Dammit, Dannon!

Why Dannon's switch to non-GMO feed for their dairy cows is just a symptom of a larger problem

In April of last year, Dannon yogurt announced via their press release that within three years, they would no longer use synthetic or GMO ingredients in their milk, and they would also source all their feed so that it is certified GMO-free. In addition, Dannon committed to ensuring that the Non-GMO Project Verified label would be seen on their products as early as December 2017. With that date rapidly approaching, this decision has started to rock the dairy farming communities and cause Dannon's farmers to have to make drastic changes to their production systems.

On the surface, committing to sustainability, as Dannon claims they are attempting to do, is a noble cause. Certainly all farmers make sustainability their top goal because it helps ensure a safe, nutritious product that they can feed to their own families and to their communities. With that being said, Dannon's contract farmers are vastly at odds with the company's changes. Why? Money. They don't like being told they have to source non-GMO feed because it's more expensive. Some of this is because a good portion of it has to be imported from overseas, since it's hard to qualify for the non-GMO project label, and because crop farmers generally prefer to grow GMO crops. Ironically, Dannon's motive is also money. They, like companies such as Chipotle and Whole Foods, want to capitalize on consumer fear surrounding GMOs. In doing so, they in turn contribute to a different kind of consumer ignorance about where food comes from. Dannon figured they'd capitalize on the expamding market for non-GMO and organic food by buying out an organic food company and by adding that nasty green, blue, and orange label to their products. Joke's on them, because it hasn't been working.

After their press release and their $10 billion purchase of Whitewave Food Co. (an organic food company), Dannon's stocks began to plummet, according to this stock market report. In fact, this year Dannon experienced their weakest first quarter sales growth in a decade. This is no accident. Consumers are at last becoming wise to the fact that non-GMO is a marketing gimmick. Farmers prefer to plant GMO crops because they decrease pesticide use and even carbon footprint, saving farmers money on insecticides and diesel, and by allowing farmers to use less harsh herbicides on their crops. In their press release, Dannon brags about using more sustainable methods, but this could not be further from reality. GMOs are the ultimate model of sustainability because of their role in reducing pesticide use and increasing yields and nutritional value, as with golden rice, and in preventing certain blights from wiping out entire crops, as with rainbow papaya in Hawaii.

Rainbow Papaya tree

I wish I could say Dannon was the only large company to use this sort of marketing scheme, but unfortunately that's not the case. McDonald's recently announced it would begin selling organic apple juice as an option in its happy meals. General Mills and Kellog's are now promoting their new GMO-free products in the form of the Annie's Homegrown and GoLean Crunch! brands. And to put the cherry on top of all of this, Stonyfild Organic, the company that funded Food Inc. (a biased, anti-GMO, anti-conventional agriculture, pro-organic documentary full of fear-mongering and scare tactics) was bought up by none other than Danone (the company that makes Dannon) in 2003. in 2015, Kroger Grocery sold $11 million dollars worth of organic products, a number that challenged even Whole Foods.

Every time changes like these happen, contract farmers are forced to change their business practices, just like Dannon's farmers are as we speak. As natural, organic, and non-GMO sales rise, so do the number of companies selling them. Dannon's callous treatment of their farmers in the name of profit and fear (even though the profit bit hasn't been working out lately) is merely a symptom of the real problem: consumer ignorance about food.

That's the root of all this trouble.

According to the former Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, 98% of American citizens are several generations removed from a farm. As a result, people no longer know how their food is grown, and in the age of social media, rely on what they see online to gather information on food production. This is problematic when they see headlines like "Study reveals GMO corn to be highly toxic" or "Seven Ways GMOs Poison Animals, Plants, and Soil." Both of these are real headlines, but I didn't link them because these people don't deserve to make advertisement money on this trash. The first makes several grave errors, especially when it says, "According to the analysis, GMO corn tested by Profit Pro contains a number of elements absent from traditional cor[n], including chlorides, formaldehyde and glyphosate." Technically table salt is a chloride (NaCl), and there's formaldehyde in pears, even organic ones. Finally, glyphosate isn't nearly as toxic as other pesticides (including organic ones), and in fact it's less toxic than caffeine, table salt, chocolate, baking soda, and even apple cider vinegar. I wonder what the foodies think of that fact.

According to he second article, "The recently released bombshell Seralini Study on GMOs and cancer rats fed a lifetime of GMOs sprayed with the toxic Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide developed serious tumors that took over their entire bodies," and, "A 2011 report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that the Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt) bacteria engineered into Monsanto’s GM corn can now be found in hundreds of streams and waterways and groundwater sources throughout the U.S. Midwest." The rat study was famously retracted because there were numerous glaring holes in it. When a paper is retracted, it means its conclusions are no longer thought of as valid by the general scientific community (we call this process "peer-review"), so the journal unpublishes it with or without the author's consent. Moreover, the second quote is laughable because it actually helps the conventional agriculture argument more than it hurts it. GMO corn does not contain the whole bacteria. In fact, it only contains a single gene called the Bt Delta protein. Since a single protein is not an organism, why is the bacterium showing up in waterways? I have a feeling that it has to do with the fact that Bt bacteria (the whole organism, not just a protein) is used as the most common pesticide applied to none other than ORGANIC (in other words non-GMO) crops.

The problem is that people see this garbage on the internet and don't know how to fact check it. the non-GMO and organic gurus can be pretty convincing, but the fact is they're nothing more than wolves in sheep's clothing. As a result, people feel compelled to purchase overpriced, unnecessary food, including single mothers struggling to get by that just want their kids to grow up healthy, and families who live in poverty, but are afraid of wild marketing claims. They are the true sufferers of these lies. And in the end, all Dannon has done is fuel the fire, at the expense of farmers and the general public.

Dammit, Dannon!

I'm a full-time college student at Texas A&M University, where I'm in the process of getting my Animal Science degree, with eventual aspirations to go to law school and work as a consulting lawyer for agriculture corporations. I grew up around animals, and currently manage an operation that breeds show-quality boer goats for 4H and FFA exhibitors. My family also raises commercial cattle in south Texas, where I also gained experience with cotton farming as an intern.