Glyphosate found in granola, crackers and oatmeal
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"Natural" alternatives like vinegar can be just as harmful to the soil & environment as commercial herbicides, and other methods can be economically unfeasible.
Unfortunately, to sustain the growth of population and increasing consumer "appetite", herbicides are the only way (at this time).
Nobody, including those who live in rural areas like I do, WANT to use herbicides (they aren't cheap) - it's just the only way to stay in business. There is no scaleable alternative at this time.
It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice".
Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together.
Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use.
I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons.
With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-)
(#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.
Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60.
There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
Except they're infested with glyphosate. Yum!
Modern yield: 170 bu/ac.
The increase in past 80 years has been amazing.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtren...
I'm not sure if this is the source you had in mind, but Seeing Like a State offers a similar story from Tanzania.
Colonists attempted to move local farmers from polycultures to "more efficient" monoculture farming, and the results were absolutely disastrous. Polycultures helped prevent erosion and soil depletion, tall sun plants covered short shade plants, and mixed crop types spread both farm labor and crop production across more of the year.
The counterargument, such as it is, is that we've committed so vastly to intensive, fertilized monocultures that we can no longer produce comparable amounts of anything using traditional methods. Which I think is probably true, but as destroy the soil and aquifers of the Midwest it looks like the modern technique isn't particularly workable either.
Taking a systems view is a good thing, but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that. But I think it's unlikely that a systems approach to farming is going to look like letting nature do the work; without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
What a quality reply. Next, a lecture that everything is a "chemical"? I took (university) biochemistry, thank you very much.
> but I think you're assuming we're not already doing that.
We are not. Proof: Monocultures that require lots of stored sun energy and lots of fertilizers (even more stored ancient sun energy) and lots of pesticides (even more energy, plus incalculable side effects).
> without cultivation, plants are not going to be food.
How about you read what I wrote? I mean, all of it, not just a few words that triggered you to lecture me as if I had said something on a child level. HN has interesting discussions, let's keep the level up a bit. If you read into my comment that I propose to let nature run all on its own, like some state park or nature preserve, than you did not really read much of it. If I have to explain what I wrote to someone who didn't read it I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time and comment space.
* Stockman Grass Farmer, a publication for smart graziers who get complexity that Joel now edits
* Acres USA, similar but for the broader topic of holistic/ecological farming
* Permaculture-oriented farmers such as Mark Shepard
Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today.
Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
My yard goes green months before the Bermuda grass monoculture lawns in the neighborhood, and I have personally observed four different species of bees feeding in it, along with the Polistes carolina paper wasps, and the occasional Trypoxylon politum mud-pipe wasps. All of them are very docile, and we've never had any stings, despite frequent nest-building activity within 3m of our front door.
Pollinators are important. There are a lot of people out there that let their yards grow plants other than glass for the express purpose of feeding pollinators between spring emergence and the flowering of commercially important crops, including the buzz pollinators like bumblebees.
And we continually have to butt heads with HOA buttheads for whom "not grass" equals "weed". Those aren't "weeds"; they're "volunteers". If you can't identify it and find it on the state's official list of noxious and invasive species, go away and come back when you can.
I think someone tried a guerilla application of herbicide a couple of years ago, because everything died. I'm glad it all came back. I simply don't understand the level of control-freakishness that would motivate a person to spray herbicide on someone else's yard. It makes me want to intentionally seed some dandelions. Dandelions seem to send that kind of person into fits, for some reason unknown to me.
Ha ha, no.
Maybe Canada is land of the free?
So, no vegetable garden for me. Unless I go to the trouble to put in an isolated raised bed with fresh soil imported from a safe source.
I wasn't aware that it could -- on its own, depending upon design -- provide significant filtration of such contaminants, although I am considering how it could also help divert rainwater to the side property lines, aiding its flow past the house to the front yard and sewer.
However, the best place for the garden -- best sun, and out of the way of other activity -- would still catch a lot of runoff.
