Swathing is going out of fashion, as most farmers desiccate to ripen their crops
nautil.us
nautil.us
“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.
30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.
It’s still a bizarre statement, as harvesting is a parallelizable operation and harvesting one big farm is no different from harvesting many small farms covering the same area.
We have this statement in the article: "Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5"
This one: 5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016)
Googling that gets to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-...
That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water.
Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.
Otherwise it would not go on with
"A farm that big would have different soil types [...] It would be hard [...]"
but use "has" and "is" instead of "would have".
Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US.
Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way.
And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.
Eat a varied diet, not too much, get plenty of exercise and sleep. Pay attention to food recalls, because accidental contamination of food by things like E. coli and salmonella kill dozens of people in the US every year and god knows how many world-wide.
Worrying about everything else, the micro-contaminants that maybe-possibly-who-knows might possibly-maybe-sort-of-contribute to some sort of who-knows after years or decades of exposure, is a bad value proposition. Maybe BPA causes cancer, or whatever it was supposed to cause. Maybe eating steak does. Maybe gluten is actually poisonous, maybe soy causes estrogen problems, maybe cooked vegetables lose all their magical healthiness. Maybe cell phones and WiFi cause cancer.
You can spend weeks and months and years trying to figure out exactly what food you personally should eat, and statistically you aren't getting those weeks and months and years back in the marginal gains to healthfulness. If you have an allergic reaction to a food, avoid it, and if you don't know if you had an allergic reaction, you probably didn't, but hey, I'm not a doctor. Talk to one.
I honestly don't know if glyphosate is safe when used this way or not (since I am mostly familiar with its more conventional uses in the US and am too lazy to do a deep dive into what the existing research says and am pretty jaded about whatever the latest mass hysteria is for reasons) but frankly if it is really being used in as wide-spread a manner as articles like this claim, it can't be particularly harmful or frankly it'd be pretty obvious epidemiologically, since there's been growing use of it in this way for decades now.
Or Eastern Canada. As a wheat grower in Ontario, harvest is typically in mid-July. Many months before weather becomes a factor. Really, the only crop we do sometimes desiccate in this part of the world are edible beans. A far cry from the "almost all crops" claim in the article.
"According to the EPA, between 1993 and 2015, glyphosate MRLs increased by 100 percent to 1,000 percent in the U.S., depending on the crop."
"Current MRLs for glyphosate range from 0.2 ppm to more than 300 ppm, depending on the crop. Between 1993 and 2015, the U.S. EPA glyphosate tolerance levels have increased by a factor of 50 for corn, and 2,000 for alfalfa."
So even without desiccation, we're still "allowed" to ingest several orders of magnitude more probably-carcinogen-related herbicides which screw with our cells and gut microbiome.
Secondly, you realize that regulatory agencies raise and lower the acceptable limits of chemicals as the evidence accumulates that they are or aren't particularly harmful, right? Some go down, because we find out they were way worse than we thought they were, some go up, because it turns out we were too conservative initially and they are safer at way higher levels that we previously thought. Science!
Thirdly, that article is confounding crops for human consumption with crops for animal consumption. We are way, way less worried about whether a pig is going to develop cancer later in life, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious, and we also conduct a brief autopsy on nearly every pig ever born, which as a side effect gives us pretty good data on how healthy the average pig is over time.
Not only is it in animal feeds, it's in processed foods. It's being passed through animals and plants. Even if you believe the claims that ingesting it won't give you cancer, it will probably screw with your gut microbiota.
The US MRLs are much higher than countries such as Japan, the EU, Canada, Australia, and Taiwan. Are our scientists just way better at sciencing, and know something these other countries' scientists don't? Or is it more probable that Monsanto has significant influence with the US's 992-billion agro industry, government, and FDA?
It's also possible that some countries have artificially low MRLs, in order to gain a competitive advantage with countries that have stricter limits on imports. But lowering MRLs means using less herbicide/pesticide, which wouldn't produce as high or reliable a yield. In order to maximize product, more herbicide/pesticide must be used more frequently (such as with desiccation), and that means you can't lower the MRLs - you can only raise them, to avoid regulatory issues from affecting your crop yields, and subsequently the profits of agro business. At the least, we know the FDA can't keep up with import testing (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297498/)
Finally, from a scientific standpoint, all of this is based on animal testing. No human testing is done, so we really don't know what long-term exposure will do to humans.
