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Roundup’s Risks Could Go Well Beyond Cancer

134 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

sschueller 7y ago
Does anyone have the insight as to why Bayer purchased Monsanto? This to me is one of the biggest corporate acquisition mistakes in history. To make things worse Bayer even retired the name Monsanto making Bayer the defendant in all these cases.
- jMyles 7y ago
  Bayer has a long history of doing the wrong thing on purpose and coming out the other side with riches to show for it. It appears that people have wisened up to this style of business practice faster than Bayer realized.
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  - monsanto 7y ago
    It appears that people have wisened up to this style of business... More to the point, I think there was a profound amount of attention scrutinizing Monsanto, more than any other company I can think of. The concept of Monsanto's business model has been probably the most chilling example of vendor lock-in ever imagined, and certainly throughout the 1980's and onward, raised more than a few eyebrows anywhere it was explained. It really resonates to the core of human values as a concept of highly calculated evil, executed as a long game. Apologists will shrug their shoulders, and with open hands, suggest that it's enough to say that a company motivated to earn money is justified in any behavior, and that the truth is that natural modes of food supply would strangle and starve civilization, were it not for innovators creating expanded production volumes by exploiting powerful technologies under tightly controlled circumstances. But, it's clear that Monsanto's products and services represent a direct threat to those who dare to depend on them. Genetic modfication of herbicide/pesticide resistant food supplies, combined with litigation designed to destroy unlicensed supplies, all to further sales of proprietary organisms and their matching chemicals, is such an intuitively horrific system of practices that it begs disbelief. And with that, you have the far reaching attention that glyphosphate weed killer and genetically engineered crops have brought upon those who would seek to threaten the world with them. To properly internalize the ideas in play, one can handily imagine what it means, should anything ever go wrong. Every mouth fed by food grown as corporate product will starve, if ever there's an incident that precludes the use of the product. Thus, if Monsanto's genetic engineering enables crops that feed two billion, and suddenly, next year, for any reason, farmers are made to cease production, well... what happens to two billion people? Except, it's worse than that. Because it's not like you can draw a line around those two billion people. They aren't living in some enclave, sealed off in a parallel universe. It's not a hypothetical person that eats RoundUp Ready food. We've all probably eaten some, and now, we'll all have to cram into the same life boat if something goes wrong, and the mistake can't be reversed.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      The only thing that got farmers sued by Monsanto was the planting of "Roundup-Ready" seeds and subsequent application of glyphosate to the crop, which would kill a non-Roundup-Ready crop. You could plant Monsanto's GM seeds all you wanted without legal risk, so long as you treated them like any other crop and didn't try to exploit their GM properties.
      - Supermancho 7y ago
        > The only thing that got farmers sued by Monsanto That is factually incorrect. https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/06/01/dissecting-claims-about-monsanto-suing-farmers-for-accidentally-planting-patented-seeds/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/06/01/dissecting-cla... The licensing cases were world news.
        tptacek 7y ago
        This is a link that directly repeats the claim I just made, in more detail. Both elements are present in these cases: the planting of licensed seed, and the subsequent application of glyphosate to that crop. If you spray non-GM soybean crops with Roundup, you kill the crop.
        Supermancho 7y ago
        > This is a link that directly repeats the claim I just made, in more detail. This is a mischaracterization. The suit is not about the USE of glyphosate. The suit is about the replanting of the plants that survive it. Making it, effectively, a licensing issue. This is why I initially characterized it as such.
        tptacek 7y ago
        I didn't, and obviously wouldn't, say that Roundup-Ready seeds aren't license-encumbered. What I said was that you don't get in legal trouble unless you plant them and then spray them with Roundup --- in other words, you can't "accidentally" use the product, because to use it, you have to do something that would kill an ordinary crop.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  oh - I suspect that Monsanto was seeing this coming, and that caused them to sell to a "too big to fail"-type company, with out-of-US base.. as noted extensively in other places, its not a bad business decision until the costs have to be paid, and actually are paid.. meanwhile collect money as usual.. the extent of this sort of strategy in the real world is probably shocking to people who aren't in the back rooms of money decisions often.. of course its unpleasant, thats part of why they keep it quiet
