The Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit Monday asking a Portland judge to order the Tillamook County Creamery Association to stop advertising that its Tillamook-brand cheese, ice cream, butter and other dairy products come from cows happily grazing on the rolling green pastures of the Oregon Coast.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund says that’s deceptive marketing: More than ⅔ of the milk for Tillamook-brand products comes from cows on the opposite side of the state -- including from the nation’s largest “industrialized dairy factory farm” in Boardman, 230 miles away in the desert of eastern Oregon, according to the lawsuit. The Threemile Canyon facility -- with 32,000 dairy cows and a total of 70,000 cattle -- is comprised of concrete or “barren dirt feedlots” and “robotic carousels” that milk the “continuously confined” animals, according to the suit.

“Boardman is flat, arid, and often swelteringly hot -- nothing like Tillamook County,” the suit states. “And the mega-dairy in Boardman is so large that it is visible from space.”

Within a month, the Animal Legal Defense Fund plans to amend its lawsuit to ask for $200 in compensation for every Oregonian who has allegedly been misled by Tillamook's marketing campaign, said Amanda Howell, staff attorney for the fund. Because Tillamook products are nearly ubiquitous across the state’s grocery stores, that could be hundreds of thousands of Oregon consumers, Howell said.

If the class-action lawsuit is successful, that could amount to many tens of millions of dollars for the company.

Tillamook released a statement in response to the lawsuit, saying the Animal Legal Defense Fund “is anti-dairy and actively advocates for people to cut all dairy products from their diets.”

“The Tillamook County Creamery Association adamantly disagrees with the allegations made in the lawsuit and we will aggressively defend ourselves,” the statement read. “Tillamook takes great pride in being a farmer-owned and farmer-led co-op, and we only work with business partners that share our values and live up to our extremely high standards.”

The statement went on to say that 80 farming families in Tillamook County “actually own and lead the company,” and that the milk supplied from eastern Oregon is humanely raised -- just as the milk is from the Tillamook County farms that also supply milk for Tillamook-brand products.

“Our farmer-owners and suppliers all take good care of their animals not only because it is their livelihood, but because it is the right thing to do,” the statement read.

The lawsuit is filed on behalf of four Oregonians from Portland and elsewhere -- Sonja Bohr, Tamara Barnes, Karen Foglesong and Mary Wood. The suit says they paid a premium for Tillamook products because they wanted to support small, pasture-based dairies and they hadn’t realized “the truth -- that the vast majority of the milk sourced for Tillamook products comes from a massive factory farm in Eastern Oregon where cows are never allowed to graze on grass.”

The lawsuit criticizes the company’s “Goodbye Big Food” advertising campaign, launched in 2016, for showing “a backdrop of farmers in misty Tillamook County, rising early to tend to cows and do farm chores” and images such as a young girl bottle-feeding a calf. The campaign states that some of its Tillamook families are in their fourth generation of farming.

According to the lawsuit, Tillamook took in about $800 million in revenue in 2017 from its dairy products and could reach more than $1 billion in sales in the near future.

Howell, the Animal Legal Defense Fund lawyer, said her organization wants Tillamook to either change its advertising or stop using milk produced under the conditions at the large Boardman farm.

The lawsuit was filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund is headquartered in California, and Portland attorney David Sugerman filed the suit as co-counsel.

Sugerman is known for, among other cases, representing 1.7 million Oregonians who began receiving checks last month for what ultimately will amount to a total of $185 each from a class-action lawsuit that accused oil-producer BP of tacking on a 35-cent debit card fee without proper notice at the pump. Oregonians encountered the 35-cent fee at ARCO gas stations and their associated am/pm convenience stores.

-- Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

o_aimee

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.