The first sentence is saying a DETECTABLE amount of glyphosate is found in 30% of a huge number of food products.
The second sentence is saying excessive amounts have been found in some of these three specific food products.
Put together, it sounds like 30% of products have excessive glyphosate in them, but if you go back to the source [0], you'll find that:
"The overall compliance rate for these surveys, based on Canadian Maximum Residue Limits (MRL), was 98.7 %. No samples of fruits and vegetables, soy products, or infant foods were found to contain residues exceeding Canadian limits."
So 30% contain detectable residue, 1.3% contain residue above the Canadian MRL.
(Which, hey, room for improvement in compliance, but it's deceptive to act like 30% of food is above the MRL.)
[0] http://www.inspection.gc.ca/food/chemical-residues-microbiol...
https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/three-options-for-osr-desiccati...
(Interesting to hear the UK described as the Far North as well :-) )
Take that and think about winter in Minnesota vs winter in England. The sea and the Gulf Stream provide a lot of warmth in winter!
I'd heard people say Madrid is on the same latitude as NY, but I didn't realise the UK was that further North before.
EDIT: anecdata, I know.
What changed that allowed him to start straight cutting in recent years? You'd never prefer swathing over straight cutting, so there must have been good reason to not straight cut in the past.
EDIT: The farm has been through three generations . . . things evolve over time.
For sure. It is just interesting to me that it would take three generations to finally get a grain table for the combine given all the pitfalls of swathing. The very first horse-drawn combine built in the 1800s had a straight-cut header for harvesting wheat, so it is not exactly new tech or a new idea.
So, that's why I wondered what changed. Finally having enough money to buy one is certainly a reasonable answer. As a farmer myself, I know all about that.
I say the US specifically because unfortunately we seem to be the origin for almost all of the modern, disturbing practices that have become ubiquitous. We've been setting the standard and hopefully we'll make a 180 and start raising the bar.
The amount that farms end up poisoning local rivers, streams etc I thought would be enough of a wake up call but I guess I was too optimistic. Organic foods aren't the answer either sadly, since a lot of the time that's the result from unfounded fears.
I can only hope you're wrong and that we don't hit a point of mass poisonings before we do anything but I can very easily see that coming to fruition.
But you are correct: Iowa’s status as the first caucus state has a lot to do with the state of farm policy.
(p.s. I live rural, have a hobby orchard/vineyard, and live next to two cash crop farms)
It isn't?
"In none of the investigated samples were glyphosate residues above the limit of detection found."
As someone that grew up on a farm, can you explain why? And also explain why the practices, aka fallow fields, are incorrect? A lot of the subidies and practices we have in place today are direct results of things like the dust bowl.
> Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable.
Have you validated such assumptions? I can guarantee that large scale farming is a lot more nuanced than one can assume in an arm chair style.
Until you've seen what pests can do to a field that hasn't been treated with fertilizer or say herbicide, its really hard to understand why they get used. It is the difference between having a crop to sell, and going out of business and selling off your farm.
This black and white thinking that comes from people that haven't any experience in the chosen field is honestly more annoying. Should we improve? Sure, no farmer would disagree, but would you be ok with increasing your food costs by 5x? 10x? even more? These are the things you ultimately have to consider when you knock modern practices.
There is no free lunch (pun intended) if you ban modern practices. There is a good chance that requiring the things you want makes large scale farming impossible, and results in more people without food at all. I'm not sure that is an overall net positive.
Another topic, a common desire among ecologists is to incentivize more natural habitat at the margins to support native plants, insects, and birds. It's fairly simple, easy to measure the cost & implementation, and the goal would be it would ultimately be better for everyone, with healthy predator populations and so forth.
Problem is that most meat simply isn't produced that way.
Thinking outside of the box, I think this is the problem we should aim to fix.
Otherwise, it's like finding an automobile manufacturing improvement that can only be used with hand assembly. Besides Rolls-Royce, it won't help anyone.
How much of this is true I do not know, but based on economic theory such negative externalities are possible.
You can’t ignore at the fact that the US is much more libertarian than Canada and the EU when it comes to business regulations. And we all know what happens when governments are too business friendly and not addressing market failures or safeguarding public interest.
Ask yourself this, what percentage of your operational best practices are invented/peddled by the industry vs truly independent research?
The EU subsidies for Iberian fisherman to allow them to catch and catch regardless of economics have been the prime mover in destroying fisheries up and down the North American and African coasts. It was, and is, one of the worst environmental crimes of the last century, perhaps only matched by the EU subsidies for diesel vehicles that have contributed so much to climate change and point-source pollution.
