I'm guessing the critical piece of information you're missing is the FDA, like most government agencies that aren't the military, suffers from chronic underfunding and lobby-funded political agendas.
Not arguing that, but we're talking about Roundup, which we know is a health hazard and used everywhere.
As a layperson, if the FDA hasn't been testing for this, it makes you wonder what they have been testing for.. or rather, it almost makes one feel like they haven't been testing food samples at all for 50+ years.. which even with an underfunded agency, would be shocking.
From the sources linked in the article there appears to be quite a bit of pushback from Monsanto to even test that infiltrated the Department of Agriculture (FDA and Department of Agriculture appear to have some overlapping responsibilities to test to standards created by EPA), there was some movement by 2016 but that was all cancelled by the new administration, doubt we'll see any progress in the USA unless Canada and EU start testing their imports from USA and banning contaminated imports.
When I visited our friends/family in Toronto, I was walking through the community and noticed how the lawns had weeds everywhere. I was very intrigued. Don't they have laws, HOA etc. I talked about this to my friend and he said weed killers are prohibited for home use, only golf courses are allowed etc. That was an awesome news for me. I really wish weed killers are abandoned everywhere. Let nature grow, if you don't like it then just mow.
Weeds choke out food crops - you can't just mow a soybean field.
"Natural" alternatives like vinegar can be just as harmful to the soil & environment as commercial herbicides, and other methods can be economically unfeasible.
Unfortunately, to sustain the growth of population and increasing consumer "appetite", herbicides are the only way (at this time).
Nobody, including those who live in rural areas like I do, WANT to use herbicides (they aren't cheap) - it's just the only way to stay in business. There is no scaleable alternative at this time.
I read an article a few years ago but I cannot for the live of me remember even the larger context, so I don't even know what to ask Google to find it again. Might have been in the context of "The omnivores Dilemma" and the "grass farmer" he visited and described? Don't know if I got it form that book itself or something else I read.
It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice".
Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together.
Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use.
I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons.
With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-)
(#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.
This is already done in some cases, cocoa is one example.
Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today.
Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
But is there any actual evidence that the "complexity approach" can produce as much as the current model? I mean, I like the sound of the idea, but that's why I'm wary of it; sounds a bit too good to be true.
Not if you only measure "rice", as in the example. If you keep externalities out of it than it's hard to compete too. Do you know how highly subsidized current food production is? All that energy (actual energy) that goes into it, when stuff is supposed to be able to grow on its own? We don't even have to look at the unknown unknowns of all the poisons. We use up sun energy stored millions of years ago to get our current energy, and the cost for doing so is zero because nature does not know about money.
I mean, modern corn is fucking astounding from a productivity standpoint.
Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60.
There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
Nothing about the food we eat is "natural" - none of the major crops we farm would exist without significant human intervention. Farming itself is an unnatural act, in that sense. We genetically modified plants that had some benefit for us - first with breeding, now with breeding and more modern techniques - to have an even greater benefit.
Taking a systems view is a good thing, but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that. But I think it's unlikely that a systems approach to farming is going to look like letting nature do the work; without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
What a quality reply. Next, a lecture that everything is a "chemical"? I took (university) biochemistry, thank you very much.
> but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that.
We are not. Proof: Monocultures that require lots of stored sun energy and lots of fertilizers (even more stored ancient sun energy) and lots of pesticides (even more energy, plus incalculable side effects).
> without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
How about you read what I wrote? I mean, all of it, not just a few words that triggered you to lecture me as if I had said something on a child level. HN has interesting discussions, let's keep the level up a bit. If you read into my comment that I propose to let nature run all on its own, like some state park or nature preserve, than you did not really read much of it. If I have to explain what I wrote to someone who didn't read it I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time and comment space.
> Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too.
I'm not sure if this is the source you had in mind, but Seeing Like a State offers a similar story from Tanzania.
Colonists attempted to move local farmers from polycultures to "more efficient" monoculture farming, and the results were absolutely disastrous. Polycultures helped prevent erosion and soil depletion, tall sun plants covered short shade plants, and mixed crop types spread both farm labor and crop production across more of the year.
The counterargument, such as it is, is that we've committed so vastly to intensive, fertilized monocultures that we can no longer produce comparable amounts of anything using traditional methods. Which I think is probably true, but as destroy the soil and aquifers of the Midwest it looks like the modern technique isn't particularly workable either.
Letting your lawn grow more wild/naturally is catching on in some cities in the US whether through conviction or just apathy. But ironically, as you mention, many places have local laws or HOA rules preventing this on a large scale.
