Whole Foods isn't alone in riding the natural foods craze. Stroll through many grocery stores nowadays, and you'll see "cage-free" eggs, "free-range" chickens and milk minus "growth hormones."

It's still a niche market, but increasingly Americans are willing to pay premium prices for food they think tastes better or feel is better for them.

That might explain why agribusiness giant Monsanto is leading a so-called "grass-roots" effort to get rid of labels such as those above at the expense of guys like Leroy Shatto, who sells hormone-free milk in glass bottles hereabouts.

"Everybody that buys our product," said Shatto, a dairyman from Clinton County, Mo., "that's the first question they ask: 'Do you treat your cows with growth hormone?' People need to have the right to know what is in their food."

Or what's not in it.

Yet for two days this week, a Kansas Senate committee heard testimony on a bill that would make it illegal to label food "as having a compositional claim that cannot be confirmed through laboratory analysis or to state a compositional or production-related claim that is supported solely by sworn statements, affidavits, or testimonials."

Translation:

Because milk can't be tested for the presence of growth hormone, dairies like Shatto's couldn't represent their products as hormone-free in Kansas, even if they had mountains of proof that their cows weren't injected with growth hormone.

A similar challenge would face the farmer who sells grass-fed beef, or raises chickens the old-fashioned way, rather than in a huge warehouse.

Full Story:
http://www.kansascity.com/115/story/510611.html