Just How Organic Is Your Milk? Well, It Depends On The Dairy It Came From

Organic milk is widely available these days, but what does that label really mean? A new investigation from The Washington Post found that there are considerable differences between the organic milk you can buy in a grocery store and the kind you can buy straight from farmers. Peter Whoriskey investigated the Aurora Organic Dairy, which supplies house-brand organic milk to many large retailers and other large dairy operations. He joined NPR's Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday to talk about what he found out from his investigation. We tested them chemically, and you can see from the results how much time a cow has been eating pasture, which is what organic cows are supposed to be doing. And you could see, you know, conventional milk was very low in the grass-fed department. And some of the organic milk, especially ones from very small farms, was quite high. The larger corporate organic milks were sort of in the middle. And there was one large organic producer that was actually almost identical to conventional milk.