14 ms·

Swathing is going out of fashion, as most farmers desiccate to ripen their crops

206 points by dnetesn 8y ago

joe_the_user 8y ago
I haven't taken the need to buy organic that seriously before but this is rather terrifying. Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.
- cardamomo 8y ago
  I agree. I had mostly preferred organics in recent years because I wanted politically to avoid Monsanto, et al. and support a more regional food system. I didn't believe that industrial-scale organics were demonstrably healthier than conventional crops. But this research and a handful of other studies that have appeared on HN recently have changed my thinking. There seems to be more and more evidence that conventionally grown crops are essentially bathed in chemicals that are at best questionable with regard to human health.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    The same thing applies to milk. Organic milk regulations disallow water and powder mixtures while conventional milk is anywhere upwards from 5% stale milk mixed with fresh milk. What organic was originally labeled for is now just a shadow. Buying organic is just precautionary to avoid the everchanging regulations that are not made with individuals in mind..but instead, industry..
- woah 8y ago
  I wish there was a label for food that is grown without pesticides, but with artificial fertilizers.
  - arnoooooo 8y ago
    I undersand artificial fertilizers are pretty bad for soil biology. We desperately need healthy soil for CO2 absobtion (not to mention fertility).
    - bluGill 8y ago
      What makes you think your understanding is correct?
      - strainer 8y ago
        Organic farming enhances soil microbial abundance and activity—A meta-analysis and meta-regression [1] > we integrated data from 56 mainly peer-reviewed papers into our analysis, including 149 pairwise comparisons originating from different climatic zones and experimental duration ranging from 3 to more than 100 years. Overall, we found that organic systems had 32% to 84% greater microbial biomass carbon, microbial biomass nitrogen, total phospholipid fatty-acids, and dehydrogenase, urease and protease activities than conventional systems. .... In summary, this study shows that overall organic farming enhances total microbial abundance and activity in agricultural soils on a global scale. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180442 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
  - ip26 8y ago
    Organic food can still use pesticides. It's a curated whitelist to be sure, including things such as soap and alcohol. But it is not pesticide free.
- jorblumesea 8y ago
  There's no real regulation of the organic label, at least in the US. So buying organic just means a larger price tag for dubious quality of produce. You may be getting something totally organic or something using 60 year old pesticides. There's no way to know based on the label.
  - NoGravitas 8y ago
    It's not true that there's no real regulation of the organic label in the US. Regarding the things that it actually regulates, the USDA organic label is strictly enforced. Your concern may be that people expect USDA organic to mean things that it doesn't. The relevant document is the [National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances](https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/01/25/organic-101-allowed-and-prohibited-substances https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/01/25/organic-101-allow...).
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Anecdotal I know, but a friend in the crop spraying business told me that plenty of food sold as "certified organic" (at least here in the UK) has been dessicated with glyphosphate too.
  - Frondo 8y ago
    Best anecdote I heard on the practice: a distant cousin of mine told me about the time he was driving down I-80 and saw them harvesting something off in a field, and there were two bins, one labeled "ORGANIC" and one labeled "REGULAR" and they were feeding the harvest into them both equally. (editing for clarity: I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. I also think people make a lot of stuff up and pass it off as anecdotes because we're a very polite society for that sort of thing.)
    - randomdata 8y ago
      > I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. What's in a bin at one moment in time is not necessarily the same crop at another moment in time. While physically labelling bins, rather than keeping record in the office, is not a practice that I see as being very common, conceivably a bin could have been labelled for organic crop at some point in the past and repurposed for non-organic crop (or vice versa) during the harvest your cousin witnessed without putting effort into removing the previous label. So, the story could be completely true, but doesn't really tell much even if it is.
      - saalweachter 8y ago
        I mean, farmers also have a sense of humor. A farmer near where I grew up had four giant bins in a row labeled "FLOUR" "SUGAR" "COFFEE" "TEA".
dev_dull 8y ago
I knew of this practice and it always bothered me regarding flour. With fruit, for example, I can wash off any herbicide or pesticide applied to the plant during its growth. However, how do I wash glyphosate or 2,4-d off a bag of ground flour? I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  > I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested. There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.
  - hammock 8y ago
    IBS is also connected to pesticides
- kristianp 8y ago
  The article notes that Glyphosate is a 'non-contact' herbicide, which means it doesn't kill on contact. It is absorbed into the plant. So in theory your fruit can also contain it, especially if its a Glyphosate-resistant variety.
  - markdown 8y ago
    Glyphosate isn't used with fruit. He was referring to contact pesticides commonly used to kill insects that damage fruit (Eg. Malathion). You can wash contact non-systemic pesticides off easily enough.
brd 8y ago
I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies and agricultural practices we've adopted. Everytime I read about modern, large scale farming I'm a little more disturbed by the norms we're establishing. Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable. I say the US specifically because unfortunately we seem to be the origin for almost all of the modern, disturbing practices that have become ubiquitous. We've been setting the standard and hopefully we'll make a 180 and start raising the bar.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  Unfortunately I think this will only arise if/when we have a major crisis that results in a large amount of Americans being poisoned. We're really, really bad at preventative measures instead opting for short term profit over long term stability and health. The amount that farms end up poisoning local rivers, streams etc I thought would be enough of a wake up call but I guess I was too optimistic. Organic foods aren't the answer either sadly, since a lot of the time that's the result from unfounded fears.
