RE: organic versus pasture discussion
Mark Kastel
Hello all,
First a little housekeeping: I'm not a technological genius and I will see if one of our staff members can remedy this. But when you are replying to a thread (discussion) regarding a topic and you are replying through the daily digest it comes up with a hokey subject line (Digest for o-...@googlegroups.com - 2 Messages in 1 Topic) that makes things hard to follow and I encourage you to try to copy and paste the original subject line in (or create something close to it).
In terms of misrepresenting eggs in the eyes of the consumer I think language is very important and we need to own and defend the ways we communicate with consumers.
As many of you know we are fighting like hell to prevent the large industrial-scale producers, with tens of thousands of birds confined in buildings without access to the outdoors, from using the organic label. If we are successful, at a minimum, organic will mean true access to the outdoors (mostly from fixed housing).
I'm a skeptic in terms of having fixed houses and providing the quality of outdoor space that we would all describe as "pasture" and getting the vast majority of the birds outside to enjoy that pasture. Normally, with fixed housing, if the birds are going out I have observed what we would refer to as a "moonscape."
However, there are a couple folks working hard on proving that you can pasture with fixed housing and that it is economically viable. We will be looking at those examples closely this year.
In general, if we are successful in this campaign, in the future, there will only be two or three levels on our organic egg scorecard (if you haven't already looked at this please visit our website). If you're going to have organic legally on the label you're either going to have, generally, a four-egg rating or a five-egg rating (beyond organic for true pastured poultry).
Best regards,
Mark
Mark A. Kastel
The Cornucopia Institute
608-625-2042 Voice
866-861-2214 Fax
P.O. Box 126
Cornucopia, Wisconsin 54827
From: o-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:o-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of OPP
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2011 1:14 PM
To: o-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: {O-Egg} Digest for o-...@googlegroups.com - 2 Messages in 1 Topic
Ted - Information, and imparting it on the customer (education) is vital to the customer learning and understanding the truth and there is no magic bullet to replace it. True education goes well beyond marketing to impart a knowledge on the customer rather than just the perceptions that marketing does. I do a lot of group education, as well as individual and retailer education. No argument, it is time consuming. I have the benefit of being a printer and graphic designer part of the day so I develop my own point of sale and education materials. You can see some of them here:
I am sure that once customers have a complete knowledge of the situation, many will choose the high end "true" organic products.
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Tim Koegel
I will be interested to see the results of your scrutiny. Personally, I have done the math and the numbers just don't work from fixed housing. Even if you have outrageous forage/vegetative growth, the ground (soil) never gets an adequate chance to "rest" and reduce pathogen loads. Anyone who has had poultry for any length of time also knows that chickens do not browse all the vegetation within a paddock equally. The denuding graduates from most intense to least the further you move away from the house. The European round house style or any other, I have serious doubts about it. When you are talking about broilers, the impact becomes even more intense, so intense that I don't repeat broiler pasturing on the same ground in any one growing season. At two square feet per bird, 6+ week old broilers (CornishX) can cap the ground in less than 12 hours.
