Monsanto’s Weed Killer, Dicamba, Divides Farmers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM
That is the video that led me to it, but after I saw it I went back through his video history to see how he got the whole project started and to see his progress over the years. He has a video in there where he recommends a series of books that he learned from, like Albert Howard's "An Agricultural Testament," Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture," and Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution." I've gotten started reading the first two and they're really great books.
Lets hope it wont be too late
This is not remotely true, unless you buy into the ridiculous Ausubel et al paper. Most conservative projections have it at 2040 for peak arable land, which is not the same as being out of agricultural space, and certainly not the same as denying climate change.
Efficiency of arable land per hectare is through the roof and continues to improve every decade by increasing multiplicative factors due to consolidation, regulation, and technology.
The problem is not food development, arable land, or generating calories at all. It is entirely in the distribution of the food and the political ramifications of such.
(I have a 2 acre 'food forest', I'm not a 'Big AG apologist' or any of the dozens of other things I've been called over the years - I'm just realistic)
As tech evolves tho, I think we'll see chemical pesticides and herbicides replaced with mechanical solutions instead.
The world doesn't necessarily need to use industrial agriculture to achieve the same yields, the alternative is to be having many more farmers working smaller a plots and actually getting better yields from it.
I'd take environmental degradation over slavery, to be honest.
Now, I do agree with you that with even better technology than we have now, we can replace much of what we need chemistry for with mechanical solutions. Although, chemical application with modern systems can be dosed on areas measured in square feet, a long way from the 'a bit of nitrogen is good so double the amount is better' mentality of a few decades ago. But the future of agriculture is not in 'back to land' or 'permaculture' style farming. It's in more technology, not less, and less labor, not more.
Despite people's knee-jerk reactions, allowing the population to decrease doesn't have to mean anything about eugenics and economics doesn't require growth. On the contrary, growth and even staying at current levels have many problems.
The belief that we need to grow is carrying us toward disaster.
I can't agree with this more.
We need to think about an alternative to it.
Albert Howard - Agricultural Testament - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2225725.Agricultural_Tes...
Sepp Holzer's Permaculture: A Practical Guide to Small-Scale, Integrative Farming and Gardening - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10023218-sepp-holzer-s-p...
Masanobu Fukuoka - The One-Straw Revolution - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev...
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You can read these books at archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.270767
https://archive.org/details/SeppHolzersPermacultureAPractica...
Folks definitely get yields of more than a snack or 2 out of food forests. Growing food from perennials in a multi-layered food forest is very efficient (minimum inputs), resilient (diverse layers designed to support each other, plants that are of age and established, healthy soil) and has many outputs (food, timber etc). Bill Mollison explains the birth of the idea here [0].
I am convinced that they are a key piece of the future if we are to feed the 9 billion people you speak of. I am also becoming convinced that industrial agriculture's tendency to plant vast amounts of monocultures does not have a place in that future.
Food forests are promoted through permaculture. The entirety of a permaculture farm wouldn't usually be dedicated to a forest like this. Grains have a place. So does meat.
There are plenty of permaculture farms out there producing meat, and it's not uncommon for this to take place in woodland. Within a forest you may find pigs and poultry[1]. As a part of a permaculture farm's systems there may be pastured cattle, poultry[2][3] and so on. Within this sphere you find farms like Mastodon Valley[4], where cattle are a key part of their regenerative agriculture. Then you have ponds designed for fish[5].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrtJbk8_GY8&t=16m20s
[1] https://youtu.be/GVQ8TUpvnDY?t=3m28s (woodland in this case, not a food forest)
[2] https://youtu.be/3Knn7ZH4Tiw?t=39m28s (a system where chickens follow cows in pasture)
[3] https://youtu.be/eFujalK2jHg?t=32m12s (using chickens to disturb an area in prep for establishing a new section of a food forest... continue watching for a few minutes to see an impressive chicken-pinning dog!)
[4] https://mastodonvalleyfarm.com
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2B2Nyji7v0 (establishing a fish pond and using cows from the farm as helpers)
In my city there's a club you pay a tiny monthly amount to get fruits delivered. And you can become a partner very easily.
All of this stems from our insane deep-rooted dependence on corn and soybeans.
We need to fix this and soon but it is "someone else's problem".
That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test.
None of the topics you listed have equivalent conclusive evidence to eachother. For example, the evidence to support the safety of contemporary versions of common vaccines is overwhelming; but when it comes to "organic foods", it depends entirely on the exact specifics of any individual product, from the shape and surface area of the plant, washing practices, specific tendency to absorb or repel specific chemicals (naturally or artificially present) which may not have even been applied to the land for decades (for example, arsenic-based pesticides from old cotton crops leeching into rice crops), the qualities of the soil.
Science isn't a belief, it's a method, and not all conclusions are equally conclusive.
