[HN Gopher] Study first to link weed killer Roundup to convulsio...
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Study first to link weed killer Roundup to convulsions in animals
Author : pseudolus
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-08-23 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| crmd wrote:
| > "A significant finding from our study reveals that just 0.002
| percent glyphosate, a difference of about 300 times less
| herbicide than the lowest concentration recommended for consumer
| use, had concerning effects on the nervous system."
|
| Many toxicity studies feed animals millions of times more of the
| substance than a human would ever be exposed to, in order to
| produce a result. This is not the case here. Also, it seems to
| target the GABA-A receptor, which is pretty stable across
| species.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| brutusborn wrote:
| 300 times is definitely worrying, but it still seems higher
| than people would be exposed to. Surely after degradation of
| the chemical on surfaces, water flushing plants and dilution
| when ingested, humans would never be exposed to a concentration
| that high.
|
| The highest levels recorded in people in the US is ~2 ug/L [0].
| It's probable that it still affects GABA receptors at this
| level but I'm hoping it has negligible effects.
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/whats_new_071922_1.html
| edumucelli wrote:
| We can reach high productivity of fruits and vegetables without
| fossil fuels: https://climateheroes.org/perrine-and-charles-
| herve-gruyer-p...
| zackmorris wrote:
| I think of the GMO/pesticide/herbicide approach like smoking. You
| may use it for years without issue, but then wake up one day and
| find yourself unable to eat whole wheat like I did.
|
| The gluten-free movement, the autoimmune diseases we're seeing,
| the continuing rise of neurological disorders like ADHD and
| autism.. they're caused by factory farming. The literature may
| not have reached consensus on that yet, but the trends are
| obvious and unmistakable now.
|
| My peer group called this out back in the 90s before it went big,
| but nobody ever listens to us because 1) I was a teenager and 2)
| the people I listen to and admire are all poor academics. There
| was profit to be made!
|
| It took 3 years, but I was finally able to get my digestive
| troubles into remission. I believe what happened is that my
| enteric nervous system got disrupted with neuropathy when I went
| through profound burnout in 2019. So the valves in my digestive
| system were opening and closing at the wrong times and I
| developed all kinds of food sensitivities. The cure is to take a
| B complex every day, specifically B1 (thiamine) and saturated fat
| to heal the nerves, so bacon and eggs is one of the best things
| I've found. I take a "stress" B complex that's less concentrated
| so I can have it every day. I've regained the ability to eat
| nightshades, but wheat/legumes/milk/nuts are still a problem.
|
| Does anyone know of any startups working to isolate and remove
| the GMO contamination from crops? There would be considerable
| money in bringing back pre-GMO crop varieties, since such a large
| percentage of the population can't eat what's on store shelves
| now. If we do, our digestion shuts down, we get severe
| inflammation, we get metabolic syndrome, we get diabetes, our
| quality of life diminishes to effectively nothing.. you see what
| I'm saying. They could call the crops heirloom or organic and
| charge twice as much and I and millions of other people would
| gladly buy them.
|
| Edit: since science is letting the population down at a level
| approaching conspiracy, I've embraced magical thinking in my own
| life. I find that holistic models simply perform better. I
| learned about the neuropathy issue here (no affiliation):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/WholeBodyHealingwithJen
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| What makes GMOs problematic?
| soperj wrote:
| They're mostly modified so that they can handle herbicides.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I'm not sure why something handling herbicides makes it
| problematic for eating? Is it because it will then have
| more herbicides on it or because you feel the incentives
| behind GMO are off or is their some more immediate problem?
| soperj wrote:
| It's more than just food for eating. For instance, in BC
| they plant GMO round up ready pine, and then spray clear
| cuts and forest fire areas with round up, so that they
| can plant mono-culture pine stands. This has caused
| massive forest fire issues which also results flooding
| issues, along with biodiversity issues.
| mattwest wrote:
| But that's only because the originators of the first GMO
| seeds had to be firms with plenty of capital and R&D
| capacity ie. chemical companies. They also had the double
| revenue stream of seeds + herbicide. Herbicide resistance
| is also the most attractive seed trait in terms of farmer
| adoption.
|
| Now, the cost of generating GMO seeds is much lower. We
| have more firms creating GMO with traits beyond herbicide
| resistance. These genotypes will have value for processors,
| retailers, and consumers. Be careful to not tarnish the
| reputation of GMO seeds before we realize their true
| potential.
| hirundo wrote:
| We're having a wet year and the weed growth is impressive. I've
| considered spraying Roundup to help control them but I'm
| concerned about the affect on my pets. Then I talked to my
| neighbor who regularly uses Roundup. He said that he sprayed a
| few weeks ago, and his weeds "just kinda look a little tired"
| instead of gone. If that's all the result I'd get why take the
| risk.
|
| But I've spent around 10 hours walking behind a weed whacker in
| the last month. That's not my favorite chore and I'm willing to
| take some risks to trim it down a bit.
| upofadown wrote:
| Don't put glyphosate on your lawn unless you don't want to have
| a lawn anymore.
| stinos wrote:
| What did you do after weed whacker usage? If you didn't remove
| all cuttings, there's your main problem. (also: 10 hours? how
| large is that piece of land?)
| hirundo wrote:
| I removed the cuttings in past years, but it doesn't seem to
| have an effect. I think every inch of soil is throroughly
| saturated with a large variety of seeds. After whacking it
| down it's just a smooth carpet of green. So I gave up on the
| removal as not worth the effort.
| peteradio wrote:
| Is this a garden of a yard you are maintaining? Cultivating
| a garden before you see weeds cuts down on the weed seed
| bank. One of those things that takes rigorous practice for
| a year or more before it is obviously having a long term
| positive impact.
| hirundo wrote:
| It's the opposite of a garden, it's a rural lot next to
| several million acres of wilderness forest. Everything
| growing here is a volunteer, there is no lawn, I've
| planted nothing.
|
| And there's plenty of wind constantly bringing more
| volunteers. This time of year I can almost see them
| growing.
|
| Should that change my weeding strategy?
| peteradio wrote:
| I'm a one trick pony, if it isn't a garden I don't know.
| Perhaps see if you can find out what national parks do
| for their parking lots?
| stinos wrote:
| If you leave the cuttings they'll decompose and fertilize
| the soil, giving advantage to fast growing weeds. Possibly
| also add nitrogen deposition from surrounding
| industry/agriculture to that, and you have an ideal cycle
| for lots of biomass. Mowing like twice a year and removing
| cuttings on the other hand can and usually does break that
| cycle, can take some years, resulting in less fierce
| growth, and more slow-growing species.
| goda90 wrote:
| I recommend reassessing what you consider a weed as well. I
| only pull up stuff with thorns that don't produce edible fruit
| and anything that might compete with that I've intentionally
| planted. That means the rest of my yard has dandelions,
| violets, clover, creeping Charlie, other random wildflowers
| throughout the grass. Mowing occasionally deals with the baby
| trees.