- abakker 7y ago
  Precision Agriculture. There is a lot of non-glyphosphate work going on there to improve farm-specific and soil specific fertilization and yield optimization. They both make chemicals, they have common inputs, it seems like the expectation was "synergies" and inorganic growth.
jMyles 7y ago
> ...10,000 further cases are pending, worrying Bayer investors as well as farmers who rely on the product as a cheap, effective herbicide. > Cancer may only be part of the story. Studies over the past decade suggest that glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — pollutes water sources, hangs around in soil far longer than previously suspected, and routinely taints human food supplies. I mean... yeah. I'm not formally trained in biology, but I think at this point it's a sane default to just suppose that any chemical compound that kills plants so efficiently on contact is likely to also have effects on human tissue, especially when the contact is as frequent and intense as is the case for farm workers. This style of farming (using genetic modification to increase robustness against a particular chemical, and then dousing the field with that chemical) is best understood as a mistake and completely set aside as immediately as can practically be done. Until it ceases (and after that), if you can afford organic food, buy it (and I don't just mean USDA Certified Organic, although that's a great start, I mean food you know to be organic from a farmer's market). Even if you don't care to reduce your own exposure, it turns out that life is sucking for thousands of these farm workers who get this shit on their hands and faces and clothes every day.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Glyphosate has been used for over 60 years. It works in a part of the plant that controls photosynthesis. No one is even sure how it would impact humans. Here's a podcast with some more information. They will update if better information comes in it disproves the previous assumptions. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676
  - jMyles 7y ago
    > No one is even sure how it would impact humans. But is that relevant? Isn't it more sane to let our first assumption be that plant killers aren't good for us? Until we have some compelling reason to believe otherwise?
    - cannonedhamster 7y ago
      You do realize vinegar is a plant killer right? Too much water is a plant killer, too much sun is a plant killer. There are insecticides that kill bugs that don't have an impact on humans. Starvation probably kills far more people than Roundup. I mean I hate Monsanto as a company too but literally you could die drinking too much water. If you cannot even define how something would impact humans wouldn't the appropriate way to determine that be to perform science? Just saying we don't know so it must be bad is literally the opposite of science. People used to think tomatoes were poisonous, they weren't. Tapioca was poisonous unless cooked. You routinely ingest poisonous metals in your food. Your argument has no place in a discussion about whether something is harmful. Evidence does, once we can define the harm, if any, we can determine whether we can mitigate it, whether it's a real risk factor, and whether it's risks outweigh the benefits. You must likely drive around in a vehicle that causes more cancer and harm to the environment than Roundup. Plastic bags don't decay for generations. We have literal known problems that we give less focus than a problem that isn't even proven to exist.
georgehayduke 7y ago
"Evidence of the cheap herbicide’s danger to biological functions and the environment continues to mount. Why are U.S. regulators not listening?" Why are regulators not listening is a great question. Perhaps they are listening, just to well paid lobbyists on Bayer's side.
manifestsilence 7y ago
Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat. This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible that many people with trouble with wheat would be fine if they were able to avoid pesticides and repair their gut bacteria and general gut health. The other thing I learned alongside reading that paper (or maybe it was mentioned in it, I forget), was that they use glyphosate not just to kill weeds, but as a dessicant applied directly to wheat to aid in the harvest, and a "ripening agent" applied directly to sugar cane. Finally, although the risks are not well understood, it has been demonstrated that glyphosate does appear in detectable amounts in human excretions (urine and milk), which goes against some of the claims that were made in approving its safety (they claimed it does not bioaccumulate). Sorry I don't have sources handy for the rest of this stuff, but it's enough to perhaps encourage others to run some searches too. Edit: a final concern is not to humans but to soil biology. This new and growing field has been finding that there are symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi in the soil and that pesticides may disrupt this, dramatically reducing effective soil quality and the nutritional content of the plants grown there.
- faitswulff 7y ago
