Photo by Shawn Linehan.

This story appears in the November 2010 issue of Milwaukee Magazine.

by Joanne Weintraub

“Driftless” isn’t in the dictionary, but proud western Wisconsinites know exactly what it means. It describes the land on the far side of Madison where the glaciers didn’t go, the places where the earth isn’t shaved as flat as, well, Milwaukee County. Beyond that, though, the driftless is a mystique.

Just minutes northwest of the state capital, the roads curve gently and the hills begin to rise invitingly. Before long, there are Holsteins and horse farms, an occasional orchard, a flock of sheep as pale and fluffy as an earthbound cloud. The rolling hills help create the deeply carved river valleys the driftless is known for, including that of the Kickapoo, the longest and most scenic tributary of the Wisconsin River. Even the names in this area are pretty: Sugar Grove, Diamond Hill, La Valle, La Farge.

That last Vernon County village, 48 miles southeast of La Crosse, is the home of Organic Valley, a company that boasts its own mystique, evoking images of bucolic dairy farming, grass-eating cows with sweet breath, and milk and cheese made the old-fashioned way. OV employs some 540 people at its hilltop La Farge headquarters and a nearby distribution center in equally tiny Cashton. Nationwide, the country’s largest organic co-op boasts more than 1,600 farmer-owners who, among other chores, tend the cows that give the milk that pays for the house that Jack built.

That would be Monterey Jack, of course, one of the dozens of dairy products that account for a healthy 88 percent of OV’s sales. And those total sales are more than healthy: $520 million in 2009 from products sold at about 13,000 stores. Organic Valley produces about 30 percent of the organic milk sold nationally, second only to Horizon, with about 42 percent. Horizon is owned by Dallas-based Dean Foods – a name that, incidentally, does not appear on the labels of Horizon products.

That is not a small issue for some. Dean Foods is a mega-corporation with more than $11 billion in total sales, mostly of nonorganic products. Dean is perhaps best known for its Silk soy milk. But critics charge that Silk and all of Horizon’s products are not as organic as their makers claim.

The 2008 documentary Food, Inc.and books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, have decried the costs of large-scale “factory farming.” Critics say these farms raise animals under inhumane conditions, cause air, water and soil pollution, and contribute to global warming through methane gas released by cows that are fed corn and other alternatives to grass.

Some consumers are so concerned about these issues that they’ll pay $4 more for a gallon of milk if it is organic. And that’s what is fueling the remarkable growth – and the remarkable story – of Organic Valley.

*****
George Siemon, 58, is a Florida native with a degree in animal science. He came to western Wisconsin to farm in the 1970s, drawn in part by the deep-shadowed beauty of the driftless. Lanky and laid-back, with long blond hair that brushes his collar in summer and flows down to his shoulders in winter, Siemon thinks nothing of greeting a visitor to his La Farge office while clad in jeans, a plaid shirt and bare feet. It seems less like an affectation or even an eccentricity than just a mild quirk – and perhaps a way of enjoying his room’s smooth, handsome floors, made of wood salvaged from an old farm kitchen.

One of just seven farmers who banded together in 1988 to start CROPP – today known as the Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer Pools – he is cutely referred to on the corporation’s website as its “C-E-I-E-I-O.” The group’s earliest members were farmers who had been lured by the Kickapoo Valley mystique and wanted to get back to the land.

Originally, CROPP’s farmers tried growing organic carrots, cucumbers and other veggies. Organic dairy was a much tougher business, given the complexities of raising herds on unsprayed pasture or grain without antibiotics or other seemingly indispensable chemicals, then getting the milk to markets where people would pay a stiff premium for such a thing.

The impracticality of an organic dairy is explained by Jim Wedeberg, another of the seven founding members of CROPP. Along with his wife, Julie, Jim raised dairy cattle without pesticides or chemical fertilizer in the ’70s because they thought it was healthier for their herds, their family, their land and their customers. But then they sold the milk through conventional channels, without an organic label, much less a markup in price.

“That’s how little commercial interest there was in organic dairy then,” recalls the soft-spoken Jim, 60, who is now OV’s dairy pool director, channeling the milk from more than a thousand herds nationally to 65 processing plants around the country.

