraud?
The customers who paid a higher price for something because it was falsely advertised.
Just because there's no proof that organic is healthier doesn't mean it isn't healthier. And people buy organic for reasons other than health, such as the idea that it's better for the environment (e.g. no pesticides seeping into the ground).
Just because there's no proof that organic is healthier doesn't mean there's no victim.
If for some reason a lot of customers want to pay extra for milk that's hand-milked by a milk maid standing on her head, we can of course talk about how funny those "head-standing milk is better" folks are. But that doesn't make it okay to lie and defraud them.
It's a variation of the common phrase "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."[1] It's a common debate, at what point, if ever, can we say something doesn't exist when there's no evidence for it. There might actually be some evidence that organic food is healthier, this study[2] found an association between organic food and reduction in non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In that exact same book by Carl Sagan he uses the quote:
> Appeal to ignorance—the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist—and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Carl Sagan says we should be comfortable with ambiguity. We should say "organic food might be healthier, or it might not, we don't know".
But I already linked one study that seemed to indicate a health benefit.
I don't see how "The Dragon in My Garage" is relevant here. In that story, the goalposts are constantly moved until the idea is untestable. But the idea of organic food being healthier doesn't seem to have moving goalposts, and it doesn't seem untestable to me.
Does it matter if organic is healthier or not? If you advertise a good for sale based on a specific characteristic, and then sell goods that don't have that characteristic, you have committed fraud. Whether or not that specific characteristic has an affect in the real world does not change the fact that you aren't selling what you advertised
As a farm boy from Wisconsin I'm obviously going to look at it a bit different than the majority of the HN crowd, but I'd say the victims were the farmers who were his competitors.
That said, I completely understand the skepticism. Who's to say that those farmers aren't trying to get their yields up via non organic methods as well? (Of course, if they were, why would they have turned him in? But you never know.)
Part of the appeal of organic is to be better for the environment. That is not something that is inherent to the product produced, but is an externality.
It depends on what you want to maximize, because you don't use manufactured fertilizer, but you might need to deforest 3x the land to generate the same long-term average yield.
Agreed that it is not so simple a calculation. However, I still don’t think you should commit fraud just because you think the calculation is complicated.
How do you figure? The animals were being raised for slaughter one way or another. You think the animals cared that the grain they were eating was mis-labeled as organic?
The real victims are the people paying higher prices for 'conventional' produce and grains because farmers are chasing higher prices and lower yields for organics. This includes most of the developing world.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
The same people who bitch about big government will strangle inspection programs via budget cuts, and then when something like this story comes out, use it as proof that government inspection programs don't work and that even more defunding is in order.
It makes me despair.