Pesticides are killing the world's soils | Hacker News Reader

Pesticides are killing the world's soils

scientificamerican.com

390 pointspmastela219 comments

In Switzerland, we're soon going to vote on two initiatives ¹² aiming at reducing pesticide use. The first is essentially about forbidding the use of all artificial pesticides by 2031 (also importation of food that was produced abroad using pesticides). The second is about removing subsidies to farmers that use any kind of pesticide, or regularly use antibiotics on their livestock, etc.

I feel like they are quite drastic initiatives, but it's good to at least have a desire for change. I'm interested in any opinion from knowledgeable people on the subject!

¹ https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/202106... ²https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/202106...

> I feel like they are quite drastic initiatives

To me the greatest thing about Switzerland's direct democracy is that society gets the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them with a very quick turnaround.

If it really is a bad thing or has unintended consequences, the people will revert it back soon enough. I doubt that is the case, but time will tell.

The problem with modern 2-party systems in the West is they are highly confrontational and loathe to undo the policies they wore on their shirt for so long, often waiting until most of the senior people behind such decisions are gone. It creates this horrible inertia against adeptly experimenting with solutions.

If politicians can offload some of the blame onto people for laws created, that's a good thing for society in my view.

> The problem with modern 2-party systems in the West

You mean the US, maybe Canada? The closest equivalents outside of North America, the UK and Australia, with the same broken voting system that favours a limited party landscape, have more than 2 parties in the mainstream and coalitions are often needed ( like Tories with DUP recently).

Canada is decidedly not a 2 party system. There are 5 parties in parliment in total, although the Greens only have 3 seats. Yes, 2 parties tend to hold power, but we also end up with the ruling party only having a minority (as is currently the case) from time to time which makes for a very different dynamic. The biggest difference between Canada and the US is that Canadian voters can and will act to kick a government out of office when they aren't acting in the interests of the people, sometimes shifting the makeup of the government significantly after a general election. Ridings also aren't gerrymandered insanely, so there are many seats which can shift parties.

I upvoted this because I agree that the UK and Australia have more than two important parties, but I believe that the Australian voting system is MUCH better than the US and UK systems (which also supports your main point in a way).

It's better, but it's still rubbish. The FPTP system virtually guarantees a two party system, which means that whatever one party thinks is a good idea, the other is effectively forced into taking the opposing view, and the lake of anti-competition laws (or enforcement of?) around media effectively means that Murdoch media and the Liberal/National coalition are basically wings of the same party.

Having seen MMP play out on the other side of the Tasman, it's pretty clear that MMP produces saner outcomes.

My personal opinion is that is MMP forces coalitions more often. The upshot of which is that everyone is forced to be more willing to communicate and compromise and take on saner positions, because the opposition one term may turn out to be the maker of the governing party the next.

An important and sometimes forgotten thing about democracy is that it isn't as simple as the majority rules. It's the majority rules while taking minorities into account. In a well functioning representational democracy this is kept in mind my career politicians. In a hybrid between representational and direct like in Switzerland, the population can overrule and just go with majority rule.

For example, the Swiss pension system is similar to others in Europe, where the current working population pay taxes almost directly towards pensions of the retired. Since this system will break down if taxes aren't increased like crazy or pensions lowered, politicians have been trying to change the system. But there are too many people soon to be retired or already retired that care less about their country's youth and future than their own pension, so they keep blocking changes. So every democratic system has its tradeoffs...

I learned this from a young Swiss when I was visiting Switzerland and praising their way of democracy. It was a few years ago though, so maybe this info is no longer accurate. And I didn't fact check, it was just an example brought up in casual conversation.

Only partly right. The Swiss pension system is based on 3 pillars, and you described only the first one, namely the solidarity pillar. The second one is the mandatory saving which accumulates only for you, and there's a third one, optional savings - also tax exempt (up to some extent). So while yes the usually older politicians are looking at their own retirement horizon, there's wiggle room from the other two pillars. And adaptations of all three happen almost every second year with the goal to at least push further away the breaking point.

Yeah the description above is very outdated, currently the main focus is on everyone's own savings (2nd and 3rd pillar), its foolish to rely on the common 1st one for anything.

Switzerland has a bit unique position within Europe by having the highest salaries, so plenty of folks retire to places like Spain or Italy (or Bali) where your Swiss pension can give you relative luxury lifestyle compared to not so great lifestyle back en Suisse.

Generally everybody in Europe wants to have Swiss pensions, not only for the amount but also for the 3-pillar systems where you actually save decent amount for yourself to live comfortably and/or retire early. Not the case in most european countries AFAIK.

Germany, France or Romania have similar 3 pillars, so I'd say the system is far from being a Swiss particularity. Edit: the Swiss pension is so high because the contributions are also that high. Nobody stops an Italian to contribute four times as much, in order to receive four times as much pension. But the difference as you say comes from the salary level - although the expenses are just as high, so if you spend your retirement in Switzerland you will feel just as rich as a German in Germany. Only the Swiss retired (and healthy) going abroad get to feel that advantage.

No, the Swiss & EU are right in this case.

Any form of retirement works the same - young people working to serve the old. How you finance it is a different question - but clearly increasing taxes & lowering pensions is just one way of the system breaking down. Another way is, everybody saving while working, not having kids, then spending when retired (results in market crashes & massive inflation).

The original problem is not having kids. The “direct transfer” system simply keeps incentives more aligned.

Many countries have realised that relying on a continuously growing population has its own problems.

So you need a pension system for a population that doesn't grow. Basically that means that everybody has to pay for their own pension. It doesn't really matter whether you do it as taxes that get paid to the people currently retired or by saving money.

The solution The Netherlands came up with (next to moving to an individual pension system) to try to raise the retirement age to 67. This is quite unpopular. But it's either that or a low pension.

No, you missed my point.

Pension isn’t about money. It’s about work. Less working adults => less surplus value created by society => less resources available for retired people.

How you finance that - via direct payments / taxes, or via individual savings - is besides the point. Neither of these can defeat the economics of supply (of working-age adults’ labour) and demand (of the retired non-producing population). If you try to force it, you’ll just cause other issues (e.g. housing / market crashes caused by all pensioners cashing out at once, or wage/food inflation caused by labour shortages).

That why I specifically mention The Netherlands raising the retirement age. That causes both more labor to be available and reduces the number of people who are retired.

Pensioners don't cash out at once. The number of pensioners grows slowly which many result in gradually lower demand for stock or real estate. No need to expect a crash because of this.

No need to expect anything to happen to food either. Food production is highly efficient and relies on only a tiny fraction of the total labour

This, TBH. Far too many people think economics is about money. Economics is really about distributing goods and services and work. Money is just one possible means to that end (perhaps the best one).

It does matter, because all the saving and dissaving of the saving-based scheme distorts financial markets and sometimes doesn't work anyway. For example, imagine a system where everyone buys an extra house, then sells it when they retire. Now there are twice as many houses as there need to be. And therefore everyone has to commute 1.41 times farther on average; twice as much lumber is used up; twice as many builders are needed. Now imagine the next generation invests in something other than houses because houses are too expensive because of all this extra demand. Let's say tulips. So the first generation goes to sell their houses to retire and... wait, nobody wants one? They already have one and they don't want to buy a second one for their own retirement savings? Well, then the housing market crashes and all those people lost money on their retirement. (And the third generation will buy up all these cheap houses and say screw the second generation's tulips, we don't want tulips...)

I naively assume that if you buy an extra house as investment, you rent it out. So the house is actually being used, no need build extra houses or have a longer commute.