You can get some more context on what I'm describing from this article, though it sounds like your swale might be shallower. https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale...
If you do it, you might consider filling yours with wood chips for appearance, easy maintenance, extra filtration, and to encourage soil building.
Most homeowners in the US are also not impacted by any laws or HOA rules mandating they have perfectly manicured lawns, either. This seems to be something limited to upscale suburbia particularly in the west, where the arid conditions require you to actually care for your lawn if you want grass.
http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20...
PRECAUTIONS
KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.
HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED.
HARMFUL IF INHALED.This is controversial to say the least. And very one-sided reporting from The Guardian.
Every research agency but one considers glyphosate safe and not linked to cancer. Bodies like WHO (World Health Organization) and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) [1], EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) [2], and ECHA (European Chemicals Agency) [3] have concluded that there is no evidence for glyphosate causing cancer.
Only one agency, IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) in France, has classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, but their work has raised some suspicion [4].
[1] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf
[2] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/151112
[3] https://echa.europa.eu/fi/-/glyphosate-not-classified-as-a-c...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-who-iarc-glyphosate-speci...
A lot of crops require "Roundup Ready" varieties, and Monsanto (ab)uses patent law to enforce licenses on their RR seeds, even in situations where it is clear Monsanto crops contaminated someone else's field.
Worse yet, due to horizontal gene transfer in some grasses and weeds, we now have RR weeds, and that is a one way process. Due to this, Glyphosate-based products are no longer useful for new weed eradication solutions, only for existing solutions until their last users are overtaken by RR weeds.
Roundup had its time, and now it is essentially a commercial failure after the fact.
All of that said, I'm anti-glyphosate because, frankly, it should have never been cleared for use. It kills valuable crops that have not been supplied with the RR gene (which has happened repeatedly due to overspray effecting neighboring fields), they've known since day one that horizontal gene transfer could produce RR weeds, and now we've lost an important tool in weed control due to the overuse and abuse of glyphosate.
Due to this overuse and abuse, the American public has been unwittingly used as guinea pigs due to bad science stating that it doesn't harm us, but very little (until recently) was done to see how it interacts with our gut flora.
We now know that in at least some of the population, glyphosate exposure has side effects. Maybe it screws with our gut bacteria (most likely not the pathway described in Glyphosate II (Samsel 2013)), maybe it is because of APMA (a metabolite of glyphosate) which mimics glutamate toxicity (and want some extra fun? Look at the relationship between autism and glutamate). I don't know.
I don't need to know the exact mechanism (although I'd like to us to know, to prevent future mistakes from harming people due to accidentally using the same pathway), I just need to know that there is enough science to link glyphosate exposure to modern diseases and disorders.
Well, that, and it doesn't really work anymore in a lot of crops, especially RR ones.
> [forces patent compliance] even in situations where it is clear Monsanto crops contaminated someone else's field
Can you provide any example of this? The only cases I'm aware of are the likes of Bowman. The supreme court finding in that case makes it pretty clear Monsanto was in the right: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
> we now have RR weeds, and that is a one way process
No, it is not. This is the same nonsense as people touting antibiotics resistance as a dead-end street. It costs energy for these organisms to maintain resistance. Once you remove the antibiotic, or glyphosate, from the environment, the biologically ideal thing to do is to lose resistance, redirecting that energy to other things that actually serve a purpose.
> I don't need to know the exact mechanism
If you are going to be implying glyphosate causes autism, for some "extra fun" as you say, then you should perhaps reconsider this. Pointing out they've both followed the curve of modern industrial chemistry expansion and implying that correlation to be causative is irresponsible.
As for antibiotics, it is interesting you bring that up because it is a good example: people do not take their antibiotics as per manufacturer's guidelines, and Doctors over-prescribe antibiotics.
In people, antibiotic resistance kills patients, but we can limit the spread. In farming, RR resistant weeds can spread miles away, or to places that aren't farms (thus we aren't looking for them there).