| hirundo wrote:
| Anything growing up through the gravel is a weed. Anything
| growing more than a few inches tall under a tree near the
| house, with the potential to be a fire ladder, is a weed.
|
| I think that most of the "weeds" are beautiful, I have
| pictures of many of their flowers on my walls. But I can't
| afford that beauty near the house in wildfire country. And
| I'd like to keep my gravelled areas clear, including the
| driveway and around the structures, and asphalt or concrete
| aren't options.
| mattwest wrote:
| Glyphosate can take up to 3 weeks to take full effect. There
| are a handful of resistant weeds. Palmer amaranth (pigweed) is
| one. Otherwise it is very effective.
|
| If you don't want to use glyphosate that's totally fine, but
| just know that residential use is essentially a non-factor in
| these studies.
| docandrew wrote:
| I've had great luck with a mixture of high-concentrate vinegar,
| a little dish soap, and some salt. It absolutely puts Roundup
| to shame. This mix is non-selective though so be careful around
| the plants/grass you want to keep.
|
| Using this mix with a battery-powered backpack sprayer is
| AWESOME.
|
| Edit: Make sure you rinse the sprayer real well afterwards
| though, vinegar and salt aren't great for the seals/pump.
| cj wrote:
| Didn't Roundup reformulate their product?
|
| I'm under the impression that the roundup from 15 years ago is
| completely different than what's in stores today.
| mattwest wrote:
| It just depends on what you buy. Read the label, as it's what
| the law requires anyway.
|
| Roundups active ingredient is glyphosate and they have added
| or removed other supplementary ingredients over the years for
| different reasons. Some are emulsifiers. Others are
| additional herbicides which may cause quicker "browning" to
| please the customer
| dmos62 wrote:
| Side question: any sign of at least borderline-viable farming
| techniques without pesticides or herbicides? By viable I mean, as
| a complete replacement for current agriculture.
|
| I know next to nothing about this, but have had some shower
| thoughts that a different agriculture system could be viable if
| we increased our expectations for farming's labour intensity. I
| probably got the idea from permaculture videos, because they seem
| to get impressive results, but it also requires some skill and a
| lot of work.
|
| I'm half-expecting a hail of downvotes, but maybe I'll find other
| people that have been wondering the same.
| lbriner wrote:
| I think this is the $10B question!
|
| It would seem that altermatives which are much more friendly to
| the planet involve lower yields but of arguably higher quality.
|
| This would mean food would be more expensive, although most
| western nations eat too much anyway and should appreciate that
| something as simple as food isn't cheap by definition,
| especially when we are effectively paying someone else to do
| all the work.
|
| The other big question is about eating meat (or at least as
| much meat as we do) since if we could reduce wasted land for
| animals, we would have more space to grow crops which could
| make up the shortfall of the lower yields.
| reedjosh wrote:
| There is soooo much land that cows graze on that can't really
| produce crops.
|
| Space isn't an issue caused by meat consumption. Further cows
| often eat the parts of crops we won't like corn stalks.
|
| Cows and other ruminants are kind of miracles and absolutely
| need to be part of our food supply.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Literally all of societal progress is built on the back of
| "that thing we used to spend a bunch of time/money on, well
| we made it cheap and can now redirect that productivity and
| resources elsewhere" for every conceivable value of "thing",
| food, clothes, written communication, transportation, energy,
| consumer junk.
|
| What you are arguing for is a non-starter. Society will not
| accept higher costs for any duration of time. Some route
| around the problem that is driving up prices will be found.
| [deleted]
| dzink wrote:
| Farming is a competition between pests, weather, consumer
| demands for perfect looking fruit, prices undercut by places
| with less regulation (or more subsidies), and your actual skill
| in caring for the farm. It's a real gamble every year for
| farmers. This at baseline would raise the costs of food as
| you'd get less crops per acre or end up seeing retailers go for
| vendors abroad who still use the chemical and made a larger
| crop.
| carapace wrote:
| More than borderline, there are many many examples these days
| of people practicing forms of ecologically-informed agriculture
| that match or exceed the yields of destructive systems and
| methods.
|
| When I first heard about Permaculture in the late 80's it was
| still pretty obscure, and regenerative agriculture in general
| was "hippie-dippy". Nowadays there are thousand of projects
| with videos on the youtube, and people are practicing
| ecologically harmonious farming all over the world. See
| especially Gabe Brown's talk linked below, he's not replacing
| current agriculture, just updating it with scientifically-
| grounded techniques that improve the volume and vitality of his
| topsoil while being more profitable.
|
| Quoting from some notes I've been keeping:
|
| There's the "Grow Biointensive" method which is designed to
| provide a complete diet in a small space while also building
| soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty
| years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and
| functioning all over the world.
|
| => http://growbiointensive.org/ Grow Biointensive
|
| (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have
| e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site
| curiously hard to use.)
|
| ## Permaculture
|
| Permaculture could be called "applied ecology" (with a kind of
| hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution)
| called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to
| mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce
| crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.)
| The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining
| and regenerative.
|
| For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
|
| => https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-
| hu...
|
| => https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-
| wit...
|
| There's a very lively and civil forum at
|
| => https://permies.com/forums
|
| ## Syntropic agriculture
|
| => https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/
| Syntropic agriculture
|
| (FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable,
| even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his
| results are incontrovertable.)
|
| I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and
| eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's
| youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event
| it's a great example:
|
| => https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ
| "Plant Abundance" (youtube)
|
| ## Growing Power
|
| If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't
| afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish
| tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) *Growing Power* model:
|
| => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power
|
| => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4
|
| => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng
|
| They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system
| to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee
| winters.
|
| ## Regenerative Agriculture
|
| Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of
| *Regenerative agriculture*, e.g.:
|
| => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A "Treating the
| Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of
| Soil Health" (youtube)
|
| => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU "Symphony Of The
| Soil" Official Trailer (youtube)
|
| This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often
| cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and
| ecologically and _economically_ superior to artificial methods
| (e.g. Brown makes money. It 's actually weird that more people
| aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have
| fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather
| than washing away in erosion.)
|
| ## Miyawaki method
|
| For regenerating native forests, not agriculture _per se_.
|
| => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki
| dmos62 wrote:
| That's exactly what I was interested in. Thanks for the hand-
| picked recommendations!
| carapace wrote:
| Cheers! I'm working up a kind of catalog or directory of
| "ecological living". It really seems like we have all the
| solutions, we just need to "get 'er done!"
| verisimi wrote:
| You can't run the corporate governance system on permaculture!
| People managing a small plot of land and getting an abundant
| amount of clean, good food won't fly.
|
| What we need are more massive farms, with just one crop,
| roundup ready seeds, imported fertiliser, etc - all owned by
| charitable (tax-free!) billionaire foundations for the
| betterment of us all! Get with the program!