It would be helpful to define “independent” because there is an “industry” of anti-GMO advocates that produce research to support their views and, compared to a Cargill-sponsored study, they’d be viewed as “independent.”
I think we ascribe too much credibility to non-profit corporations. As an example, we routinely dismiss an Exxon climate study as “biased” or “corrupt” but a Greenpeace study is somehow more noble or accurate? Greenpeace lives and dies from donations — donations that would disappear if the threats they purport to care about are diminished. Greenpeace type organizations have just as much at relative stake as “industry” and thus studies they sponsor ought to be held to similar levels of skepticism as “industry” studies. Climate change is an industry with just as much as stake as fossil fuels. Al Gore, as an example, became a billionaire from the climate change issue. It would be difficult to argue that research promoted by a guy like him are independent considering he has gotten ultra wealthy from peddling climate alarmism just as Exxon gets rich from promoting studies rife with skepticism. Truly independent studies are extremely rare — everyone has an agenda.
We don’t necessarily need more independent studies because even independent studies are funded by someone with an agenda, what we need are more reproducible studies that can be analyzed objectively. A reproducible Exxon study is more valid than an in-reproducible study from the Sierra Club (and vice-versa
The problem is that an Cargill study is immediately dismissed as corrupt, but some non-profit study is given the benefit of the doubt.. I propose that all studies should be viewed with skepticism until their results are reproduced and corroborated.
The fact of the matter is that our modern farming practices are way too short sighted. Topsoil erosion is the easiest thing to point to to identify that something needs to change. Things like monoculture issues, herbicide issues, pollinator health, are all things we should take more seriously but nothing is as concrete as the argument that we need to maintain our soil better.
Small scale forest farming practices have shown that there's alternative methods to produce high yields off the same land with better practices. There's a multitude of simple techniques like hugelkultur that seem like amazingly efficient ways to improve yields. Salatin's work has highlighted some potential ways to incorporate more biodiversity on the farm to maintain a healthier long term ecosystem. There's been meaningful traction with hydroponic and vertical farming practices.
I'm certainly no expert in what the actual solution is but whatever we're doing now is unsustainable. Much of it originates from the abused and malformed subsidies that over-emphasize food security over health or environmental issues. High Fructose corn syrup and ethanol being perfect examples of the stupidity of our current strategy around agricultural subsidies.
The government already pumps a tremendous amount of money into the agriculture industry. We should just do it more deliberately and thoughtfully.
Sure, prices or taxes will likely go up. By how much is the real debate but ultimately I'd say whatever the change is it's probably going to be worth it. Modern farming practices is right up there with climate change as an existential threat that we should not neglect and saddle future generations with.
It feels like part of the problem is one of wording. 'Modern farming' sounds very positive -- who doesn't like modern things? I suggest that 'industrial farming' would be a better description, and invoke a more realistic mental image of what it involves.
Holmgren & Mollison formulated a more recent answer to the problems of sustainable food production than Haber & Bosch. So perhaps a system that doesn't rapidly render the land unproductive, and does not requiring an energy input roughly the same as the (food) energy output, could be considered more 'modern'.
In my meager attempts at a backyard garden, I have lost entire "crops" of vegetables due to insects. From the slugs eating the young/new growth, grasshoppers eating the leafy plants, birds/insects eating the fruit, and just neighborhood stray cats using the loose soil as litter box digging up the plants. Then there's the squirrels and possums or raccoons that come along digging up plants looking for food. I just want to nuke the whole place from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
With all of that, it's just a hobby to "keep me off the streets", but damn those pesky pests. I have often said that I'm really lucky/thankful that my livelihood does not depend on me being able to successfully grow food. Oh, and before you get to the stage of pests, it has to rain just the right amount. Not enough, and nothing grows. Too much, and everything drowns and rots. None of these things are in the farmer's control.
Farmers who irrigate are very concerned about ground water because they know when it is gone so is their profits.
Have you questioned your assumptions yourself that food cost has to go up using alternative approaches? There is research out there painting a different picture[1].
[1] https://rodaleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/RI-FST-Brochu...
One reason is sheer hypocrisy of the country to force developing or under-developed countries to stop subsidizing _their own_ farming.
Like the 2014 Farm Bill? I farm outside of the US, but from an outsider’s perspective that seemed like a huge change.
