Staff of Wisconsin watchdog group threatened by employee of national organic certifier

A California man made violent threats against leaders of an organic industry watchdog group based in southwest Wisconsin, an investigation found.

Vernon County Sheriff’s Office identified 23-year-old Gabriel Ramirez of Santa Cruz, California as the source of several threatening emails and a threatening phone call made to staff at the La Farge-based nonprofit OrganicEye.

Ramirez was employed at the time by California Certified Organic Farmers, or CCOF, the nation’s largest USDA-accredited organic certification service.

Ramirez began sending the messages in November 2023, shortly after OrganicEye filed a formal complaint with the National Organic Program over alleged conflicts of interest at CCOF. 

The watchdog group claimed CCOF had not effectively separated its certification service from the group’s nonprofit foundation. The group claimed that could allow major national organic brands to use charitable donations to the foundation to sway the company’s decisions around organic certification.

Mark Kastel, executive director of OrganicEye, said he’s been threatened with lawsuits before over the group’s investigations into alleged misconduct in the organic industry. But these messages threatened violence against himself and his family, as well as other OrganicEye employees and their families.

“I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and this is the first threat of violence we’ve received,” Kastel said.

A sheriff’s department investigator was able to get a search warrant for phone records related to a threatening call made in February 2024. The investigator traced the call to a personal cellphone belonging to Ramirez.

Sheriff Roy Torgerson said both Ramirez and his employer cooperated with his department’s investigation. His department has referred the case to Vernon County District Attorney Angela Palmer-Fisher for review, including a potential felony charge of threats to injure.

“Just completing the investigation and identifying the source sends a very loud message to our community that we don’t tolerate this type of behavior,” Torgerson said. “Where it goes from here, I don’t know if it’s as important as it was taken this far and it was taken seriously.”

A spokesperson for CCOF said in an email that the company was informed by local police on Feb. 20 that Ramirez allegedly made threats against Kastel. CCOF placed Ramirez on administrative leave and conducted an internal investigation, which ended in Ramirez’s termination five days later.

“CCOF has a zero-tolerance policy regarding violence or threats of violence,” the company said in a statement. “We unequivocally do not condone any threat of violence to any person at any time under any circumstances.”

In a signed letter shared by OrganicEye, Ramirez apologized to Kastel on Feb. 24, saying he did not intend to cause “harm, fear or distress” and stating he acted as an individual, not as a representative of CCOF. 

Kastel said he offered to forgo seeking charges against Ramirez in exchange for the apology. But he said his organization is interested in investigating whether criticism or statements made by CCOF leadership may have motivated Ramirez to act.

“This is certainly symptomatic of a society that is not being polite to each other,” he said. “There’s some kind of false insulation that people feel exists when they interact online. Many people say and do things that they would never say face to face, and so it is a problem.”