  Note that the USDA organic label isn't exactly foolproof either - "organic" compounds are chosen by committee: > This week, in a process that is largely invisible to consumers but that has become a semi-annual ritual of controversy within the world of organic politics, a committee called the National Organic Standards Board is selecting those synthetic substances that organic farmers and processors may use. > ...For while many would prefer to exclude the use of any synthetic chemicals, there are some substances - including herbicides, fungicides, emulsifiers and other additives - that some organic farmers say they cannot do without. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/sure-that-food-has-the-governments-organic-label-but-that-doesnt-mean-it-was-made-without-chemicals/?utm_term=.31330c089081 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/sure-...
- 7y ago
beat 7y ago
This topic is so aggravating. On one hand, you have the "Don't eat science words, they give you the autism cancer!" reactionaries, and on the other side, you have the "Everything is completely benign, because science!" reactionaries.
- manifestsilence 7y ago
  Yup, I hear you. I try to put my faith on the in-between folks, who say, "we can't prove in a court of law that this is harmful, but in this case there is a plausible mechanism and the risks don't seem justified. In this other case, there's no plausible mechanism for harm or the benefits outweigh the risks." The people who show some kind of doubt are, as always, the ones to actually listen to.
  - beat 7y ago
    Such a world we live in, where the fools are absolutely certain and the wise are full of doubt.
    - codr7 7y ago
      It couldn't be any other way. The more you really learn, the less ignorant and more nuanced you become.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    That sort of reaction is exactly why the Overton window works. If Alice says that 2 + 2 = 4 and Bob says that 2 + 2 = 8, then Bob is wrong and the answer is not 6.
  - tcfunk 7y ago
    Sort of a tangent here, but I find very often in the workplace that my managers want me to tell them about how I "know" something will work. I never know if something will work. I can only be mostly sure that it will. It goes against my nature so much to respond to these questions the way that they want.
beat 7y ago
I am really looking forward to the day we can replace chemical herbicides with weed-hunting robots. It seems such a huge market opportunity... little, inexpensive bots that can roam a field, picking out weeds the moment they appear as seedlings, never touching the crop itself, not putting anything in the soil. When I was a kid growing up in central Illinois in the 1970s, before Roundup, "walking beans" was a common summer job for kids. You'd go out into soybean fields with some tools and rip out everything that wasn't a soybean plant. Of course, spraying chemicals is cheaper than hiring a busload of kids, so that's just a memory now.
- chicob 7y ago
  Even in that case, we would have the issue of Vavilovian Mimicry. This time being done by robots, which would certainly be a counter-argument for those that claim that this is not natural selection, but artificial selection.
- ptah 7y ago
  or even better: abandon monoculture
  - beat 7y ago
    Abandoning monoculture means completely upending the harvesting process. That's a much harder problem. Or abandoning annual crops in favor of perennials, which would have tremendous negative impact on productivity. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
    - ptah 7y ago
      in the long term we will have to do this with perennials and find new harvesting techniques as current system is creating dustbowls long term
- manifestsilence 7y ago
  That would be pretty cool. I've seen some early prototypes in the news, so perhaps we'll get there in the not-too-distant future. It seems to me that chief challenges would be the AI of course, but also energy and mobility across a wet, tangly, clumpy terrain.
loganfrederick 7y ago
The book "Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science" by Carey Gillam is a very thorough take-down of Monstano, Roundup, glyphosphate, and the government agencies that have historically looked away from the evidence. She has done incredible work bringing these issues to light. https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Killer-Cancer-Corruption-Science/dp/1642830429 https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Killer-Cancer-Corruption-Sc...
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Even if such substances gets controlled in U.S. and manufacturers penalised, they will have a free run in developing countries. Pesticides inc. *cides in agriculture along with antibiotics in poultry, which helped address world hunger is becoming bane of humanity. When there are chances of superbug arising from antibiotics abuse such as colistin from India becoming a pandemic, why treat these issues as local to the country?
dls2016 7y ago
My wife used to administer Medical services in Santa Barbara country: coordinating translators and a program providing insurance to undocumented children. Many of the recipients worked the fields and I was always astonished to hear the frequency of occurrence of certain birth defects in these populations. It's entirely possible the occurrence wasn't elevated relative to populations she didn't work with or I didn't hear about... but I've long suspected that there's a story hiding in plain sight that's bigger than even the recent cancer-related damages. Especially given that many of the workers are Mixtec and so are incredibly isolated from society-at-large (many would pretend to understand Spanish and didn't realize they could request Mixtec-speaking translators).