|
| PS I'm being downvoted - but what's the problem? Bill Gates
| "owns less than 1 percent of the nation's total farmland" (from
| https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/bill-gates-purchase-of-
| north-d...).
| m_coder wrote:
| I believe you are on target. Small plots of land are on
| average far more productive per acre than large mono cropping
| plantations.
|
| "Dacha gardening accounts for about 3% of the arable land
| used in agriculture, but grows an astounding 50% by value of
| the food eaten by Russians." (from
| https://smallfarmersjournal.com/russian-dacha-gardens)
| pas wrote:
| > Small plots of land are on average far more productive
| per acre than large mono cropping plantations.
|
| the bottleneck is not exactly land, but cost, manpower,
| etc. that's why industrial farming dominates the food and
| feedstock sectors.
| m_coder wrote:
| You are right on target however I am not seeing people
| here understanding that the tight spot is not land but
| manpower.
|
| It seems to me that people think that if the first farm
| is more efficient in converting labor, dollars and cheap
| fuel into food than the second farm, then the first is
| the most efficient farm across all categories including
| land use. When one of the pieces changes (for instance
| fuel costs) then the formula needs to be revisited.
|
| Realizing that personal, scientific and careful
| management of land yields more food per acre without agri
| chemical products is an important first step to thinking
| about the picture even if the low cost of fuel is a
| current reality.
| bluGill wrote:
| that isn't a fair comparison though. Small farms grow high
| value crops that need a lot of labor, large farms that grow
| the same crops are even more productive (not by much
| though), except that there isn't enough demand to support a
| large farm growing those crops. There is a large demand for
| corn, so a lot of large farms grow it.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "You can't run the corporate governance system on
| permaculture! People managing a small plot of land and
| getting an abundant amount of clean, good food won't fly."
|
| I have seen quite some permaculture farms, but abundance of
| food I have never wittnessed, compared to conventional
| (organic) farming. Rather big talks and low yield.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I believe we could feed the world without
| the need of mass scale poison, but not while blinded by
| dogma.
| mjhay wrote:
| If we're willing to accept higher labor intensiveness, there's
| plenty of very realistic farming techniques that could be
| reintroduced. For example:
|
| - Off-season cover crops like legumes, etc both can fix
| nitrogen and out-compete weeds.
|
| - Intercropping, where different crops are planted in proximity
| (like alternating rows). This is less susceptible to pests and
| disease than monocultures, and the plants can be chosen to
| mutually enhance each other's fitness.
|
| In general, a lot of these techniques also give a healthier
| ecosystem, with more pollinators and predators of pests. The
| yields can be excellent and sustainable, but it is more labor.
| However, there's plenty of bullshit jobs[0] out there, and many
| people in them might find this kind of work more meaningful. I
| think a future society would do well to allocate labor with
| these goals in mind.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| Loughla wrote:
| >If we're willing to accept higher labor intensiveness
|
| In general will translate to
|
| >If we're willing to accept higher costs
|
| We may be willing to accept the first one, but I am
| absolutely not convinced of the second.
| mjhay wrote:
| Current industrial agriculture isn't physically sustainable
| in the long run for many reasons (soil loss, depleted
| aquifers, salinity), so the status-quo isn't a long-term
| option. Either we figure out how to feed billions of people
| sustainably, or things will get rather unpleasant in the
| future.
|
| I don't disagree with you though.
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| The problem with the word "costs" is that it's too easy to
| conflate this with money, and just think it means spending
| more of an abstract and essentially unlimited resource
| (money).
|
| The reality is that it means we will HAVE LESS STUFF, food
| or otherwise, because we are increasing the effort required
| to generate a unit of food.
| sillystuff wrote:
| Florida farm workers got McDonald's to agree to paying a
| penny per pound extra for tomatoes where the penny was to
| go directly to the farm workers' wages. This resulted in a
| 71% increase in farm worker pay.
|
| It appears that labor costs are not a significant portion
| of the price of produce. Of course, this would not apply if
| automated harvesting had to be replaced by manual labor.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0933192520070409
| cameldrv wrote:
| There are several companies that are using machines with
| computer vision to identify weeds and then either squirt a tiny
| amount of herbicide (Blue River/John Deere) onto them, or burn
| them with a laser (Carbon Robotics, others).
| yeldarb wrote:
| Or flamethrower https://hackaday.com/2021/09/11/dont-sleep-
| on-the-lawn-there...
| tonyhb wrote:
| Yes: https://www.gothamgreens.com/.
|
| They grow foods in hydroponic warehouses with no soil and no
| pesticides. You can find them in Whole Foods.
|
| I'm a huge fan of urban farming like this.
| progre wrote:
| I wonder what the energy budget look like for an operation
| like that. The argument against urban farming is that it is
| energy intesive and not really space efficient if you include
| the space needed for the extra energy production.
|
| It would be interesting to see a comparison with conventional
| farming where the energy to produce fertilizer was included.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Thats cool but you probably need ~2000 calories a day which
| would require chewing through 28 pounds of lettuce(70
| kcal/lb) which ain't easy.
| mattwest wrote:
| They aren't growing significant calories and hydroponics do
| not currently have the ability to do so in a way that
| competes with soil cropping
| SquareWheel wrote:
| So the "animals" mentioned in the title refers to roundworms, a
| parasite that lives in soil. Not something you exactly want, but
| also not something you would expect to be targeted by a
| herbicide.
|
| Glyphosate discussions always brings out people with strong
| opinions, but the product is studied extensively by researchers
| and the majority of studies have not shown harm. That doesn't
| prove it's safe of course, but it's where we're currently at.
|
| Because Roundup is such an important part of our agricultural
| industry, it should continue to be studied in depth. This study
| and others like it are important to ensuring that farming at
| scale remains safe for human consumption, as well as minimizes
| environmental impact.
| whalesalad wrote:
| dekhn wrote:
| c elegans are roundworms, but they are not parasites. They eat
| bacteria and yeast that grow on rotting fruit and other
| decaying matter.
|
| If roundup or glyphosate had these effects on c. elegans I'd
| expect a large-scale visibly noticeable impact on crop yields.
| wirrbel wrote:
| To me it appears that roundup kind of blocks an honest
| discussion on other causes of declining insect populations.
| soperj wrote:
| what would these be? edit: this was a genuine inquisitive
| question, not snarkiness.
| mattwest wrote:
| One factor could be land use and reduction of the overall
| richness of our ecosystem. That could be highways, cities,
| suburbs, timberland, and the coverage of monoculture crops
| user3939382 wrote:
| > the product is studied extensively by researchers
|
| Which researchers and funded by whom? This is the line Monsanto
| brings out every time. It turns out their corrupt research
| couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame
| for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.
|
| And it's not just roundworms
| https://sites.psu.edu/soilmicrobiology/projects/glyphosate-i...
|
| This chemical is bad news and the only reason it's legal is
| regulatory capture by Monsanto/Bayer.
| ekianjo wrote:
| you know that this judgment was very controversial or you
| believe everything is just 1 and zeroes in life?
