2 ms·

While glyphosate may technically be considered safe, there are reports and I believe lawsuits about it reacting with hard water creating extremely unsafe compou

by stubish 6mo ago

While glyphosate may technically be considered safe, there are reports and I believe lawsuits about it reacting with hard water creating extremely unsafe compounds. ie. it poisons your ground water. https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient-connected-to-epidemic-levels-of-chronic-kidney-disease/ https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient...

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
I'm not opposed to further studies, but basic critical thinking makes it unlikely that this is a danger outside of those specific areas. First remember that glyphosate has been used around the world continuously for 52 years. If there is some kind of pattern of harm due to its use, it's already happened, so it should be possible to find those harms all over the place. 85% of the USA has hard water. If glyphosate being in hard water causes 10% of children to have early onset kidney disease, we would have been seeing that in the USA for at least the last 42 years. But we haven't. So it's likely that whatever is happening in Sri Lanka, is specific to Sri Lanka. You can take this same basic logical premise and apply it to all of the concerns about glyphosate. None of them stand up to scrutiny, because we have been using it for so long, everywhere, and despite that, we have no concrete evidence of any significant harms caused by glyphosate itself.
hinkley 6mo ago
And real farmers have bad days and have difficulty maintaining the prescribed application conditions. For one, you can't control what the weather does in the afternoon after you've applied it in the morning (and it might take all morning because farms are huge and you have to tank up again)
- defrost 6mo ago
  Real farmers, all 3,500 of them in local coop, take careful measures to control everything on large farms- spraying is generaly done at night for the cooler temps, rates are watched as over spray costs $$'s etc. Seed volumes are manually run through air seeder calibrate seed weight per acre, etc. The trend today is toward AgBot / SwarmBot type boom sprayers with onboard weather stations for wind speed and air temp, coupled with computer vision to limit spray to actual weeds rather than broad area even spray for weed / non weed alike. Again, driven by $$ watching, etc.

by stubish 6mo ago

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago

I'm not opposed to further studies, but basic critical thinking makes it unlikely that this is a danger outside of those specific areas. First remember that glyphosate has been used around the world continuously for 52 years. If there is some kind of pattern of harm due to its use, it's already happened, so it should be possible to find those harms all over the place. 85% of the USA has hard water. If glyphosate being in hard water causes 10% of children to have early onset kidney disease, we would have been seeing that in the USA for at least the last 42 years. But we haven't. So it's likely that whatever is happening in Sri Lanka, is specific to Sri Lanka. You can take this same basic logical premise and apply it to all of the concerns about glyphosate. None of them stand up to scrutiny, because we have been using it for so long, everywhere, and despite that, we have no concrete evidence of any significant harms caused by glyphosate itself.

hinkley 6mo ago

And real farmers have bad days and have difficulty maintaining the prescribed application conditions. For one, you can't control what the weather does in the afternoon after you've applied it in the morning (and it might take all morning because farms are huge and you have to tank up again)

defrost 6mo ago
Real farmers, all 3,500 of them in local coop, take careful measures to control everything on large farms- spraying is generaly done at night for the cooler temps, rates are watched as over spray costs $$'s etc. Seed volumes are manually run through air seeder calibrate seed weight per acre, etc. The trend today is toward AgBot / SwarmBot type boom sprayers with onboard weather stations for wind speed and air temp, coupled with computer vision to limit spray to actual weeds rather than broad area even spray for weed / non weed alike. Again, driven by $$ watching, etc.