What changed? A growing national aversion to chemicals, the first USDA standards for organic dairy, even a changing style of child-raising that saw parents willing to shell out bigger bucks in the interest of keeping little Caitlins and Kyles safe from the world’s dangers.

But OV’s distribution system changed, too. The expense and what would come to be called the carbon footprint of shipping milk from, say, North Carolina to Ohio shrank as hundreds of new family farms – today, in 33 states and four Canadian provinces – joined the cooperative, bringing the product closer to stores. In a business with revenues that can vary erratically, stable producer prices, set by a board of directors made up of CROPP’s farmer-owners, became OV’s calling card.

“If you can’t sustain prices, you can’t sustain the family farm,” Siemon says. “And sustaining the family farm is part of our bottom line. In some ways, we’re more like a social experiment disguised as a business.”

That was attractive to Vermont farmer Annie Claghorn, who milks a herd of 30 Jerseys with her husband. Organic farmers since the late ’80s, they were not happy with the corporate dairy producer they’d been dealing with, a regional company later bought by Horizon. A meeting with some New England OV members persuaded them to switch to the co-op in 2002.

“They’re much more friendly to small farmers,” Claghorn says of OV. “We feel they really try to hold prices stable.”

As the number of farmers and product volume has grown, so have sales. At New York City’s 16 Food Emporium supermarkets, whose inventory has more in common with, say, Pick ’n Save’s than with Outpost’s, OV’s milk, cheese and eggs now outsell Horizon’s – no small thing, says senior dairy buyer Mike Corsello, given that Horizon has been available at the store for 20 years and OV for a mere two.

“It got very popular very fast,” notes Corsello. “Why? I don’t know. Well, maybe I do. I’d say it’s because people just feel good about supporting family farms today. That’s Organic Valley’s profile, and it’s very appealing to a lot of customers.”

Elizabeth Culotta, who buys her OV milk at a supermarket in Kent, Ohio, is one of those customers. She complains mildly about having to pay $6.50 a gallon for it. The former science writer for the Milwaukee Journal, who now telecommutes to her Washington job as an editor for Sciencemagazine, is a vegetarian, along with her husband and their 13-year-old son.

Like a lot of parents, Culotta, 49, thought more seriously about organics when her son was ready for milk. But for her, organic milk is less about the missing chemicals and more about the treatment of animals. “For me, that’s really the priority,” she says. “I’ve done the research, and I like what I read about Organic Valley and their practices.”

Increasingly, organic milk is becoming less exotic. It’s the likes of the Pick ’n Saves, the Krogers and the Food Emporiums that now account for nine-tenths of OV’s sales. Organics still amount to just 4 percent of grocery purchases, but that’s growing fast, as more people react to information they learn about big agribusiness companies.

*****
An unusual smell emanates from the Krusen Grass Farms in Elkhorn, Wis. Unusual, that is, to anyone who’s spent any time on conventional farms. The aroma is clean and grassy, with only the merest whiff of that other thing cows produce so much of besides milk. Methane, to put a scientific name on it.

“It’s because the cows are not confined,” explains Sue Krusenbaum, who runs the farm with her husband, Altfrid. “That’s the difference you’re smelling.”

Of the country’s 9 million dairy cows, fewer than 150,000 are raised organically. Most are unlikely to roam a pasture. They are also fed corn or soybeans or barley, rather than grasses like alfalfa or flaxseed that cows had eaten for countless centuries.

Factory-farm cows are more likely to expel methane, partly with flatulence, but mostly with burps. Professor Frank Mitloehner of the University of California-Davis has done experiments showing the average cow expels 200 to 400 pounds of methane a year. Organic cows, their champions say, belch less, have sweeter breaths and shinier coats.

Methane has 20 times the heat-trapping ability of carbon dioxide. Stonyfield Farm, known for its yogurt, commissioned a study in 1999 to assess the company’s impact on climate change. The biggest impact, a company official told TheNew York Times, was not fossil fuels used for transportation or packaging, but the methane emitted by cows. In response, Stonyfield began a
program to help its supplier farms change their cows’ diets from grains to grasses.

The Krusenbaums – he’s 53, she’s 46 – graze 130 Holsteins, Jerseys and Swedish Reds on 340 acres less than an hour’s drive from Milwaukee. He’s a city boy from Germany – the last name means “gnarled tree,” if you’re interested – and she’s a third-generation farmer, the descendant of a legendary East Troy agriculturalist, Max Zinniker, who was one of the pioneers of what was then called biodynamic farming.

