My crisis of faith in organic foods

I'm having a crisis. My faith in organic food has been shaken, and I'm doing some soul searching as I try to figure out what's right for my family.

The setup: I'm a strong believer in buying locally, and I think that, in theory, the benefits to buying organic food are so obvious that it would take an act of willful ignorance to deny them.  I want to buy food that is free of added hormones and antibiotics, free of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.  I don't want the animals that provide our family's food to have been fed a steady diet of trash (no, worse than trash) their whole lives.  I want to support farms that don't add to our mounting environmental problems.

Yet I've been running into problems on a near-weekly basis with what I'm buying.  I have to question the intelligence of purchasing food that just ends up being thrown away.  I don't have money to waste.  Who does?

Let's take this week's purchases:  broccoli and organic milk.  The broccoli was locally grown, and cheaper than grocery-bought broccoli.  The milk is from a local organic dairy, and much more pricey than grocery store skim.  I bought the broccoli on Saturday and attempted to cook it Sunday night, but it was already bad.  All of it.  When I purchased it, I knew that I would have to use it soon, but within a 36 hour period it went from quite acceptable to completely unusable.  I tried to cook up the nicest parts to see if any of it was salvageable, and it was terrible.  The entire purchase went unused.

And then the milk.  I'm actually a little post-traumatic stressed about this.  I had previously bought milk from this dairy three times, with good results.  But last week's milk was terrible immediately.  It was...chunky.  I poured a glass, saw that it was bad and poured it out.  I poured a second glass and realized it was the same.  Then I smelled it.  It was absolutely bad.  I tried salvaging it by using a little as cream in my coffee and even that was totally unpalatable.  I poured it all down the drain.  This week I bought skim milk instead, from the same dairy.  The expiration date on the milk is still ten days away, but as of today the milk was absolutely bad.  I noticed it when I poured some in my coffee and it came out like a big dollop of slime.  Slime - I've never seen milk do anything like that.  I poured a little into a glass, and it looked fine so I took a sip.  The taste and smell were unmistakable:  vinegar.  It tasted and smelled like vinegar.  I don't even know how that's possible.  I poured the entire bottle down the drain.

Why am I buying organic when I keep having these experiences?  Is better living through science really a better concept than sustainable living through organics?  What do I do?

I know the short term answers:  I'll ask about the milk tomorrow when I return the bottle and see what they suggest.  As for the broccoli, I can certainly do a better job of checking for freshness, but I don't know that I would have chosen any differently - that broccoli looked very good on Saturday.  Maybe I'll avoid that seller altogether - his wasn't the only broccoli at the market.  The short term answers aren't what I need here, though.  In the long term, do I continue to buy organic, local food and hope that I have more "hits" than "misses?"  Do I have that kind of money to waste on the "misses?"

I know what I want to do:  I want to continue to buy local, organic food.  I also know I don't want to waste more time and money than I already have.  Organic foodies, do you have advice?