There's a handful of times where my opinion on something has been flipped by a single argument that fits into a single paragraph or even sentence, and my opinion on GMOs is one of them. Nassim Taleb argues that while any given GMO product may be in fact entirely safe, that as you consider the whole line of GMOs that will be created over the next decades at an accelerating pace, the odds that at least one of them turn out to be catastrophically bad enough to entirely erase the benefits of everything else done with them goes up quite distressingly.
This makes sense of the idea that A: all current GMO foods are actually quite safe but B: it may still be a bad idea in the long run. Given that things will be GMO'd on an increasing curve as it becomes easier and easier, we've seen only a very small fraction of what will ultimately be done with the technology.
I think the key takeaway is that these aren't new or different risks. You could say the same thing about iPhone apps, pharmaceuticals, or traditionally bred plants: as you consider the whole lines of $ITEMS that will be created over the next decades at an accelerating pace, the odds that at least one of them turn out to be catastrophically bad enough to entirely erase the benefits of everything else done with them goes up quite distressingly.
Thalidomide happened. But it doesn't justify abandoning pharmaceuticals entirely. There just might be some wisdom in that.
[1]: https://io9.gizmodo.com/you-can-thank-genetic-engineering-fo...
Yea, these are good points.
Just to be precise, rennet was needed in basically all cheese making with just few exceptions, it was not just parmesan.
Just found that earlier today after doing some research inspired by this thread.
You can make "parmesan style hard cheese" but it's not the same. Grana padano is not parmesan, and that's PDO/DOP too
...or a dairy product megafactory in Italy proper, not unlike many in the US.
1. Overuse of pesticides leads to tolerance which leads to an escalation which is some of what you see in this article.
2. One or two large corporations controling the vast majority of food production for the US. Gains in farming are awesome, but they shouldn't be at the expense of autonomy of the farmers who bring us the food.
"The Flavr Savr turned out to disappoint researchers ... as the antisensed PG gene had a positive effect on shelf life, but not on the fruit's firmness, so the tomatoes still had to be harvested like any other unmodified vine-ripe tomatoes. An improved flavor, later achieved through traditional breeding of Flavr Savr and better tasting varieties, would also contribute to selling Flavr Savr at a premium price at the supermarket.
...
The failure of the Flavr Savr has been attributed to Calgene's inexperience in the business of growing and shipping tomatoes."
Sounds like Flavr Savrs were just a failure. I don't see anything about alarmists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
The controversy section is very telling. While not directly quoted in the article, I've seen/heard people argue, "It hasn't been proven safe!" Well, yeah? Of course it hasn't. Nothing is ever proven safe, really. It'd be much easier to demonstrate the benefits if, you know, they actually let trials go forward.
Some trials have been started, but people keep protesting and doing stuff like burning the fields.
That's not the reason why Golden Rice has been a failure[1]:
> While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, it is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of Golden Rice.
> “Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many years,” he said.
Rather:
> As Stone and Glover note in the article, researchers continue to have problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GMO strains already being grown by farmers.
[1] https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden...
Dicamba is a herbicide, not a pesticide.
Using Dicamba or Glyphosphate leads to less herbicide use. Because the soybeans or maize has been modified specifically to tolerate dicamba or glyphosphate and that those herbicides kill pretty much anything that is green, they don't have to use a lot of it.
If we didn't have broad spectrum herbicides, farmers would have to use many narrow spectrum herbicides to kill weeds of different varieties. More herbicide, not less.
>If we didn't have broad spectrum herbicides, farmers would have to use many narrow spectrum herbicides to kill weeds of different varieties. More herbicide, not less.
The reverse is true. Narrow application of herbicides to just the weed plants encroaching upon a field results in far less herbicide application then spraying entire fields as a matter of practice.
The science behind GMOs are fine. The situation with GMOs being patentable IP, and the monopolization of the market that has resulted from this, to me is rather worrying.
I do have a bit of wariness in the back of my mind about the long-term ramifications of setting the precedent that companies can own genetic patterns. I don't think anybody knows quite what the knock-on effects of that might be in twenty or thirty years... but I also don't know how we can protect and encourage this kind of innovation without granting those exclusive rights.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roun...
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/glyphosa...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/05/18/gmos-safe-eat-s...
On the other hand, I've been accused of it three or four times, and, no, nobody's ever paid me for posting things on the internet. So it's also definitely an accusation flung around in cases where it is not justified.
To be sure, internet shills exist. But it's punting, and intellectually lazy, to simply dismiss arguments as, "This guy is arguing X; clearly he's a paid shill."
https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-round...
And Monsanto overdoes it with their shilling on Reddit to the point where it is so much in your fact that it hurts. I guess they do it in house instead of contracting? They aren't very good at it.
I don't disagree with the science as it regards the safety of GMO crops. I'm sure that I could eat concentrated amounts of whatever protein the added/modified DNA codes for without ever noticing.