The Swiss-born Zinniker’s place, later run by Sue’s parents, was known for shunning chemicals and depending instead on crop rotation, herbal remedies and other age-old practices. “There was also a spiritual element to it,” Sue recalls. “We got lots of visitors, and in the ’60s and ’70s, it was sort of a hippie heaven.”

But Sue had no intention of farming when she grew up. It was her future husband, whose own father sold Lindt chocolates in the German industrial hub of Essen, who dreamed of a life outdoors.

In college, Altfrid at first thought he’d try forestry. But what really interested him was preserving the environment, and that led him to agriculture. “I had this rosy picture of plowing in the sunset,” he recalls. “The reality is a little different.”

Still, a series of internships and farm jobs in Germany, New Zealand, the United States and Canada convinced him farming was his future. And the farmer’s daughter and granddaughter he met while she was studying in Germany wound up returning to her roots as well.

Trim, dark-haired and courtly, Altfrid opens an electrified gate with the slightest bow of his head. He’s a gracious tour guide, and there’s a lot to see: the milking parlor, the rolling acres, a calf not yet 24 hours old, Sue’s generous vegetable garden and a preening posse of roosters.

The difference between Altfrid’s rosy fantasy and real life on a farm, even an organic one? Just ask the family dog Bodo, who, it seems, learned not to touch chickens early in life, when he caught one and was forced to wear the bloody, stinking carcass around his neck for days. His first dead chicken was his last one, Altfrid says. “You have to teach them, yes?” he asks rhetorically, suddenly sounding not very courtly.

Still, this is a guy who has roped off a small triangle where the cows can’t graze so as not to disturb the ground-nesting killdeer and red-winged blackbirds. He’s proud that his herd of cows gets less than 10 percent of its nutrition from grain, fattening instead out in the open on grass.

It’s quite a contrast to how Horizon treats its cows. According to a story in Business Week, one Horizon “farm” has 8,000 cows in the Idaho desert that consume such feed as corn, barley, hay and soybeans, as well as some grass from pastureland. Yet the USDA still classifies Horizon milk as organic.

“There’s this ‘milk is milk’ mentality,” Altfrid says of those who question why it matters how cows are raised. “It’s not just about the no’s,” as in no pesticides, no synthetic growth hormones, no feedlots. “It’s bigger than that. By respecting the land and respecting the animals, you’re also supporting the future.”

The Krusenbaums have established a “sharemilker” program in which individuals or families lacking the means to buy their own farms provide labor in exchange for a share of the milk proceeds and, eventually, some of their own livestock, allowing them to gradually build their own little business.

If the tradition of organic farming isn’t passed on, Altfrid says, people will just revert to what they know – which is often just wrong and quite damaging, he believes. “I had very patient mentors,” he says with a bemused smile, “and I feel some responsibility to mentor others.”

*****
George Teague is a fifth-generation farmer in North Carolina who feared he’d become trapped in the “Get big or get out” mentality that has come to dominate conventional farming. One memorable day, he had a nightmarish experience with a chemical pesticide. The valve on a 1,000-gallon spray tank broke off while Teague was handling it, and, desperately trying to stop the spill, he jammed his hand into the hole, soaking himself with chemicals.

“I was nauseated, just sick to my stomach for two days,” he recalls. “And, you know, to this day, grass won’t grow around that spot.”

A tour of organic farms sponsored by North Carolina State University convinced him there was another way. Today he and his family milk a herd of 90 cows and sell the milk to Organic Valley.

Experts estimate that 70 percent of the pesticides used in the United States go toward farming. Many are known to cause poisoning, infertility and birth defects, as well as damage to the nervous system and potentially even cancer.

Pesticides are commonly used by farms for growing the grain that feeds cows. This may pollute nearby water supplies and expose workers to pesticides. And when the grain is fed to livestock, pesticide residues accumulate in the animals’ fatty tissue and can be expelled in animal waste. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified a number of chemical, bacterial and viral compounds from animal waste that may travel into the soil and water.

