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In 1989, a long-time dairy farmer in Central Vermont named Peter Flint won awards for having the highest production herd of Jersey cows in the United States. And yet for Peter and his wife Bunny, this distinction was more of a wake-up call than a celebration. "We didn't like that kind of notoriety, actually," Peter Flint recalled in a 2012 interview. "It wasn't us. It was a lot of stress." Like many American dairy farmers at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, Flint was burned out by the pressure he felt to continually increase milk production. "I felt like I didn't like myself very much," he said. "We were doing a lot of embryo work and feeding the cows eight times a day, starting at 3:30 in the morning. I said, 'I don't want to farm like this, for the sake of my cows.'" Flint believed his Jersey milk to be of superior quality, and he was determined to stop shipping to Agri-Mark, a Northeast milk cooperative. The couple decided to follow their dream of processing their own milk products, so they sold their milking cows and started an organic herd with 28 heifers in the fall of 1989. They bought used processing equipment and set up a small plant to make cheese and bottle milk in glass bottles under the name The Organic Cow of Vermont.
After several years of steady sales in local stores, they moved on to milk cartons. When these launched in 1994, sales took off rapidly. "It was like instantaneous," Flint explained. Organic Cow entered a phase of growth not because of the move to cartons, but as a result of a recent event that would soon catapult organic dairy products into the mainstream: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) for use in milk production. The highly publicized controversy over rBST laid the foundation for growing demand for organic dairy products, which, according to organic certification rules, came from cows not treated with rBST. In just a few years, organic dairy was transformed from a niche product available only in health food stores to a staple of conventional supermarkets and a "crossover" food for consumers previously unaccustomed to buying organic.