Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1@yahoo.com>]

Seems Dean will be retiring their organic milk, and using the same horizon label hoping consumers won't notice. One paragraph in the article spells out the basic problem with corporate food involvement (for me at least).  As long as their concern is short term growth, quarterly revenues, and margins (one definition of shareholder value)- and not the actual value of their product to the consumer, the long term stability of their sourcing relationships, or their reputation (another definition of shareholder value) they probably shouldn't be selling food or food like substances. We can argue the former and later need not be orthogonal. I think whenever a business owns a large part of the marketshare of a particular product they generally are , they don't even need to hold the bulk of the marketshare to set the tone for other distributors since a simplified notion of competition is what drives the industry as a whole. Perhaps if food business's shares weren't publically traded or only were allowed to sell preferreds we'd see something different.

Profit Over Organics: Dean Foods Sets Up New Competing Market Category - "Natural" Dairy Products

"
has launched their "alternative to the organic label" at a time when sales in the industry have flattened after averaging 20% per year growth rates for more than a decade.  Recent articles in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Associated Press have profiled falling prices and production caps now being placed on farms producing organic milk-with many of these family farmers now facing financial ruin.
"


http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18437.cfm