This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Adam Warthesen, vice president of government and industry affairs and sustainability at Organic Valley.
The discussion explores a recent lawsuit filed by the Coalition for Organic Dairy Exemption — which includes the La Farge-based co-op — challenging elements of the federal milk marketing program. This system prices milk from U.S. farms, applying set regulations to milk handlers that buy and sell milk as well, such as Organic Valley.
Warthesen says the co-op in western Wisconsin is unique due to only handling organic dairy products. He argues the national pricing system first created in the 1930s “doesn’t fit the organic marketplace in any way shape or form” in its current state.
“It actually creates a problem, in that it extracts resources that should otherwise live in the organic dairy ecosystem,” he said.
The co-op has been raising concerns about the law for more than a decade, first petitioning for a change in 2015 with no success, Warthesen explained. The only way to change the federal milk system is a national hearing process with a related vote by farmers, or an act of Congress, he said.
During a national hearing held by the USDA in 2023, the co-op said “organic receives no benefit from the orders, our pricing is completely detached from how the orders function,” among other concerns. Warthesen said the federal agency didn’t accept any of the proposals aimed at addressing these concerns, instead moving forward with more narrow formula changes that came into effect in 2025.
But those changes resulted in greater costs for organic businesses in the coalition, prompting the new lawsuit announced last month.
“It increased our costs to the pooling, which is how the dollars get moved around, by 60%,” he said. “So we’re not talking a couple hundred thousand dollars here or there, we’re talking about millions upon millions of dollars annually, that a company like ours is putting into this pool that is then redistributed back to conventional dairy farmers.”
The coalition is challenging the federal system through multiple legal avenues, including one seeking $60 million to offset some of the costs of being required to participate in the program.
“The legal action is one that we didn’t want to have to take, but the [USDA] has been unresponsive,” Warthesen said. “And this isn’t organic versus conventional, this is organic saying this is government intervention into the organic marketplace that does not make sense.”
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
