Demand for organic soybeans is outstripping supply but farmers are having a difficult time increasing supply due to a shortage of seed and biotech contaminates from their non-organic neighbors, The Wall Street Journal reported. Currently 91% of USA soybeans are grown from genetically modified seed which is banned under the USDA Organic protocol. The premium for organic beans currently runs 15 to 20% above the $10 per bushel price of conventional soybeans. This has sent organic soybean users in two directions. One, to substitute non-organic beans for organic beans, and two, to buy their beans from China. Currently, China is the world’s largest grower of organic soybeans. Organic acreage there has increased from 40,000 hectares in 2002 to 3.4 million acres in 2006. Recently Dean Foods introduced a non-organic line of their Silk soymilk that is 30 cents a half gallon cheaper than their Certified Organic version. Of course, if consumers really want to save money, old-fashioned milk from cows is 50 cents a half gallon cheaper than the cheapest soybean milk.

Hydrogen, the most common energy source in the universe, has long been touted as the power of the future. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to produce, store and transport. Now, scientists at Ohio University have found that cheap quantities of hydrogen gas are released when they put a specially designed nickel electrode into a pool of urine and apply an electrical current, The Economist reports.. The scientists say the urine from one cow could supply hot water for 19 homes.

Low corn and natural gas prices have put American ethanol producers firmly in the black and have encouraged them to bring mothballed plants back on-line and to build new plants.. Estimates by the Renewable Fuels Association estimate that an additional 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol is on the way soon. This will more than offset the 1.2 billion gallons of production capacity from the idled plants. Archers Daniel Midland is building a brand new 275 million gallon plant in Columbus, Nebraska and another ADM plant of the same size will start up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, early in 2010. A 60 million gallon bankrupt plant in Burley, Idaho, has also asked the court for permission to reopen to take advantage of the current profitability. More sanguine analysts say that with gasoline demand still low all of this new production will quickly push the ethanol industry back into the red and will flush out the few remaining smaller players.

The USDA has decertified Promiseland Livestock LLC from the National Organic Program for four years citing multiple improprieties including not feeding organic grain to feedlotted cattle, selling fraudulent organic feed and "laundering" conventional cattle as organic. The company could have been fined millions of dollars for these violations but the USDA declined to do so. This calls into question just how tough the Obama administration is going to be in enforcing the organic law. Miles McEvoy, the new director of the National Organic Program, had previously stated that the program was entering a new "age of enforcement." His predecessor under the Bush administration largely refused to enforce the law at all. Promiseland with operations in Missouri and Nebraska was a major supplier of replacement dairy cattle to Dean Foods (Horizon Dairy), Natural Prairie in Texas and Aurora Dairy based in Colorado. Attention will now shift to Promiseland’s organic certifier, Quality Assurance International (QAI). QAI was also the certifier for Aurora Dairy which was cited by the USDA as having "willfully violated" 14 tenets of the organic law but which received no punishment for having done so.. QAI also certifies Dean Foods organic dairies. Critics of the USDA Certified Organic program point out that certifiers who earn big checks from the people they certify have no incentive to turn them in if they violate the law as this will end their certification fees. Such glaring inconsistencies and the lack of enforcement of the rules by the USDA have made many consumers skeptical of all Certified Organic products.

The Organic Trade Association has filed a friends of the court intervention in the consumer class-action lawsuit accusing the nation’s largest supplier of private-label organic milk, Aurora Dairy, of consumer fraud for not grazing its cows on pasture as the organic law requires. Aurora bottles private-label organic milk for Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway and many other grocery chains. Surprisingly, this support brief was supposedly funded by Organic Valley Co-op which has represented itself as the "alternative" to such large-scale organic milk suppliers and is the nation’s second largest supplier of organic milk. Mark Kastel of the non-profit farm policy research group, Cornucopia, said he was "flabbergasted" that a cooperative owned by family farmers would stick up for a corporation at the heart of the biggest scandal in the history of the organic food industry. Organic food industry lobbyists have said that the lawsuit would set a "dangerous precedent" for the industry as it would open all current organic production practices to scrutiny. Currently, it is assumed that up to one-third of America’s organic milk comes from large scale feedlot dairies rather than the small-scale pastoral dairies the industry like to publicize. Wal-Mart and Target food stores have been the subject of separate USDA investigations for misrepresented organic claims. "The 14 willful violations (by Aurora) prove that some organic certificates aren’t enough to demonstrate that a product is organic when marketed," said Kevin Engelbert, a nationally recognized organic leader and dairy farmer in Nichols, New York. "The ‘organicness" of questionable products must be challenged when necessary to maintain organic integrity." Consumer dismay over finding out that Certified organic milk was not what they thought they were buying is credited for at least some of the recent decline in demand for organic milk.

The USA Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority are both cracking down on food companies making undocumented health claims. In its first action the FDA rebuked General Mills, the maker of Cheerios, for claiming that it lowers cholesterol. The two agencies say they will now require that all companies back up food health claims with fully transparent scientific studies that do not cherry-pick the results and that publish unfavorable results. Claims recently rejected include those made for cocoa as a weight loss activator, quinoa as a hair restorer and Jerusalem artichokes as gut health restorer. Food manufacturers are squalling saying that this will squash what had been the food industry’s fastest growing segment and that the need for studies will limit health foods to large corporations who can afford the scientific research. The food companies hoped to produce more of what they called "functional foods" that would function similar to drugs. They said that most of their claims were based upon historical research that goes back many generations. The food regulators said that if food companies wanted to make claims similar to drugs they must be prepared to submit their products to similar scrutiny.