I ripped my front yard out and put in raised beds with gravel in between each box. I have had several positive comments from neighbors who initially thought I was crazy but now see the positives of what I’ve done. Also I don’t have a HOA to contend with so the 8 months my yard was a dirt or mud lot wasn’t as much of an issue.
Most homeowners in the US are also not impacted by any laws or HOA rules mandating they have perfectly manicured lawns, either. This seems to be something limited to upscale suburbia particularly in the west, where the arid conditions require you to actually care for your lawn if you want grass.
I was considering putting in a vegetable garden. Then I realized that my otherwise ideal location is downslope from my neighbor's yard. And the absence of weeds in his lawn.
So, no vegetable garden for me. Unless I go to the trouble to put in an isolated raised bed with fresh soil imported from a safe source.
This is one of many reasons why permaculturalists dig swales on contour. You can catch water, erosion, and pollutants uphill, plan a garden just beyond, and your garden benefits from the water catchment soaking the soil without much if any detriment from the pollutants.
Interesting. I'm considering some significant landscaping, adding an additional, walled "tier" to that back slope -- it already has one, lower down.
I wasn't aware that it could -- on its own, depending upon design -- provide significant filtration of such contaminants, although I am considering how it could also help divert rainwater to the side property lines, aiding its flow past the house to the front yard and sewer.
However, the best place for the garden -- best sun, and out of the way of other activity -- would still catch a lot of runoff.
The permaculture slogan for handling water is "stop, spread, and soak". A contour is at a right angle to runoff, so by digging a swale with a downhill berm you bring it to a halt. And yes, you can deliver water elsewhere by putting it on a 1-2% grade.
FYI, clover is absolutely wonderful for walking on barefoot.
My yard goes green months before the Bermuda grass monoculture lawns in the neighborhood, and I have personally observed four different species of bees feeding in it, along with the Polistes carolina paper wasps, and the occasional Trypoxylon politum mud-pipe wasps. All of them are very docile, and we've never had any stings, despite frequent nest-building activity within 3m of our front door.
Pollinators are important. There are a lot of people out there that let their yards grow plants other than glass for the express purpose of feeding pollinators between spring emergence and the flowering of commercially important crops, including the buzz pollinators like bumblebees.
And we continually have to butt heads with HOA buttheads for whom "not grass" equals "weed". Those aren't "weeds"; they're "volunteers". If you can't identify it and find it on the state's official list of noxious and invasive species, go away and come back when you can.
I think someone tried a guerilla application of herbicide a couple of years ago, because everything died. I'm glad it all came back. I simply don't understand the level of control-freakishness that would motivate a person to spray herbicide on someone else's yard. It makes me want to intentionally seed some dandelions. Dandelions seem to send that kind of person into fits, for some reason unknown to me.
In my locality the legal definition of "weed" is literally anything that isn't a tree, shrub, or cultivated garden. You just have to keep the "weeds", which include grass, below 10 inches. So I planted dutch white clover, which doesn't grow above 10 inches tall, absolutely everywhere I could. It fixes nitrogen and is generally great stuff. And it is hard to kill with RoundUp...my neighbor applies quite a bit at his fence line.
Weedkiller, pesticides, fossil fuel emissions, food additives, preservatives, industrial run off and on and on. Does anyone look at all this at scale? With all the crap we're pumping into the air, water, and our food, I really wonder.
Also plastic is ubiquitous and treated like it is harmless - it’s in close contact with your skin and your food pretty much continually, plus also in water and airborne dust.
A lot of people don't know that RoundUp is sprayed on many (perhaps most) grains shortly before harvest. It desiccates the grain crop, keeping the combine from getting gummed up and increasing yields.
When I learned this, I decided enough was enough and switched to strictly organic grains. I think it actually helps my health quite a bit. I wonder how many of the health problems we blame on wheat are actually due to the poison that is routinely sprayed on it.
I've been a veggie farmer. I'm familiar with what's allowed in the NOP (national organic program), and given the chance to be exposed to the worst of it I'd choose it over RoundUp every day of the week.
I absolutely know that organic food also contains glyphosate and that I'm not eliminating my exposure. My family has chosen to reduce our exposure this way, since to whatever extent the organic certification works, this practice is prohibited.
"We reject the notion, however, that this “common” practice of U.S. farmers “saturating” wheat crops with Roundup herbicide as a desiccant before each harvest has been causing an increase in wheat-related ailments, as these claims are unsupported even by the research cited in articles making such a claim."
How definitive is Snopes.com? I don't see a specific reference as to why they made their rejection.
Anecdotally, I spent a year in France in the 00's and had minimal issues with bread I consumed there (before I realized I was sensitive to wheat in general).
Also I know someone who moved from France to the US and she's had lots more digestive and allergy issues with fruits/etc in the decade+ she's been here.