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Seriously, WTF is wrong with people... we repeatedly
| polluted whole world with harmful substances like lead that
| killed god knows how many people and damaged in some way
| _everybody_ else with this kind of logic, yet people have
| the balls to come up with "innocent until proven guilty by
| 100 peer reviews" mantra for... MONSANTO
|
| I don't believe, unlike many, that they are comically evil
| guys. Just playing a god for profit with stuff they
| probably understand only in lower 90 percentile range,
| especially second, third etc. order effects. And probably
| too over-invested in direction company took decades ago, so
| nobody looking at bonuses as drive will change its
| direction dramatically.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Choosing to blindly believe one side over blindly
| believing the other side is a dubious approach to these
| things. I care about environmental issues, and have no
| love for many aspects of Monsanto's business and history,
| but your emotional appeal is extremely unconvincing.
|
| > for Monsanto
|
| GP isn't making their comment "for Monsanto", but for the
| sake of seeking the truth on _this specific issue._ You
| will continue to be shocked until you change your
| perspective on how we ought to evaluate nuanced issues.
| Especially when those issues have to do with global food
| production.
| soperj wrote:
| > sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue
|
| I don't disagree with you, I also don't think we should
| be using the product when the truth is as clouded as it
| is. So ban it until the truth comes out.
| gruez wrote:
| >So ban it until the truth comes out.
|
| Okay but given that we have endless studies already, it
| seems like "until the truth comes out" really means
| "until my _preferred conclusion_ comes out ".
| soperj wrote:
| My preferred conclusion would be that it's actually safe,
| since we're using a massive amount of it already and
| we're all exposed.
| drekk wrote:
| It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes
| cause cancer in humans. Similarly to tobacco companies
| Monsanto is subsidizing research that just happens to
| find no harms with RoundUp. I'm sure it's fine though, no
| big deal that trace amounts can be found in urine samples
| from 80% of Americans. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2022/jul/09/weedkiller-g...
| gruez wrote:
| >It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes
| cause cancer in humans.
|
| Glyphosate has been around for almost 5 decades.
| Wikipedia says "The consensus among national pesticide
| regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that
| labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence
| of human carcinogenicity"[1]. If you think this is not
| "conclusively" enough, how much longer/more evidence do
| you need? Is this a standard that we should apply to
| everything[2], or just chemicals made my evil
| multinational corporations? Maybe we should delay rolling
| out cell phones for a few decades _just to be sure_ that
| they don 't cause brain cancer?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
|
| [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-
| isolated-demand...
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I have to take it at face value to a degree otherwise
| Monsanto can fire cannons of money at scientists and yell
| "the science isn't settled!" until the end of humanity even
| if roundup really did cause cancer.
|
| At the same time I think there is a limit to how bad
| roundup can be to have fought off criticism in EVERY
| country and remain on the market.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Have you ever sat on a jury? Seen how that particular
| sausage is made?
| gruez wrote:
| >It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a
| court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the
| tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.
|
| What makes you think a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better
| qualified to make conclusions on the available evidence than
| scientists?
| user3939382 wrote:
| Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides
| of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw
| conclusions. Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the
| side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to
| suggest.
| pjlegato wrote:
| If someone is not qualified as an expert on a given topic
| themselves, they have no rational basis for evaluating
| competing and mutually incompatible claims generated by
| two parties who are each qualified experts. The process
| devolves into mere sophistry.
| gruez wrote:
| >Because the jury are listening to experts from both
| sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to
| draw conclusions.
|
| That doesn't answer the question. What makes you think
| that a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better able to
| determine the truth from 2 conflicting teams of experts,
| than a team of experts versed in the relevant field?
|
| >Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of
| Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to
| suggest.
|
| They seem to be uniformly on the side of
| Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, according to wikipedia.
|
| >The consensus among national pesticide regulatory
| agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled
| uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human
| carcinogenicity. [...]
|
| there's more but I'm not going to quote the whole
| paragraph
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
| indiv0 wrote:
| Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph
| that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of
| non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?
|
| > The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment
| toxicology review in 2013 found that with regard to
| positive correlations between exposure to glyphosate
| formulations and risk of various cancers, including non-
| Hodgkin lymphoma, "the available data is contradictory
| and far from being convincing".[11] A meta-analysis
| published in 2014 identified an increased risk of NHL in
| workers exposed to glyphosate formulations.[12] In March
| 2015, the World Health Organization's International
| Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified
| glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic in humans" (category
| 2A) based on epidemiological studies, animal studies, and
| in vitro studies.[8][13][14][15] In contrast, the
| European Food Safety Authority concluded in November 2015
| that "the substance is unlikely to be genotoxic (i.e.
| damaging to DNA) or to pose a carcinogenic threat to
| humans", later clarifying that while carcinogenic
| glyphosate-containing formulations may exist, studies
| "that look solely at the active substance glyphosate do
| not show this effect."[16][17] In 2017, the European
| Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing
| serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did
| not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen, a
| mutagen, toxic to reproduction, nor toxic to specific
| organs.[18]
|
| Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the
| *European Chemicals Agency* over a company with a vested
| interest in keeping their product on the market.
| gruez wrote:
| > Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph
| that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of
| non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?
|
| I'm glad that you quoted the whole paragraph, but this
| seems to put a damper on your conclusion
|
| >"the available data is contradictory and far from being
| convincing"
|
| >Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the
| _European Chemicals Agency_ over a company with a vested
| interest in keeping their product on the market.
|
| Their conclusion is:
|
| >the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified
| glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to
| aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as
| a carcinogen
| user3939382 wrote:
| It wasn't "just" a jury in the first place, Monsanto
| appealed and also lost.
| voakbasda wrote:
| The courts ignored the science. The law has little to do with
| truth or justice.
| user3939382 wrote:
| You have no evidence of that. More likely the plaintiff had
| their own scientific experts who were more persuasive,
| that's how all technical matters are adjudicated in courts.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Nonetheless, surely the point is well-made that just
| because 12 jurors or 1 judge decide that a presentation
| is more persuasive does not say anything about the truth
| value of the underlying science.
|
| Just look at the junk science of the FBI crime labs - and
| that stuff is being measured at the higher "beyond a
| reasonable doubt" standard.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Another factor that makes Monsanto/Bayer look really bad
| here is that they lost despite having basically an
| unlimited legal budget with a huge team of lawyers versus
| this school groundskeeper and their case was so bad they
| still lost.
| gruez wrote:
| >having basically an unlimited legal budget with a huge
| team of lawyers
|
| no, their budget is capped at the amount that they're
| suing for. If you're getting sued for $1M there's no
| point in spending more than $1M on lawyers.
|
| >versus this school groundskeeper and their case was so
| bad they still lost.
|
| According to the court filings for the appeal, Johnson
| was represented by
|
| >The Miller Firm, LLC Michael J. Miller, Curtis G. Hoke,
| Jeffrey A. Travers;
|
| >Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, P.C.; R. Brent Wisner,
| Pedram Esfandiary;
|
| >Audet Partners LLP, Mark E. Burton
|
| Something tells me that he wasn't paying for all of this
| out of pocket.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| c.f. also the talcum powder lawsuits against J&J.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Majority of research claimed that J&J talkum powder is
| safe?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Basically, the best studies show no link e.g.
