The Future of Milk

By David Goodman, "The Future of Milk," July/August 2010

As small dairy farms are vanishing, what is happening to our milk?

READER'S COMMENT:

"Skip the milk produced by the big commercial dairy farms. Better yet, go vegan or vegetarian and support dairy and cattle farmers that switch to growing vegetables and fruit which are more healthy and ecological alternatives. Too much of...

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An Organic Solution

Local. Pure. Fresh. Healthy. Flavorful.

This is the past—and future—of milk. For George Woodard, the quest for the basic goodness of milk led him to become an early convert to organic farming.

Interest in organic milk was growing slowly in the 1990s, and then spiked. In 1993, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), also called recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), an artificial hormone Monsanto developed and then sold to a division of Eli Lilly & Co. in 2008. An analysis undertaken and published by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association concluded that while the hormone can increase milk production by up to 16 percent, it also increased the risk of lameness in cows by 55 percent, among other negative effects. rBGH, which is injected into cows, remains banned from use in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and most of Europe. However, the FDA maintains that milk from cows treated with rBGH is safe for human consumption and that there is no significant difference between the milk from cows treated with rBGH and milk from untreated cows.