I've reviewed grain-industry literature discussing this issue as a matter-of-fact consideration (in materials that were primarily on other topics). I've read accounts from grain farmers themselves. It's not made up.
I said "poison" to refer to something that is sold for the purpose of being devastating to many forms of biological life. I and many very smart and well-educated people I know prefer to avoid exposing ourselves to industrial poisons if we can avoid it, even if they target different species.
Speaking of LD50 values: I know some people who ingest borax as a mineral supplement, and its LD50 is higher than table salt, roughly double if I recall correctly. I bet I can't get you to try it as a dietary supplement! The point is that there is more to consider than that one specific measurement.
People are working on it, however it's just very very difficult. Contaminants can have an adverse effect at 1 part per billion, so as you can imagine the sensitivity of testing equipment must be very advanced.
Currently contaminants can only be reliably detected with advanced equipment like mass spectrometers that run over a hundred thousand, require clean conditions, trained operators, advanced software, and routine upkeep.
Improvements in these machines would be a huge step in the right direction.
I spent a while working on this sort of thing a few years ago. Right now there's basically no market for this sort of thing. The characterization technique(s) need to be really sensitive, really specific, really fast, and generalized to the whole domain possible contaminants, which means expensive. Consumers don't care enough to pay for it right now.
Pretty much the only practical tech right now is a card with a shitload of immuno assays on it, like those pan-drug test strips. There are a pain to validate and expensive/no fun to develop. The business model here would be spending a few million buying antibodies from commercial suppliers, validating tests, and selling cards for <<$1 per test. Test cards would likely be e.g. "artificial hormones", "pesticides I/I/III" etc
Education is also an issue, when the domain of possible contaminants is so large.
The sample prep in this case is still a problem, though. Easy for drinking water, harder when you're trying to take a standard sample of e.g. apple skin
There is a little bit more 'political will' in China because there is greater awareness of food contamination. But the market only supports water conductivity meters and gimmicks like that, unless something's changed in the past year.
The closest thing I think is the "Consumer Physics SCiO," aka the Theranos of chemical characterization. Their device is both too expensive (for a mainstream consumer product) and useless for any real world contaminant test, although it is fine at testing water/sugar/protein content for e.g. bad baby formula
Archaea can remediate soil from glyphosate and many other pollutants. It is difficult to produce at scale, but a man named Oppenheimer, a relative of the man who worked on the Manhattan Project, figured out how to package it and transport it. BioZome is a trade name for it.
edit: whoops, I missed that by "pick up" you meant "detect", not "munch through"!
I am no expert, but isn't this stuff supposed to degrade quickly in soil? Isn't that the whole reason why we're using it in the first place? If it behaves differently than expected, the implications are enormous--this stuff is even sprayed, as one commenter also noted, over the entire crop before harvest. Can anyone trust Monsanto?
I think you are confusing "degrade" with "run-off"; glyphosate "sticks" to soils with high organic content - presumably due to opposing electric charges. The point of that being that it doesn't get washed into watersheds et cetera when it rains; of course, again, this only applies in high-organic-content soils.
Glyphosate degrades with a "half-life" of about 1-170 days. If you consume a product sprayed with glyphosate within about 90 days of the last spray, on average it will contain about half of the original dose.
What is the half-life based on? Spontaneous decomposition? Or does it depend on external factors such as exposure to sun light (certain wavelengths)? If it depends on such factors half-life is variable depending on those conditions.
It seems this number is for soil decomposition from microbial action. It's stable to chemical and photo decomposition.
It also seems I was wrong about half-life in plants; the half life given for some tree species is 9 days. Unsurprisingly, industry does not appear to have funded research on the half-life in corn, soy and other commonly sprayed products.
I've been anti-glyphosate for awhile. But first, my point of view:
A lot of crops require "Roundup Ready" varieties, and Monsanto (ab)uses patent law to enforce licenses on their RR seeds, even in situations where it is clear Monsanto crops contaminated someone else's field.
Worse yet, due to horizontal gene transfer in some grasses and weeds, we now have RR weeds, and that is a one way process. Due to this, Glyphosate-based products are no longer useful for new weed eradication solutions, only for existing solutions until their last users are overtaken by RR weeds.
Roundup had its time, and now it is essentially a commercial failure after the fact.
All of that said, I'm anti-glyphosate because, frankly, it should have never been cleared for use. It kills valuable crops that have not been supplied with the RR gene (which has happened repeatedly due to overspray effecting neighboring fields), they've known since day one that horizontal gene transfer could produce RR weeds, and now we've lost an important tool in weed control due to the overuse and abuse of glyphosate.