  - brd 8y ago
    I'm hoping for a single solid study establishing either A) alternative farming practices that are reasonably efficient and profitable to highlight a way for smaller scale farmers to thrive. B) the negative health effects of some of these choices in our food supply that causes people to actually get up in arms about it and force some regulation with real teeth. I can only hope you're wrong and that we don't hit a point of mass poisonings before we do anything but I can very easily see that coming to fruition.
    - artificialLimbs 8y ago
      Regarding A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GMXqgQIU9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GMXqgQIU9c
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    One cynical/cute view is that farming subsidies will start disappearing when Iowa is no longer the first primary state.
stefs 8y ago
a couple of weeks ago i heard that people who move to the us lose ~30% of their gut bacteria diversity - here's one paper https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(1831382-5.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(1831382-5.pdf . most sources claiming a monotonic diet lacking in fibre. could the influence of glyphosat also play a role in this?
- bsaul 8y ago
  Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster. From meal habits, to crop to cattle, to sugar, and obesity. This society is in self destruction mode, and the only good side of it is that as a consequence your pharmaceutical industry is a huge economy that’s discovering new drugs that benefits to the rest of the world. I wouldn’t expect this to be a sustainable model for too long though.
  - lurquer 8y ago
    >Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster. The US has the most plentiful and cheapest foods. It supplies its own population with food so cheap the prices have to be supported. And, even with that, there is enormous surplus. And, on top of that, the US is by far the worlds largest exporter of food. As well as the world's largest supplier of free food for relief purposes. In light of that, your comment seems odd.
    - swift532 8y ago
      To me it was quite apparent that he referred to produce quality and quality of ingredients/too much sugar in various products.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      "We have the most food so our food is the best" sums up the whole problem pretty well, actually.
      - jacobush 8y ago
pfarnsworth 8y ago
I think I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to navigate what is actually healthy to eat, and more importantly, what is healthy for my children to eat. Is there a single, trustworthy authority that can tell me which brands are safe, knowing full well designations like "USDA Organic" are being gamed by companies?
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  Short answer: no. Longer answer: buy from farmer's markets, preferably places where you have seen the farm or met the farmer. You can't inspect everything they do, but you can ask yourself, "does this seem like the kind of person who is trying to do things right?" But, also, refer to the short answer, above.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Thanks. Shorter, and more to the point, than my answer :)
- mirimir 8y ago
  I'm not aware of any such authority. And maybe worse, I doubt that there could be, at the national level. It's not just that designations like "USDA Organic" are gamed. Stuff is just too complicated, and there's inadequate data. Over the past century, the chemical industry has commercialized numerous novel compounds, maybe 10^5 to 10^6 or more. Although there's been some toxicity testing, of course, we are basically living in the only large-scale, long-term test. Anyway, to be safest, your best bet is growing your own food, or buying from trusted local producers. And yes, I realize how impractical that is for most people. But no matter where your food comes from, it's arguably safest to eat as low on the food chain as possible.
- strainer 8y ago
  The Organic "designation" has to be adequately enforced for international trading purposes, as well as your own consumer confidence. How did you come to the belief that it is being significantly gamed? Besides rumor and anecdote, have you seen any evidence or quality journalistic reports on the gaming of organic certification?
jessaustin 8y ago
At least one part of TFA plays rather fast and loose with the numbers... “Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all. 30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.
- notatoad 8y ago
  And there are definitely no 6000 square mile farms in saskatchewan.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      According to this, there are actually a few that big: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/biggest-farms-in-the-world.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/biggest-farms-in-the-wor... It’s still a bizarre statement, as harvesting is a parallelizable operation and harvesting one big farm is no different from harvesting many small farms covering the same area.
- benj111 8y ago
  Yeah, check the references also. First off links to news sites, not studies, then the links just point to the front page. We have this statement in the article: "Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5" This one: 5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016) Googling that gets to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-purity-in-question-after-environment-group-finds-weed-killer-traces-idUSKCN0VY222 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-... That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water. Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.
tyu1000 8y ago
An interesting topic but there were some really silly speculations that ruined a lot of the piece. Big farms can't combine in stages because they have more diverse terrain? Multiple combines harvesting together are a picture from a horrible dystopia? I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done. If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  The same is true of most businesses, for example, big retailers are more efficient than many smaller retailers. Though I don't think I'd want to live in a world where I can only shop at Amazon or Walmart any more than I'd want to live in a world where only a few corporate farms produce all food. Efficiency isn't always what's best for the market, and doesn't mean lower prices for consumers.
