After several years of often bitter debate about what it means to be an organic dairy farm, the USDA earlier this month settled the issue, by moving to finalize a new rule saying that organic cows have to be pastured at least 120 days per year, and that 30% of their feed intake must come from pasture-grown forage.

This decision, which will be final in June, is the latest salvo in the more than ten year-long battle over defining organic dairy production.  Up till now, organic dairy products mostly have been defined by what they’re not:  they’re not from farms that use synthetic pesticides (though natural pesticides are OK); they’re not from farms that use antibiotics (although all milk is screened for antibiotics to ensure they don’t enter the dairy supply); and they aren’t treated with growth hormones (although organic milk, just like regular milk, contains the same trace levels of hormones).

The matter of pasture access was really a footnote.  The National Organic Program regulations said organic cows had to have pasture access, but it was never codified as to what that really meant.  Now we know.

This pasture access battle was really another proxy in the long fight over what type of farms should be allowed to produce certified organic milk.  The thinking behind these new stipulations is that it will keep the largest dairies from fudging on the pasture access issue.  If you’ve got a 1,000+ cow dairy – and there are some in that range that are currently organic – it will take a great deal of management skill to ensure those cows get enough forage during their four months on the range.  Also, the 120 days is a minimum threshold, and if you live in a more temperate part of the world…say, California, the expectation is that the cows will be out the majority of the time, which creates its own headaches in the cool, rainy months where there is a lot of mud to go along with the grass.

Here are a couple thoughts on this decision: 

First, even four months on pasture means eight months in a barn or corral.  So the notion that organic farms have continual pasture access is not what this law achieves.  Same applies to the 30% dry matter intake requirement – that puts the majority of feed in a different bunker.

Second, USDA’s research shows that most farms have pretty decent pasture access already.  The 2007 NAHMS survey found that 33% of the cows, and nearly 60% of the farms, put their cows on pasture during at least part of the year (see page 71 for the chart).  So the practice among conventional farms is not too far different than what will be required of organic ones.

Third, as I wrote about this issue in 2008, this is not about making a more nutritious or safer product, or one that has any functional superiorities.  It’s all about marketing, and whose farm is truer to what is a totally arbitrary notion about how to raise cows.  It’s 0% scientific, 40% economics, and 60% politics.

Last, the USDA also recently released a national survey of organic farming.  It found that about 200,000 dairy cows in 2008  produced about 2.75 billion pounds of milk – which is 1.4% of the U.S. dairy supply.  And that was a good year for organic dairy demand – 2009 was not.

These new regulations are not likely to make it easier to manage organic cows or produce organic milk, meaning that the category will remain an exclusive, and expensive, niche product into the future.  Is ensuring that access to the organic club remains unworkable for most a good thing?

First, this isn’t a post about climate change, and whether the weather is affected by global warming…not directly, anyway.  What it is about is the simple fact that many political trends – the issues of the day that get talked about on the nightly news by reporters standing in front of the Capitol – are driven purely by anecdotes.  By that, I mean that often what sets the agenda in Washington, particularly in Congress, is one or two stories or events.  Not 100 or 1000 of them, but just a few. 

Examples:  one erstwhile shoe bomber, Richard Reid, means that now we all have to take our shoes off and scan them at airports. The underwear bomber from December will certainly hasten the need to install full body scan machines.  Complaints about the MMR vaccine being linked to autism led to the end of the use of thimerosal in vaccines.  The peanut food safety scare last year helped prompt the creation of a new food safety bill.   What these all have in common is that one or two incidents, mostly isolated and perhaps not even related, have been the force, the tipping point, behind significant policy decisions.

Which brings me to the weather.  As has been widely reported, Washington, DC, has in the past week received more than 30 inches of snow, in two blizzardy installments.  We’ve now had more snow this winter than in the more than 120 years of weather recording in Washington. 

So it is no coincidence that efforts to address climate change, already on the ropes since last year, are now most likely to be literally buried under the tundra.  It was good political theater, the building of an igloo near the Capitol Grounds by Sen. Jim Inhofe’s family, to mock former Sen. Al Gore’s global warming crusade.  That snow job is more than just sarcastic humor; it’s a challenge to those who want to impose carbon taxes to stop the planet from heating, even while the rest of Washington has run out of milk, salt and shovels. 

Which brings me to the point:  of course, the large and lingering debate about climate change isn’t going to melt away when the snow leaves the Capitol.  It’s just that it becomes much harder to build a consensus about too much heat, when the winter is way too cold and snowy.  Now, some will say weather has nothing to do with climate change, and all this snow in Washington means nothing.  But a lot of the climate change debate has been about the significance of selected events.  What’s the point of talking about ice caps and polar bears as evidence of a warmer climate, if other anecdotal examples of colder weather don’t also count for something?  The scandal over the East Anglia University climate change emails shows that data and examples, used (or not used) selectively, say a lot more about politics than science.

It’s like Joseph Stalin said:  one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.  People react to the former, and shrug at the latter.  36 inches of snow is also a statistic, but if you’ve blown out your back from too much shoveling, and you’re a member of Congress, do you really want to continue digging into the climate change issue?