https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/the-great-organic-food-fraud
Long article. TLDR: once a farm has been certified organic, it is possible (and illegal! But apparently fairly easy) to purchase and sell that kind of produce elsewhere, and that may or may not be organically raised. In the case of Randy Constant, a broker for Organic Land Management, he was buying--and selling at a premium--far more corn than could possibly be raised on his acreage:
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I see an awful lot of grocery-store products that are labeled "organic". With the massive increase in goods labeled "organic, I wonder how many produce/meat/milk products are genuinely organic, and how widespread this fraudulent practice is.
Long article. TLDR: once a farm has been certified organic, it is possible (and illegal! But apparently fairly easy) to purchase and sell that kind of produce elsewhere, and that may or may not be organically raised. In the case of Randy Constant, a broker for Organic Land Management, he was buying--and selling at a premium--far more corn than could possibly be raised on his acreage:
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"There was a pause. Bushman then asked, with evident anxiety, how much corn Organic Land Management had been growing in Missouri in recent years. About fifteen hundred acres, Borgerding said. Both men were again silent. Borgerding recalls, “You could have heard a pin drop.”
The math didn’t work: Bushman had been buying far more corn from Constant than could possibly have been grown on Organic Land Management’s Missouri farms. It began to dawn on Borgerding that “we were not talking about a load or two—we’re talking millions of dollars of grain.” He recalls concluding that Constant might have just been acting as a broker on the side—buying grain from other organic farmers and then selling it on. Borgerding laughed, weakly, then said, “Or he was doing something else.”
Constant was, in fact, passing off non-organic grain as organic grain. The scheme, in which at least half a dozen associates were involved, is the largest-known fraud in the history of American organic agriculture: prosecutors accused him of causing customers to spend at least a quarter of a billion dollars on products falsely labelled with organic seals."
----------I see an awful lot of grocery-store products that are labeled "organic". With the massive increase in goods labeled "organic, I wonder how many produce/meat/milk products are genuinely organic, and how widespread this fraudulent practice is.
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