Beyond Organic... What's the Big Deal?

Beyond Organic vs. Industrial Organic

What is industrial organic? Industrial organic is what you buy in the grocery store. Better known by brand names such as Horizon Organic, Cascadian Farms and Kashi and owned by the likes of Heinz, General Mills and Kellogg. It is mega-corporations cashing in on your emotional attachment to healthy food and bucolic farm scenes.

Unfortunately, industrial organic is mostly a front and marketing machine to separate you from even more of your food dollar. The organic market has ballooned into a $15,000,000,000 a year industry! Even Walmart is in the organic game now! Don’t get me wrong, industrial organic is organic good. It is better for you than the other sludge they offer in the store., but it is not fresh, not grown by your neighborhood farmer or even by a farmer at all. In fact, most of the organic produce sold in this country is grown by 6 mega-farms located California. Do not be misled, organic does not mean “small family farmer”. The men that run these farms don’t even want to be called “farmers”, they prefer the term “agri-businessmen”. The next time your searching for organic in the grocery store check to see how much of it is local. These stores are not supporting local farmers. Often there is only a token appearance and there are never any local meats available. Given the choice between local tomatoes and California organic tomatoes, which is the better choice? I argue it’s better to buy local even if not organic! Why? Because I would rather drive past fields of tomatoes on my way to the grocery store; not fields of townhouses.

Now take organic milk for example. Organic milk is “ultra-pasteurized”. Why? The only reason to use high heat on milk is to kill everything in it. This allows mega-producers to transport organic milk over long distances and store it on store shelves for long periods of time. That way they can centrally locate their mega-dairies near commodity centers where inputs are cheap. Do you see how this is beginning to look more and more like conventional food? According to our USDA organic dairies don’t even need to have the cows on grass. Now you have “organic” cows in dry feed lots just like conventional dairies with all the horrors that go along with the feed lot system. The only difference is that the corn they feed the cows is certified organic. Big deal. They put a shiny picture of a happy cow in a pasture on the milk carton to give us the emotional feeling that this product must be better. That’s simply fancy marketing capitalizing on your preconception of what organic means.

Beyond Organic

Enter Breakaway Farms and other local family farmers. First off, we are a family farm. We farm less than 150 acres with only the labor contained in our God given bodies. We are not certified organic, but we don’t need to be either, we have you as customers. You are the most discriminating and demanding judges of quality there is. If your not happy you don’t come back and we go out of business. It’s a very simple equation. If we want to stay in business we must demand nothing but excellence. We do not have fancy packaging and a marketing team to pump you for money. We depend on our product superiority and customer relationships to grow our business.

So, how does a small family farm compete with the mega-organics of the world? It's actually quite elementary. We have you. We cultivate relationships with our customers that the mega-organics cannot. We absolutely grow the best food in the world. We put cows on grass where they belong, we feed the poultry and pigs locally grown organic grains, we use local businesses to process your meats and we partner with like minded folks to present a unified front against industrial organic.

When you consider the total cost (superior nutrition and freshness, ecological impact, local sustainability, and humane treatment of animals) Breakaway Farms' beyond organic products will always be the better choice. We are immeasurably glad you buy our products. We just wanted you to know that. Thanks a million!