Blindly investing and then assuming that it still has value when you retire has a lot of risks. This sometimes happens with owners of small shops who hope to retire with money they get from selling the shop.

Many European countries have massive pension funds collected over the decades, with accumulation and payout planned in advance to match the demographics. This is the better model parent suggested that is hard to get through if it wasn't started during the boomer generation.

> For example, the Swiss pension system is similar to others in Europe, where the current working population pay taxes almost directly towards pensions of the retired. Since this system will break down if taxes aren't increased like crazy or pensions lowered, politicians have been trying to change the system. But there are too many people soon to be retired or already retired that care less about their country's youth and future than their own pension, so they keep blocking changes. So every democratic system has its tradeoffs...

Other European countries (not all) have similar pension systems that you describe, with same problems, and even though they don't have the Swiss direct democracy, they have been equally unable to change their systems.

Is this better or worse than the OTHER kind of pension system, where people are required to hoard resources over their lifetime and then in their retirement, slowly release those resources back to younger people (who will then hoard them for their own retirement)?

> The problem with modern 2-party systems in the West

Could you elaborate on this? Very few countries i know in the west have a 2-party system.

It's a common mistake to judge the entire west from an US perspective. But the UK is not very far from the 2 parties system either.

Arguably the UK is a "2-party-but" system. The main parties are limited in their policies towards Scotland because of how much influence the SNP has, and we've seen what UKIP managed to do while barely ever winning seats. There's enough of a threat from smaller parties to keep the big ones somewhat cooperative, or at least take a wider range of views into account.

France is closer and closer from a 2 parties system

Bullshit, look at any election from the past 5 years and there are at least 5 mainstream parties - PS, LR, RN, LREM, EELV. PS are in a bit of a crisis but still do decently in local and European elections.

France is currently a 1 party system.

France is always a 1 party system in regards to who is in direct central power, since parliamentary elections are just after presidential ones, to send the winning president a parliament they can work with. In almost all cases the ( slim) majority the ruling party has falls apart over the course of their term.

And that's why there's an indirectly elected upper chamber ( Senate), to avoid a populist wave changing too much.

The success of that type of system relies pretty heavily on having an informed populace. It's worth noting that in the US almost all of our media is owned by just a handful of corporations. We can vote on things all day long but it doesn't necessarily mean it'll be in our own interest.

This is awesome, under what conditions would Brexit be a) possible and b) reversed in the Swiss model?

You can actually see the same dynamic playing out with Swiss access to the EEA: https://www.euronews.com/2021/05/27/what-s-the-future-of-eu-...

The debate doesn't seem to be being carried out in quite such a stupid way as it was in the UK, but everyone is clear that it's the public objection to immigrants that is the flashpoint.

How did you get that from the article? The agreements in place already allow immigration from eu countries, not a lot would have changed in this regard. The main problem is the further erosion of swiss direct democratic rights and sovereignty.

No, Brexit isn’t possible in Switzerland.

People voted for what is essentially Brexit, but the politicians refused to implement it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swiss_immigration_initi...

Actually it is implemented as we speak, after years of tough negotiations, because that's the beauty of Swiss initiatives, they give the tone but not the legal terms - ensuring there's negotiation room, both internal and external. So depending on your personal definition it is succeeding or failing, but the fact is it is happening, there's no doubt about it. It's also not a "Brexit" because Switzerland never was part of the EU so using that name makes the discussion highly confusing for an outsider.

EDIT: I can’t add to my answer above but the point is to ask about how in the Swiss direct democracy model something as complicated as Brexit would have been handled (same? different?). I’m well aware Switzerland is not part of the EU. Apologies this wasn’t clear!

Switzerland would have to be part of the EU, for one.

Assuming the UK was using the Swiss model.

The Swiss negotiated for 7 years a general agreement with the EU (and failed at it in the end) so I would say no, the UK wasn't using the Swiss model.

One could say that the initiative to subsidize farmers who use highly toxic chemicals and unsustainable practices resulting in depletion and eventual destruction of soil is also drastic.

As in paying money to destroy the soil and help someone profit a bit extra in the process is maybe not the best investment of people’s taxes.

Of course, it took us some time to start paying attention to the externalities. But now that we do let’s correct course.

To clarify, I believe the goals are laudable, and the "drastic" adjective was the best approximation I had. My first guess would be to vote 2× yes, but I have some reservations:

* I heard that even among organic farmers, it was not a clear 2× yes.

* There is the question of efficiency of organic/no pesticide farming: are we going to have a really bad output and something less ecological in the end due to more work for the same amount of food produced?

* Am I just a bourgeois voting for my trendy ideals, not seeing that poorer people won't have the money to pay for heightened prices?

* Am I just a city-dweller that thinks farming is easy peasy, putting even more strain on the farmers, whose lifes as hard enough as it is?

* Are we going to rely more on importation, thus simply externalizing the problem (seemingly the initiative take care of this question)?

All this to say: I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of farming and ecology to yet say I'm going to vote 2× yes.

Your reservations are similar to mine. I still voted yes, I think we need a clear signal, that we want an exit strategy and what is being done is not enough. Even if both pass, I highly doubt they will be put into effect 1:1 (just look at the migration initiative). If they do not pass, it would be sad if only like 1/4 or less voted yes.

You're right in your doubts and I have the same, but let's not forget we're talking about Switzerland and nobody ends up not being able to feed themselves. Maybe social help will increase but on the other side a healthier diet eases the pressure on the health system (remember the 39% increased incidence of brain tumor in children from agrarian regions in canton Zurich?)

I am surrounded by organic farmers as well as "2 mal nein" (2 Times no) propaganda. I don't understand it, but it seems they are going for no.

If you're interested in the subject, I highly recommend Tomorrow's Table [1], a book by Pamela Ronald, a plant pathologist and geneticist, and Raoul Adamchak, her husband and an organic farmer (disclaimer: my fiancé works in Pam's lab).

The subject of the book isn't pesticides or biodiversity per se, but rather how to produce food sustainably in the face of population growth and climate change.

An anecdote from the book: what happens when artificial pesticides aren't used (setting aside the meaning of artificial/natural)? Corn can be sprayed with crystal toxins derived from proteins in the soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), engineered to produce these proteins, or exhibit damage from insects (it looks pretty gross [2]).

If you're going to ban pesticides, you need an alternative or will face lower yields.

[1] https://cropgeneticsinnovation.ucdavis.edu/book-tomorrows-ta...

[2] https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/use-and-im...

Somewhat lower yields are fine, just reallocate land from other uses. In Europe there's overproduction so large parts of land ended up growing biofuels, which is incredibly stupid. In America large part is fed to cows (in Europe grazing is preferred).

Switzerland doesn't have lots of excess land, it is highly industrialised already.

In Switzerland of all places there should be pretty accurate estimates what would happen after pesticides ban.

Anyone would be so kind as to link them so we could move beyond such nebulous arguments/counterarguments? ;)

Both initiatives are indeed quite drastic, but so is the decline in biodiversity. Double yes from my side!

What is the sentiment about this vote within you and your group of friends/family? As I pass by Swiss countryside I see a lot of farmers claiming they will vote 2xNO as it presumably kills their business but I have a hard time believing that. Is there a swiss website where I can see current general sentiment regarding this initiatives?

Among friends and family, it's mainly 2× yes. You see a lot of banners in the cities for the initiative, but I don't know how good an indicator that is (political banners seem to have boomed in the last 3 years: each campaign now has its own that people rush to hang on their balconies, etc). As you said, in the countryside, you almost only ever see the 2× no ads.