chrispeel 8y ago
Swathing is definitely still used for alfalfa and grass hay. It may be called "mowing" or just "cutting hay"; it's definitely not chemical desiccation.
omegaworks 8y ago
>Cattle are fed low dose antibiotics in feedlots—not to stave off disease, but because it makes them gain weight more easily than an antibiotic-free cow. It changes their gut microbes so that they grow fat on less food. Curious if we're externalizing the costs of producing desiccant-free food into our healthcare system. CDC says obesity will cost us $147 billion this year[1]. Does glyphosate save the agriculture industry that much? Has the link even been examined? 1. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html
- briandear 8y ago
  Obesity is generally caused by eating too many calories. The real cause of being fat is too many calories and not enough movement. The fault is at the fork, not the farm.
  - omegaworks 8y ago
    >they grow fat on less food. Seems to indicate that the effects of these chemicals change the way the animal physiologically responds to an intake of a given number of calories. When we're talking a problem that impacts us on a societal level, we need to look at all potential influencing factors. Limiting that analysis to the "calories-in, calories-out" hypothesis hasn't gotten us any closer to a solution.
  - swift532 8y ago
    While that is true, it is also true that it's much easier to remain on a sustainable amount of calories if you're eating better, more filling food that's not just empty calories.
saalweachter 8y ago
This comes up on HN like quarterly, so for anyone else who is always confused when it does: Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US. Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does. So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes. Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way. And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Frankly my advice -- which as a human, you are incapable of heeding, being genetically programmed to obsess about food purity -- is not to worry about. Eat a varied diet, not too much, get plenty of exercise and sleep. Pay attention to food recalls, because accidental contamination of food by things like E. coli and salmonella kill dozens of people in the US every year and god knows how many world-wide. Worrying about everything else, the micro-contaminants that maybe-possibly-who-knows might possibly-maybe-sort-of-contribute to some sort of who-knows after years or decades of exposure, is a bad value proposition. Maybe BPA causes cancer, or whatever it was supposed to cause. Maybe eating steak does. Maybe gluten is actually poisonous, maybe soy causes estrogen problems, maybe cooked vegetables lose all their magical healthiness. Maybe cell phones and WiFi cause cancer. You can spend weeks and months and years trying to figure out exactly what food you personally should eat, and statistically you aren't getting those weeks and months and years back in the marginal gains to healthfulness. If you have an allergic reaction to a food, avoid it, and if you don't know if you had an allergic reaction, you probably didn't, but hey, I'm not a doctor. Talk to one. I honestly don't know if glyphosate is safe when used this way or not (since I am mostly familiar with its more conventional uses in the US and am too lazy to do a deep dive into what the existing research says and am pretty jaded about whatever the latest mass hysteria is for reasons) but frankly if it is really being used in as wide-spread a manner as articles like this claim, it can't be particularly harmful or frankly it'd be pretty obvious epidemiologically, since there's been growing use of it in this way for decades now.
blueprint 8y ago
Disgusting.
jelliclesfarm 8y ago
Farming is an incredibly inefficient way to keep people alive. The way we have been feeding ourselves must stop. 1. Taking some Ag indoors would help 2. Making synthetic and customized ‘food’ would also make sense. We eat too much and not right. 3. Enormous wastage in the industry. We treat Ag like industry and supply chain is very leaky. 4. It’s imbecility to dig up fossil fuel and release it to create food and use it as fodder to eat more. We are just a fart’s way to create another fart. 5. We need to think of food as fuel and food as pleasure. Let’s farm to create food for pleasure. In a sci-fi world, we should be able to synthesize our own nutritional requirements...but realistically it’s possible to customise individual food needs at diff life stages and consume synthetic food. 6. If I were to imagine a world where this is possible..one could go to a health center once a month and assess nutritional/calorific needs based on health requirements. A monthly supply of food-meds should sustain us. ‘Food’ as we know it now would be for hedonistic purposes. Why shouldn’t this be possible in our lifetimes? I am appalled and horrified and disgusted by what we are doing to this planet in the name of farming. One can’t say one word against large scale farming without being shamed and called anti-science...and then being accused of not knowing the reality of ‘feeding the billions’. Farming has NOT made our lives and our planet better. I am hoping robotics and AI and automation would perhaps make things better by nudging us towards a diff way to farm. Not sure if it will happen in my lifetime. I just think of sci fi story plots instead.
- jacobush 8y ago
  I don't like that future of yours. Robotic farming where traverse the fields and selectively nips the weed and kills the unwanted bugs, could probably be done with no chemicals at all. Fertilized could probably also be added very selectively this way.
  - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
    What about land availability and water? And labour? Farms are just open air food factories. They are not ‘natural’..they have to be erased of habitat and soil structure to start anew every year. It’s actually horrifying and appalling. I am not a generational farmer and I don’t harbor any romantic notions about farming anymore after 6+ years. We have to change farming. It’s brutal treatment of nature.
arnoooooo 8y ago
What is being done to soil biology, even in organic farming, is a disaster. I don't know the impact this specific technique has on soil life, but I'd wager it can't help. If we want to keep the soil fertile, and restore CO2 absorbtion to the soil, we need healthy soil !
upofadown 8y ago
The article took a long time to get to the point. The idea is that desiccation, if done badly can result in more glyphosate ending up in the grain. There is an idea floating around that glyphosate can affect gut bacteria in humans. No one has tested that so it might be a good idea to do some research.