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-
| abstract/27584...
|
| The American Cancer Association doesn't list talc at all
| when talking about risk factors for ovarian cancer:
| https://www.cancer.org/cancer/ovarian-cancer/about/new-
| resea...
|
| J&J is winning most of the cases in court, or having
| large verdicts overturned on appeal, but there are
| supposedly something like 38,000 cases out there and each
| one has an outside chance to end up being like the one
| they lost in Wisconsin state court which initially
| awarded over $4.69bn to 22 plaintiffs (reduced to $2.11bn
| on appeal).
| scotty79 wrote:
| Do you think it really is a risk factor for ovarian
| cancer?
| kingkawn wrote:
| These neurotoxins do not deserve the benefit of the doubt until
| shown otherwise
| gruez wrote:
| It's a neurotoxin... according to whom? A search for "neuro"
| in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate turns up 0
| matches. However, the same wikipedia article does mention the
| mechanism of action
|
| >It inhibits a plant enzyme involved in the synthesis of
| three aromatic amino acids: tyrosine, tryptophan, and
| phenylalanine
|
| which seems decidedly not a neurotoxin.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This whole subject does reveal the duplicity and manipulation
| of Bayer-Monsanto on this topic, because they use studies on
| _purified glyphosate_ to make their claims of harmlessness.
|
| However, RoundUp is glyphosate + surfactants (oily lipid-type
| molecules) which are needed to dissolve the waxy leaf surface
| so that the glyphosate can be absorbed by the plant, without
| which the herbicide would be ineffective.
|
| Studies with RoundUp formulation show the disruption of cell
| cycle effects, which can lead to cancer in applicators who get
| exposed. This is a common issue with a wide variety of strong
| surfactants, for example see this from the Deepwater Horizon
| blowout, where they dumped tons of a surfactant mix called
| Corexit:
|
| https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corexit
| shawnz wrote:
| Surfactants are essentially soaps, right? So surely their
| safety profile is well understood already and glyphosate is
| the more important component to be researching anyway?
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Surely" is the opposite of science. There are as many
| kinds of surfactants as of acids and bases.
|
| You would not say of an acid, "surely it is essentially
| vinegar", or of a base "surely it is essentially baking
| soda".
| shawnz wrote:
| Are they using an especially unusual choice of surfactant
| in roundup? Wouldn't it be trivial to just go to one with
| a better safety profile if it's not the active
| ingredient? It just doesn't seem like a plausible
| conspiracy to me that Monsanto would be going to such
| efforts to hide the side effects of the surfactant they
| are using. I'm not saying it shouldn't be studied, I'm
| just saying this doesn't seem like such a huge "gotcha"
| to me.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Plants have waxy leaves; surfactants which dissolve waxes
| allow the glyphosate to enter the plant; such surfactants
| tend to be highly potent (i.e, they'd effectively strip
| oils from skins cells and get into those cells). Soap
| probably wouldn't dissolve waxes.
|
| Fundamentally, the exact identity of the 'inert
| ingredients' in Roundup and similar products should be
| exposed on the label. Currently that's proprietary
| information, but there's a wide range of toxicity of such
| substances.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30951798/
|
| > "(2019) As glyphosate-based-herbicide composition is
| legally classified as confidential commercial
| information, confusion concerning the identity and
| concentrations of co-formulants is common and
| descriptions of test substances in published studies are
| often erroneous or incomplete. In order to resolve this
| confusion, laws requiring disclosure of the chemical
| composition of pesticide products could be enacted.
| Research to understand health implications from ingesting
| these substances is required."
| gabereiser wrote:
| There will always be people who believe the Bayer-Monsanto
| propaganda. Just like there are people who believe that
| burning 100m-year-old plant matter is fine. Just like people
| believe that there are aliens living among us.
|
| There have been countless studies on the matter. Even without
| the surfactants it's still a nasty substance.
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.7639.
| ..
|
| https://www.cornucopia.org/2014/03/gut-wrenching-new-
| studies...
|
| https://www.figo.org/removal-glyphosate-global-usage
|
| https://jech.bmj.com/content/71/6/613
|
| https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-.
| ..
| Dig1t wrote:
| >Glyphosate discussions always brings out people with strong
| opinions
|
| That's funny, I've experienced this first hand. There's a guy
| who comes into the vet clinic I frequent who's dog died of
| cancer and he drives around with giant decals pasted all over
| his white van saying that Roundup killed his dog and to stay
| away from it. He claims that the gardener sprayed his dog
| deliberately and that his dog died as a result. He is very
| passionate about it and spends a lot of time evangelizing this
| cause.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| Pesticides & herbecides in general are just not safe at the
| moment and it's been clear they having been causing lots of
| health problems.
|
| A lot of people, especially the farmers themselves & people
| living close to the farms get way too high amounts of
| pesticides in their system. And I also don't trust the safe
| amounts allowed are actually properly tested over a lifetime.
|
| Causing all kinds of issues, among parkinsons and such, take
| France for instance:
| https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/06/vineyard-...
| gcheong wrote:
| This site seems to promote organic agricultural practices as
| pesticide-safe but organic farming uses some of the most
| dangerous pesticides (e.g copper sulfate) precisely because
| of the anti-scientific requirement that anything used must be
| of "natural" origin, which is just the naturalistic fallacy.
| The bias here is clear.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I wonder how much the effect on microorganisms has been
| studied. I have a small hunch that a lot of the weird reactions
| people have to various plants can be traced back to glyphosate
| and its effect on our gut biome.
| slimsag wrote:
| Do you know if there /are/ any studies done with smaller
| mammals, out of curiosity? My worry is always that we're
| poisoning our dogs/cats, where a toxic amount I imagine is much
| smaller
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You're worried about dogs and not children or adults?
| nemo44x wrote:
| You want to wait for it to dry before letting animals and
| people in the area you have applied Roundup.
| slimsag wrote:
| Of course, but it's still there after drying. dogs/cats
| sniff the ground, lay on it, eat bugs that have interacted
| with it, etc. (hopefully not for all of these, but I am
| sure they do)
| cma wrote:
| Some things completely change character after drying.
| Permethrin will kill cats while wet (like just after
| applying topically to a dog), but they wont absorb enough
| of it dry. And it doesn't really re-wet by just adding
| water (permethrin for hiking stays on clothes through 30
| washes or something).