I don't really know how to probe for the general sentiment: you can look at what the different political parties recommend on their websites (that's my usual lazy voting strategy: if the green, socialists and far left agree on a choice, I'll usually go with it), look for polls and/or read the press (probably swissinfo.ch is a good starting point?). Typically in this case, the socialists and green agree on the 2×yes, and since the socialists are pretty tame, I guess it's a good indicator that I can safely vote that.

EDIT: Correction, the tendency among my entourage might be tilting to a "no" to the drinking water initiative!

Why the downvotes?

Removing antibiotics use I think is cruel and wasteful as you're going to just instead cause culling of livestock and increased greenhouse gas emissions per piece of product from livestock.

Also "artificial pesticides" are better for the environment than "natural pesticides" for equivalent effect. Natural pesticides are less effective and more frequent spraying which has additional problems associated with it.

Removing antibiotics as a cheap default option (as it is in the US) creates an economic incentive to ensure livestock health and welfare. In practice antibiotics are used mostly to compensate for unhealthy conditions and to increase yield (i think only by about %10 for milk, for instance). Keeping livestock on broad spectrum antibiotics continuously for their entire lives is not only medically unnecessary, but deeply irresponsible and a contributor to rising antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotics/vaccines are for exactly the purpose of "ensuring livestock health and welfare".

> The second is about removing subsidies to farmers that use any kind of pesticide, or regularly use antibiotics on their livestock, etc.

Anecdotally through medical school I've heard that there is evidence that antibiotic overuse in livestock, contrary to intuition, has no correlation with antibiotic resistance of human pathogens.

odd, because the literature is full of studies showing rather high correlations.

Here is a nice review article published in the Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

The WHO is pretty convinced of the connection https://www.who.int/news/item/07-11-2017-stop-using-antibiot...

The initiative includes that farmers have to produce the fodder themself. wtf?

I'm honestly happy with this part: I'm all for reducing livestock use as much as possible, and the fodder restriction is a nice way to push for this by giving a natural constraint: can't have more livestock than you can feed "by yourself".

I guess the idea is to minimize the amount of slurry per square meter.

"Nitrate exceeds the limit value of 25 mg/l in groundwater at almost 15 % of the monitoring sites across Switzerland. In areas where arable farming is predominant, concentrations are above the limit at more than 40% of the monitoring sites."

Farming in Switzerland is a completely different, smaller, culture. Think many small farmers working together instead of one or two big farmers per valley

I've watched the entire cycle in the past thirty years as a former agronomist. We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects. This allowed us to stop spraying thousands of tons of less insecticides.

But the very people complaining about spraying chemicals rejected these new enhanced plants saying they weren't 'natural'. We have been breeding plants to do things the past 170 years ever since Gregor Mendel and his pea breeding. The only difference now is that we have better tools. You cannot win everyone over.

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

We also, at the same time, genetically modified plants to be resistant to Glyphosate so that we could spray thousands of tons more of this herbicide. Semantic arguments about what is and isn't 'natural' aside, it's clear the technology has been a double-edged sword.

I'm not set against GMOs myself, but I feel that proponents of the technology do themselves a disservice with the argument that it's no different to selective breeding with better tools: there is actually a difference of kind, not just degree here, because the technology allows you to introduce complete alien genes to an organism rather than incremental modifications or regulation changes of genes already existing in that species. Trying to gloss over that feels dishonest.

BASF has produced herbicide tolerant crops plants without using GMO in the breeding process, and patented the whole system (BASF Clearfield ® Production System).

This does everything people accuse GMO's for, but it's not GMO.

That just proves that it is possible to achieve what the GMO proponents argue that GMOs are necessary for, without using GM.

And it certainly doesn't do the main thing that we accuse GMOs for, which is spreading genetically modified organisms in nature.

I couldn't quickly find any information about the system that didn't look like marketing material. But apparently you have to combine it with other practices, like crop rotation, that usually is considered better for the soil and the environment.

No, it's far worse than GMO. Because besides the changes which were desired, there are also a whole bunch of random mutations which were introduced, which could do anything from making the species highly invasive, to putting carcinogens in the parts used for human consumption.

GM is much safer and easier to verify as not having harmful side effects. And, it's easier. The only reason they invented this process at all is because people were scared of GM.

Also, what process is there for verifying that GMOs don't have any harmful side effects that you can't use for traditionally bred plants?

With GMOs you know exactly where the differences are, so you can test very deeply on those components. Traditional breeding and these accelerated mutation processes could have differences anywhere, so you pretty much need to do a ground up re-evaluation of the whole organism to get the same safety coverage as GM. (yeah right, like traditional breeders are going to do that).

You assume that it is easy to predict exactly what effect some genes from some bacteria would have is, say, spinach. It is rarely so. In traditional breeding, you know what you start with, and crossing two variants from the same species never creates anything unexpected.

These processes are not crossing existing lines of plants. They bombard the seeds with radiation to massively increase the number of mutations, then select in the much more highly variable results for the traits they are interested in. There is nothing predictable or controlled about the process, it is just a way of getting a result quickly without getting a GMO label at the same time. It gives the same safety margins as traditional breeding, but is much less safe than GMOs.

Animal and human testing just like virtually every other biological scientific endeavor. We also have gotten pretty good at detecting chemicals that would cause such issues. I guess I'm just throwing that out there.

The question was about what kind of testing that can be done on GMOs that can't be done on other types of organisms. The commenter that I was hoping to answer me claimed that it is harder to test traditionally bred organisms than GMOs.

More random mutations than traditional breeding? I would be genuinely interested if you could provide some reliable source for what you are claiming. But I must confess that for now it sounds like FUD spread by the GMO industry.

Ostensibly the same as traditional breeding, but done on an industrial scale. GM is the outlier, with no random mutations, only the specifically designed ones.

Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

Bees are dying from neonics getting into the pollen. You willing to bet the biosphere that you’re right, and nothing bad will happen?

> Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

All plants that, in the nature, tend to get eaten by insects, naturally produce pesticides against their pests. Humans have bred super-edible, non-pesticide plants for cultivation, and insects are happy to attack these. Now we are bringing back into crop plants some of the natural defenses that wild plants have always had against the insects.

insect populations are declining rapidly and are also in need of protection. we're probably going to have to start eating bugs for survival when all the animals are dead, since bugs are one of the most efficient sources of protein, so i'd personally be wary of telling the bugs to fuck off just so we can save the crops.

If insect populations are dwindling and in need of protection, why would we suggest people eat them? Wouldn’t that accelerate their demise?

Also, most folks are not protein deficient, but they are not getting enough fiber. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/20/18214505/fiber-diet-weight-los...

i didn't say that we should eat bugs because insect populations are declining. i said we are going to have to start eating bugs anyway (e.g. there are no more wild fish), and also that insect populations are declining.

Understood. I think most people would start eating plants for protein before they resort to insects unless the insects are processed beyond recognition and relabelled. :)

If we start eating insects, we will start farming them. But most of the insects we’re talking about as food sources are not primary pollinators.

And that’s the important distinction that your question raises. Increasing the total biomass of insects won’t help with the pollination problem if we’re only boosting non-pollinator species. It will not help the situation with insecticides and plants.

We'll have the same problem that salmon farms and honeybee wranglers have now: so many parasites that they transfer to the wild populations.

I mean, I still think we should farm insects, but as a more natural substitute for corn for our omnivore meat sources.