- feld 7y ago
  They were probably exposed to 2,4D, not glyphosate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid If they're using undocumented workers do you think they're going to prevent them from being exposed to a key ingredient in Agent Orange?
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    It's also worth noting that 2,4-D, in addition, to being dangerous, is organic. A prime example of why "organic" food is dangerous. We developed artificial herbicides and pesticides to be safer than organic counterparts. I'm not exactly sure how people are convinced that "organic" food = higher quality and safer
    - dls2016 7y ago
      > I'm not exactly sure how people are convinced that "organic" food = higher quality and safer Well the obvious answer to "how are people convinced" is "advertising".
  - dls2016 7y ago
    > They were probably exposed to 2,4D, not glyphosate Ok, and...? I'm not well-versed in these things, but a quick google suggests the situation with 2,4-D is the same: anecdotal evidence of birth defects and cancers, lack of research into these topics and, miraculously, an EPA declaration that they're safe. > If they're using undocumented workers do you think they're going to prevent them from being exposed to a key ingredient in Agent Orange? No, of course I don't think the employers or regulators are protecting the workers. That's my entire point.
stickfigure 7y ago
I sprayed a bunch of glyphosphate yesterday and I'll spray a bunch more today. I live on country property that is infested with yellow starthistle, an invasive noxious weed. Right now is it's growing season. There's absolutely no practical way to beat it back without chemistry. I'm sympathetic to concerns about our food chain but to the folks hoping for the downfall of Monsanto/Bayer: You are hereby invited over to pull weeds in 100 degree weather. I'll supply the beer.
- manifestsilence 7y ago
  I've done both chemical and manual removal of thistle in 100 degree weather, and I hear your pain. I don't think herbicide should be outright banned, but think it needs to be more carefully controlled and used more judiciously. I'm not familiar with starthistle in particular, but thistles can be controlled through timed cuts and/or burning the seed heads. Takes multiple years and a lot of work though.
- snarfy 7y ago
  There are alternatives. Vinegar works pretty well.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    From https://www.post-gazette.com/life/garden/2009/06/13/Carefully-apply-vinegar-to-eliminate-thistles/stories/200906130126 https://www.post-gazette.com/life/garden/2009/06/13/Carefull... [Vinegar] works as a contact or burn-down herbicide, which means that it only kills the portion of the plant it contacts. The thistle will re-grow from the roots, and you will have to make repeated applications until you exhaust the carbohydrate reserves in the roots. There is probably a lot of seed present in the soil, and new thistle plants will sprout that you will have to treat in future years. Just picture yourself doing this on 90ac of hills!
    - whenchamenia 7y ago
      Its not that bad for anything under 5-10 acres. Just mix in a dash of soap and a lil salt, and fill a backpack sprayer. Soak the plant, specifically the leaves, and you have a very selective, very benign herbicide. Full grown plants take more than 1 treatment many times, but with thistles, you can just carefully remove the heads.
gdubs 7y ago
There’s a second order conclusion here that seems to get constantly lost in the conversation. On a bumper sticker it’d be, “It’s the monocultures, stupid.” When we talk about things like glysophate staying around in the soil or making it’s way into the water supply, what we really should be questioning is why so much is being used in the first place. And that’s because we grow fragile annual crops in enormous monocultures making the use of chemicals a necessity. I’m for alternative methods of farming, like permaculture, but I’m not so ideological to be against chemicals in the absolute. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, pragmatic use of sprays isn’t terribly dangerous. I’m talking spot spraying as part of conservation and restoration work, etc. The fixation on particular chemicals like glysophate is a distraction from the root issue, which is that industrial scale agriculture is — on the whole —damaging to the planet.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Yes but permaculture is not scalable for big companies, since it requires a lot of skilled labors. You cannot use one big tractor for a huge perma field and be done with it. And they dictate the market.
- dan_quixote 7y ago
  Alternative ideas like a robot weeder [1] are interesting. This could be pretty effective on some crops. Doesn't solve the pesticide problem though. [1] https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/autonomous-robot-weeder/ https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/autonomous-robot-weeder/
feld 7y ago
If glyphosate is banned we will all starve. There is no strong evidence of its harm yet. It may be an EDC, but we don't have the data to prove it. The fearmongering has got to stop. Why wasn't Bayer/Monsanto allowed to provide expert witness testimony? Are we going to continue to throw scientific methods out the window?

