As with several of the other ingredients, however, the realities of the modern farming and food production system prove even more counter-intuitive. “Harvesting" intestines for sausage casings, it turns out, is a specialty that many slaughterhouses don’t offer, and none of the small-scale hog farmers or processors interviewed by The Daily Green could fathom a certified organic slaughterhouse getting into the business.

“I’m not aware of them being available anywhere," said Mike Lorentz, CFO of Lorentz Meats, a growing business based in Minnesota that does every part of the organic meat processing process from slaughter to packaging.

At one time in America, small regional slaughterhouses catered to local, family farms. But the industrialization of the meat industry resulted in a few big firms handling most of the processing in large centralized plants, and many of those small slaughterhouses disappeared in lockstep with the demise of the family farm and encroachment of suburbia.

“The problem with the little guys like ourselves is finding a processor that can do it," said Denise Brownlee, an owner of Wil-Den Family Farms, which makes sausages and other products from naturally raised (not certified organic) pigs. “They are so few and far between."

Even as boutique farmers are finding growing markets for their sausages at farmers’ markets and the like, they often find it harder to process their animals.

Keith Cooper, owner of Sweet Briar Farms in Oregon, estimated that setting up shop to process his own pigs, which are not certified organic but which meet nearly all the USDA requirements, would cost about $500,000.

Lorentz Meats is expanding its business into markets where a concentration of small farmers in a region need a small-scale organic processing plant. But even Lorentz could foresee no business for organic sausage casings because there would not be a great enough concentration of organic farmers in any one area to supply enough animals, and because the “harvesting" process is so difficult. Most natural casings, he said, are imported.

“I think it would be so cost-prohibitive," he said, adding that sausage makers would opt for skinless organic sausages rather than paying for organic natural casings.

It’s a case of “organic" and related marketing labels helping to cater to consumer demand for local and sustainable foods, at a time when the industrialized agribusiness has already run away with the means of production. One farmer, who pays close attention to every environmental and ethical aspect of her business, admitted she didn’t even know where her sausage casings originate.

“I guess I’ve never really thought about it," she said.

Other options for organic sausage makers are off the table because they are synthetic and represent “a step away from the ‘minimally-processed’ food paradigm which is at the heart of the organic production philosophy," according to the petition by Organic Valley-Organic Prairie, North American Natural Sausage Casings Association and Applegate Farms to include natural casings on the USDA list. Non-organic sausage is most often encased with peelable cellulose or eatable collagen.

Since organic natural sausage casings are not available, and since the non-organic casing represents only about 1% of the sausage, the product meets the USDA requirements for an organic label.