Yeah, I haven’t looked into that but there’s no reason to expect otherwise. Speaking broadly, farming optimizes for output and disregards the ecosystems that the farms are a part of. For each farmer, this is okay; it works for them for now. Taken as a whole, it is not okay and contributes to bigger problems later (sometimes for earlier values of later).

A greater understanding of farming trade-offs when it comes to ecosystems would likely obviate the need for farming insects in the first place. High up on the list is eliminating factory farms, and IMO all livestock farms and massive monoculture plant farms will have to be deeply scrutinized.

A bunch of organic and permaculture people are discovering that you can feed food waste to chickens. They get a little veg, and then as the rest breaks down the food slowly turns into bugs and worms.

It's morally similar to pre-consumer paper recycling - you're sourcing materials from food services. As long and you can keep the carbon footprint of transportation down, it's something you can use to offset feed corn, which has a large footprint. One place corn wins out is the low moisture content. You're not trucking water back and forth. But the corn doesn't win out on nutrition or quality of life for the animals, nor from a host of environmental concerns.

Surely it's better to replace indiscriminate spraying of substances known to be harmful with GMO crops carefully bred to have the smallest changes possible?

Genes do not stay put.

Genes do not know how to stay put. Their whole purpose is to spread. The difference between weed and crop is very narrow in many cases. Brassicas especially. Any gene you put into them you’re going to deal with in a weed very soon.

>One example of hybridization between GM crops and wild species has been documented in creeping bentgrass commonly used on golf courses. Scotts Miracle-Gro genetically engineered this grass to contain a gene that confers resistance to a common herbicide so that the golf course can be sprayed to kill weeds without harm to the grass. Because this grass is wind-pollinated, a perennial, and highly capable of outcrossing with related wild species, researchers decided to investigate wild grass in close proximity for the presence of the herbicide resistance gene. The researchers collected seeds from wild plants at varied distances from the origin of the grass farm and used herbicides to detect tolerant plants. They confirmed the presence of the herbicide resistant gene in wild grass up to 9 miles from its origin only one year after the grass was planted [2,3,4]. This distance is very surprising because most hybridization events have been reported between plants that are less than a mile apart. It is clear from this study that genetic modifications can be transferred to wild species through hybridization; however, future investigations will need to be performed in order to differentiate whether the genetic modification increases the fitness of wild species or if these hybridizations are a natural result of planting a large grass farm in close proximity to wild species.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/challenging-evolutio...

In 'Gathering Moss', RWK talks about how moss spores hitchhike on squirrels, increasing their effective range by over one or two orders of magnitude.

Recently it came out that birds can and sometimes do transport live fish eggs to new bodies of water, miles away. And I learned today that birds that don't eat the seeds they get from the bird feeder? They take them and hide them, for instance in the chinks in tree bark. For the species this man knew about, most of those seeds end up in a 50 meter radius of the source, but there are other transport systems like digestive tracts (see also birds and pepper seeds)

Animals that keep transporting viable germlines around with them create a selective advantage for their entire species. Squirrels, humans, pollinators, etc. If our ancestors hadn't literally and figuratively squirreled seeds away we'd probably not be here to have this conversation.

Those are not the only alternatives available. There are farming practices that give good yield, use none or a minimum of pesticides and herbicides, and don't use any GMOs.

I saw a video that I wish I had bookmarked about a US farmer using alley cropping with no pesticides, and indeed almost no management other than the first planting and yearly harvesting.

Their setup is to grow asparagus for income in the alleys between nut trees (which take 7+ years to start producing), leave a bunch of asparagus to go to seed instead of harvesting it all, and time their field mowing to support asparagus growth. When the trees start producing, they will reforest the fields between them. Low-effort and low-cost by working with native species and using long-established techniques.

Is it going to yield as much as highly-managed farmland? No. But it also takes a fraction of the effort, so they can pursue other things in the meantime. It ain’t quite passive income, but it ain’t real active either, and they’re rehabilitating the flora and fauna while they do it.

Lots of permaculture ideas share similarities with this and are more geared towards higher yields.

I'm willing to bet it's less bad than the status quo.

Sure, bad things will happen with a few GM crops, but worse things will probably happen from existing non-GM farming practices. I think most experts would also agree with that assesment.

That is a false dichotomy. It is perfectly possible to get good yields with farming practices that use neither pesticides nor GM.

It isn't as much of a false dichotomy as you make out.

At any point in the decision making chain, in general, the decision is "should be do this new thing, so should we not".

So it really is a dichotomy, at least as far as the decision maker is concerned.

It is certainly a false dichotomy, because you paint it as a decision between GMO and conventional non-GMO farming. But as in all false dichotomies, there are more alternatives.

And no, that is not how decisions are made. You don't stand stupidly and consider if you should drive your car to work this morning or not, without at the same time taking into account the alternatives and their consequences. How long would it take to walk, how is the path, the weather? Are public transport available, how much does it cost, how long would it take?

So there is no dichotomy for the decision maker either.

Exactly. This reminds me the interview where a Monsanto rep was asking an activist whether she’d prefer to provide people with genetically engineered rice or have them suffer from vitamin deficiency.

What a made up false dichotomy.

> We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects.

Isn't this the good old "naturalistic fallacy" though? Would you eat a poisonous mushroom because the poison is "natural"? You can at least wash some pesticides off.

I'm not a biologist but I'm sure there is a difference between crossing different varieties of peas versus introducing a non-pea (or maybe non-plant) gene into the pea DNA.

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that produces proteins specifically active against certain insects.

This is the exact same insecticide used by certified organic growers. Plant breeders have just engineered the plants to produce it in their leaves, not in the corn itself.

For thirty years objections have been raised, scientific research has been done disproving the objections. Yet Bt corn is still banned in a large part of Europe.

There are other political reasons for the ban... Do you want your whole food supply dependant on licensing from another nation who is an ally today, but could use this as a bargaining chip to "do as we say or we'll stop licensing you corn and destroy your agriculture industry".

If this was the only driver then the logical response wouldn't be a ban but rather more r&d spending to develop European alternatives.

Any European alternative developed would end up banned in the US, the biggest corn market. The US doesn't let people muscle in on its flagship agritech industries.

Europe might be a big enough market to be worth the R&D though - although it doesn't grow anywhere as much corn as we do.

Sure, but licensing/patents are entirely separate from the environment benefits here.

They're definitely separate issues, but decision makers still need to take both into account.

"It's better for the environment" is a poor excuse when you have angry farmers yelling outside one door, and poor hungry people outside the other.

If you say "I'll take the environmental benefits, but pass on the patents/licensing", you're quickly gonna get slapped with sanctions.

So they aren't really seperate.

Just do what European pharmaceutical companies do and make a generic version.

Sorry, no. Even Monsanto's own research confirms that large-scale use of Bt-corn will destroy organic farming.

When a pesticide is widespread, insects develop resistance. At the moment, few insects have resistance to BT, because it is not continually in the environment in sufficiently high numbers.

So it works as an organic insecticide when needed.

Genetically engineer it into large numbers of plants, and in 30-40 years it is no longer effective.

Which means organic farmer no longer have the option of using it.

Just because it occurs naturally in soil doesn’t mean it is harmless, especially in concentrated settings.

Putting BT-Genes in plants also means using pesticides indiscriminately and precludes targeted pesticide use.

"we shouldn't mess with nature" is also a naturalistic fallacy, fyi

No it isn't. While the naturalistic fallacy is the belief that natural = preferable, and that does sit very close to 'don't mess with nature', so too does the Precautionary Principle, and I would argue that sits supreme.

