So what is the safer alternative to Glyphosate?
That's not terribly bad. There are also communities of organic farmers working on methods to improve yields without pesticides. There is a lot still to be learned (and re-learned) about crop cycling, for example. Other ideas are mixed fields with different crops, new tilling protocols etc.
Some pesticides are also legal under different certification schemes. Sulfur, for example, is the most used pesticide in the EU. Pyrethroid is allowed under some schemes, and it's actually a drug approved for human use (lice), and therefore (and because it's rather old) thought to be safe at the far lower doses one is exposed to via the food chain.
The chart https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pflanzenschutzmittel#/media/Da... is also rather interesting, in that it shows highly diverging use of pesticides and fertilizers across EU countries. There is no definitive pattern here, with Sweden and the Netherlands as the extremes on opposite sides, two countries that are rather similar both in economics as well as climate. Spain/Italy/Portugal might be high because they have much larger shares of multi-year crops such as wine and olive trees, while yearly crops such as corn and wheat are less susceptible because the diseases die with the plants every year. OTOH, at least olives aren't fertilized I believe.
What's also interesting is the positive correlation between pesticide use and fertilizer use. I expected the opposite, i. e. farmers compensating for expected losses to disease with increased fertilizer and vice versa. This not happening may point at a cultural issue at play here, with some farmers choosing these tools excessively, or maybe a lack of knowledge of alternatives.
Meanwhile, I nevertheless advocate buying Organic. Use a warm solution of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) in which to dissolve fruits like apples and others for 12-15 minutes. It helps dissolve a fair portion of the pesticides, but is not a substitute for buying Organic. Refer to https://suppversity.blogspot.com/2017/10/nahco3-aka-baking-s...
This is patently false. Natural pesticides and herbicides are almost always more toxic to humans than synthetic pestices and herbicides, in large part because minimizing human toxicity is one of the goals in the chemical research programs.
No one has been able to demonstrate health effects due to pesticide residue. Even studies purporting to show health effects for glyphosate do so at concentrations associated with handling the chemical in bulk, not at concentrations associated with consumption of residue.
Do more well-accepted organic pesticides have these kinds of problems with bulk handling? Because otherwise I feel like this should be reason enough to avoid it.
Does it sound more organic if I call it ‘Bordeaux Mixture’ (before pointing at the all the people that died of copper poisoning)?
Say you have a fungus that eats at your corn, maybe there is another one that just eats that fungus but leaves the corn alone. Or maybe you have some insect that eats your wheat, and some naturally occurring compound exists that is bad for the exoskeleton of that insect; put compound (found naturally or replicated synthetically) on the wheat, insects will be sad/dead/gone, there ya go, organic pesticide.
Those natural, or, organic pesticides usually evolved with some specific target in mind, while man-made pesticides are more like chemo therapy: kill as much as possible without killing the produce we want. This has the downside that killing as much as possible actually kills things we don't want killed.
Obviously, and sarcasm apart, the difference is nuanced. Organic Farming revolves around what is apparently natural, and in practice there is just a list farmers must respect.
I've been paraphrasing myself a lot these days, only to avoid saying the same thing many times. But in my humble opinion as a farmer, Organic Farming is a secular kosher for urban people. It has nothing to do with better farming practices, and everything to do with a sense of control over purity - purity in terms of what is closer to the urban conception of what constitutes True Nature.
Better farming practices involves the rational use of pesticides, synthetic or otherwise, used only as a last resort and having always in mind the effects to Nature (soil, water and wildlife) and human beings (farmers and consumers). In Europe all of these considerations are contemplated under an official standard called Integrated Farming - Organic Farming's big sister, as I call it.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/20/far-more-toxic...
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