134 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

Does anyone have the insight as to why Bayer purchased Monsanto? This to me is one of the biggest corporate acquisition mistakes in history. To make things worse Bayer even retired the name Monsanto making Bayer the defendant in all these cases.

jMyles 7y ago
Bayer has a long history of doing the wrong thing on purpose and coming out the other side with riches to show for it. It appears that people have wisened up to this style of business practice faster than Bayer realized.
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- monsanto 7y ago
  It appears that people have wisened up to this style of business... More to the point, I think there was a profound amount of attention scrutinizing Monsanto, more than any other company I can think of. The concept of Monsanto's business model has been probably the most chilling example of vendor lock-in ever imagined, and certainly throughout the 1980's and onward, raised more than a few eyebrows anywhere it was explained. It really resonates to the core of human values as a concept of highly calculated evil, executed as a long game. Apologists will shrug their shoulders, and with open hands, suggest that it's enough to say that a company motivated to earn money is justified in any behavior, and that the truth is that natural modes of food supply would strangle and starve civilization, were it not for innovators creating expanded production volumes by exploiting powerful technologies under tightly controlled circumstances. But, it's clear that Monsanto's products and services represent a direct threat to those who dare to depend on them. Genetic modfication of herbicide/pesticide resistant food supplies, combined with litigation designed to destroy unlicensed supplies, all to further sales of proprietary organisms and their matching chemicals, is such an intuitively horrific system of practices that it begs disbelief. And with that, you have the far reaching attention that glyphosphate weed killer and genetically engineered crops have brought upon those who would seek to threaten the world with them. To properly internalize the ideas in play, one can handily imagine what it means, should anything ever go wrong. Every mouth fed by food grown as corporate product will starve, if ever there's an incident that precludes the use of the product. Thus, if Monsanto's genetic engineering enables crops that feed two billion, and suddenly, next year, for any reason, farmers are made to cease production, well... what happens to two billion people? Except, it's worse than that. Because it's not like you can draw a line around those two billion people. They aren't living in some enclave, sealed off in a parallel universe. It's not a hypothetical person that eats RoundUp Ready food. We've all probably eaten some, and now, we'll all have to cram into the same life boat if something goes wrong, and the mistake can't be reversed.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    The only thing that got farmers sued by Monsanto was the planting of "Roundup-Ready" seeds and subsequent application of glyphosate to the crop, which would kill a non-Roundup-Ready crop. You could plant Monsanto's GM seeds all you wanted without legal risk, so long as you treated them like any other crop and didn't try to exploit their GM properties.
    - Supermancho 7y ago
      > The only thing that got farmers sued by Monsanto That is factually incorrect. https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/06/01/dissecting-claims-about-monsanto-suing-farmers-for-accidentally-planting-patented-seeds/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/06/01/dissecting-cla... The licensing cases were world news.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        This is a link that directly repeats the claim I just made, in more detail. Both elements are present in these cases: the planting of licensed seed, and the subsequent application of glyphosate to that crop. If you spray non-GM soybean crops with Roundup, you kill the crop.
        Supermancho 7y ago
        > This is a link that directly repeats the claim I just made, in more detail. This is a mischaracterization. The suit is not about the USE of glyphosate. The suit is about the replanting of the plants that survive it. Making it, effectively, a licensing issue. This is why I initially characterized it as such.
        tptacek 7y ago
        I didn't, and obviously wouldn't, say that Roundup-Ready seeds aren't license-encumbered. What I said was that you don't get in legal trouble unless you plant them and then spray them with Roundup --- in other words, you can't "accidentally" use the product, because to use it, you have to do something that would kill an ordinary crop.
mistrial9 7y ago
oh - I suspect that Monsanto was seeing this coming, and that caused them to sell to a "too big to fail"-type company, with out-of-US base.. as noted extensively in other places, its not a bad business decision until the costs have to be paid, and actually are paid.. meanwhile collect money as usual.. the extent of this sort of strategy in the real world is probably shocking to people who aren't in the back rooms of money decisions often.. of course its unpleasant, thats part of why they keep it quiet
abakker 7y ago
Precision Agriculture. There is a lot of non-glyphosphate work going on there to improve farm-specific and soil specific fertilization and yield optimization. They both make chemicals, they have common inputs, it seems like the expectation was "synergies" and inorganic growth.

