Cornucopia Institute: Organic activists campaign against GMOs, ‘corporate’ farming

The Cornucopia Institute (Cornucopia) was launched in 2004 by Mark Kastel and Will Fantle. It’s initial funding is murky. A claim that Cornucopia was started with donations from Organic Valley, a large farming cooperative, has been disputed by Kastel. Kastel was a public relations consultant for much of his career who, according to Kastel, helped launch the Organic Valley brand in the 1980s and 90s. He wrote in 2011:

Then I helped found the Cornucopia Institute eight years ago, when it looked like the wheels would fall off of this movement; when the giant corporate agri-businesses that has squeezed family farmers out of conventional farming, and that were responsible for the deterioration in the nutrient level and the safety of our food, were buying out, on a wholesale basis, all the brands that had launched the organic commercial movement.

Organic Valley is a cooperative of organic farmers based in La Farge, Wisconsin. Founded in 1988, it is the largest organic farmer-owned cooperative in the world with over 1,800 farmer-owners across the United States, Canada and Australia. Organic Valley markets products in all 50 states and exports to 25 countries. In 2015, annual sales topped $1 billion. The NGO is nearby in La Farge, WI......

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