Due to this overuse and abuse, the American public has been unwittingly used as guinea pigs due to bad science stating that it doesn't harm us, but very little (until recently) was done to see how it interacts with our gut flora.
We now know that in at least some of the population, glyphosate exposure has side effects. Maybe it screws with our gut bacteria (most likely not the pathway described in Glyphosate II (Samsel 2013)), maybe it is because of APMA (a metabolite of glyphosate) which mimics glutamate toxicity (and want some extra fun? Look at the relationship between autism and glutamate). I don't know.
I don't need to know the exact mechanism (although I'd like to us to know, to prevent future mistakes from harming people due to accidentally using the same pathway), I just need to know that there is enough science to link glyphosate exposure to modern diseases and disorders.
Well, that, and it doesn't really work anymore in a lot of crops, especially RR ones.
> [forces patent compliance] even in situations where it is clear Monsanto crops contaminated someone else's field
Can you provide any example of this? The only cases I'm aware of are the likes of Bowman. The supreme court finding in that case makes it pretty clear Monsanto was in the right: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
> we now have RR weeds, and that is a one way process
No, it is not. This is the same nonsense as people touting antibiotics resistance as a dead-end street. It costs energy for these organisms to maintain resistance. Once you remove the antibiotic, or glyphosate, from the environment, the biologically ideal thing to do is to lose resistance, redirecting that energy to other things that actually serve a purpose.
> I don't need to know the exact mechanism
If you are going to be implying glyphosate causes autism, for some "extra fun" as you say, then you should perhaps reconsider this. Pointing out they've both followed the curve of modern industrial chemistry expansion and implying that correlation to be causative is irresponsible.
The only cases I can find with a cursory Google search is where they have sued over seed saving, such as the story of Michael White. There are many farmers like him that Monsanto has trampled.
As for antibiotics, it is interesting you bring that up because it is a good example: people do not take their antibiotics as per manufacturer's guidelines, and Doctors over-prescribe antibiotics.
In people, antibiotic resistance kills patients, but we can limit the spread. In farming, RR resistant weeds can spread miles away, or to places that aren't farms (thus we aren't looking for them there).
What these both share is misuse and overuse of the product, and the manufacturer complicit in this by continuing to sell the product in ways that allow (or even encourage) the misuse and overuse.
HN has certainly gotten stories to the front page about antibiotic resistance being an ongoing issue, and how some antibiotics have fallen to the wayside due to people not strictly following the label (where, if everyone had followed the label, we'd still be using it).
I have also seen stories on HN's front page about how bacteria has done horizontal gene transfer to trade antibiotic resistances. This, too, is similar to RR weed's existence.
As you can see by reading it, it is not over seed saving for his own farm. It is over him intentionally growing 120 acres of roundup-ready crops for the purpose of producing his own RR seeds to sell commercially. "Yeah. I took advantage of it.", is a quote from Mr. White on page 7. The court found this in violation of the agreement he'd signed when he bought the seeds, and he lost the case.
I think your example of Mr. White is illustrating exactly my point, that these cases have been misrepresented by anti-GMO groups to further their agenda.
> What these both share is misuse and overuse of the product
Yes. But this is not what you said or what I addressed. You said RR resistance was a "one way process". This is incorrect. I agree with the point that you are making here about misuse and manufacturers like Monsanto being complicit in that misuse.
> If you are going to be implying glyphosate causes autism, for some "extra fun" as you say, then you should perhaps reconsider this.
No. The burden of proof is on those defending a chemical. Even if there's a 1/1000 chance that glyphosate explains 5% of autism cases, then it should be banned.
The world doesn't need more food, America throws away half its food. The world needs better health -- the sperm count in America has dropped 50% in the last 30 years, autism is at about 1/52
Suicide is the purest expression of the precautionary principle. Think about it.
Seriously, oxygen is a known carcinogen, responsible for the massive generation of free radicals in the body. Realize: look at how oxygen burns wood, it can even eat steel! And you're sucking this extremely hazardous and potent oxidizer into your body with every breath.
Yes, global food delivery systems are inefficient with different sources of loss in different places (and, in the US, a big one is “people buy food and don't use it”.)
In the absence of proven solutions to these inefficiencies, though, less food production means higher prices globally, which is particularly harmful for the poorest of the poor. Sure, solving the inefficiencies would reduce the needed production levels for any given price level, but the people fighting GMOs and/or products like glyphosate aren't solving the inefficiencies, they are just attacking production while diverting energy from solving the inefficiencies.
“We don't need more food” is an attitude associated with the same privilege of wealth that leads to the US throwing away much of its food.
>Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide. Several epidemiological studies on cancer
outcomes following occupational exposure to glyphosate were available. The evaluation of these
studies focused on the occurrence of NHL. Overall, there is some evidence of a positive association
between glyphosate exposure and risk of NHL from the case–control studies and the overall meta-
analysis. However, it is notable that the only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of
an association at any exposure level. Glyphosate has been extensively tested for genotoxic effects
using a variety of tests in a wide range of organisms. The overall weight of evidence indicates that
administration of glyphosate and its formulation products at doses as high as 2000 mg/kg body weight
by the oral route, the route most relevant to human dietary exposure, was not associated with
genotoxic effects in an overwhelming majority of studies conducted in mammals, a model considered
to be appropriate for assessing genotoxic risks to humans. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is
unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures. Several carcinogenicity studies in mice and
rats are available. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic in rats but could not
exclude the possibility that it is carcinogenic in mice at very high doses. In view of the absence of
carcinogenic potential in rodents at human-relevant doses and the absence of genotoxicity by the oral
route in mammals, and considering the epidemiological evidence from occupational exposures, the
Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure
through the diet. The Meeting reaffirmed the group ADI for the sum of glyphosate and its metabolites
of 0–1 mg/kg body weight on the basis of effects on the salivary gland. The Meeting concluded that it
was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute
toxicity.
From the above, it seems that glyphohosate is pretty safe, and that it being found on food items in trace amounts is not big a deal. This seems yet another article that tries to get clicks by having a scary headline of the form "Look chemicals!"
I'm sorry, but science can not prove a chemical safe (because science doesn't prove anything). The FDA may consider a chemical safe-enough, but a surprising amount of the time they later revoke that decision after people have been exposed.
The FDA process for testing safety involves exposing rats with a much HIGHER dose for a short period of time and looking for acute effects. However, this process is now highly disputed by scientists due to the fact that dose/response relationship of chemicals is non-linear, and sometimes even MORE severe at LOWER doses! [1]. It's also rightly criticized because you can't test a rat for a language disability. It's also rightly criticized because long term effects would never be identified with the FDA procedure, which may explain the high false negative rate.
This is controversial to say the least. And very one-sided reporting from The Guardian.
Every research agency but one considers glyphosate safe and not linked to cancer. Bodies like WHO (World Health Organization) and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) [1], EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) [2], and ECHA (European Chemicals Agency) [3] have concluded that there is no evidence for glyphosate causing cancer.
Only one agency, IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) in France, has classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, but their work has raised some suspicion [4].
Glyphosate is not carcinogenic though, and not dangerous to humans in concentrations typically found on produce. This is due primarily to its mechanism of action. The biological pathways it disrupts in plants are simply not present in humans.
Does it matter? Its probably way below the level of toxicity. The ld50 in rats is 5,600 mg/kg multiply that by 130 and that's close to 1 and 1/2 lbs you would need to ingest to get half of a lethal dose. So it'd take 3 lbs to kill you. A couple of specks of it in food in benign. I mean the ld50 of caffeine is 26 grams people. I don't see people complaining about caffeine killing us all. Stop it with the chemophobia.
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[ 70.6 ms ] story [ 1588 ms ] threadI'm sure I'm missing some critical piece of information, but this seems like something that agencies should have started testing for decades ago.
As a layperson, if the FDA hasn't been testing for this, it makes you wonder what they have been testing for.. or rather, it almost makes one feel like they haven't been testing food samples at all for 50+ years.. which even with an underfunded agency, would be shocking.
"Natural" alternatives like vinegar can be just as harmful to the soil & environment as commercial herbicides, and other methods can be economically unfeasible.
Unfortunately, to sustain the growth of population and increasing consumer "appetite", herbicides are the only way (at this time).
Nobody, including those who live in rural areas like I do, WANT to use herbicides (they aren't cheap) - it's just the only way to stay in business. There is no scaleable alternative at this time.
It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice".
Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together.
Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use.
I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons.
With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-)
(#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.
Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today.
Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60.
There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
Except they're infested with glyphosate. Yum!
Modern yield: 170 bu/ac.
The increase in past 80 years has been amazing.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtren...
Taking a systems view is a good thing, but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that. But I think it's unlikely that a systems approach to farming is going to look like letting nature do the work; without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
What a quality reply. Next, a lecture that everything is a "chemical"? I took (university) biochemistry, thank you very much.
> but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that.
We are not. Proof: Monocultures that require lots of stored sun energy and lots of fertilizers (even more stored ancient sun energy) and lots of pesticides (even more energy, plus incalculable side effects).