|
| I'm not sure if it chemically changes or if it starts out
| in some kind of emulsion or something that can't be
| recreated by just rewetting with water.
| slimsag wrote:
| That's really interesting, I didn't know that. Makes me
| wonder how many herbicides / insecticides are like this
| for sure
| dzink wrote:
| That roundworm aerates the soil and is critical for the health
| of plants you're eating as well. It's also a proxy for nervous
| system reactions.
| Symmetry wrote:
| On the other hand, in the Americas it's an invasive species
| and many crops were doing fine before it's introduction so
| I'm not sure I'd call it critical for plants health. In the
| end we can compare yield in fields with roundup applied and
| those without and compare yields to find out the overall
| effect on plants.
|
| But the dangers of it affecting other animals' nervous
| systems the same way it affects roundworms is a serious
| worry.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Footnote: Roundworms and Earthworms are different animals.
|
| The animals cited in this study are roundworms and belong
| to the Filum Nematoda, one of the most frequent animals in
| this planet and also one of the most overlooked.
|
| Most of them are not parasite animals, but we know more
| about the parasites because they cause gross diseases in
| humans.
|
| Earthworms are the common pink worms found on soil, they
| belong to Filum Annelida (and is true that some european
| earthworms invaded America a few thousands years ago).
|
| Earthworms and humans are basically not directly linked in
| the trophic chain. We don't feed on them, and they don't
| feed on us directly or cause us diseases.
| dekhn wrote:
| The roundworm in this study, C. Elegans is not invasive.
| It's one of the critical components of an ecosystem. You
| are thinking of other roundworms.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Hmm, I was assuming the OP was extending the _c elegans_
| result to earthworms since I 've never heard of _c
| elegans_ aerating soil. And now that I go google it I 'm
| seeing lots of stuff on _c elegans_ requiring aerated
| soil but none on it doing it itself so I think I 'm
| correct in my assumption?
| dekhn wrote:
| c. elegans help maintain the decomposition pipeline, not
| soil aeration.
|
| There are a few things that if they were lost globally
| would greatly affect the necessary process of
| decomposition.
|
| A lot of what's written about c. elegans environment has
| been overturned. It was thought to be a soil nematode,
| but it's really most common in rotting fruit.
| XorNot wrote:
| Glyphosate doesn't _last_ in soil though, it 's broken down
| in a few days by soil bacteria.
| katbyte wrote:
| Doesn't mean that it doesn't last elsewhere, studies in BC
| have shown that is persists in plants that are sprayed but
| don't die for at least a year
| https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-herbicide-
| glyph...
|
| Which makes the practice above of spraying replanted
| forests so "the good trees grow faster" even more abhorrent
| soperj wrote:
| > the good trees grow faster
|
| They replant with round-up ready pine, so they spray to
| kill aspen which is a firebreak species, and grow massive
| pine stands which are the opposite. It's the major reason
| for the massive forest fires we've had lately (and thus
| the massive flooding).
| gruez wrote:
| "a few days" is the lower end. From wikipedia:
|
| >The half-life of glyphosate in soil ranges between 2 and
| 197 days; a typical field half-life of 47 days has been
| suggested. Soil and climate conditions affect glyphosate's
| persistence in soil. The median half-life of glyphosate in
| water varies from a few to 91 days.[57] At a site in Texas,
| half-life was as little as three days. A site in Iowa had a
| half-life of 141.9 days
| alfor wrote:
| If it show up in your urine, it mean it lasted too long.
|
| It is also a powerful chelating agent (make you lose
| minerals) is another concern for humans.
|
| "Although the chelating properties are well known, this
| potential additional environmental risk was never
| adequately considered in the regulatory risk assessment
| (EFSA 2015a, 2015b)."
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5823954/#:~:te
| x....
| giantg2 wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? I thought the half-life in
| soil was 90 days. Certainly would be perplexing as to how
| various Roundup products work for months to a year.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The long-lasting Roundup products contain other active
| ingredients in addition to glyphosate.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It seems regular Roundup has multiple active ingredients
| these days.
| primroot wrote:
| Let's not forget adjuvants.
| thecolorblue wrote:
| I have heard this too, but then how is it showing up in
| people later on?
| katbyte wrote:
| It gets into plants and animals during those days
| https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-herbicide-
| glyph...
| pvaldes wrote:
| Soil roundworms are not necessarily parasites. Free living ones
| have huge populations in the soils and sea bottoms. In ecology
| handbooks there is often shown a study that found more
| kilograms of roundworms than kilograms of deer living in the
| same places.
|
| They are highly influential in fertile soils.
| londons_explore wrote:
| We keep asking ourself "is this chemical safe".
|
| But what we should be asking is "does use of this chemical have
| benefits to humans that outweigh the disadvantages to humans".
|
| A weedkiller that harms people might still be a good thing if it
| has overwhelming benefits too, like for example it saves far more
| peoples lives through greater food production.
|
| Regulators never seem to see this bigger picture - instead we
| allowed things that have small benefits and large known harm (eg.
| leaded fuels), and disallow things that could have huge benefits
| and tiny harm (gm crops).
|
| Regulators need to be the ones seeing the bigger picture, because
| the people getting the benefits (eg. farmers) are rarely the ones
| taking the downsides (eg. cancer risk of those eating the
| produced food).
| TheMiddleMan wrote:
| You say this like there aren't alternatives. We can find a way
| to grow crops that isn't harmful to people.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > We can find a way
|
| Are you a commercial farmer? What crops, what volume?
| echelon wrote:
| > We
|
| Who is "we", and why are you including yourself in this?
|
| It's one thing to state that. It's quite another to go and do
| it.
|
| The farm industry has made a choice. What are you going to do
| to make them change that? Offer to pay more? Get lawmakers to
| side with you? Purchase different things at the grocery
| store?
|
| I think we'll still be talking about glyphosate in another
| twenty years and that not much will have changed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Everything involves some harm to people. For example, if you
| use a tractor to plough that land, you'll be emitting some
| diesel particulates giving the people in the area worse
| health.
|
| If you ban machines and plant everything by hand, someone's
| going to get a bad back.
|
| Every option involves some harm. The trick is to minimize it.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Not permanently damaging the soil and causing long term
| chemical poisoning to the population and our offspring is a
| pretty basic don't
| bluGill wrote:
| That plow will do a lot more damage to the soil than
| roundup.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| I don't think we will ever understand the amount of death,
| literally, that Monsanto's products have caused. And what's worse
| is they were fully aware all along, and still the US government
| had their back.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| What do you mean? People are living longer and our food is
| safer than ever before. How could you argue otherwise?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Their products have probably caused more deaths indirectly that
| from the chemicals themselves. Their chemicals are a major
| reason starvation isn't a problem (thus saving many lives) and
| have helped in growing crops so much that we use their
| byproducts in many things (line HFCS, etc) which has made
| processed food so incredibly cheap and accessible that we have
| a diabetes and obesity epidemic.