What these both share is misuse and overuse of the product, and the manufacturer complicit in this by continuing to sell the product in ways that allow (or even encourage) the misuse and overuse.
HN has certainly gotten stories to the front page about antibiotic resistance being an ongoing issue, and how some antibiotics have fallen to the wayside due to people not strictly following the label (where, if everyone had followed the label, we'd still be using it).
I have also seen stories on HN's front page about how bacteria has done horizontal gene transfer to trade antibiotic resistances. This, too, is similar to RR weed's existence.
Here is the case with Mr. White:
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-alnd-5_03-cv-02804/pd...
As you can see by reading it, it is not over seed saving for his own farm. It is over him intentionally growing 120 acres of roundup-ready crops for the purpose of producing his own RR seeds to sell commercially. "Yeah. I took advantage of it.", is a quote from Mr. White on page 7. The court found this in violation of the agreement he'd signed when he bought the seeds, and he lost the case.
I think your example of Mr. White is illustrating exactly my point, that these cases have been misrepresented by anti-GMO groups to further their agenda.
> What these both share is misuse and overuse of the product
Yes. But this is not what you said or what I addressed. You said RR resistance was a "one way process". This is incorrect. I agree with the point that you are making here about misuse and manufacturers like Monsanto being complicit in that misuse.
Are there some really bad weeds out there you want to save the glyphosate for?
No. The burden of proof is on those defending a chemical. Even if there's a 1/1000 chance that glyphosate explains 5% of autism cases, then it should be banned.
The world doesn't need more food, America throws away half its food. The world needs better health -- the sperm count in America has dropped 50% in the last 30 years, autism is at about 1/52
Yes, it does.
> America throws away half its food.
Yes, global food delivery systems are inefficient with different sources of loss in different places (and, in the US, a big one is “people buy food and don't use it”.)
In the absence of proven solutions to these inefficiencies, though, less food production means higher prices globally, which is particularly harmful for the poorest of the poor. Sure, solving the inefficiencies would reduce the needed production levels for any given price level, but the people fighting GMOs and/or products like glyphosate aren't solving the inefficiencies, they are just attacking production while diverting energy from solving the inefficiencies.
“We don't need more food” is an attitude associated with the same privilege of wealth that leads to the US throwing away much of its food.
Seriously, oxygen is a known carcinogen, responsible for the massive generation of free radicals in the body. Realize: look at how oxygen burns wood, it can even eat steel! And you're sucking this extremely hazardous and potent oxidizer into your body with every breath.
I'm sure I'm missing some critical piece of information, but this seems like something that agencies should have started testing for decades ago.
As a layperson, if the FDA hasn't been testing for this, it makes you wonder what they have been testing for.. or rather, it almost makes one feel like they haven't been testing food samples at all for 50+ years.. which even with an underfunded agency, would be shocking.
When I learned this, I decided enough was enough and switched to strictly organic grains. I think it actually helps my health quite a bit. I wonder how many of the health problems we blame on wheat are actually due to the poison that is routinely sprayed on it.
"We reject the notion, however, that this “common” practice of U.S. farmers “saturating” wheat crops with Roundup herbicide as a desiccant before each harvest has been causing an increase in wheat-related ailments, as these claims are unsupported even by the research cited in articles making such a claim."
Anecdotally, I spent a year in France in the 00's and had minimal issues with bread I consumed there (before I realized I was sensitive to wheat in general).
Also I know someone who moved from France to the US and she's had lots more digestive and allergy issues with fruits/etc in the decade+ she's been here.
You can be paying 30% more for your food and still be eating pesticides. There is no fool proof way to do this validation in most countries.
In rat studies, glyphosate has about the same LD50 value as table salt.
Speaking of LD50 values: I know some people who ingest borax as a mineral supplement, and its LD50 is higher than table salt, roughly double if I recall correctly. I bet I can't get you to try it as a dietary supplement! The point is that there is more to consider than that one specific measurement.