> without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
How about you read what I wrote? I mean, all of it, not just a few words that triggered you to lecture me as if I had said something on a child level. HN has interesting discussions, let's keep the level up a bit. If you read into my comment that I propose to let nature run all on its own, like some state park or nature preserve, than you did not really read much of it. If I have to explain what I wrote to someone who didn't read it I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time and comment space.
I'm not sure if this is the source you had in mind, but Seeing Like a State offers a similar story from Tanzania.
Colonists attempted to move local farmers from polycultures to "more efficient" monoculture farming, and the results were absolutely disastrous. Polycultures helped prevent erosion and soil depletion, tall sun plants covered short shade plants, and mixed crop types spread both farm labor and crop production across more of the year.
The counterargument, such as it is, is that we've committed so vastly to intensive, fertilized monocultures that we can no longer produce comparable amounts of anything using traditional methods. Which I think is probably true, but as destroy the soil and aquifers of the Midwest it looks like the modern technique isn't particularly workable either.
* Stockman Grass Farmer, a publication for smart graziers who get complexity that Joel now edits
* Acres USA, similar but for the broader topic of holistic/ecological farming
* Permaculture-oriented farmers such as Mark Shepard
http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20...
Ha ha, no.
Maybe Canada is land of the free?
Most homeowners in the US are also not impacted by any laws or HOA rules mandating they have perfectly manicured lawns, either. This seems to be something limited to upscale suburbia particularly in the west, where the arid conditions require you to actually care for your lawn if you want grass.
So, no vegetable garden for me. Unless I go to the trouble to put in an isolated raised bed with fresh soil imported from a safe source.
I wasn't aware that it could -- on its own, depending upon design -- provide significant filtration of such contaminants, although I am considering how it could also help divert rainwater to the side property lines, aiding its flow past the house to the front yard and sewer.
However, the best place for the garden -- best sun, and out of the way of other activity -- would still catch a lot of runoff.
You can get some more context on what I'm describing from this article, though it sounds like your swale might be shallower. https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale...
If you do it, you might consider filling yours with wood chips for appearance, easy maintenance, extra filtration, and to encourage soil building.
My yard goes green months before the Bermuda grass monoculture lawns in the neighborhood, and I have personally observed four different species of bees feeding in it, along with the Polistes carolina paper wasps, and the occasional Trypoxylon politum mud-pipe wasps. All of them are very docile, and we've never had any stings, despite frequent nest-building activity within 3m of our front door.
Pollinators are important. There are a lot of people out there that let their yards grow plants other than glass for the express purpose of feeding pollinators between spring emergence and the flowering of commercially important crops, including the buzz pollinators like bumblebees.
And we continually have to butt heads with HOA buttheads for whom "not grass" equals "weed". Those aren't "weeds"; they're "volunteers". If you can't identify it and find it on the state's official list of noxious and invasive species, go away and come back when you can.
I think someone tried a guerilla application of herbicide a couple of years ago, because everything died. I'm glad it all came back. I simply don't understand the level of control-freakishness that would motivate a person to spray herbicide on someone else's yard. It makes me want to intentionally seed some dandelions. Dandelions seem to send that kind of person into fits, for some reason unknown to me.
When I learned this, I decided enough was enough and switched to strictly organic grains. I think it actually helps my health quite a bit. I wonder how many of the health problems we blame on wheat are actually due to the poison that is routinely sprayed on it.
You can be paying 30% more for your food and still be eating pesticides. There is no fool proof way to do this validation in most countries.
"We reject the notion, however, that this “common” practice of U.S. farmers “saturating” wheat crops with Roundup herbicide as a desiccant before each harvest has been causing an increase in wheat-related ailments, as these claims are unsupported even by the research cited in articles making such a claim."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/grain-of-truth/
Anecdotally, I spent a year in France in the 00's and had minimal issues with bread I consumed there (before I realized I was sensitive to wheat in general).
Also I know someone who moved from France to the US and she's had lots more digestive and allergy issues with fruits/etc in the decade+ she's been here.
In rat studies, glyphosate has about the same LD50 value as table salt.
Speaking of LD50 values: I know some people who ingest borax as a mineral supplement, and its LD50 is higher than table salt, roughly double if I recall correctly. I bet I can't get you to try it as a dietary supplement! The point is that there is more to consider than that one specific measurement.
So what are the other measurements to consider?
Currently contaminants can only be reliably detected with advanced equipment like mass spectrometers that run over a hundred thousand, require clean conditions, trained operators, advanced software, and routine upkeep.
Improvements in these machines would be a huge step in the right direction.
