Please join us for this stakeholder session on Minimum Regenerative Standards for retail food claims. This session will focus on regenerative dairy production. Guest panelists include Dr. Meg Cattell (CSU), Phil Forbes (Kalona) and Phyllis Van Amburgh (Dharma Lea). Pics and bios below.

As our work groups sessions unfold, we now turn to how regenerative dairy production is managed. It's imperative to know how feed is grown, how pastures and paddocks are maintained, and how milking, pasturing, and harvest are managed. Vaccinations, antibiotics and other pharmaceutical use will be examined. Animal welfare and environmental outcomes are key.

This session on regenerative dairy production builds on previous conversations about Synthetics, Soil Health and Fertility and Compost, Manure, and Cover Crops, Tillage, Ruminant Livestock, and Hogs and Poultry, by asking what are the best practices - and worst practices - when managing dairy production in a regenerative system. Our panelists are practitioners with skills honed from decades of experimentation and learning. They also bring cautionary tales of shortcuts and unpredicted outcomes.

The session is organized around the following topics to help stay focused but also embrace the holistic complexity of dairy production:

PART ONE: What is the longstanding and ancient human relationship to milk animals?
• Safe and nutritious meat/milk/preserved food/ byproducts produced by animals consuming inedible grass and non-potable water
• Key foundation for family and community food sovereignty and resilience.
• A system that cares for animals and ecological outcomes.
• Source of manure fertility for food crops

PART 2: What are the current best practices in dairy in North America and are they still similar?
• Animal welfare
• Pasturing
• Grassfed ecology
• Appropriate breeds
• Scale of operation
• Feed, forage
• Confinement .and manure management
• Local processing and consumption

PART 3: We need to take a moment to describe conventional and large-scale dairy industry’s weak points, where the economic and ecological system built to support it often undermines some longstanding best practices.
• Substantial grain and silage feeding
• Feed crops produced with GMO and conventional pesticides
• Concentrated confinement and antibiotic treatment
• No real and consistent access to living pasture
• Little improvement to ecological outcomes

PART 4: Describe the tensions between higher production costs, and consumer demand when weighing higher retail prices.
• Accounting for the integration of true costs into production system instead of externalizing costs to environment, animal welfare, community vitality.
• What works to communicate to shoppers the values behind the higher price?
• What works to communicate to shoppers how low-priced industrial milk is based on externalized costs to the animal welfare, worker welfare, farmers, and local ecology?
• Why are some smaller certified organic dairies struggling to maintain market share and stay in operation? Do legitimate label claims help fix this imbalance?

PART 5: Comparing label claims and certification systems
• What parts of current best practices are addressed by USDA organic certification and which are not?
• Grassfed, herd size, access to pasture, antibiotics, weaning, grain supplements, nutrition supplements, insemination.
• Origin or livestock, non-GMO grain and silage, antibiotic use
• Are current NOP Organic rules comprehensive? Consistent? Enforced?
• Is there a regenerative claim whose requirements meet your own expectations of “regenerative”?
• What practices and outcomes make a dairy operation regenerative?
• Can average shoppers consistently match practices to label claims across brands?

All session info at https://ifoamnorthamerica.org/regenerative-minimum-standards/ New podcasts released every three weeks.