206 points by dnetesn 8y ago

I haven't taken the need to buy organic that seriously before but this is rather terrifying. Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.

cardamomo 8y ago
I agree. I had mostly preferred organics in recent years because I wanted politically to avoid Monsanto, et al. and support a more regional food system. I didn't believe that industrial-scale organics were demonstrably healthier than conventional crops. But this research and a handful of other studies that have appeared on HN recently have changed my thinking. There seems to be more and more evidence that conventionally grown crops are essentially bathed in chemicals that are at best questionable with regard to human health.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  The same thing applies to milk. Organic milk regulations disallow water and powder mixtures while conventional milk is anywhere upwards from 5% stale milk mixed with fresh milk. What organic was originally labeled for is now just a shadow. Buying organic is just precautionary to avoid the everchanging regulations that are not made with individuals in mind..but instead, industry..
woah 8y ago
I wish there was a label for food that is grown without pesticides, but with artificial fertilizers.
- arnoooooo 8y ago
  I undersand artificial fertilizers are pretty bad for soil biology. We desperately need healthy soil for CO2 absobtion (not to mention fertility).
  - bluGill 8y ago
    What makes you think your understanding is correct?
    - strainer 8y ago
      Organic farming enhances soil microbial abundance and activity—A meta-analysis and meta-regression [1] > we integrated data from 56 mainly peer-reviewed papers into our analysis, including 149 pairwise comparisons originating from different climatic zones and experimental duration ranging from 3 to more than 100 years. Overall, we found that organic systems had 32% to 84% greater microbial biomass carbon, microbial biomass nitrogen, total phospholipid fatty-acids, and dehydrogenase, urease and protease activities than conventional systems. .... In summary, this study shows that overall organic farming enhances total microbial abundance and activity in agricultural soils on a global scale. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180442 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- ip26 8y ago
  Organic food can still use pesticides. It's a curated whitelist to be sure, including things such as soap and alcohol. But it is not pesticide free.
jorblumesea 8y ago
There's no real regulation of the organic label, at least in the US. So buying organic just means a larger price tag for dubious quality of produce. You may be getting something totally organic or something using 60 year old pesticides. There's no way to know based on the label.
- NoGravitas 8y ago
  It's not true that there's no real regulation of the organic label in the US. Regarding the things that it actually regulates, the USDA organic label is strictly enforced. Your concern may be that people expect USDA organic to mean things that it doesn't. The relevant document is the [National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances](https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/01/25/organic-101-allowed-and-prohibited-substances https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/01/25/organic-101-allow...).
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Anecdotal I know, but a friend in the crop spraying business told me that plenty of food sold as "certified organic" (at least here in the UK) has been dessicated with glyphosphate too.
- Frondo 8y ago
  Best anecdote I heard on the practice: a distant cousin of mine told me about the time he was driving down I-80 and saw them harvesting something off in a field, and there were two bins, one labeled "ORGANIC" and one labeled "REGULAR" and they were feeding the harvest into them both equally. (editing for clarity: I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. I also think people make a lot of stuff up and pass it off as anecdotes because we're a very polite society for that sort of thing.)
  - randomdata 8y ago
    > I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. What's in a bin at one moment in time is not necessarily the same crop at another moment in time. While physically labelling bins, rather than keeping record in the office, is not a practice that I see as being very common, conceivably a bin could have been labelled for organic crop at some point in the past and repurposed for non-organic crop (or vice versa) during the harvest your cousin witnessed without putting effort into removing the previous label. So, the story could be completely true, but doesn't really tell much even if it is.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      I mean, farmers also have a sense of humor. A farmer near where I grew up had four giant bins in a row labeled "FLOUR" "SUGAR" "COFFEE" "TEA".

