Lesson 3: Getting to Know Your Organic Processor
M.O.M's is a small family operated creamery that only sells to a few thousand, largely local, customers. General Mills is a major international corporation with dozens of subsidiaries and hundreds of food product labels. The company's retail customers likely number in the millions.
Both M.O.M's and General Mills, through subsidiaries such as Muir Glen, have come to the realization that selling certified organic products is profitable. The Hartmans, the farm family that owns M.O.M's, has known this for a long time. Before they started their farmstead creamery their cows and land were certified organic. General Mills is more of a newcomer to organics.
Both companies are relying upon the long history, and extensive conceptual development of "certified organic" to sell their products and make their profits. The key to making organic certification work isn't so much an effective policing system. The key to the effectiveness of the certified organic label is a set of clearly stated guidelines from the field to you, the eater. As Carolyn Hetzel, of Farm Verified Organic, told you in Lesson One the adherence to those standards has to be traceable throughout the food system.
Advocates of the certification process claim its transparency is at the very heart of the ability to charge premium prices for organic products. Consumers should perhaps begin asking if the transparency is real.
In this lesson we'll visit the Hartman's farm, and their small creamery, and we'll drop in on some folks at General Mills, J.M. Smuckers, and two other companies selling certified organic products.
You may, or may not, have preferences about buying from large or small companies. I am biased. And my experience with these companies reinforced the bias. The Hartmans were glad to give me a tour of their creamery and farm. They understand the value of openness and transparency. They answered all the questions I asked them freely. Not one of the larger companies was willing to answer all my questions. They may not have been hiding anything but they sure made me feel like they were.
The Hartmans were glad to have my wife and I visit them. But they couldn't handle thousands of visitors. That, of course, is the problem. Not everybody can visit M.O.M's. And big companies seem to want to rely more on the efforts of the images created in their marketing and advertising departments than on harder realities. Could we have a food system based upon tens of thousands of small processors that would welcome questions and visitors? Or must our food system be primarily made up of large multinational corporations that foster a culture of secrecy?
Decades of hard work have gone into making organic certification reliable and transparent. Are big companies honoring the hard work of the small farmers, processors, and certifying agencies who created "certified organic" or are they reducing it to mere marketing gimmickry? It's up to consumers to find out and to hold farmers, processors, and food handlers to the high standards of the prestigious "certified organic" label.
"The lifeblood of organics is grassroots, consumer-based confidence in and demand for safe foods that are produced and processed using environmentally sound, humane, and socially just practices. These are based on public openness, honesty, and direct consumer access," writes Michael Sligh writes in his essay "Organics at the Crossroads" in the book Fatal Harvest. "All public and private stakeholders, including farmers, laborers, processors, handlers, retailers, suppliers, and consumers, must actively participate in this process."
M.O.M's: Minnesota Organic Milk
M.O.M's. That stands for Minnesota Organic Milk. After eight years of being on the shelves of numerous Twin Cities food co-operatives and grocery stores, the bright blue and green half gallon cartons of M.O.M's are familiar to thousands of quality conscious shoppers.
The Hartmans, that's Mike, Diane and Mike's brother Roger, are the family behind this successful organic dairy.
"When we were planning this we had 52 farms lined up to go," Mike says as he remembers the planning for the creamery in the early 1990s. "But every way we figured, it didn't work financially."
The point of setting up a farmer owned creamery was to capture the processing and marketing profits for the farmer owners. So, when it was clear the big creamery idea wouldn't fly as well as a barn yard chicken, the Hartmans decided to build a creamery for their thirty-five cows on their farm.
Mike is now a happy prophet of small, on-farm dairy processing.
"Small on-farm creameries can help rejuvenate the country side," he says. "They can make small dairies like ours profitable. That will create economic opportunities in towns. And urban people will be drawn back to the rural areas."
The vehicle for this economic renaissance is a milk processing room not much larger than the living room. It's filled - not jammed - with used dairy processing equipment that Mike has located from as far away as Wyoming and Pennsylvania.
What Mike found allows M.O.M's to bottle two kinds of milk - skim and two percent - make a range of flavored ice creams, and make butter.
The diversity and flexibility of the creamery reflect the broader diversity of the Hartman farm. In addition to the creamery, the farm has pigs, dairy steers, chickens for meat and eggs, and a variety of crops. It's just as important that the farm takes advantage of natural connections that a more specialized industrial style farm would avoid in the name of efficiency.
"The sows act as protection from predators for the chickens," Mike says.
Another connection: a portion of the rinse water from the creamery, rich with milk solids, is fed to the pigs.
Mike's philosophy is there is no such thing as waste on a farm. The Hartman's even throw their junk mail to the hogs.
"The old story is that hogs like to spend one third of their time sleeping, one third of their time eating and one third of their time in destructive activity," Mike says. "They shred all that paper and mix it in with the bedding and manure and it makes a good carbon source for the fields."
The idea that well run farms have no waste products has served M.O.M's customers well. M.O.M's hasn't raised prices for five years.
"We've learned how to operate more efficiently. That's where we've been able to generate our wealth," Mike said.
Roger likes to joke that milk is itself a waste product.
"In the old days farmers would separate the milk from the cream," he says. "The only thing they hauled to town was the cream. They fed milk to the pigs."
At M.O.M's the milk is the cake. The products from the cream - vanilla ice cream, chocolate chip molasses ice cream, chocolate ice cream and butter, are the frosting. Vanilla ice cream and the one pound blocks of butter are the biggest sellers.
"Vanilla outsells the flavored ice creams four or five to one," Mike says. "People would rather add their own toppings."
The Hartmans recently discovered another under utilized product that can generate wealth. Roger, who quit his job as a CPA to help run the creamery, demonstrates how he makes butter in the fifty pound churn.
"There is a point - it happens all of a sudden - when the buttermilk separates from the butter," he says.
In the past the buttermilk would have gone to the pigs or the chickens. Recently they've begun adding organic chocolate syrup to uncultured buttermilk.
"We've been letting people taste it and they keep coming back for more," says Roger.
They are waiting until their glass bottling and washing operation is set up before marketing the buttermilk. The glass bottling project is pure M.O.M's in style. Mike and Roger located a used glass bottling machine in some distant lands. They brought it home and are studying how it operates, cleaning it and getting it ready to run. In his spare time Roger is building a bottle washing addition onto the creamery.
"You can't bring dirty bottles into the creamery," Roger says.
The glass bottling machine is simpler than the carton filling machine M.O.M's uses now. Among other things, the glass doesn't have the complicated heat sealing equipment that the carton filling machine has. It will be easier to maintain and clean. Roger thinks customers will like glass better too.
As in any business, customers and marketing are vital. M.O.M's marketing program is as diverse as the rest of the farm. They sell to food co-operatives, grocers and a farmer owned marketing co-op. They also sell to consumer managed buying clubs. And, although most of their markets are in Minneapolis and St. Paul, they have a home delivery route in the nearby town of New Ulm.
Roger, who does a lot of M.O.M's marketing, says people ask him if he drinks his own milk. The answer is yes and no.
"I drink the milk from the creamery to test it," he says. "But I prefer milk straight from the bulk tank. It's really delicious."
M.O.M's can't sell milk straight from the bulk tank. But their goal is to get certified organic dairy products to their customers that tastes as close to the sweet, fresh taste of "straight-from-the-bulk-tank" as processing rules allow. That includes lower pasteurization temperatures, minimal agitation, no homogenization of bottled milk and careful handling of the finished product.
