On some bureaucrat's desk in President Obama's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sits a document that has the power to either destroy the nation's 1,800 family-operated organic dairy farms or come to their rescue.

In the early 2000s, virtually all of the nation's organic dairy farmers-not to mention the millions of consumers willing to pay a premium for organic products-agreed that milk certified as organic by the United States Department of Agriculture had to come from cows that had access to pasture. As government regulations go, it sounds pretty straightforward: room to roam, clean air to breathe, fresh grass to eat. And that was the general consensus on what the National Organic Standards required.

But beginning in the mid-2000s, about the time it became evident that the green "USDA Organic" label translated into bigger profits, Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with herds of up to 10,000 cows located in western states got into the organic milk business. There was one obvious problem. How do you provide pasture for thousands of hungry cows in a semi-arid landscape that would, at best, produce enough feed for a few dozen animals?

The answer, according to Mark Kastel--co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based advocacy group for organic family farms--is that the corporations that owned the CAFOs did everything they could to muddy the definition of "access to pasture."

In some cases, a narrow, grassless strip outside the vast barns where the animals were kept was considered "pasture" because some hay had been spread there. In addition, National Organic Standard Board (NOSB) regulations that allowed companies to keep cows and their very young calves indoors for a short period after birth were twisted to include all milking cows being kept inside 24/7 for 310 days a year.

Just take a quick glance at these photographs from Cornucopia and draw your own conclusions about whether this method of farming looks organic.

Either through bureaucratic lassitude or willful neglect, USDA officials helped the big producers every step of the way. "Between 2000 and 2008, they basically sat back and did nothing," Kastel said in an interview.

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