But the idea that big dairy farms might have a problem with pesticides is contested by Jim Dickrell, longtime editor of the industry magazine Dairy Today. “There is no discernible difference in pesticide content” between organic and traditionally produced milk, says Dickrell, who raised dairy cattle himself in Elkhart Lake in the ’80s. “There’s a misconception that pesticide residue makes it into the milk. The USDA says it does not.”

But Theresa Marquez, OV’s chief marketing executive, scoffs at what she calls the “risk assessment system” of the USDA. “There’s a certain amount of distrust of the USDA,” she says. “They’re experimenting, and I don’t want to participate in the experiment.”

OV’s website is primed to sell consumers on the idea that organic farming is healthier. There are statements on animal welfare and carbon footprints and a Research Library tab featuring such academic hits as “The Magnitude and Impacts of the Biotech and Organic Seed Price Premiums” and “Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years.”

There’s also a kid-friendly Ovie’s Underground page featuring a cartoon worm with a sunhat and shades who says that composting is cool, making hay is awesome and all living things depend on one another for survival.

“Organic Valley uses powerful and sophisticated outreach to parents and children,” notes an admiring 2009 report from the UW-Madison Extension, and worm-dudes aren’t the half of it. OV has partnered with the Waterkeepers Alliance, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting water from pollution, has “adopted” a school garden in New York City’s Greenwich Village and announced plans to install a green roof in the same school. OV’s farmers visit classrooms to demonstrate the fine art of churning butter. Its labels are bright, clean and wholesome-looking.

The main building of OV’s headquarters in La Farge, with its cheerful red-and-white exterior and gambrel roof, looks like a cross between a real barn and a child’s fanciful drawing of one. Surrounded by snapdragons and solar panels, it has a parking lot in which the premium spaces are reserved not for the executives’ cars, but for the most eco-friendly ones.

Much of the main building is recycled, recyclable or both. The cubicle partitions were bought from a now-defunct dot-com business; the drywall is partially made of recycled paper, and the ceiling tiles are made from mostly recycled material. The cafeteria serves up not just spicy tofu and roast pork, but yoga classes. An employee-tended garden grows an impressive array of leafy things. And just a few hundred yards down the road is the 1912 dairy that was the original headquarters and now houses the graphics department: the wainscoting is old barn wood and the conference table is made of a couple of big old wooden doors covered with a sleek pane of glass.

All of it – the Benjamin Moore Eco Spec paint, the green-approved carpet glue, the herbal aromatherapy spray in the women’s bathroom – is part of OV’s sustainability culture. It’s as much a part of the OV ethos as the absence of growth hormones in the cattle or pesticides in the pastures.

“Sustainability is at the heart of what we do,” Siemon says. “And it embraces a lot of things. It’s what ‘organic’ means here.”

The folks in the graphics department – a workspace that is funky yet sophisticated, as graphics departments are required to be by some unwritten law – get their OV groove on in their own way. Above that barn-wood wainscoting is what appears at first to be an ad for Silk, the incessantly advertised soy milk made by Dean Foods, the parent of OV rival Horizon.

But actually, the elegant lettering spells out “Slik.” The insult is as natural as a Siamese hissing at a spaniel, but it’s also a reminder that if you get too slick, you can lose touch with your roots. Even with a barefoot C-E-I-E-I-O, there’s always that risk.

*****
The advertisement has been a staple of public radio for years: “Silk is soy.” The gentle tone of the ad seems to shout out the purity of the soy milk made by Dean Foods.

But a May 2009 report by The Cornucopia Institute, a nonprofit advocate for organic farming, contended Silk isn’t truly organic. The report noted Dean Foods had switched its soybean sourcing from American farms to cheaper organic beans from China. Later in 2009, Cornucopia revealed Dean Foods had largely abandoned organic soybeans, changing the soybeans in Silk from organic to conventionally grown soybeans the company was calling “natural.”

Cornucopia does an online “Organic Soy Scoreboard” rating. Organic Valley gets a rating of four beans and 880 points. Silk gets zero points and one dark bean, apparently gone bad. Maybe the stale bean did the trick: This year, Whole Foods announced its relationship with Dean Foods had “chilled”; it was bringing in a different organic soy milk made by Earth Balance.