We can argue about the degree of overlap of course, but it's not clear cut. I believe our scientific understanding in this area is at best partial, and so minimal interference only where strong justification exists is preferable.

The precautionary principle is false though.

If you have a good explanation of the dangers of a particular action, then that’s sufficient to argue for caution—there’s no need for an additional principle, because you have an explanation about the dangers involved.

If you don’t have a good explanation of the dangers of a particular action, then you definitely don’t need a principle to tell you how cautious you ought to be. Presumably even when abiding by the precautionary principle one must estimate the plausibility of any hypothetical danger (to avoid universal hypothetical dangers of the form “there could be a wizard out there who has decided that they will kill us if we do X”), but developing good explanations for the plausibility of dangers is precisely the work mentioned in the previous paragraph that obviates the need for the precautionary principle.

yes it is. "we shouldn't mess with nature" and "we should be cautious when we are messing with nature" are two completely different things.

If you are pointing at me, I have never said that.

i know, i'm just filling in the blanks

Different means to the same ends. DNA is DNA no matter what organism it is in. Many genes are conserved through most orders of life.

Again, I'm not a biologist but I highly doubt that. Evolution had millions of years to create very specialised genes in different organisms. Genes have complex interactions between them and we don't always have a full grasp of those interactions. Cherry picking a single gene from an insect and transplanting it onto a plant might have unforeseen effects.

I'm neither pro-pesticide nor anti-GMO but we should refrain ourselves from a blanket "GMO is natural, hence better than chemicals" statement.

Well you shouldn't. We share about 50% of our DNA with a banana.

And that 50% seems to do something very different in humans than in bananas

Usually it does the exact same things actually!

Exactly my point. It's a huge difference.

Yes, we have been breeding plants and animals for a long time, long before Mendel. But the difference between breeding and GM is not only a difference in magnitude, it is also a difference in kind. We are not only breeding faster and better aimed, but we are not only ingesting genes from completely different species, but from different kingdoms!

"Well, people have been killing each other with spears forever. Nukes are just more of the same."

Are intentionally conflating breeding with genetic engineering? That’s one of Monsanto’s tactics to confuse the public and dismiss concerns with genetically engineered plants.

If you can breed plants to make their own pesticide, why use techniques like CRISPR? If you can't why pretend GMOs are the same selective breeding?

If the pesticides stay in the plant, you're asking customers to eat a lot of pesticides. Are you sure they're safe? You can't wash them off after all. If they don't then they'll leak into the soil and kill it just like externally provided pesticides won't they?

I am unconvinced by the case for GMOs (in case you hadn't guessed :)). But questioning it isn't anti-science. Quite the opposite: it should be A-OK to make all the points above. The fact that I will be down voted for doing so sort of demonstrates my concern: no one is questioning this tech because doing so is "antiscience" and unexamined changes are almost always bad...

As something of a "peace offering", "look I can be reasonable" closing point, I like ideas like Golden Rice, created to have improved nutritional content. I am not blanket opposed. I just don't think opposition is always fear mongering or that the usual points in support for more GMOs hold much water...

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

I've read this argument since forever yet I still have a small issue about GMO because, it seems to me that, at that level, potential negative mutations can happen a lot more than the old way. It's a bit like saying we've been using sun light to heat ourselves, and it's nuclear so why worry about radioactive uranium.

I don't think the negative changes are higher. On other hand I do not really understand why don't we apply same standards for testing with any cultivar as we do with GMO one. Surely that isn't too much to be asked for food safety.

I'm all for GMOs that allow reduction of pesticides and more sustainable ag practices in general... but that's not what we've seen happen.

Additionally, the IP issues raised when Monsanto's GMO plant pollen drifts onto my land making me subject to litigation due to infringement of Monsanto's IP... yeah, that's total bullshit.

The other downside with the GM approach that people rarely mention is that there are no transformation protocols for many crops.

What is a transformation protocol in this context?

The ability to genetically modify a crop. Generally (though not always) you need a tissue culture protocol to regenerate whatever you've transformed into a plant (so shoots, roots etc.). Plenty of species are recalcitrant to the transformation itself when using things like agrobacterium or projectile bombardment, or recalcitrant to tissue culturing.

The so called organic food has little to do with environment preservation. One can use pesticides in organic farming. They just have to be "natural". But I wonder if these so called natural pesticides are any less dangerous. Also by requiring more soil to grow this isn't sustainable to feed the human population.

Organic food is for a bunch of people scared of modern technology. Some usually take alternative medicine such as homeopathy and are afraid of electromagnetic waves.

They claim buying organic is better for the environment and their health. But that's in fact the opposite

I don’t know how it works everywhere, but in EU, buying organic means buying “regulated and supervised crops”. Organic, here, it’s more expensive mainly because your production needs to be accounted.

Tech side, it’s as “modern” as the non-organic farming; but just regulated and controlled. Most of the non-organic crops in my country are just not at all supervised and uneducated farmers that constantly commit ecological harm because the more x I put in the field the better it should work.

So, I prefer to pay a little more to eat a fruit produced with some sciences and technicians involved in the production.

I'm also on the EU, and the EU has also many rules for "traditional" agriculture, it is also regulated and controlled.

The problem I have with the Bio label is that these extra rules are counter productive.

    - no use of artificial pesticides (but still allow "natural" ones) 
    - no use of mineral fertilizer
    - no use of GMO
    - no use of artificial food colouring or aromas or conservative.

The thing is that there is little evidence that any of this is better for health or for the environment.

Dengue is a serious health threat in Singapore. Fogging (1) is pretty common.

Now, the Singapore government says fogging should be used judiciously, not routinely. But, that doesn't seem to be the case. Many condos will fog once a week, year-round. Supposedly all operations must be submitted in the an "E-fogging Submission System", but as far as I can tell, there's no visibility into this.

Singapore has also recently declared a "climate change emergency", and I'd consider biodiversity, at the very least, a part of that.

My point is that: if the Singapore Government is unable or unwilling to manage this with a sense of urgency (or "emergency"), then I'm not generally hopeful.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogging_(insect_control)

Dengue fever is a serious disease and it’s not rare in Singapore, there were 40,000+ cases in 2020 which is pretty high for a population of 5M.

If they stopped their mosquito control efforts it would be disastrous for human health.

Wouldn't a healthier ecosystem better handle mosquitoes, though? Predators of mosquitoes are bats, birds, fishes, frogs…

A healthy ecosystem in Singapore will be chock-full of mosquitoes and no humans.

The island started out as a swamp.

Fun fact: Singapore's equivalent to Disneyland, the island of Sentosa (home to Universal Studios etc), used to be called "Pulau Blakang Mati", or "Island of Death from Behind", because of its incredible malaria rates.

And yet 5 million humans swarmed in and Singapore is among the highest nominal GDP countries in the world. Shows that there's little hope bringing balance between humanity and other species in the current economic system.

Well it wasn't 5M until recently. And one could argue that putting 5M people into a tiny island is being efficient with space, leaving vast swaths of Malaysia untouched (where it wouldn't be if Singapore wasn't so dense).

Sometimes I think mother nature just looks at people shaking her head quoting the line from Last Crusade, "you chose poorly" on selecting where to live.

And, ironically, other insects (for example, dragonflies) which are also killed by the fogging. What's more, the predatory insects usually have a much longer life-cycle, so after a fogging the mosquitos will come back long before their predators. Thus, once you start fogging, you have to keep doing it or you'll end up with more mosquitos than before.

