Stonyfield Farm, purveyor of organic yogurt and milk, is concerned that some folks got the wrong idea about its business strategy from a recent Business Week article about the big-ification of organic, which I pointed to a couple of weeks ago.
Stonyfield has now posted a response and clarification on its website, emphasizing its long-standing commitment to supporting organic family farms. It also points out that it hasn’t yet bought one dash of powdered milk from New Zealand (and might never), and that powdered milk makes up less than 5 percent of milk used in its yogurt — a small supplement rather than a primary ingredient.
This jives with what “farmer” said in his comment under my last post:
In defense of Stonyfield — As someone who has dairy farmed in Vermont for 30 years, the last five years organically, I would like to say that the 100 or so organic small dairy farms, would not be here, because my co-op (OrganicValley) supplies Stonyfield with organic milk produced in Vermont. I certainly can understand the concern with these big corporations getting into organic, but the fact is, under our present system, all those small organic farms that the general public wants to see, would not be there without Stonyfield buying our organic milk.