No doubt the graphic designers at Organic Valley cheered this victory over “Slik,” but OV has faced its own controversy involving raw milk. Sales of raw milk are illegal in Wisconsin but allowed in some states. Those who want to see raw milk sold commercially – a small market segment, but one with a significant organic overlap – were angry when OV’s board voted to prohibit its members from selling it in the wake of a notorious incident involving raw milk in Michigan, unrelated to OV. The decision forces more than 100 of OV’s farmer-members to choose between supplying the co-op and continuing their sales of the controversial product.

The issue wasn’t clear-cut; it was a gray area for the OV board. “It was painful,” Siemon says of the board’s 4-3 decision in May. “We know it’s going to force some of our farmers to make a tough choice.”

On the liberal website grist.org, critic David Gumpert claimed that “some of the [company’s] idealism has vanished” with the raw milk decision. “Organic Valley may or may not be a part of Big Ag,” Gumpert wrote, “but its decision is certain to add a new emotional and economic overlay to the issue. It’s too bad farmer has to be pitted against farmer.”

Green is such a happy color; gray is not. But the need to compromise comes up a surprising number of times in interviews at OV. “Idealism is a wonderful thing,” says Siemon, with the slightly weary air of someone who says it a lot, “but sometimes your idealism can be too inflexible.”

As a young man, Siemon learned this lesson well. He grew up in West Palm Beach, Fla., where his parents ran an independent office-supply business downtown. Later, his siblings took it over. Then the big-box guys – Staples, Office Max and the rest – moved into the suburban malls. His family did not, even as downtown business declined. The result was a family bankruptcy that Siemon still sighs about as he recalls it.

“It sobers you up,” he says. “We talk about sustainability, but where’s sustainability if you can’t sustain your business?”

Or, put another way – from no less an authority than Albert Einstein, whose image looks at Siemon from a poster with a place of honor in his office – “It’s just math.”

These days, the math looks pretty good. Though Siemon repeats – it’s almost a mantra – that “we’re not driven by growth, we’re driven by mission,” he’s obviously pleased to have surpassed half a billion dollars in sales. The company predicts $622 million in revenues for 2010, a hefty 19 percent increase.

In January, the company expanded its deal with Stonyfield Farm, whose organic yogurt uses OV milk. Some OV products are certified kosher by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – notably its cheeses, which are made without animal rennet – and OV is now looking into halal certification, a similar seal of approval for those who observe Muslim dietary laws. Siemon wants to see a modest expansion of fresh produce, which was the original impetus for CROPP but now accounts for just a tiny $3 million in sales, and hopes for growth in the company’s Organic Prairie line of meats.

One thing OV won’t get into much is something that’s big elsewhere in the Kickapoo Valley: artisanal cheese. Besides a few items such as cheddar and sharp feta, OV’s cheeses tend toward the basic and bland. Issues of shelf life and distribution, Marquez says, favor colby over Camembert.

Product lines aside, the heart of OV is its farmers, people like the Wedebergs, whose farm is 116 years old. Jim inherited the farm from his parents. Now sons John, 28, and Jake, 25, represent the fifth generation working the same acreage near Gays Mills, where they milk a modest herd of 50.

Jake, who holds a degree in agricultural engineering from UW-Platteville, is well-schooled in the OV sustainability culture. “When I was at Platteville, a lot of the people in the program talked about more and more and bigger and bigger,” he reflects. “I don’t necessarily see it that way.”

Instead, he’s turned his engineering talents to converting a tractor so it runs on used vegetable oil collected from nearby restaurants: “You pretty much take the french fries out and that’s it.”

He talks with satisfaction – “It’s a good way to make a living” – about the family farm’s century-plus history, about the research he’s done into soil microbiology and biodiesel fuels, and about the way the sunset looks over the driftless hills when he’s mowing hay in the evening.

For centuries, the Kickapoo River has carved its way through this region’s hills, twisting and turning in the most impractical and picturesque way. Nearly all of the 492,000 acres drained by the Kickapoo are devoted to forest and agriculture. Not far from the Wedebergs’ farm is the pristine Kickapoo River State Wildlife Area.

Jake says the idea of conventional farming – of chancing the possibility that manure and pesticides and the like would run off into the soil and water – has never even occurred to him. “I canoe on the Kickapoo River,” he says, as though the answer is stunningly simple. “Why would I want to dump chemicals in there?”

Joanne Weintraub is a Milwaukee-area freelance writer. Reach her at letters@milwaukeemag.com.