dev_dull 8y ago

I knew of this practice and it always bothered me regarding flour. With fruit, for example, I can wash off any herbicide or pesticide applied to the plant during its growth. However, how do I wash glyphosate or 2,4-d off a bag of ground flour? I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested. There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.
- hammock 8y ago
  IBS is also connected to pesticides
kristianp 8y ago
The article notes that Glyphosate is a 'non-contact' herbicide, which means it doesn't kill on contact. It is absorbed into the plant. So in theory your fruit can also contain it, especially if its a Glyphosate-resistant variety.
- markdown 8y ago
  Glyphosate isn't used with fruit. He was referring to contact pesticides commonly used to kill insects that damage fruit (Eg. Malathion). You can wash contact non-systemic pesticides off easily enough.

brd 8y ago

I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies and agricultural practices we've adopted. Everytime I read about modern, large scale farming I'm a little more disturbed by the norms we're establishing. Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable. I say the US specifically because unfortunately we seem to be the origin for almost all of the modern, disturbing practices that have become ubiquitous. We've been setting the standard and hopefully we'll make a 180 and start raising the bar.

fzeroracer 8y ago
Unfortunately I think this will only arise if/when we have a major crisis that results in a large amount of Americans being poisoned. We're really, really bad at preventative measures instead opting for short term profit over long term stability and health. The amount that farms end up poisoning local rivers, streams etc I thought would be enough of a wake up call but I guess I was too optimistic. Organic foods aren't the answer either sadly, since a lot of the time that's the result from unfounded fears.
- brd 8y ago
  I'm hoping for a single solid study establishing either A) alternative farming practices that are reasonably efficient and profitable to highlight a way for smaller scale farmers to thrive. B) the negative health effects of some of these choices in our food supply that causes people to actually get up in arms about it and force some regulation with real teeth. I can only hope you're wrong and that we don't hit a point of mass poisonings before we do anything but I can very easily see that coming to fruition.
  - artificialLimbs 8y ago
    Regarding A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GMXqgQIU9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GMXqgQIU9c
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  One cynical/cute view is that farming subsidies will start disappearing when Iowa is no longer the first primary state.

stefs 8y ago

a couple of weeks ago i heard that people who move to the us lose ~30% of their gut bacteria diversity - here's one paper https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(1831382-5.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(1831382-5.pdf . most sources claiming a monotonic diet lacking in fibre. could the influence of glyphosat also play a role in this?

