Walmart <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wal_mart_stores_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  plans to announce on Thursday that it is putting its muscle behind Wild Oats organic products, offering the label at prices that will undercut brand-name organic competitors by at least 25 percent.

The move by Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and grocer, is likely to send shock waves through the organic market, in which an increasing number of food companies and retailers are seeking a toehold.

“We’re removing the premium associated with organic groceries,” said Jack L. Sinclair, executive vice president of Walmart U.S.’s grocery division. The Wild Oats organic products will be priced the same as similar nonorganic brand-name goods.

    

For now, Walmart will carry the Wild Oats <http://wildoats.com/>  label, which is owned by the Yucaipa Companies, a private investment firm, only in its pantry section, with items like tomato paste, chicken broth and cinnamon applesauce cup. Over 90 percent of its offerings at Walmart will be organic, while the rest will adhere to company standards about ingredients and additives, a Wild Oats executive said, but not to any government regulations.

Instead of hitting the entire national market at once, Walmart will first introduce Wild Oats at 2,000 stores in the coming months, only half of its national footprint, and then roll it out to the rest of the country. Mr. Sinclair said that concerns about supply kept the retailer from introducing the brand in all its stores at once.

“What we don’t want to do is launch it in 4,000 stores and then not be able to supply those 4,000 stores in the short term,” he said. “Certain commodities are challenging in terms of being able to access both the raw material and the processing capacity.”

In an effort to manage and ensure the supply, Mr. Sinclair said, Walmart plans to enter into long-term agreements with suppliers — for five years, for example — so it can lock in what it will need to meet its enormous requirements.

Over at least the next few years, Walmart’s move is likely to raise prices for organic ingredients, which are already going up because of fast-growing consumer demand. Organic food accounted for $29 billion in United States sales in 2012, according to the most recent data, the Organic Trade Association said. Ten years earlier, its sales were $8 billion.

Eager to tap into that demand, Target, one of Walmart’s primary competitors, said on Tuesday that it would expand the presence of organic products <http://www.startribune.com/business/254437901.html>  in its stores. At Walmart, internal company research found that 91 percent of customers said they would buy “affordable” organic products if they were available, executives said.

While organically produced grains do not necessarily cost more to grow than other types, Lynn Clarkson, founder of the Clarkson Grain <http://www.clarksongrain.com/> , which processes and sells organic and conventional wheat, soy, corn and other grains, said they commanded a huge premium because they were scarce.

“Right now, there is so much demand and competition for supplies that the price is very high, and I cannot imagine that changing anytime soon,” Mr. Clarkson said.

He estimated that farmers in the United States were producing about six million bushels of organic soybeans, for example, when some 20 million bushels are needed to meet current needs. Organic soy is selling for $25 to $30 a bushel, Mr. Clarkson said, or about twice the price of regular soy beans.

The amount of land devoted to organic farming has grown, according to the Agriculture Department, but not nearly enough to address growing consumer demand.

“Younger people are much more interested in the chemistry of their lives, and so for them the issue of pesticides is a troubling one,” Mr. Clarkson said.

Ultimately, however, Walmart’s move could increase the supply, and eventually bring prices down.

The online grocery retailer Fresh Direct <http://www.freshdirect.com>  has an extensive selection of organic products among its overall merchandise mix. A five-pound bag of conventional russet potatoes was selling for $3.99, while its organic counterpart was $5.99. A box of Driscoll’s organic strawberries is usually a dollar more than its conventional brethren.

“We offer both, but mor

e often than not I try to push people into the organic because I think it’s better,” said David McInerney, a founder of Fresh Direct. “You can compress the margins on organic to make it more attractive.”

Mr. McInerney said he did that in hopes of building the scale of organic products. “Prices can and will come down with scale,” he said. “We’ve already seen that as demand for organic products has grown.”

He said an increasing number of farmers he dealt with were considering switching at least a portion of their conventional production to organic, attracted by the premiums.

But even if a farmer decided to turn to organic production today, various restrictions mean that it would be three years before any crop could receive the federally approved organic seal.

  

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2014, on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Walmart to Offer Organic Line of Food at Discount Prices.

Raw politics

drive milk wars

By TARINI PARTI

politico.com

3/29/14

Got raw milk?

Although not a campaign slogan just yet, a bipartisan coalition of House members is pushing for the overturn of a decades-old ban on the interstate sale of raw milk. A controversial topic within the food industry, it has slowly evolved into a pet cause that’s bringing together some of the most anti-government libertarians and left-leaning liberals.

Loosening regulations on raw – or unpasteurized — milk, which the Food and Drug Administration believes poses too many health risks, has been gaining steam on the state level in recent times, with at least half of states now allowing the sale of raw milk directly to consumers and several more seeing raw milk-related bills being introduced in the previous two sessions.