Pretty much the only practical tech right now is a card with a shitload of immuno assays on it, like those pan-drug test strips. There are a pain to validate and expensive/no fun to develop. The business model here would be spending a few million buying antibodies from commercial suppliers, validating tests, and selling cards for <<$1 per test. Test cards would likely be e.g. "artificial hormones", "pesticides I/I/III" etc
Education is also an issue, when the domain of possible contaminants is so large.
The sample prep in this case is still a problem, though. Easy for drinking water, harder when you're trying to take a standard sample of e.g. apple skin
There is a little bit more 'political will' in China because there is greater awareness of food contamination. But the market only supports water conductivity meters and gimmicks like that, unless something's changed in the past year.
The closest thing I think is the "Consumer Physics SCiO," aka the Theranos of chemical characterization. Their device is both too expensive (for a mainstream consumer product) and useless for any real world contaminant test, although it is fine at testing water/sugar/protein content for e.g. bad baby formula
edit: whoops, I missed that by "pick up" you meant "detect", not "munch through"!
Glyphosate degrades with a "half-life" of about 1-170 days. If you consume a product sprayed with glyphosate within about 90 days of the last spray, on average it will contain about half of the original dose.
Source: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/dienochlor-gly...
It also seems I was wrong about half-life in plants; the half life given for some tree species is 9 days. Unsurprisingly, industry does not appear to have funded research on the half-life in corn, soy and other commonly sprayed products.
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html
A lot of crops require "Roundup Ready" varieties, and Monsanto (ab)uses patent law to enforce licenses on their RR seeds, even in situations where it is clear Monsanto crops contaminated someone else's field.
Worse yet, due to horizontal gene transfer in some grasses and weeds, we now have RR weeds, and that is a one way process. Due to this, Glyphosate-based products are no longer useful for new weed eradication solutions, only for existing solutions until their last users are overtaken by RR weeds.
Roundup had its time, and now it is essentially a commercial failure after the fact.
All of that said, I'm anti-glyphosate because, frankly, it should have never been cleared for use. It kills valuable crops that have not been supplied with the RR gene (which has happened repeatedly due to overspray effecting neighboring fields), they've known since day one that horizontal gene transfer could produce RR weeds, and now we've lost an important tool in weed control due to the overuse and abuse of glyphosate.
Due to this overuse and abuse, the American public has been unwittingly used as guinea pigs due to bad science stating that it doesn't harm us, but very little (until recently) was done to see how it interacts with our gut flora.
We now know that in at least some of the population, glyphosate exposure has side effects. Maybe it screws with our gut bacteria (most likely not the pathway described in Glyphosate II (Samsel 2013)), maybe it is because of APMA (a metabolite of glyphosate) which mimics glutamate toxicity (and want some extra fun? Look at the relationship between autism and glutamate). I don't know.
I don't need to know the exact mechanism (although I'd like to us to know, to prevent future mistakes from harming people due to accidentally using the same pathway), I just need to know that there is enough science to link glyphosate exposure to modern diseases and disorders.
Well, that, and it doesn't really work anymore in a lot of crops, especially RR ones.
> [forces patent compliance] even in situations where it is clear Monsanto crops contaminated someone else's field
Can you provide any example of this? The only cases I'm aware of are the likes of Bowman. The supreme court finding in that case makes it pretty clear Monsanto was in the right: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
> we now have RR weeds, and that is a one way process
No, it is not. This is the same nonsense as people touting antibiotics resistance as a dead-end street. It costs energy for these organisms to maintain resistance. Once you remove the antibiotic, or glyphosate, from the environment, the biologically ideal thing to do is to lose resistance, redirecting that energy to other things that actually serve a purpose.
> I don't need to know the exact mechanism
If you are going to be implying glyphosate causes autism, for some "extra fun" as you say, then you should perhaps reconsider this. Pointing out they've both followed the curve of modern industrial chemistry expansion and implying that correlation to be causative is irresponsible.
Are there some really bad weeds out there you want to save the glyphosate for?
As for antibiotics, it is interesting you bring that up because it is a good example: people do not take their antibiotics as per manufacturer's guidelines, and Doctors over-prescribe antibiotics.
In people, antibiotic resistance kills patients, but we can limit the spread. In farming, RR resistant weeds can spread miles away, or to places that aren't farms (thus we aren't looking for them there).
What these both share is misuse and overuse of the product, and the manufacturer complicit in this by continuing to sell the product in ways that allow (or even encourage) the misuse and overuse.
HN has certainly gotten stories to the front page about antibiotic resistance being an ongoing issue, and how some antibiotics have fallen to the wayside due to people not strictly following the label (where, if everyone had followed the label, we'd still be using it).
I have also seen stories on HN's front page about how bacteria has done horizontal gene transfer to trade antibiotic resistances. This, too, is similar to RR weed's existence.