bsaul 8y ago
Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster. From meal habits, to crop to cattle, to sugar, and obesity. This society is in self destruction mode, and the only good side of it is that as a consequence your pharmaceutical industry is a huge economy that’s discovering new drugs that benefits to the rest of the world. I wouldn’t expect this to be a sustainable model for too long though.
- lurquer 8y ago
  >Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster. The US has the most plentiful and cheapest foods. It supplies its own population with food so cheap the prices have to be supported. And, even with that, there is enormous surplus. And, on top of that, the US is by far the worlds largest exporter of food. As well as the world's largest supplier of free food for relief purposes. In light of that, your comment seems odd.
  - swift532 8y ago
    To me it was quite apparent that he referred to produce quality and quality of ingredients/too much sugar in various products.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    "We have the most food so our food is the best" sums up the whole problem pretty well, actually.
    - jacobush 8y ago

pfarnsworth 8y ago

I think I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to navigate what is actually healthy to eat, and more importantly, what is healthy for my children to eat. Is there a single, trustworthy authority that can tell me which brands are safe, knowing full well designations like "USDA Organic" are being gamed by companies?

rossdavidh 8y ago
Short answer: no. Longer answer: buy from farmer's markets, preferably places where you have seen the farm or met the farmer. You can't inspect everything they do, but you can ask yourself, "does this seem like the kind of person who is trying to do things right?" But, also, refer to the short answer, above.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Thanks. Shorter, and more to the point, than my answer :)
mirimir 8y ago
I'm not aware of any such authority. And maybe worse, I doubt that there could be, at the national level. It's not just that designations like "USDA Organic" are gamed. Stuff is just too complicated, and there's inadequate data. Over the past century, the chemical industry has commercialized numerous novel compounds, maybe 10^5 to 10^6 or more. Although there's been some toxicity testing, of course, we are basically living in the only large-scale, long-term test. Anyway, to be safest, your best bet is growing your own food, or buying from trusted local producers. And yes, I realize how impractical that is for most people. But no matter where your food comes from, it's arguably safest to eat as low on the food chain as possible.
strainer 8y ago
The Organic "designation" has to be adequately enforced for international trading purposes, as well as your own consumer confidence. How did you come to the belief that it is being significantly gamed? Besides rumor and anecdote, have you seen any evidence or quality journalistic reports on the gaming of organic certification?

jessaustin 8y ago

At least one part of TFA plays rather fast and loose with the numbers... “Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all. 30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.

notatoad 8y ago
And there are definitely no 6000 square mile farms in saskatchewan.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    According to this, there are actually a few that big: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/biggest-farms-in-the-world.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/biggest-farms-in-the-wor... It’s still a bizarre statement, as harvesting is a parallelizable operation and harvesting one big farm is no different from harvesting many small farms covering the same area.
benj111 8y ago
Yeah, check the references also. First off links to news sites, not studies, then the links just point to the front page. We have this statement in the article: "Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5" This one: 5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016) Googling that gets to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-purity-in-question-after-environment-group-finds-weed-killer-traces-idUSKCN0VY222 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-... That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water. Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.

tyu1000 8y ago

An interesting topic but there were some really silly speculations that ruined a lot of the piece. Big farms can't combine in stages because they have more diverse terrain? Multiple combines harvesting together are a picture from a horrible dystopia? I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done. If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.

Johnny555 8y ago
The same is true of most businesses, for example, big retailers are more efficient than many smaller retailers. Though I don't think I'd want to live in a world where I can only shop at Amazon or Walmart any more than I'd want to live in a world where only a few corporate farms produce all food. Efficiency isn't always what's best for the market, and doesn't mean lower prices for consumers.

chrispeel 8y ago

Swathing is definitely still used for alfalfa and grass hay. It may be called "mowing" or just "cutting hay"; it's definitely not chemical desiccation.

omegaworks 8y ago

>Cattle are fed low dose antibiotics in feedlots—not to stave off disease, but because it makes them gain weight more easily than an antibiotic-free cow. It changes their gut microbes so that they grow fat on less food. Curious if we're externalizing the costs of producing desiccant-free food into our healthcare system. CDC says obesity will cost us $147 billion this year[1]. Does glyphosate save the agriculture industry that much? Has the link even been examined? 1. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html

briandear 8y ago
Obesity is generally caused by eating too many calories. The real cause of being fat is too many calories and not enough movement. The fault is at the fork, not the farm.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  >they grow fat on less food. Seems to indicate that the effects of these chemicals change the way the animal physiologically responds to an intake of a given number of calories. When we're talking a problem that impacts us on a societal level, we need to look at all potential influencing factors. Limiting that analysis to the "calories-in, calories-out" hypothesis hasn't gotten us any closer to a solution.
- swift532 8y ago
  While that is true, it is also true that it's much easier to remain on a sustainable amount of calories if you're eating better, more filling food that's not just empty calories.

