The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) submitted a formal Complaint to the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) against the California-based company, Bayliss Ranch, and the organic certifier, Quality Assurance International (QAI), for illegally counting ordinary water in Bayliss Ranch’s water extracts as “organic.” This scheme enables Bayliss Ranch’s customers – manufacturers of food and body care products for Consumers such as Avalon. Nature’s Gate, and Jason’s – to make fraudulent claims that their body care products are “70% organic,” by counting the ordinary water in the Bayliss extracts as the primary “organic” content of the products. OCA says this practice threatens to undermine consumer confidence in the USDA organic label, which assures consumers that products claiming organic status are truly at least 70% organic WITHOUT counting water as “organic.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed changes to federal regulations that would lump sewage sludge in with organic composts and label them all “compost made from recovered organic materials,” says the mid-winter issue of Organic Farms, Folks & Food from NOFA-New York. The EPA admits that the purpose of the amendment is to foster markets for materials recovered from solid waste. Sludge is prohibited for use in organic agriculture under the National Organic Standards, after a huge public outcry when USDA first proposed allowing its use on organic farms. The EPA amendment could confuse growers by calling sludge organic, in the chemical sense of the term (meaning it contains carbon molecules).