| docandrew wrote:
| This is a bit hyperbolic - unless you mean excess deaths caused
| by obesity, heart disease and diabetes because of how abundant
| food has gotten.
|
| But starvation is less of a problem anymore, largely because of
| agricultural advances like fertilizers, machinery enabling
| better practices (like no-till farming) and yes, herbicides and
| pesticides.
|
| Undoubtedly there are harmful side effects but they need to be
| viewed with a sensible cost-benefit analysis.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| But it's perfectly safe to drink, right?
| https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM
| vel0city wrote:
| Its a pretty common practice to include manure when fertilizing
| a field. Would you eat manure?
|
| There's lots of things that are safe to use in their expected
| capacities that I probably wouldn't eat.
| a2tech wrote:
| This comment made me chuckle and I think is an excellent
| illustration.
|
| There's a lot of people in these threads that don't
| understand how farming works and the sheer scale of the
| problem with growing plant matter for food and industry.
| There are people seriously encouraging manual farming as a
| solution to the worlds food/pest issues. It boggles my mind--
| have these people have hand worked a field? Even maintaining
| an acre of garden as a single person would illustrate the
| amount of effort you have to put in and the low amount of
| yield you get in return. I'd love to know how people would
| get 'selected' as field workers. Because I doubt you'd have
| people rushing out to till fields by hand unless they're
| pressed into service.
|
| Personally I'd rather deal with a little extra chemical
| buildup than reinventing a modern slave class.
| [deleted]
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Nobody would drink a glass of offered liquid from somebody who
| is clearly acting antagonistically towards them. Beyond that,
| there's clearly a difference between something being appealing
| and safe to drink. The way anti-GMO people tout this as a slam
| dunk is just intellectual laziness.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > "anti-GMO people"
|
| There it is. The implication that anyone who isn't
| unquestionably pro GMOs, is against them, no matter the
| modification or the company pushing it.
|
| I mean, what kind of an anti-science rube uses
| "intellectually lazy" arguments, such as "asking a guy who
| said Roundup is safe to drink to actually drink some".
|
| This, from the guy who conflates RoundUp with it's active
| ingredient glyphosate. Scientific evidence showing RoundUp is
| significantly more toxic -
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17537-w- Hmm, that
| study was easy to find ...
|
| This, on an article which explicitly calls out how little we
| know of glyphosate's effect on the nervous system.
|
| This, on an article which notes the terrifying fact that 80%
| of US urine samples, children included, contain glyphosate.
|
| RoundUp is nasty shit. And I'm not anti-science for being
| worried about glyphosate in my piss.
| frazbin wrote:
| In the thread: bunch of tech workers acting like 19th century
| small farmers. The story here is that chemistry is a blunt tool
| and in 50 years we won't need it for agriculture. Biocontrols
| will have totally taken over. In the meantime anything we can do
| to remove incumbent chemical technologies and create economic
| room for their replacements is.. important. Why? cause we're
| gonna need those biocontrols anyway to keep farming at current
| yields under an evolving pest/weed regime.
|
| We got through the 20th century without sustainable farming. I'm
| OK with that, it led to things like me existing. Now it's time to
| focus a little more effort on doing the job properly.
| mattwest wrote:
| Biocontrols have potential, but they have certainly not taken
| over. We will always use a combination of herbicides, genetic
| engineering, RNAi, and biocontrols. The key will be finding a
| balance between these technologies.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The animal in question is C. elegans, a soil-dwelling roundworm.
| So, undeniably an animal, but probably not among the first 50
| animals that the headline is likely to conjure in the reader's'
| imagination.
| incomingpain wrote:
| I feel like Glysophate is equivalent to leaded gasoline. Everyone
| knows it's bad for everyone but we keep using it. With some near
| future where we ban it.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is a difference. With leaded gasoline it was the chemists
| who study this stuff that knew it was bad trying to convince
| everyone else. With roundup it is the non-chemists "bloggers"
| and conspiracy theorists who know it is bad trying to convince
| everyone else.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Just to be sure, biologists use a number of model organisms which
| are well understood. C. Elegans is a model organism for studying
| genetics and neurophysiology.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans
| chmaynard wrote:
| If the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the authority to
| regulate industrial chemicals along the lines of the FDA's
| regulation of pharmaceuticals, this type of clinical study would
| have been required before Roundup ever hit the shelves.
| h2odragon wrote:
| When Roundup first hit shelves, "soil erosion" was the big
| concern and it was a miracle chemical that enabled "no till"
| agriculture. Now erosion is not a concern anymore, hardly
| anyone does more than disc their fields once a decade.
|
| Of course while that _helps_ erosion, it doesn 't fully solve
| the problem, and it also took down the flood control benefits
| the erosion mitigation efforts gave us, too.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > hardly anyone does more than disc their fields once a
| decade.
|
| I guess nearly every single of the "hardly anyone" are near
| me. Pretty much every field seems to be tilled every year or
| every other year.
| stinos wrote:
| _Now erosion is not a concern anymore, hardly anyone does
| more than disc their fields once a decade._
|
| That's a bit of a stretch. Really depends on location and
| crop type. At least around this local village, lots of hills,
| it is still an issue. As in: every rainfall which is like a
| tad rougher than average results in several streets being
| flooded with mud. Totalling several metric tonnes (official
| measurements, weird these numbers are weight, not volume) of
| soil disappearing from only a couple of km^2 of farmland
| every single year. This isn't the type of issue Roundup or
| anything like that is going to solve, it really need thorough
| systematic change.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > Really depends on location and crop type.
|
| Great point; around me they let the small fields on the
| hills go back to forest and stopped building little dams.
| Can still find traces of the horse drawn plowed fields,
| further up the hills, where they turned furrows to be
| terraces. Those last got plowed 100+ yr ago in some cases
| and now stand out from the gullies below them.
| ouid wrote:
| not weird at all the the measurements are in mass. Mass is
| conserved, volume is not. For instance what do you get when
| you add half a yard of silt to a yard of pebbles? thats
| right, a yard of silty pebbles
| stinos wrote:
| Makes sense, but only if interpreted as 'mass of dried
| material (i.e. soil only, not the water in it)' then I
| guess?
| jlmorton wrote:
| This is not exactly the first study on glyphosate. There are
| 857 studies on links on the links between glyphosate and Non-
| Hodgkin's Lymphoma alone. Pubmed finds 4,585 studies mentioning
| glyphosate, going back to 1975.
|
| It's an extremely intensively-studied chemical.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Rephrased a bit for those not familiar with the process:
|
| New chemicals can be introduced and are considered innocent
| until proven guilty.
|
| This was the entry point for forever-chemicals.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant
| giantg2 wrote:
| File this under "study confirming shit that beekeepers already
| know". Seeing bees twitching and shaking as they die is pretty
| common after various herbicide, pesticide, and fungicide
| applications.
| mattwest wrote:
| The only reasonable study linking glyphosate to bee harm was
| designed to mimic large-scale farming application. They used
| huge concentrations and only found disorientation of bees, but
| not a reduction in bee population.
|
| Glyphosate is not a neonicotinoid, which is class of chemicals
| you are probably referring to.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There are a number of agricultural chemicals that we see as
| being anecdotally harmful.
|
| Heres a meta study concluding that glycophosphate exposure
| can contribute to population reduction.