So what are the other measurements to consider?
Currently contaminants can only be reliably detected with advanced equipment like mass spectrometers that run over a hundred thousand, require clean conditions, trained operators, advanced software, and routine upkeep.
Improvements in these machines would be a huge step in the right direction.
Pretty much the only practical tech right now is a card with a shitload of immuno assays on it, like those pan-drug test strips. There are a pain to validate and expensive/no fun to develop. The business model here would be spending a few million buying antibodies from commercial suppliers, validating tests, and selling cards for <<$1 per test. Test cards would likely be e.g. "artificial hormones", "pesticides I/I/III" etc
Education is also an issue, when the domain of possible contaminants is so large.
The sample prep in this case is still a problem, though. Easy for drinking water, harder when you're trying to take a standard sample of e.g. apple skin
There is a little bit more 'political will' in China because there is greater awareness of food contamination. But the market only supports water conductivity meters and gimmicks like that, unless something's changed in the past year.
The closest thing I think is the "Consumer Physics SCiO," aka the Theranos of chemical characterization. Their device is both too expensive (for a mainstream consumer product) and useless for any real world contaminant test, although it is fine at testing water/sugar/protein content for e.g. bad baby formula
edit: whoops, I missed that by "pick up" you meant "detect", not "munch through"!
Glyphosate degrades with a "half-life" of about 1-170 days. If you consume a product sprayed with glyphosate within about 90 days of the last spray, on average it will contain about half of the original dose.
Source: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/dienochlor-gly...
It also seems I was wrong about half-life in plants; the half life given for some tree species is 9 days. Unsurprisingly, industry does not appear to have funded research on the half-life in corn, soy and other commonly sprayed products.
Per the joint FAO and WHO report
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf?ua=1
>Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide. Several epidemiological studies on cancer outcomes following occupational exposure to glyphosate were available. The evaluation of these studies focused on the occurrence of NHL. Overall, there is some evidence of a positive association between glyphosate exposure and risk of NHL from the case–control studies and the overall meta- analysis. However, it is notable that the only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level. Glyphosate has been extensively tested for genotoxic effects using a variety of tests in a wide range of organisms. The overall weight of evidence indicates that administration of glyphosate and its formulation products at doses as high as 2000 mg/kg body weight by the oral route, the route most relevant to human dietary exposure, was not associated with genotoxic effects in an overwhelming majority of studies conducted in mammals, a model considered to be appropriate for assessing genotoxic risks to humans. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures. Several carcinogenicity studies in mice and rats are available. The Meeting concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic in rats but could not exclude the possibility that it is carcinogenic in mice at very high doses. In view of the absence of carcinogenic potential in rodents at human-relevant doses and the absence of genotoxicity by the oral route in mammals, and considering the epidemiological evidence from occupational exposures, the Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet. The Meeting reaffirmed the group ADI for the sum of glyphosate and its metabolites of 0–1 mg/kg body weight on the basis of effects on the salivary gland. The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity.
From the above, it seems that glyphohosate is pretty safe, and that it being found on food items in trace amounts is not big a deal. This seems yet another article that tries to get clicks by having a scary headline of the form "Look chemicals!"
The problem with this is it's just bullshit.
I'm sorry, but science can not prove a chemical safe (because science doesn't prove anything). The FDA may consider a chemical safe-enough, but a surprising amount of the time they later revoke that decision after people have been exposed.
The FDA process for testing safety involves exposing rats with a much HIGHER dose for a short period of time and looking for acute effects. However, this process is now highly disputed by scientists due to the fact that dose/response relationship of chemicals is non-linear, and sometimes even MORE severe at LOWER doses! [1]. It's also rightly criticized because you can't test a rat for a language disability. It's also rightly criticized because long term effects would never be identified with the FDA procedure, which may explain the high false negative rate.
[1] http://endocrinesciencematters.org/non-monotonic-dose-respon...