December 26, 2003 The Washington Post by Margaret Webb Pressler,

To be certified as being organic by the Agriculture Department, beef cattle must be fed a strictly vegetarian diet, which would prevent them from being exposed to the kind of tainted feed suspected of causing the mad cow disease discovered in Washington state.

Additionally, organic cattle farmers rarely process meat from sick or injured animals, a common practice in the traditional meatpacking business that has been criticized by some food-safety activists. Organic producers also say they don't employ the kind of high-tech, high-pressure meat extraction systems used in traditional meat processing that some critics say can pull tissue from areas where the infection mostly occurs, the spinal column and brain, into the surrounding muscle tissue.

These differences cannot guarantee that a cow raised organically will not develop mad cow disease, however, because some of the ways the disease is transmitted are still unknown. And non-organic cuts of beef are considered safe, according to federal food-safety officials who note that the disease has never been found in muscle meat from an infected cow -- such as steaks and roasts.

Nevertheless, food scares can cause consumers to change their habits quickly, often without regard to actual science or true risk.

"Food has always been considered special in terms of risk factor," said Elizabeth M. Whelan, executive director of the American Council on Science and Health, a New York-based nonprofit organization that tries to educate consumers on issues related to food, nutrition, the environment and health. "People are willing to choose alternatives even if there's no rational basis for it."

And because of that, organic beef producers expect to benefit.

"Without a doubt it will be good for our business," said Seldon Moreland, a spokesman for Dakota Beef Co. of Chicago, the nation's biggest producer of organic beef. "More than that, it's going to be good for the consumer because it's going to help us get into the national grocery chains."

Whole Foods Market Inc., the nation's largest natural-foods grocery company, experiences an increase in business after every food-safety issue that gets major media attention, said company spokeswoman Sarah Kenney. Now the chain is anticipating an influx of organic beef-buying customers because so many people have been eating more meat due to the popularity of the Atkins diet and others like it. "A lot of people added red meat back into their diet because it was cool to do that and considered healthful," she said.

The biggest difference between organically and traditionally raised cows is what they are fed. Organic cows are fed grass and grain exclusively, and their feed cannot be supplemented with blood from slaughterhouses or any other kinds of animal waste.

In the traditional cattle business, though, such products are sometimes added to grain to boost its food value. One way mad cow disease can be spread is through infected neurological tissue in animal feed.

"Blood is used as a very high protein feedstuff in some dairy cattle diets," said Gary Weber, executive director of regulatory affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. Weber explained that the available research has shown that such animal byproducts do not carry disease and are safe. But introducing animal byproducts into animal feed clearly creates some risk. Federal regulators say it's most likely the cow in Washington state was contaminated by feed that had been illegally or accidentally supplemented with infected neurological tissue.

"It's a 99.9 percent probability [the cow] consumed prohibited material that had a BSE [mad cow disease] agent in it," Weber said. "We need to find out where that feed came from."

An organic cow theoretically would not be exposed to mad cow disease from tainted feed, but that doesn't mean one could never get the disease. A non-organic cow may produce organic offspring as long as she is cared for organically starting in the third trimester of gestation. But that cow could theoretically be infected because the disease has a long gestation period. Because it's unknown if a cow can transmit the disease to her calf, federal officials have quarantined the calves of the sick cow in Washington as a precautionary measure.

Consumers who decide to buy organic might be buying themselves only peace of mind, not necessarily greater safety.

But if people are willing to pay for that, the organic business may benefit in another way: using the higher prices it can command to recruit more ranchers to raise organic beef. Cattlemen have been enjoying high prices for anything they could sell in recent years because of heavy demand. Beef prices are up 25 percent just since May.

But cattle futures have been falling sharply since Tuesday's news about the discovery of mad cow disease. If prices continue to fall, the price gap between organic and traditionally produced beef could grow. Traders are worried not only about falling domestic demand, but also about closed export markets, as 26 countries now have banned the importation of U.S. beef. Cattle futures fell 3.4 percent yesterday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the daily price-change limit.

For a traditional rancher, at least for a while, times could be quite lean. That's good news for Moreland of organic producer Dakota Beef.

"What we anticipate is that people will see its worth the effort to go from a conventional producer to step up and become certified organic," he said.