Now, with the introduction of two new bills in Congress by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), proponents of legalizing raw milk are making strides on the national front, too. Massie’s first bill, the “Milk Freedom Act of 2014,” would overturn the interstate ban on raw milk, and his other bill, the “Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2014,” would allow interstate shipment of raw milk only between two states where raw milk sales are already legal.

The swing in momentum can, in part, be attributed to a transformation of the argument that advocates are using. The debate used to be centered on the health and nutritional benefits of raw milk versus the safety of pasteurized milk, but the likes of Ron Paul — who mentioned the issue in several speeches during his 2012 presidential run and introduced similar bills when he was in Congress — have turned it into one about freedom of choice.

“It’s nice to see that people are now advocating for their right rather than science,” said Baylen Linnekin, executive director of Keep Food Legal, a group that describes itself as “the first nationwide membership organization devoted to food freedom—the right of every American to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, share, cook, eat, and drink the foods of their own choosing.”

In a statement on his two bills, Massie, too, highlighted the right to choose argument. “Today, many people are paying more attention to the food they eat, what it contains, and how it is processed. Raw milk, which has been with us for thousands of years, is making a comeback among these discerning consumers,” he said. “Personal choices as basic as ‘what we feed our families’ should not be limited by the federal government.”

Massie’s bills already have nearly 20 co-sponsors, including Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Tom McClintock (R-Calif.).

It’s a strange alliance.

Pingree, in particular, doesn’t typically share the same views on food-related policy as Massie or other Republicans, having fought recently against food stamp cuts and the use of pesticides that are endangering the Monarch butterfly population. But, in 2011, she wrote <http://localfoodlocalrules.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/pingree_letter_fda.pdf>  FDA to express her concern over the agency’s diverting of precious resources to “prevent consumers from choosing the type of milk that they drink.”

“When Ron Paul introduced his bill, he had trouble even getting one sponsor,” said David Gumpert, author of The Raw Milk Revolution, a 2006 book that paints an unflattering view of the government crackdown on raw milk producers. “This is quite an about-face. It speaks to the huge political change that as many representatives would go on record in support of raw milk just a few years after Ron Paul did this. It’s pretty impressive.”

The two new bills follow Sen. Rand Paul’s proposed amendment to the farm bill that would have allowed the direct sale of raw milk across state lines. The Kentucky Republican also made the food freedom argument, but he was unsuccessful in gathering support for hi

In the past, raw milk advocates have argued that the product is actually healthier than pasteurized milk, but the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have countered that claim by pointing to data that shows the number of foodborne illnesses that can be attributed to raw milk.

The CDC, in 2012, reported <http://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/nonpasteurized-outbreaks.html#nonpasteurized>  that of the 121 dairy-associated foodborne illness outbreaks it registered between 1993 and 2006, for which the product’s pasteurization status was known, 75, or 60 percent, involved raw products and resulted in 1,571 cases of illnesses, including 202 hospitalizations and two deaths. That might be a little more than half of the illnesses, but consider that raw milk makes up only a small percentage of all dairy sales.

                            

Pete Kennedy, president of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the major national group advocating for raw milk, argues that the statistics paint a misleading picture. He says there are several other products that aren’t banned that contribute to diseases, such as cigarettes, alcohol and even pasteurized milk in some cases.

“The trouble is that raw milk is the only food that is held to a standard of perfection,” he said.

Kennedy’s group, the advocacy arm of The Weston A. Price Foundation, more than doubled its fundraising — a measure of the growing interest in raw milk — between 2009 and 2011, according to the group’s tax filings. It raised about $240,000 in 2009 and nearly $530,000 in 2011.

Another factor now driving the movement is consumers’ growing disdain for Big Ag, said Bill Marler, a Seattle-based attorney and food safety advocate who has represented several clients made sick by raw milk.

“There has certainly been a more vocal movement to consume raw milk as people have turned away from mass produced agriculture,” he said.

“The reasons why (clients) were consuming raw milk was because they believed it was healthier, and they were supporting small farmers and poking a stick in the eye of Big Ag.”

Despite the growing grassroots movement in favor of loosening raw milk regulation and bipartisan support, getting a bill through Congress will continue to be an uphill battle, especially with strong opposition from the dairy industry. The National Milk Producers Federation and International Dairy Foods Association — usually on opposite sides of dairy policy — have repeatedly compared consuming raw milk to “playing Russian roulette.”

Chris Galen, spokesman for NMPF, said his group will be educating members of Congress on the risks associated with raw milk to deter Massie’s bills from gaining traction. NMPF joined with state dairy associations in Wisconsin earlier this year to keep a raw milk bill from advancing in the state legislature and push Gov. Scott Walker to veto the legislation.

“The right to choose argument is the only one that proponents have because they don’t have the science on their side,” Galen said. “They don’t have the ability to talk about this from a health and nutrition standpoint.”

Kimberly Hartke, a spokeswoman for The Weston A. Price Foundation’s Campaign for Real Milk, acknowledges that any changes on raw milk regulation on the federal level might be tough to achieve, but she remains confident her side will prevail.