jMyles 7y ago

> ...10,000 further cases are pending, worrying Bayer investors as well as farmers who rely on the product as a cheap, effective herbicide. > Cancer may only be part of the story. Studies over the past decade suggest that glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — pollutes water sources, hangs around in soil far longer than previously suspected, and routinely taints human food supplies. I mean... yeah. I'm not formally trained in biology, but I think at this point it's a sane default to just suppose that any chemical compound that kills plants so efficiently on contact is likely to also have effects on human tissue, especially when the contact is as frequent and intense as is the case for farm workers. This style of farming (using genetic modification to increase robustness against a particular chemical, and then dousing the field with that chemical) is best understood as a mistake and completely set aside as immediately as can practically be done. Until it ceases (and after that), if you can afford organic food, buy it (and I don't just mean USDA Certified Organic, although that's a great start, I mean food you know to be organic from a farmer's market). Even if you don't care to reduce your own exposure, it turns out that life is sucking for thousands of these farm workers who get this shit on their hands and faces and clothes every day.

cannonedhamster 7y ago
Glyphosate has been used for over 60 years. It works in a part of the plant that controls photosynthesis. No one is even sure how it would impact humans. Here's a podcast with some more information. They will update if better information comes in it disproves the previous assumptions. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676
- jMyles 7y ago
  > No one is even sure how it would impact humans. But is that relevant? Isn't it more sane to let our first assumption be that plant killers aren't good for us? Until we have some compelling reason to believe otherwise?
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    You do realize vinegar is a plant killer right? Too much water is a plant killer, too much sun is a plant killer. There are insecticides that kill bugs that don't have an impact on humans. Starvation probably kills far more people than Roundup. I mean I hate Monsanto as a company too but literally you could die drinking too much water. If you cannot even define how something would impact humans wouldn't the appropriate way to determine that be to perform science? Just saying we don't know so it must be bad is literally the opposite of science. People used to think tomatoes were poisonous, they weren't. Tapioca was poisonous unless cooked. You routinely ingest poisonous metals in your food. Your argument has no place in a discussion about whether something is harmful. Evidence does, once we can define the harm, if any, we can determine whether we can mitigate it, whether it's a real risk factor, and whether it's risks outweigh the benefits. You must likely drive around in a vehicle that causes more cancer and harm to the environment than Roundup. Plastic bags don't decay for generations. We have literal known problems that we give less focus than a problem that isn't even proven to exist.

georgehayduke 7y ago

"Evidence of the cheap herbicide’s danger to biological functions and the environment continues to mount. Why are U.S. regulators not listening?" Why are regulators not listening is a great question. Perhaps they are listening, just to well paid lobbyists on Bayer's side.

manifestsilence 7y ago

Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat. This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible that many people with trouble with wheat would be fine if they were able to avoid pesticides and repair their gut bacteria and general gut health. The other thing I learned alongside reading that paper (or maybe it was mentioned in it, I forget), was that they use glyphosate not just to kill weeds, but as a dessicant applied directly to wheat to aid in the harvest, and a "ripening agent" applied directly to sugar cane. Finally, although the risks are not well understood, it has been demonstrated that glyphosate does appear in detectable amounts in human excretions (urine and milk), which goes against some of the claims that were made in approving its safety (they claimed it does not bioaccumulate). Sorry I don't have sources handy for the rest of this stuff, but it's enough to perhaps encourage others to run some searches too. Edit: a final concern is not to humans but to soil biology. This new and growing field has been finding that there are symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi in the soil and that pesticides may disrupt this, dramatically reducing effective soil quality and the nutritional content of the plants grown there.

faitswulff 7y ago
Note that the USDA organic label isn't exactly foolproof either - "organic" compounds are chosen by committee: > This week, in a process that is largely invisible to consumers but that has become a semi-annual ritual of controversy within the world of organic politics, a committee called the National Organic Standards Board is selecting those synthetic substances that organic farmers and processors may use. > ...For while many would prefer to exclude the use of any synthetic chemicals, there are some substances - including herbicides, fungicides, emulsifiers and other additives - that some organic farmers say they cannot do without. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/sure-that-food-has-the-governments-organic-label-but-that-doesnt-mean-it-was-made-without-chemicals/?utm_term=.31330c089081 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/sure-...
7y ago

beat 7y ago

This topic is so aggravating. On one hand, you have the "Don't eat science words, they give you the autism cancer!" reactionaries, and on the other side, you have the "Everything is completely benign, because science!" reactionaries.

