Monsanto Company has put its Posilac division up for sale. Posilac, as you all know, is a genetically modified bovine growth hormone that has been controversial in the dairy industry for over twenty years. Bad press and reluctant submission to the grocery industry giants who finally got the point that their customers demanded rBGH-free milk may be a hopeful sign that this battle has been won. We shall see. So far, there are no buyers.

Posilac is a powerful synthetic hormone that boosts milk production in cows. No test for rBGH residue exists, another failure on the part of the FDA who approved the drug in the first place and violated its own rules for mandatory residue testing. Recent studies by professors at Cornell and Penn State making claims for its benefits are only another small example of how money corrupts academia. Professor Bauman of Cornell made the point that more milk from fewer cows meant less belching, farting and pooping, an environmental plus.

What is green to us is not green to the academics still pushing Posilac. According to the professors, less yield from cows grazing on grass is a bad thing indeed. The ‘characteristic reduction in yield conferred by pasture based systems can be attributed to a lack of an adequate supply of nutrients, especially metabolizable energy, and the greater maintenance energy expenditure associated with grazing behavior.’ It’s just not efficient! (Full disclosure: Cornell, my alma mater, no longer invites me to speak, as I once did regularly, over issues like this).

And yet over 80% of Americans polled thought injecting cows with hormones was a bad idea. This is a clear example of mass market, grass roots support eventually challenging big business and government. Oddly enough, statistics on milk production per cow, published by the USDA, show no significant increase in milk production in this country since Prosilac was introduced in 1994 beyond the ordinary upward trend over the past fifty years. Some cows, it turns out, don’t produce more on the drug at all. Our colleague Paul Kindstedt, in an early study, found that casein, a key component of cheese and cultured dairy products, actually decreased in rBGH -treated cows.

Although the FDA acknowledged that milk from injected cows contains much higher levels of insulin-like growth factor (igf-1) , a suspected carcinogen; and that Monsanto’s own studies showed the animals’ highly stimulated metabolism caused the abnormal growth of their organs and glands; and that multiple births in humans were also linked to increased igf-1 levels in milk; and that milk duct tissue cancers in post menopausal women in the USA rose about 55% in the five years following rBGH’s sale and widespread use; and that the American nurses association and the AMA both asked hospitals to feed patients rBGH-free dairy products, it was the consumer, via the large grocery chains, that put the final pressure on Monsanto to sell the division.

More and more, the public is being educated about the dangers that industrial agriculture poses to the health and well being of our citizens. But the industrialization of our food supply continues nonetheless. (For example, in our own field, cheese, Leprino Foods is building a huge plant in Colorado to produce low grade pizza cheese, whatever that is. At full capacity, the plant will utilize 7 million pounds of milk per day. The whole state of Colorado now produces 2.7 million pounds of milk per day). It is my belief that good business practices and well-earned profits are not best achieved by the illusion of efficiency at the expense of true costs to health, worker welfare, or the environment and how we live in it. That method of business maximizes profits in the short term only, and the long term costs – the true costs – always prevail in the end.

sources: Pete Hardin; John Bunting; Paul Kindstedt.