“It’s basically just the grassroots’ hard work, energy and enthusiasm that’s making the difference,” Hartke said. “And ultimately that will win the day.”

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The Other Bees

April 4th, 2014

Modern Farmer

by Kristin Ohlson

There are thousands and thousands of bees that are not honeybees out there, pollinating our flowers and helping plants produce food. Who knew?

Hear that hum as a bumblebee settles onto a tomato blossom? It’s a faint but powerful sound: The bee is working hard. It’s grabbing the flower with its jaws, vibrating its flight muscles and producing a tone that’s close to middle C. That vibration causes the flower to release pollen – a process called sonication, or buzz pollination.

More than 85 percent of the world’s plants either require or benefit from animal-mediated pollination. Farmers know this and have panicked in the face of the colony collapse disorder that’s reducing populations of honeybees around the country. (Some were even flying in packaged bees from Australia at $200 a pop until the USDA halted the practice for fear of importing new diseases and parasites.)

But what most farmers don’t realize – and the rest of us, too, as we anxiously search our gardens and parks for honeybees – is that there are another 20,000 species of bees. Four thousand are native to North America – including 50 native bumblebees – and they are busily at work in our landscapes.

We rarely notice our wild native bees because most are small and solitary and gentle – they aren’t likely to draw our attention with a sting.

But their impact on flowering plants is huge, with studies suggesting that they’re twice as effective at pollination than honeybees.

“The value of honeybees is that you can truck mobile hives to a farm and release tens of thousands of bees into the landscape,” says Eric Maden, the Assistant Pollinator Program Director of the Xerces Society, an organization that advocates on behalf of invertebrates and their habitat. “And people are fascinated with their social structure and with honey production. But bee for bee, most of the wild ones are vastly more productive.”

For one thing, Maden says, not all honeybees are even interested in pollen. Some are pollen foragers, but most are nectar foragers that ignore the critical spot where the flowers display pollen, called anthers. For another, honeybees are exceptionally finicky about the weather. They won’t fly when it’s cool, cloudy or rainy, whereas our native wild bees are game for inclement days. And honeybees sleep late.

Maden points to squash bees, the same size and color as honeybees, which co-evolved with squashes and make their individual nests in the soil near the plants. Pumpkin farmers and other squash growers are often unaware of these wild bees and unnecessarily pay to have honeybees hives trucked in for the season. “The squash bees go out before sunrise and are finished foraging by noon,” Maden says. “Honeybees don’t even wake up until it’s sunny and bright and, by that time, the squash bees have already gotten the job done.”

Valuable as our native wild bees are, their populations are dropping – for instance, an analysis by the Xerces Society ‘s Rich Hatfield suggests that 30% of our native bumblebees are threatened by extinction.

But Maden says that this is one threatened species story that can easily have a happy ending: Just plant wildflowers.

The loss of native flowering plants from development and conventional agriculture – especially the vast stretches of Roundup-resistant GMO crops in which everything but that commercial plant has been blasted away – has eliminated habitat for wild bees. Quite simply, there isn’t enough food for wild bees when there is only one plant – the commercial plant – blooming for a few weeks. They need a flowery source of food spring, summer and fall.

“Pesticide use is also an issue, but the single most important factor is habitat loss,” Maden says. “The solution is not complicated, and everyone can have a role. If you’re a farmer, plant native wildflowers around your farm. If you live in the city and your only access to the outdoors is a fire escape, put a pot of wildflowers there. If every person planted one wildflower, conditions for bees in this country would be significantly better.”

Farmers who create habitat for wild bees are doing themselves a favor. Maden points to a study by biologists Lora Morandin and Mark Winston showing that canola growers who took 30 percent of their land out of production and let native plants flourish grew as much or more seed on their remaining land. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167880906000910> * A soon-to-be published study by Michigan State University entomologist Rufus Isaacs and former student Brett Blaauw <http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/pollinating_highbush_blueberries>  shows that blueberry farmers who put in wildflower borders had more wild bees per bush and up to 800 pounds more fruit per acre adjacent to the plantings.

Planting wildflowers not only helps our wild bees thrive. It also saves butterflies. They aren’t essential pollinators, but they provide food for birds and have a place in the ecosystem – and they’re so darned pretty. Butterfly scientists are alarmed at the rate of disappearance of several common species including the Monarch, whose numbers may be so low that they will be unable to manage a migration this year. Their favored plant, the milkweed, has been decimated by the use of Roundup in cornfields planted with GMO glyphosate-resistant corn.

“I remember when I was a kid in North Dakota and we’d drive a few hours – even if we were just going grocery shopping, we’d have to drive a few hours,” Maden says. “The front of the car would be a sticky mass of insects. Now I can drive across the US in July and not have as many dead insects on my car as we did from a two-hour drive in North Dakota.”

You get the point. He doesn’t want you to kill bees and butterflies with your car, but it would be great if there were once again so many of them that they’re hard to miss. Find some wildflower seeds native to your region, and go sow.