manifestsilence 7y ago
Yup, I hear you. I try to put my faith on the in-between folks, who say, "we can't prove in a court of law that this is harmful, but in this case there is a plausible mechanism and the risks don't seem justified. In this other case, there's no plausible mechanism for harm or the benefits outweigh the risks." The people who show some kind of doubt are, as always, the ones to actually listen to.
- beat 7y ago
  Such a world we live in, where the fools are absolutely certain and the wise are full of doubt.
  - codr7 7y ago
    It couldn't be any other way. The more you really learn, the less ignorant and more nuanced you become.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  That sort of reaction is exactly why the Overton window works. If Alice says that 2 + 2 = 4 and Bob says that 2 + 2 = 8, then Bob is wrong and the answer is not 6.
- tcfunk 7y ago
  Sort of a tangent here, but I find very often in the workplace that my managers want me to tell them about how I "know" something will work. I never know if something will work. I can only be mostly sure that it will. It goes against my nature so much to respond to these questions the way that they want.

beat 7y ago

I am really looking forward to the day we can replace chemical herbicides with weed-hunting robots. It seems such a huge market opportunity... little, inexpensive bots that can roam a field, picking out weeds the moment they appear as seedlings, never touching the crop itself, not putting anything in the soil. When I was a kid growing up in central Illinois in the 1970s, before Roundup, "walking beans" was a common summer job for kids. You'd go out into soybean fields with some tools and rip out everything that wasn't a soybean plant. Of course, spraying chemicals is cheaper than hiring a busload of kids, so that's just a memory now.

chicob 7y ago
Even in that case, we would have the issue of Vavilovian Mimicry. This time being done by robots, which would certainly be a counter-argument for those that claim that this is not natural selection, but artificial selection.
ptah 7y ago
or even better: abandon monoculture
- beat 7y ago
  Abandoning monoculture means completely upending the harvesting process. That's a much harder problem. Or abandoning annual crops in favor of perennials, which would have tremendous negative impact on productivity. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
  - ptah 7y ago
    in the long term we will have to do this with perennials and find new harvesting techniques as current system is creating dustbowls long term
manifestsilence 7y ago
That would be pretty cool. I've seen some early prototypes in the news, so perhaps we'll get there in the not-too-distant future. It seems to me that chief challenges would be the AI of course, but also energy and mobility across a wet, tangly, clumpy terrain.

loganfrederick 7y ago

The book "Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science" by Carey Gillam is a very thorough take-down of Monstano, Roundup, glyphosphate, and the government agencies that have historically looked away from the evidence. She has done incredible work bringing these issues to light. https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Killer-Cancer-Corruption-Science/dp/1642830429 https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Killer-Cancer-Corruption-Sc...

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Even if such substances gets controlled in U.S. and manufacturers penalised, they will have a free run in developing countries. Pesticides inc. *cides in agriculture along with antibiotics in poultry, which helped address world hunger is becoming bane of humanity. When there are chances of superbug arising from antibiotics abuse such as colistin from India becoming a pandemic, why treat these issues as local to the country?

dls2016 7y ago

My wife used to administer Medical services in Santa Barbara country: coordinating translators and a program providing insurance to undocumented children. Many of the recipients worked the fields and I was always astonished to hear the frequency of occurrence of certain birth defects in these populations. It's entirely possible the occurrence wasn't elevated relative to populations she didn't work with or I didn't hear about... but I've long suspected that there's a story hiding in plain sight that's bigger than even the recent cancer-related damages. Especially given that many of the workers are Mixtec and so are incredibly isolated from society-at-large (many would pretend to understand Spanish and didn't realize they could request Mixtec-speaking translators).