When you live in the city that doesn't happen - nobody transports sewage back to the fields. It isn't necessarily a good idea to try: the energy to transport sewage back to the fields needs to come from somewhere; sewage needs to not have harmful chemicals/heavy metals from other processes mixed in.
So as long as the farms in the US fulfills this criteria there is no urgent reason for the government to restructure the subsidy criteria, incentives and payouts.
I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.
There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.
"Non-contact herbicides are taken up by the living plant and incorporated into still growing tissues, while contact herbicides kill the tissues they touch."
Also the article is written by a woman.
I suppose corn is botanically a fruit.
It could, but then the plant would die – or at very least show symptoms of roundup exposure, which is equally undesirable. Roundup binds to the soil, making it not bioavailable for absorption through the roots.
I wonder if it's glyphosate, or some other pesticide.
I didn't figure it out until I started logging food and symptoms.
I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done.
If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.
Efficiency isn't always what's best for the market, and doesn't mean lower prices for consumers.
Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.
What organic was originally labeled for is now just a shadow. Buying organic is just precautionary to avoid the everchanging regulations that are not made with individuals in mind..but instead, industry..
> we integrated data from 56 mainly peer-reviewed papers into our analysis, including 149 pairwise comparisons originating from different climatic zones and experimental duration ranging from 3 to more than 100 years. Overall, we found that organic systems had 32% to 84% greater microbial biomass carbon, microbial biomass nitrogen, total phospholipid fatty-acids, and dehydrogenase, urease and protease activities than conventional systems. .... In summary, this study shows that overall organic farming enhances total microbial abundance and activity in agricultural soils on a global scale.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
(editing for clarity: I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. I also think people make a lot of stuff up and pass it off as anecdotes because we're a very polite society for that sort of thing.)
What's in a bin at one moment in time is not necessarily the same crop at another moment in time. While physically labelling bins, rather than keeping record in the office, is not a practice that I see as being very common, conceivably a bin could have been labelled for organic crop at some point in the past and repurposed for non-organic crop (or vice versa) during the harvest your cousin witnessed without putting effort into removing the previous label.
So, the story could be completely true, but doesn't really tell much even if it is.
I wouldn’t expect this to be a sustainable model for too long though.
The US has the most plentiful and cheapest foods. It supplies its own population with food so cheap the prices have to be supported. And, even with that, there is enormous surplus. And, on top of that, the US is by far the worlds largest exporter of food. As well as the world's largest supplier of free food for relief purposes.
In light of that, your comment seems odd.
No doubt there can be lots of improvements in all agricultural sectors around the globe but having too much food is much better than having too little.
Love this "everything is invented in the US" syndrome.
"Justus von Liebig was a German chemist who [...] has been described as the "father of the fertilizer industry" for his emphasis on nitrogen and trace minerals as essential plant nutrients, and his formulation of the law of the minimum, which described how plant growth relied on the scarcest nutrient resource, rather than the total amount of resources available. He also developed a manufacturing process for beef extracts [...]"
So I do think "father of the fertilizer industry" is therefor a good point, but ymmv.
Is there a single, trustworthy authority that can tell me which brands are safe, knowing full well designations like "USDA Organic" are being gamed by companies?
Over the past century, the chemical industry has commercialized numerous novel compounds, maybe 10^5 to 10^6 or more. Although there's been some toxicity testing, of course, we are basically living in the only large-scale, long-term test.
Anyway, to be safest, your best bet is growing your own food, or buying from trusted local producers. And yes, I realize how impractical that is for most people. But no matter where your food comes from, it's arguably safest to eat as low on the food chain as possible.
Curious if we're externalizing the costs of producing desiccant-free food into our healthcare system. CDC says obesity will cost us $147 billion this year[1]. Does glyphosate save the agriculture industry that much? Has the link even been examined?
Seems to indicate that the effects of these chemicals change the way the animal physiologically responds to an intake of a given number of calories.
When we're talking a problem that impacts us on a societal level, we need to look at all potential influencing factors. Limiting that analysis to the "calories-in, calories-out" hypothesis hasn't gotten us any closer to a solution.
I don't know the impact this specific technique has on soil life, but I'd wager it can't help.
If we want to keep the soil fertile, and restore CO2 absorbtion to the soil, we need healthy soil !
Robotic farming where traverse the fields and selectively nips the weed and kills the unwanted bugs, could probably be done with no chemicals at all. Fertilized could probably also be added very selectively this way.