Here is the case with Mr. White:
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-alnd-5_03-cv-02804/pd...
As you can see by reading it, it is not over seed saving for his own farm. It is over him intentionally growing 120 acres of roundup-ready crops for the purpose of producing his own RR seeds to sell commercially. "Yeah. I took advantage of it.", is a quote from Mr. White on page 7. The court found this in violation of the agreement he'd signed when he bought the seeds, and he lost the case.
I think your example of Mr. White is illustrating exactly my point, that these cases have been misrepresented by anti-GMO groups to further their agenda.
> What these both share is misuse and overuse of the product
Yes. But this is not what you said or what I addressed. You said RR resistance was a "one way process". This is incorrect. I agree with the point that you are making here about misuse and manufacturers like Monsanto being complicit in that misuse.
No. The burden of proof is on those defending a chemical. Even if there's a 1/1000 chance that glyphosate explains 5% of autism cases, then it should be banned.
The world doesn't need more food, America throws away half its food. The world needs better health -- the sperm count in America has dropped 50% in the last 30 years, autism is at about 1/52
Seriously, oxygen is a known carcinogen, responsible for the massive generation of free radicals in the body. Realize: look at how oxygen burns wood, it can even eat steel! And you're sucking this extremely hazardous and potent oxidizer into your body with every breath.
Yes, it does.
> America throws away half its food.
Yes, global food delivery systems are inefficient with different sources of loss in different places (and, in the US, a big one is “people buy food and don't use it”.)
In the absence of proven solutions to these inefficiencies, though, less food production means higher prices globally, which is particularly harmful for the poorest of the poor. Sure, solving the inefficiencies would reduce the needed production levels for any given price level, but the people fighting GMOs and/or products like glyphosate aren't solving the inefficiencies, they are just attacking production while diverting energy from solving the inefficiencies.
“We don't need more food” is an attitude associated with the same privilege of wealth that leads to the US throwing away much of its food.
Per the joint FAO and WHO report
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf?ua=1
>Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide. Several epidemiological studies on cancer outcomes following occupational exposure to glyphosate were available. The evaluation of these studies focused on the occurrence of NHL. Overall, there is some evidence of a positive association between glyphosate exposure and risk of NHL from the case–control studies and the overall meta- analysis. However, it is notable that the only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level. Glyphosate has been extensively tested for genotoxic effects using a variety of tests in a wide range of organisms. The overall weight of evidence indicates that administration of glyphosate and its formulation products at doses as high as 2000 mg/kg body weight by the oral route, the route most relevant to human dietary exposure, was not associated with genotoxic effects in an overwhelming majority of studies conducted in mammals, a model considered to be appropriate for assessing genotoxic risks to humans. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures. Several carcinogenicity studies in mice and rats are available. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic in rats but could not exclude the possibility that it is carcinogenic in mice at very high doses. In view of the absence of carcinogenic potential in rodents at human-relevant doses and the absence of genotoxicity by the oral route in mammals, and considering the epidemiological evidence from occupational exposures, the Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet. The Meeting reaffirmed the group ADI for the sum of glyphosate and its metabolites of 0–1 mg/kg body weight on the basis of effects on the salivary gland. The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity.
From the above, it seems that glyphohosate is pretty safe, and that it being found on food items in trace amounts is not big a deal. This seems yet another article that tries to get clicks by having a scary headline of the form "Look chemicals!"
The problem with this is it's just bullshit.
I'm sorry, but science can not prove a chemical safe (because science doesn't prove anything). The FDA may consider a chemical safe-enough, but a surprising amount of the time they later revoke that decision after people have been exposed.
The FDA process for testing safety involves exposing rats with a much HIGHER dose for a short period of time and looking for acute effects. However, this process is now highly disputed by scientists due to the fact that dose/response relationship of chemicals is non-linear, and sometimes even MORE severe at LOWER doses! [1]. It's also rightly criticized because you can't test a rat for a language disability. It's also rightly criticized because long term effects would never be identified with the FDA procedure, which may explain the high false negative rate.
[1] http://endocrinesciencematters.org/non-monotonic-dose-respon...
This is controversial to say the least. And very one-sided reporting from The Guardian.
Every research agency but one considers glyphosate safe and not linked to cancer. Bodies like WHO (World Health Organization) and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) [1], EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) [2], and ECHA (European Chemicals Agency) [3] have concluded that there is no evidence for glyphosate causing cancer.
Only one agency, IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) in France, has classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, but their work has raised some suspicion [4].
[1] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf
[2] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/151112
[3] https://echa.europa.eu/fi/-/glyphosate-not-classified-as-a-c...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-who-iarc-glyphosate-speci...