feld 7y ago
They were probably exposed to 2,4D, not glyphosate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid If they're using undocumented workers do you think they're going to prevent them from being exposed to a key ingredient in Agent Orange?
- sdinsn 7y ago
  It's also worth noting that 2,4-D, in addition, to being dangerous, is organic. A prime example of why "organic" food is dangerous. We developed artificial herbicides and pesticides to be safer than organic counterparts. I'm not exactly sure how people are convinced that "organic" food = higher quality and safer
  - dls2016 7y ago
    > I'm not exactly sure how people are convinced that "organic" food = higher quality and safer Well the obvious answer to "how are people convinced" is "advertising".
- dls2016 7y ago
  > They were probably exposed to 2,4D, not glyphosate Ok, and...? I'm not well-versed in these things, but a quick google suggests the situation with 2,4-D is the same: anecdotal evidence of birth defects and cancers, lack of research into these topics and, miraculously, an EPA declaration that they're safe. > If they're using undocumented workers do you think they're going to prevent them from being exposed to a key ingredient in Agent Orange? No, of course I don't think the employers or regulators are protecting the workers. That's my entire point.

stickfigure 7y ago

I sprayed a bunch of glyphosphate yesterday and I'll spray a bunch more today. I live on country property that is infested with yellow starthistle, an invasive noxious weed. Right now is it's growing season. There's absolutely no practical way to beat it back without chemistry. I'm sympathetic to concerns about our food chain but to the folks hoping for the downfall of Monsanto/Bayer: You are hereby invited over to pull weeds in 100 degree weather. I'll supply the beer.

manifestsilence 7y ago
I've done both chemical and manual removal of thistle in 100 degree weather, and I hear your pain. I don't think herbicide should be outright banned, but think it needs to be more carefully controlled and used more judiciously. I'm not familiar with starthistle in particular, but thistles can be controlled through timed cuts and/or burning the seed heads. Takes multiple years and a lot of work though.
snarfy 7y ago
There are alternatives. Vinegar works pretty well.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  From https://www.post-gazette.com/life/garden/2009/06/13/Carefully-apply-vinegar-to-eliminate-thistles/stories/200906130126 https://www.post-gazette.com/life/garden/2009/06/13/Carefull... [Vinegar] works as a contact or burn-down herbicide, which means that it only kills the portion of the plant it contacts. The thistle will re-grow from the roots, and you will have to make repeated applications until you exhaust the carbohydrate reserves in the roots. There is probably a lot of seed present in the soil, and new thistle plants will sprout that you will have to treat in future years. Just picture yourself doing this on 90ac of hills!
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    Its not that bad for anything under 5-10 acres. Just mix in a dash of soap and a lil salt, and fill a backpack sprayer. Soak the plant, specifically the leaves, and you have a very selective, very benign herbicide. Full grown plants take more than 1 treatment many times, but with thistles, you can just carefully remove the heads.

gdubs 7y ago

There’s a second order conclusion here that seems to get constantly lost in the conversation. On a bumper sticker it’d be, “It’s the monocultures, stupid.” When we talk about things like glysophate staying around in the soil or making it’s way into the water supply, what we really should be questioning is why so much is being used in the first place. And that’s because we grow fragile annual crops in enormous monocultures making the use of chemicals a necessity. I’m for alternative methods of farming, like permaculture, but I’m not so ideological to be against chemicals in the absolute. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, pragmatic use of sprays isn’t terribly dangerous. I’m talking spot spraying as part of conservation and restoration work, etc. The fixation on particular chemicals like glysophate is a distraction from the root issue, which is that industrial scale agriculture is — on the whole —damaging to the planet.

sametmax 7y ago
Yes but permaculture is not scalable for big companies, since it requires a lot of skilled labors. You cannot use one big tractor for a huge perma field and be done with it. And they dictate the market.
dan_quixote 7y ago
Alternative ideas like a robot weeder [1] are interesting. This could be pretty effective on some crops. Doesn't solve the pesticide problem though. [1] https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/autonomous-robot-weeder/ https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/autonomous-robot-weeder/

feld 7y ago

If glyphosate is banned we will all starve. There is no strong evidence of its harm yet. It may be an EDC, but we don't have the data to prove it. The fearmongering has got to stop. Why wasn't Bayer/Monsanto allowed to provide expert witness testimony? Are we going to continue to throw scientific methods out the window?