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33636765/
| clarionbell wrote:
| This is possibly the first study demonstrating adverse Roundup
| effects I've read that doesn't have any immediately obvious
| issues. There could be some, obviously, but it's nothing like
| using animal strains prone to cancer.
|
| In this case the worms are mutants, but the strains are not noted
| to be more prone to convulsions. They still had electrocute them,
| but the time to recovery did seem to relate to chemicals
| administered.
| mattwest wrote:
| These studies always bring out knee-jerk reactions in genpop, but
| you have to understand what herbicides and GMO crops have done to
| alleviate global hunger and malnutrition.
|
| In the most developed countries, we spend 7-15% of our income on
| food. The poorer you are, the higher that percentage is. In some
| African countries, families will spend upwards of 70% of their
| income for not just food, but for _bags of rice_. The bare
| minimum.
|
| In the past 4 decades, we've increased our crop yields by 4x.
| This is because of intensive farming.
|
| Now, is it destructive to the environment? Yes
|
| Does it create fragility in our food systems and supply chains?
| Yes
|
| Should we immediately stop using herbicides and large-scale
| monoculture systems? Think carefully about that one.
|
| When people say, we need to implement regenerative agriculture,
| or organic practices, or stop eating meat, etc, they _rarely_
| have a full understanding of how our agrifood system works.
|
| I'm an advocate for improving these systems, reducing herbicide
| use, and implementing sustainable practices (whatever that means
| at this point). But please, please, please try to fully
| understand how our food system really works. Try to understand
| the magnitude of cost reduction our current system has provided.
| Try to understand how global life expectancy has increased by >20
| years due to these practices.
| wilburTheDog wrote:
| Sri Lanka is an interesting case study. President Rajapaksa
| suddenly banned using pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. It
| caused significant reductions in crop yields and ended up
| costing the country a great deal of money. This article in Vox
| seems to cover it in a pretty balanced way
| (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-
| la...).
|
| I like organic farming. I use an organic approach for my home
| garden. But yields are lower than with conventional farming.
| Even the most positive studies agree on that (see
| https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/12/09/organic-conventional-
| fa...). It also takes more effort, which means more people
| would have to be farmers than currently.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > These studies always bring out knee-jerk reactions in genpop,
| but you have to understand what herbicides and GMO crops have
| done to alleviate global hunger and malnutrition.
|
| "I am too young to remember flipper babies."
|
| To an older, educated portion of the 'genpop' your post is just
| carrying water for Monsanto and has zero to do with GMO as a
| concept. You've typed up a manifesto stating the obvious and
| missing the point. Ask yourself why people would "oppose GMO"
| if they agree with every point you make here.
| Maursault wrote:
| So it has nothing to do with maximizing profits and greed? Good
| to know.
| mattwest wrote:
| Who said that?
| malfist wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy and you know it.
|
| You can seek profit AND help make food less scarce at the
| same time.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| ? The above comment never made that dichotomy. Interesting
| that you took it that way.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maximum profit works best if you don't starve to death, and
| thus continue eating year after year. Even better if you
| decide you can afford to have a few kids (importantly feed
| them)
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I regularly advocate for regenerative agriculture. I have
| studied and practiced, on a small scale, regenerative methods.
| Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are not needed for the
| abundance and we would be better off not using them. However,
| the shift from chemical farming to regenerative practices
| cannot be forced or rushed. It takes about 3 years to bring the
| soil back to life and get it working as the plant's stomach and
| yields to match or beat chemical farming. Forcing a change in
| land management practices is a recipe for absolute disaster of
| famine and likely war.
|
| Due to the higher profitability of regenerative agriculture I
| am confident that the majority of farms will shift to
| regenerative in the decades to come. The only thing that can
| stop the transition is government intervention to try to "save"
| chemical farmers by subsidizing their chemical inputs. We just
| have to stay out of the way and let the transition happen.
| mattwest wrote:
| Edible calories per acre per season are one thing. Labor cost
| per acre are another, and that's the key element we need to
| figure out if we want to transition. Right now the economics
| don't work out.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| What makes the labor costs higher?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > yields to match or beat chemical farming
|
| Is it true? "Chemical farming" only happened because the
| yields were better. Much better. What were farmers doing
| wrong?
|
| This sounds like another "we don't count fallow fields in the
| divisor" hustle. I'd love to be wrong.
|
| > Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are not needed
|
| How do you control for herd immunity? One pesticide-free
| field will never see a locust plague, a thousand pesticide-
| free fields absolutely will.
|
| > government intervention to try to "save" chemical farmers
| by subsidizing their chemical inputs
|
| Is this really an anti-intervention argument or is it an
| attempt to frame the absence of steep fines on fertilizers
| and pesticides as a subsidy?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Chemical farming happened because the bomb makers wanted to
| continue selling ammonia and giving ammonia to plants does
| make them grow big. But, it is a shortcut and destroys the
| symbiotic relationship with the soil life. Initially the
| soil still had a lot of organic matter and life in it and
| it only took a small amount of fertilizer. After killing
| the soil life there is no nitrogen, carbon, or phosphorus
| cycle, the OM erodes away, and the remaining dirt becomes
| compacted. As the soil degrades it has taken continually
| more fertilizer to keep yields up.
|
| Pesticides destroy the food chain. They kill pests and
| their predators which makes it easier for the pests to
| thrive. Predators keep pest populations in check but do not
| eliminate them.
|
| Fining the use of fertilizers and pesticides would be
| disastrous. If fertilizers and pesticides are seen as the
| sole way to grow all of our food the government will
| absolutely try to step in and pay for a portion or all of
| the fertilizers and pesticides as prices increase. This is
| the only way that chemical farming will remain dominant. It
| is simply becoming too costly to continue chemical farming.
|
| Like I said before, the best course is to just let the
| transition happen at the rate that it happens.
| gruez wrote:
| >Due to the higher profitability of regenerative agriculture
|
| That might be true today, but will it hold into the future?
| Organic agriculture is also more profitable than conventional
| agriculture, even though it's less productive and has higher
| costs. The only reason it's more profitable is that people
| are willing to pay a premium for it. Obviously that's not
| something that's scalable. You might be able to convince a
| good chunk of bay area professionals to buy your
| organic/regenerative agriculture crops at 3x prices, but once
| you saturated that market you'll have much more trouble
| convincing the rest of the country to into paying 3x (or
| whatever) for their produce.
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