I've actually seen this happen... ok, my observation is purely anecdotal and has no scientific validity, but the effect I observed was pretty dramatic. Where I live in South America dengue is also endemic, and during some particularly bad Dengue outbreaks a few years ago the city government did some extensive one-shot fogging. Immediately afterward there were practically no mosquitos at all for a few weeks and reduced numbers for some months. But thereafter for at least 6 months to a year everybody complained that the mosquitos were worse than ever (mostly without making any connection to the insecticide fogging, they just complained the way people complain about the weather).

What makes you think a "healthy" ecosystem isn't deadly for humans? I mean, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever are all natural parts of the ecosystem.

There are alternatives, like the release of genetically engineered male mosquitos.

Singapore has been trialing as well that since 2016. It's safe to say they haven't solved the problem yet.

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/nea-release-wolbachia-...

That still remains to be seen, right? Wasn't the first release of gmo mosquitos only recently in Florida?

No, there were several earlier trials. I think there were issues in scaling up the mosquito modification process.

There is a very scalable process. You breed mosquitoes, about half of which have the gene you're after (so the population isn't infertile). You have machines that can sort them very quickly, and you only release to the wild the infertile male ones. I made a sorting machine that can sort 10 larvae per second - it's all just computer vision looking at their microscopic balls!

Reach out to Tom Scott (I'm serious, he is very responsive to e-mails) and he'll probably make a video about this, especially if you are in the UK like your name suggests. I know I would love to see it.

Sick, thanks for the process details. Are there plans for larger releases? if not, do you know what is preventing that from moving forward?

False dichotomy

I'm dismayed at how little we seem to know about pesticides, neonicotinoids for example but probably a host of other types. It certainly stands to reason that industrial application of poisons is going to kill a lot of species and destabilize ecosystems.

The decline of insect populations over several decades - which to me is symbolized by the near-extinction of the monarch butterfly, is probably more destabilizing to our environment than the loss of charismatic megafauna would be.

Pesticide policy, if the example of DDT holds, can at least be changed - and hopefully soils and insect populations can recover with protection and management in the same way that raptor populations have recovered in recent years. It will take a lot of work.

If anything I'd say the problem is we don't understand enough about how soil and its corresponding ecosystem works, the article even says that:

> Currently, regulators completely ignore pesticides’ harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species.

Pesticides and herbicides are designed to kill certain things, with the assumption that "this is bad because it's not what I want to grow or it damages my crops", but that's missing a big part of the picture.

The permaculture movement seems to be taking the right path, hopefully some of those concepts can be adopted by big ag before they damage the soil too much.

Someone I have been studying that is a step up in scale from permaculture is Jean-Martin Fortier [1] (inspired by Eliot Coleman [2]) who does a fully organic/biodynamic system. It is relatively small scale but high output for-profit farming. I am developing an open source robot that I hope will be able to farm this way, though it’s early days. [3]

JM Fortier of course is only one of many skilled farmers throughout the world, but what I appreciate is that he has clearly documented his process in videos and text so I find it easy to pick up on. His new farm is larger in scale and getting more to the kind of production we need, though the largest commercial farms are still orders of magnitude larger.

I have also been appreciating the No Till Market Garden Podcast and YouTube channel. [4]

[1] https://youtu.be/1BH0NkN6zHs

[2] https://youtu.be/cBKr9kPrpzU

[3] https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk

[4] https://youtu.be/9SVbLqJHMXE

Permaculture is phantastic – however, how does it align with selling produce, i.e. removing material from the farm?

Well JM Fortier doesn’t call his method permaculture. But he buys organic compost to add to his beds regularly to replenish the lost material.

There are many parts of the plant left over even after harvesting the parts you can sell commercially as food. Those can be used to produce compost which can go back in the soil.

Compare this to how most commercial farming is done today, where whatever is left over is usually used as animal feed.

> before they damage the soil too much.

That really depends on the definition of 'too much'. Does too much mean arid dry wasteland that no longer supports life at all? Does it mean the native flora&fauna no longer grow and everything that does grow must be artificially supported mean too much? Does using it all mean too much (I lean this way personally).

Yes.

What does "using it all" even mean, given soil is a renewable resource? Should we "use all energy" from the Sun if we could, if that would mean we'd turn it into a brown dwarf 100 years from now?

This is a skillfully written piece to raise anger. But if you look closely, there are some signs:

This piece refers to a study [1]. As they mention, this Scientific American piece is written by 2 of the 5 authors of the study. 4 out of 5 of the study authors don't work in a conventional academic institution, but in nature conservation non-profits [2, 3]. The study [1] is titled "A Hazard Assessment". If you know the lingo, a hazard is different from a risk. Hazard means: This could potentially be a risk, if right conditions are met. The study itself [1] is a literature search of laboratory and field studies on the impact of pesticides on soil invertebrates. From [1]:

> Conclusion

> This paper constitutes a comprehensive review of the impacts of agricultural pesticides on soil invertebrates. We found that pesticide exposure negatively impacted soil invertebrates in 70.5% of 2,842 tested parameters from 394 reviewed studies.

If you do a literature study on studies on how plant and insect poisons affect insects, the expected result is of course, insect poisons are poisonous to insects. And plant poisons can have observable effects, meeting the conditions of a hazard.

Now, to what extend is farming "Killing the World's Soils", and to what extent can the negative effects of farming be attributed to pesticide use, soil tilling, biodiversity loss etc., this piece is not a high quality contribution.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.6438...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Biological_Diversit...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth

Think the people putting their names to this peer review should be noted:

    EDITED BY

    Christophe Darnault
    Clemson University, United States

    REVIEWED BY
    Roberta Fulthorpe
    University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada

    Alan Kolok
    University of Idaho, United States

    Kean Goh
    California Department of Pesticide Regulation, United States

Do you plan to write a rebuttal to the journal and those who oversaw it at any point? Or just post here?

I think the literature review article in Frontiers in Environmental Science is pretty honest at being what it is. They do literature searches and take notes on the presence and potential of a hazard. It's not a risk analysis, and it's not quantitative, and it doesn't pretend to be.

They conclude (end of Abstract):

> The prevalence of negative effects in our results underscores the need for soil organisms to be represented in any risk analysis of a pesticide that has the potential to contaminate soil, and for any significant risk to be mitigated in a way that will specifically reduce harm to soil organisms and to the many important ecosystem services they provide.

and (end of Conclusions):

> This review presents extensive evidence that pesticides pose a serious threat to soil invertebrates and the essential ecosystem services that they provide. Given the widespread and increasing adoption of seed and soil applied pesticides that pose a particular threat to soil organisms, we strongly support the inclusion of a soil health analysis in the United States pesticide risk assessment process.

And I think there is some distance from these to "Pesticides Are Killing the World’s Soils".

But I don't know how much should it concern the editors or Frontiers in Environmental Science, if same people first publish in their journal, and then go on to write something different in a popular science magazine (Scientific American)?

Note that Tara Cornelisse has a PhD inn Environmental Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. She also worked as an assistant professor at Canisius College in Buffalo. Just the fact that she works at a nature conservation non-profit does not disqualify her as an expert.

I work on developing pesticides based on RNA, which should significantly reduce adverse impacts on the environment (including soils) if commercialised and adopted. Biodegradable and highly species specific.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-rnai-based-products-sustainabl...

Still more development to be done, but there are alternatives to existing synthetic pesticides on the horizon.

When we first started using pesticides we didn't understand the long term implications. How can you be so confident that you understand the long term implications of an arguably much more complex application (genetic vs chemical)?

