Even without overalls or a red barn (his are green), third-generation dairy farmer Jon Bansen evokes the days when milk really did arrive on our doorsteps at dawn. With his wife and four young blond children, Bansen raises 200 Jersey cows in the shadow of Oregon's coastal mountains. On a recent clear morning, as frost melts beneath a bright sky, cows with names such as Eileen and Trish crowd around Bansen, rubbing their noses on his jeans.

"I'm a grass farmer first -- if I don't grow grass well, there's nothing for the cows," Bansen explains. "It's all about the health of the cow; it starts with healthy soil, and that relates to a healthy plant, and it just goes all the way up the food chain. Really, if people just use common sense, it's an absolute no-brainer. If an animal is healthier, what they produce will be healthier."

Bansen describes how he rotates his cows to graze different sections of his 310 acres of grass so that the land isn't overgrazed and trampled. During the winter months, when the Oregon rains make grazing dangerous for the cows, Bansen feeds the animals pickled grass that he cut last season. Today, Bansen sells his milk to Organic Valley, a cooperative owned and run by nearly 700 families with an emphasis on pasture. In 2004, it sold $208 million worth of milk, butter and yogurt. He and his wife make an income comparable to that of doctors or lawyers and he has three employees who make up to $35,000 annually.

Yet if the USDA continues to allow big companies like Horizon to play by different standards, Bansen says his livelihood will be at stake. If large dairies don't invest in the cost of land for pasture, they can sell their milk for less. While the large demand for a limited supply of organic milk has kept prices high for everyone, Bansen worries that when more large confinement dairies like Horizon enter the market, they will dictate cheaper prices.

"We can't compete with somebody milking 6,000 cows who's doing it in a manner that doesn't cost as much," he says, sitting in his living room that overlooks a broad green field. "Big dairies threaten the structure of rural America, which is contingent on living-wage jobs. Organic has provided for small family businesses."

Already, some small dairy farmers say the big dairies are squeezing them off the shelf. About 30 miles southeast of Bansen's farm, Franz Wenz, owner of Noris Dairy Inc., the only independent organic milk producer and bottler in the Northwest, says only large operations like Organic Valley and Horizon can afford to spend big bucks on flashy marketing and offer supermarkets exclusive deals at lower prices.

"The big guys can bury us," says Wenz, an Austrian native with bushy eyebrows and heavy jowls. "They can make exclusive deals and say, 'You just take our product and we'll give you a good deal.' The stores don't understand that they're hurting themselves when they depend on just one company that can then control the price."

To stay in business, Wenz and his family have carved out a niche by selling and personally delivering their glass-bottled milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream and sour cream directly to more than 300 customers in the Portland and Eugene area. Wenz says he and his family intend to stick it out, despite hard financial times.

As the sun rises high above the morning's cloak of white fog, before us stretches the mythic American heritage dairy. Happy cows graze in a broad pasture of green grass. Only this time the picture is real.

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