I, and many other people, are lightly uneasy about the general trend of over-engineering our food supply. The trend points at fewer and fewer varieties of each species being farmed. That results in monocultures and all the inherent risks, such as susceptibility to pests etc. Both selective breeding as well as gene editing also optimise for only those traits with immediate commercial reward: The one or two varieties of Apples you'd end up will be huge, extremely colourful, and have 18 month shelf life. Already we've seen that the market doesn't usually care about taste, and there's a recent paper showing a widespread loss in nutritional value over the last decades.
In regards to nutrition, it has been shown again and again that there's more to it that the day's science has firmly established. The discovery of the major categories (protein/fat/carbohydrates) was immediately used to optimise diets in, for example, the newly industrialised cities, or the military. The result was a widespread decline in health among these populations, with fun new pathologies such as beriberi or scurvy.
Those mistakes were corrected with the discovery of Vitamins (beriberi: B1 deficiency, scurvy: C deficiency), and, once again, science thought it knew enough to reduce nutrition to its parts, and create healthy foods from scratch. Only they continue to fail, because the are myriads of molecules working in a complex network with gut bacteria etc that all have effects on your health. And the only winning strategy has always been: variety.
Note that none of this is really controversial within nutritional science today. But what scientists say is good for you is not always the same as other scientists' new crops. One is human physiology, the other is crop science.
I'm also hesitant to embrace such technology because it turns an industry traditionally organised around small, family-owned businesses into the purvey of three or four incredibly large multinationals and their patent portfolio. And while I think today's democracies have established a working regulatory regime for these behemoth, there are just to many stories about rather shady conduct by such companies in countries with weak governments and institutions.
I also question the need for further increases in ag yields. Much of the discussion is infused by the fear of exponential population growth that was all the rage in the 80s (Club of Rome etc.), but we're actually seeing a gradual flattening of growth, and aren't too far of from "peak humanity". Hunger is no longer the #1 problem of humanity, and where it still exists, it is caused not by a lack of production, but by organisational deficiencies (see North Korea vs South Korea, or Venezuela today vs Venezuela 1995).
Citation showing this has anything to do with GMOs?
1. Inducing rapid genetic change (i.e. making GMOs) could alter the nutritional profile of foods in ways that are difficult to test. 2. Similarly, it could reduce the ability of the plants to fight diseases. 3. Combined with 2., producing crops with less and less biodiversity could very conceivably lead to massive crop death due to disease. This is very much a "black swan" scenario and just because it hasn't happened (much) already, doesn't mean it won't. In fact, you need only to look at bananas to see this in action. 4. The benefits of GMOs often require externalities to realise i.e. fertalisers, pesticides, mechanised agriculture. 5. Largely related to 4., the true (mid to long term) economic benefits of GMOs are hard to quantify. In my opinion, this comes down to the production process fundamentally requiring a bunch of energy and oil-derived products to work. These costs are massively subsidised and are largely hidden and unknown.
There are some articles that address these issues. I've read some of them. All the articles I've read, like many scientific articles (outside the likes of maths/physics/chemistry etc.), were unconvincing because they had insufficient data and failed to account for obvious confounding factors in any way. It is also entirely obvious at this point that scientific articles are frequently produced with data that has been heavily manipulated or even fabricated.
I use the term "scientific" here to refer to the style and place of publication, rather than any abstract principle of quality.
And it seems like their stuff is truly dangerous: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup...
People who grow grapes (or tomatoes, or anything but soy/corn for that matter) are really upset and angry about the growth in the use of Dicamba.
It's already very frustrating each year to find your plants damaged from drift from rampant glyphosate use. But the degree of damage from dicamba is just off the charts.
This article spends a lot of time talking about Dicamba's effects on other cash crop farmers. But it doesn't talk about those who choose to grow other things. The agriculture industry already acts like the only thing that matters is cash crop corn/soy rotation farmers. Drift reports basically amount to a shrug. That's very very frustrating.
The NYT has some strangely poor writing sometimes. This whole article is about GMO seeds designed specifically to allow application of pesticides. Nobody disputes that it will increase the use of pesticides - that's the whole point, as explained the rest of this article other than this paragraph.
The article then goes on to do just as you say, which allows the reader to make the conclusion about whether those environmentalists concerns are valid. Since this is a newspaper article, it would be improper style to directly make the implication on the part of the author over whether those concerns are valid. It's simply their job to report such concerns exist.
Some people just love to criticize the NYT.
While it is a fact that some vaccines contain tiny amounts of mercury [1], when anti-vaxxers try to make a sensation of "vaccines contain poisonous mercury!", it is nothing but misleading with ill intentions. Although that sentence is also true and fact, that doesn't make its writer's intentions any less sinister.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/do...