There could be unintended consequences associated with any crop protection approach - synthetic, organic, whatever.

However, the active ingredient, double-stranded RNA, is ubiquitous in nature without obvious adverse impacts. It degrades very readily. It doesn't impact gene expression in mammals, even if completely homologous to a transcript (which is why in contrast to synthetic short interfering RNAs there's no obvious use as a therapeutic). It's an extraordinarily narrow spectrum approach, which is quite different to anything in the past, and why the approach is receiving a lot of interest and investment.

There's ongoing synthesis of data on environmental impacts. Have a read: https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...

I've planted a large variety of vegetables and clovers, buckwheat and things that wasps and bees love for several years. In the last two years of crop alone, I had absolutely no horn worms on any of my tomatoes or related Solanaceae family, no white moths able to lay eggs and destroy my kale, broccolis, or other greens and this is something if you're familiar with farming is unheard of without pesticides. I welcome so many yellow jackets and red wasps, hornets into our backyard that they just annihilate all those pests. The only thing I've had a tiny issue with is clusters of aphids in my tomatoes late season and I can just spray them down with a mild nicotine tea or mint family oils. If you get the ecosystem into balance, there is no need for chemical pesticides. Needing them is a sign of a total out of whack ecosystem in the first place. Mid summer season, it's fun to just sit back and watch 4-5 yellow jackets climbing up and down heirloom kale plants hunting. Without them, the kale would just about be leaf veins left propped up on stalks, as the greedy little worms will absolutely destroy all the leaf if left to their own devices. Don't spray wasps! They are just as crucial as honey bees.

I also have found the same success. The more i lean into supporting insect diversity the more prolific my garden becomes. Do you have any tips for supporting wasps? I make sure to have water available for them at all times.

In The Netherlands we have what we proudly call "The Green Heart", the rural area inbetween the cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht. But while this looks nice to the untrained eye, green pastures and all, it might as well be a desert. Monocrop grasslands with little to no life in the ground, hardly any insects let alone birds. Grown on industrial fertilizer, and sprayed with insecticides. It is quite sad.

Netherlands, a tiny tiny country, has this crazy intensive meat and poultry industry. We are largest chicken exporter in the world [0] and no. 6 in pork exports [1]. And in agriculture we are surprisingly number 2 worldwide after the USA [2].

While this is all nice and stuff for our economy, it has many downsides. Small, sustainable farmers find it very hard to eek out a living, and even the large producers find it ever harder to get good income. All the animals crammed together in mega stables pose pandemic risks, and overall the environment is suffering.

But what the technology being used shows is that higher yields are well possible, also with way more sustainable production methods. This should be the focus and then export that expertise around the world so we can all benefit.

I hope that in Netherlands itself we can scale back the crazy industrial race to the bottom, replacing with a mixture of traditional small-scale best-practice and innovative new agrotech.

[0] https://www.worldstopexports.com/chicken-exports-by-country/ (2019)

[1] https://www.bizvibe.com/blog/food-beverages/top-pork-produci... (2018)

[2] https://humboldt.global/top-agricultural-exporters/

In the Netherlands we are witnessing a dramatic reduction in meadow birds. One of the main suspects is the deteroration in soil life.

Does anyone have sources for suggestions about what we should do?

I read these articles, and worry, and wonder what can I do. It's not clear to me that buying organic mono-cropped bananas at the mega mart is in anyway better or worse than buying non-organic mono-cropped bananas.

I'd really like to just build up some more understanding on what I can do in my daily life to make things not worse.

There's a ton individuals can do.

The societal solutions to this has been around from decades, if not centuries. Look up the documentary called Kiss the Earth for a good intro that covers this and more.

As far as individuals goes, you can look for food sourced locally using regenerative agriculture -- agroforestry, permaculture, etc. The farm is usually operated as a diverse ecosystem that is designed to grow the soil as part of an integrated effort. They usually have livestock raised with the crops. None of this stuff is really new and doesn't require bleeding edge technology. We've had people practicing these things for a very long time.

There are also other things you can do to take more direct action as an individual: grow your own food, participate in communities that are planting and growing a food forest in parks, participate in composting, or better yet, compost on-site for your garden.

They usually have livestock raised with the crops.

People stopped doing this because of parasites, prions, and other pathogens like salmonella.

They stopped doing that because feed grain was subsidized and it was easier to put the livestock all together. It was a race to maximize yield by specializing on one cash crop or one livestock.

Can’t do much about prions. That wasn’t even discovered until after broad use of synthetic fertilizers.

Parasites can be an issue. Salmonella can also be an issue. But I think they are still an issue on ranches where livestock have to live with each other’s waste.

As far as salmonella getting into the crops ... it can’t survive more than a few hours outside of a host.

As far as salmonella getting into the crops ... it can’t survive more than a few hours outside of a host.

If that's the case, then why have there been multiple recalls of produce and peanut butter for salmonella contamination?

I don't know why. I had looked it up once because I have backyard chickens. I had found an article talking about the few hours thing, but when I looked for it again, I found these:

https://www.reference.com/world-view/long-can-salmonella-liv...

This one talking about salmonella surviving on surfaces for months.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/12/salmonella-fact-she...

This one has more specifics:

> Salmonella bacteria love wet environments shielded from the sun. They have the remarkable ability to survive under adverse conditions. They survive between the pH’s of 4 to 8+, and can grow between 8 and 45 C. Salmonella are facultative anaerobic bacteria that can survive under low oxygen tension such as in manure slurry pits. Salmonella are known to survive for long periods in soil and in water. Salmonellae spread onto fields in the form of manure may survive for long periods; it is best to spread the manure onto flat land (to prevent runoff problems) where it is exposed to the drying effects of wind, and to the bactericidal effect of UV irradiation from the sun; manure should be spread onto cropland rather than onto pastures for grazing.

I think the article I got was talking about how long salmonella can survive in the sun. (I live in Phoenix). I was wrong about salmonella surviving only a few hours outside the body, though it seems there are circumstances where exposure to UV light from the sun and drying out can kill the salmonella faster.

In that same paragraph, it also mentions the best practice is to spread it onto cropland rather than pastures for grazing. In the regenerative practices I was talking about, the grazing animals are frequently rotated through sections of pasture. It might be a full year before they are rotated back onto the same section again. On other farms, the pasture is actually no-till cropland that have cover grown on it, and probably sectioned off as well.

On feedlots, the livestock all confined together. You have to keep up with clearing the manure, and I think it is more likely for pathogens to infect the whole herd, than when you are rotating the livestock to new pastures.

I found this map/lookup tool linked from their website to be useful for finding local farms to support: https://regenerationinternational.org/regenerative-farm-map

You can join a CSA (Community supported agriculture) or join a local Foodcoop. Eat local things that grows naturally like weed in your area. For example, in my case I do not buy bananas at all, but organic apples from sources and land I know.

> Eat local things that grows naturally like weed in your area

Eating wild plants is a forgotten art. In my neighbourhood there's an insane amount of Prunus Cerasifera but they're basically left to rot on trees, seems I'm the only one who bothers to pick them up.

But it must be pointed out that one should be careful with weed foraging, I'm part of a forum on "edible wild plants" and the amount of mis-identified ones is staggering.

There tons of abandoned apple farms / trees here. It is incredible people still buy apples in the supermarket. They taste like shit in comparison to the old forgotten trees, cost money and are full of pesticides. Strange and stupid times.

Mind sharing the forum? - And for those reading this; in the vein of avoiding pollution, maybe don't forage next to a major highway.