saalweachter 8y ago

This comes up on HN like quarterly, so for anyone else who is always confused when it does: Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US. Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does. So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.

joe_the_user 8y ago
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes. Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way. And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Frankly my advice -- which as a human, you are incapable of heeding, being genetically programmed to obsess about food purity -- is not to worry about. Eat a varied diet, not too much, get plenty of exercise and sleep. Pay attention to food recalls, because accidental contamination of food by things like E. coli and salmonella kill dozens of people in the US every year and god knows how many world-wide. Worrying about everything else, the micro-contaminants that maybe-possibly-who-knows might possibly-maybe-sort-of-contribute to some sort of who-knows after years or decades of exposure, is a bad value proposition. Maybe BPA causes cancer, or whatever it was supposed to cause. Maybe eating steak does. Maybe gluten is actually poisonous, maybe soy causes estrogen problems, maybe cooked vegetables lose all their magical healthiness. Maybe cell phones and WiFi cause cancer. You can spend weeks and months and years trying to figure out exactly what food you personally should eat, and statistically you aren't getting those weeks and months and years back in the marginal gains to healthfulness. If you have an allergic reaction to a food, avoid it, and if you don't know if you had an allergic reaction, you probably didn't, but hey, I'm not a doctor. Talk to one. I honestly don't know if glyphosate is safe when used this way or not (since I am mostly familiar with its more conventional uses in the US and am too lazy to do a deep dive into what the existing research says and am pretty jaded about whatever the latest mass hysteria is for reasons) but frankly if it is really being used in as wide-spread a manner as articles like this claim, it can't be particularly harmful or frankly it'd be pretty obvious epidemiologically, since there's been growing use of it in this way for decades now.

blueprint 8y ago

Disgusting.

jelliclesfarm 8y ago

Farming is an incredibly inefficient way to keep people alive. The way we have been feeding ourselves must stop. 1. Taking some Ag indoors would help 2. Making synthetic and customized ‘food’ would also make sense. We eat too much and not right. 3. Enormous wastage in the industry. We treat Ag like industry and supply chain is very leaky. 4. It’s imbecility to dig up fossil fuel and release it to create food and use it as fodder to eat more. We are just a fart’s way to create another fart. 5. We need to think of food as fuel and food as pleasure. Let’s farm to create food for pleasure. In a sci-fi world, we should be able to synthesize our own nutritional requirements...but realistically it’s possible to customise individual food needs at diff life stages and consume synthetic food. 6. If I were to imagine a world where this is possible..one could go to a health center once a month and assess nutritional/calorific needs based on health requirements. A monthly supply of food-meds should sustain us. ‘Food’ as we know it now would be for hedonistic purposes. Why shouldn’t this be possible in our lifetimes? I am appalled and horrified and disgusted by what we are doing to this planet in the name of farming. One can’t say one word against large scale farming without being shamed and called anti-science...and then being accused of not knowing the reality of ‘feeding the billions’. Farming has NOT made our lives and our planet better. I am hoping robotics and AI and automation would perhaps make things better by nudging us towards a diff way to farm. Not sure if it will happen in my lifetime. I just think of sci fi story plots instead.

jacobush 8y ago
I don't like that future of yours. Robotic farming where traverse the fields and selectively nips the weed and kills the unwanted bugs, could probably be done with no chemicals at all. Fertilized could probably also be added very selectively this way.
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  What about land availability and water? And labour? Farms are just open air food factories. They are not ‘natural’..they have to be erased of habitat and soil structure to start anew every year. It’s actually horrifying and appalling. I am not a generational farmer and I don’t harbor any romantic notions about farming anymore after 6+ years. We have to change farming. It’s brutal treatment of nature.

arnoooooo 8y ago

What is being done to soil biology, even in organic farming, is a disaster. I don't know the impact this specific technique has on soil life, but I'd wager it can't help. If we want to keep the soil fertile, and restore CO2 absorbtion to the soil, we need healthy soil !

upofadown 8y ago

The article took a long time to get to the point. The idea is that desiccation, if done badly can result in more glyphosate ending up in the grain. There is an idea floating around that glyphosate can affect gut bacteria in humans. No one has tested that so it might be a good idea to do some research.