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Comment by DoodleBuggy | Hacker News Reader

The primary reason most people who eat organic food do so is to avoid consuming pesticides and herbicides.

I have yet to read a single study indicating that consuming pesticides is good for health, but if anyone has such a study I'd love to read it.

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The purpose of pesticides is not to add healthfulness to food. I doubt even the most scummy Monsanto PR rep would claim that. I think the goal is to make the yield/health tradeoff equation balance out. Usually that's done by claiming the pesticides have little to no health consequences.

I am pretty sure consuming food with small pesticide residue is much healthier than starving to.

If you have a working method to maintain crop yields while eliminating all pesticide use and not increasing cost significantly, I think there would be a lot of people interested, and probably a lot of money to earned.

Robots.

If you have a small machine that constantly plucks weeds, you don't need herbicides.

Not sure about pesticides.

Autonomous tractors are totally a thing. They will only get better with time and development, but they can't replace pesticides yet.

You're conflating pesticides and herbicides

I understand the distinction you're making. My understanding has been that pesticide is a term that includes both insecticides and herbicides.

> Pesticides are substances that are meant to control pests or weeds. The term pesticide includes all of the following: herbicide, insecticide, insect growth regulator, nematicide, termiticide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, predacide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, antimicrobial, fungicide, disinfectant (antimicrobial), and sanitizer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide

My bad. As the child of farmers it's never been used this way where I'm from

No harm, no foul! Growing up in a farming community myself was one of the reasons I spoke up, and I'm sure there's variation in how these terms are used. I definitely knew what you were getting at. Language is pretty interesting!

Plucking a weed is not enough to stop it from growing, especially if it's roots are deep. Also, plant debris can spread the weed.

Purslane is really annoying.

There's no need for herbicides or pesticides if the growth medium, plant food, etc. are tightly controlled, like in a hydroponic vertical factory farm in a climate-controlled, air-locked building.

There is a better way. Look up the work of farmer Joe Salatin and ecologist Alan Savory.

False dichotomy. There is no mandate to consume pesticide residue. Yields will often be somewhat less without pesticides and monocultural ag isn't itself inherently sustainable, but sufficient calories can be produced without pesticides. Hydroponic factories have the real potential to strickly control cleanliness, diseases and pests maybe able to do without pesticides entirely, while still maintaining a low price-point.

organic farming uses pesticides, they're just organic pesticides.

Yes, and they can be just as dangerous to health. People seem to fail to realize that natural isn't synonymous with harmless, plenty of natural things will kill you so we shouldn't be surprised that 'natural' pesticides are also dangerous, maybe more so as they haven't been through the same safety studies synthetic ones have to go through. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/pesticide...

Some organic pesticides are dangerous. These seem to mostly be problematic when natural ingredients are industrially concentrated. Also, seems some companies sell synthetics that can be derived from plants, but aren't for economic reasons, and still call them "organic". (Personally, I think calling an substance derived from plants but which is extracted with a number of synthetic and toxic chemicals is kind of stretching the meaning of the term 'organic' to the breaking point).

There are many that are much more safe: neem oil, citrus oil, tobacco, salt water, baking soda water, chili powder, soap.

I think that the presumption of danger from pesticides derived from plants humans have been living alongside for millennia should be less than novel synthetics that may have only existed for a decade or two.

What's the basis for that presumption? Are you arguing humans evolved during that period to be less affected by the natural chemicals? Are you invoking some kind of gaia hypothesis? A chemical is a chemical whether it's natural or synthetic, there are plenty of natural chemicals which will easily kill you. If anything novel synthetics that have been through a rigorous regulatory review process should seem safer than natural chemicals whose toxicity has been less well studied.

The basis of the presumption is that if humans have been to exposed to something for 1000 years and we haven't noticed an effect yet, its less likely that we'll notice an effect in the future vs a substance for which we have no data about human exposure.

Certainly many 'all-natural' chemicals can be highly toxic, but because we have a history of interacting with the plants that produce them, most of these harmful chemicals we already have some idea that they may be dangerous.

I remember reading a professor at Wageningen University claiming that vegetables grown with pesticides tended to have less carcinogens because they don't need to produce as many defensive chemicals of their own.

I would like to see some research backing up that claim myself, though.

organic food stillnhas those.

> The primary reason most people who eat organic food do so is to avoid consuming pesticides and herbicides.

Let's be clear. The primary reason most people who eat organic food do so is because they desire to conform to the values of their social group. It doesn't matter to them why their social group might have decided on this.

No matter what the activity is, if it's defined in terms more specific than "eating", "sleeping", "breathing", or "reproducing", that is the primary reason most people who engage in it do so.

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