It doesn't change the fact that they said it. You have to report on the facts, and the fact is they said it contains a dangerous amount. The report can then go on to show how that's a false premise, but newspaper writing purposely doesn't make bold claims like "ANTI-VAXXERS LIE ABOUT POISONOUS AMOUNTS OF MERCURY IN VACCINES" because people call that sensationalist and biased.
They assume their readers are smart enough to connect the dots. If the writer's intentions were truly "sinister" as you say, then they would manipulate the facts into an argument that supported the idea that vaccines have a dangerous amount.
The analogy also fails because it truly is a fact that this would increase the amount of pesticides used. Whether that is a bad thing or not is entirely up to the readers to decide.
Again you just seem to be spinning some narrative about the NYT having malicious intent here (especially by analogizing it to vaccines) without anything but a sly deferral to "poor writing". It's just an excuse for you and others to confirm your dislike of the NYT when they're writing in the same style every newspaper reporter is taught.
The sentence before the one I quoted is "But weeds are becoming more resistant to Roundup, so the industry is developing seeds that are tolerant to more herbicides."
Here's an example of a better and more professional way to follow that sentence in order to make reference to these concerns:
'This application of a larger volume of pesticides - including those designed to eliminate these newly Roundup-resistant plants, has caused concern among some environmentalists and weed scientists.'
So the difference? That structure follows directly from the rest of the article and doesn't leave any impression that there's controversy over whether there will be more pesticides.
It is from other farmers who are growing things other than the target crop. In some places it is in an urgent crisis for them.
Also, you should not bracket parenthetical statements with dissimilar punctuation marks.
So organic farming?
It's a matter of evolution, and stopping resistance. Like HIV, cancer, antibiotics, or any other biologic system, there is a necessity for multiple modes of action.
Plants evolve very slowly. This is good. It means they adapt to things like roundup very slowly. It took decades to adapt to glyphosate, and even today it is still widely effective. However, since it is a single mode of action, resistance is inevitable.
The trick is that if you increase modes of action, you raise the cost of natural selection to the point that the species simply cannot adapt. Ever.
We need glyphosate, 2,4-D AND dicamba resistance, all together so that we can stop any one chemical from being resistant. Stopping resistance means having a full toolbox, and a full effective toolbox means less overall chemicals on fields.
Literally impossible. Mutations can't magically move to high frequency in one generation. The article you said this 'Plant populations began to diverge significantly in response to insect attack in as few as three to four generations'. Not one. Yes intense single mode-of-action selection can change allele frequencies in a short period of time, but that is much different than adapting to novel challenges.
The types of adaptations you are talking about are likely what we call "standing variation". Dormant mutations at intermediate frequency that become fit during intermittent circumstances. Like a stressful year, or a certain predator that comes every decade.
In the case of chemicals however, we are dealing with an entirely novel mechanism, with little to no standing variation to draw upon. Thus evolution in this circumstance is slow.
Isn't this a classic Red Queen's Race?
A similar arms-race in agriculture is the last thing we want. It's like all of our big inventions are being rolled back against us, starting with modern medicine, passing through agriculture and eventually taking fire away as we have to shut down the power plants to stop global warming. Give it a few years and we'll probably discover something horribly wrong with the wheel.
We probably won't get to multiple-resistant weeds in a day, or even a decade, but the path towards stronger weed control measures is going to be a very painful one.
The only way off the treadmill is to stack as many traits as possible so that evolution doesn't have time to adapt.
This was the key to effective treatment of HIV for example. Anti-retroviral cocktails of 3-5 drugs, each with a different mode of action.
We're lucky though, plants evolve slow, so we only need a few different traits to slow/stop evolution.
Although the dandelions and bindweed in my garden would be prominent counter-examples.
Dandelions need sunlight too. Assuming your weed bot keeps the plant reduced to a leafless stub the roots will die eventually.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/cri...
“The conflict was no longer farmer versus weed, but also farmer versus farmer. When his neighbors illegally sprayed the pesticide, Wallace reported it. After harvest, Wallace was shot and killed.
On today's show, a murder mystery – about how a weed divided neighbors and led to Mike Wallace's death.”
Here’s a link to the episode: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episo...
It's not a simple problem to solve. Moralizing about someone else's business without understanding the fundamental economics isn't going to solve it. It's a public policy question in the end.
I have skin in the game. I own row crop land in Iowa and Minnesota that is operated by local farmers. My leases require good land stewardship and I only lease to farmer/operators that are willing to meet the conditions. For the majority of farmers, good stewardship of the land and environment is part of their ethos. There are obvious exceptions. We should do something about the exceptions, and that is where it becomes a public policy question.
IMHO, herbacide drift is fundamentally a form of trespass when it drifts out of your own field. Let's start with treating drift as trespass. Cattle breaking the fence is treated that way, the maintainer of the fence is liable for damages. Keep your chemicals behind your own property line.