It's a Facebook group and it's in Italian, so I'm not sure it'll be interesting to you, but look for "erbe spontanee mangerecce".

Molte grazie

Eat more diverse foods. Large monocrops are a huge part of this problem, both in the field and in the farmer’s pocket book. Commodity crops are are the mercy of many more forces working against the farmer, and the narrow margins help push people into expediencies. Four commodity grain crops are most of our volume, and if one develops a pernicious enough pest or pathogen we are truly fucked.

So eat weird fruits, vegetables, legumes. Get used to multigrain bread.

Find and support local farmers that participate in the international 4 per 1000 initiative. https://www.4p1000.org/

Individually, try to compost and grow food plants if possible. Choose to buy natural food rather than processed food that relies on federal subsidies. Explore less common foods instead of bananas. :) Visit a local ethnic grocery and ask for suggestions.

Support local farmers who follow better practices, such as low/no till or organic. Buy meat that was grazed on local grass, which is the single best thing we can do to build better soil. Buy things in season that grow well locally.

Organic still uses pesticides, just “organic” ones.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/national-...

For crops it includes copper sulfate, peracetic acid, ferric phosphate.

Some very effective organic pesticides/fungicides are bacteria. Two examples are Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis for larvae that feed on roots[1] and Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, which out-competes soil pathogens[2] and prevents powdery mildew on foliage.[3]

Research in this area is an important step toward learning how to build healthy soil instead of killing it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israele...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_amyloliquefaciens

[3]https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2015.0088...

  Buy 1 share in a pesticide manufacturer
  Go to shareholder meetings
  Introduce aggressive candidates (possibly yourself) for board positions
  Make a fuss
  Get thrown out
  Have planned for this so you had an accomplice to film it and organized your press conference with local news in advance

Support your local CSA and sustainable agriculture.

Bees do touch soil. Quite often they like to collect water from rich, wet soils and dirty water. It's thought that they enjoy dirty water over clean water due to minerals.

I’ve seen both bees and wasps go nuts over seeps in wetlands.

If you kill the bees, no food, but kill the wasps and you have more pests to deal with.

I’m fascinated by soil and all the interactions between microorganisms, insects and plants. Does anyone have any recommendations for books on soil science (Edaphology)?

Over the course of three years I transitioned a small plot from a monoculture into a thriving “forest garden”. My goal was to restore the soil health and utilised a variety of plants, insects, and mycelium to achieve that. It was an amazing adventure that taught me a lot and also helped me through a mental crises. That experience and experiment has motivated me to be a soil farmer.

My biggest lesson was that pests and weeds are symptoms of a larger problem. INSTEAD of trying to manage them, look for what nature needs to manage them. For example, what attracts ladybugs? What environments are friendly for ladybugs?

It's easy to be mad about some outcome that you don't like. It's much harder to actively consider tradeoffs among various available (actual, not hypothetical) options.

Pesticides raise crop yields and increase farmer productivity. Of course we could stop using pesticides, but then we would need to devote more labor to farming, losing out on whatever else that labor would have produced instead. We would have fewer haircuts, shoes, medical procedures and houses. Maybe that's okay - I'm not trying to argue that point. But we have to consider the tradeoffs.

Small time farmers who are at the mercy of handful of Big Corp. will do everything at their hands to increase the yield for meeting the demand laid down upon them or they perish.

So this is not just a technical problem.

The documentary, Kiss the Earth talks about this, but it starts with a FDR-era government service that had been attempting to teach farmers about soil health for decades.

A big part of this is that the solution to this comes from a very different way of seeing, a different way of solving problems.

Yields of a specific crop from a farm practicing regenerative agriculture or permaculture is less than the yields of a monocropping farm. However, the profit from across all of the crops and livestock from farm practicing regenerative agriculture is much better per sq ft than conventional farming. It is also more resilient against crop failures and market swings.

But using the paradigm from which conventional farming methods come from, regenerative agriculture is counter-intuitive.

It first starts with seeing soil as a living organism, and the whole farm as a living system -- an ecosystem. From there, growing good crops require growing your soil. Feeding grazing livestock directly on cover plants not only helps grow the soil, pasture-raised livestock are happier and yield healthier meat. (So you don't just rotate crops, you also rotate grazers). I can go on.

So is this about the world or US soils? The title suggests the former, but everything in the article and all the authors of the study are around the US. Considering the vastly different regulations and practices in the EU ( e.g. grazing, crop rotation are very popular) i suppose the situation is different.

> Considering the vastly different regulations and practices in the EU ( e.g. grazing, crop rotation are very popular)

Source? From what I heard, crop rotation here isn't widely used yet.

What? I thought the corn-soybean rotation was the norm in the US?

I'm French.

Do you all not rotate? Just the same crop in the field year after year after year?

That is so shocking to me; growing up in the Midwest we were always rotating the crops, usually between the standard mix of corn, soybeans and wheat, but occasionally through sorghum or a grass mix. I assumed it was the standard for conventional agriculture everywhere.

My next door neighbors just had a pesticide treatment sprayed on the entire exterior of their house... including patio furniture, outdoor cooking area, the yard that their young children play in... this just one week after a neighborhood wide mosquito treatment (I opted out and asked for an MSDS from the application company).

I just don't understand people. I would rather see a spider/wasp/ant occasionally than be doused in pesticides.

My observation is that smaller farmers, especially cottage farming, have a really good grasp on soil health and actively cultivate soil via grazing.

Grazing is one of the best things we can do to build soil. Animals and the soil grew up and evolved together.

It’s a shame the world is turning so strongly against meat, regardless of how it’s raised.

From Wikipedia: "Grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world's production of beef ..."[1]

I don't think there's going to be a 91% reduction in beef intake in my lifetime. Rest easy, grazing is safe.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding

While I am sure there is an augment to be made that grazing is best, perennial grasses harvested for animal consumption with the manure applied back onto said land, with rotation only after several years, is a close second. Having cover and cereal crops in an animal-free rotation can help, but is not nearly the same.

You may be missing the sentiment of the comment by being overly concerned about the details.

Grazing with works well in the types of habitat where cows, sheep evolved. It wreaks absolute havoc on ecosystems that aren't used to it, such as Australia or reclaimed Brazilian jungle.

https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_offices/australia/environmental_pr...

The most sustainable meat to eat in Australia is kangaroos.

Are there any new ideas regarding small scale electronically controlled insect repellents and plant control ? I don't know .. like small ultrasonic transducers to annoy them or maybe LEDs .. or maybe changing pH conditions.

Small scale items in large scale industrial agriculture sounds like something that wouldn't work too great. And might cause even more issues.

Makes me actually think how practical and ecological micro-drones would actually be? Have hundreds or thousands of these little things made out of plastic, with electronics and batteries in them. How do you track those and be sure each and everyone is responsibly recycled? It feels to me like something that would actually cause more issues than solve...

hmm right, near-passive sensors can be made to work long but actuators its another game

This is one of the serious issues that should be addressed at a serious level. The thing is we want to change but we are not ready for it. For some of us Just money matters, not health.

It's weird how drug trafficking from third world countries is illegal, but developed countries selling poisons that destroy natural resources in these lands is perfectly fine. Both must be illegal. Megacorps are always looking for small farmers in low-industry countries to adopt their chemical fertilizers and pesticides to fight native bugs that can be controlled with organic agriculture. These countries don't need to produce huge volumes, there is no need for all those imported poisons. Make them illegal and don't let them kill their nature as well.

Legislation to shut down subsidies for non sustainably grown produce would transform the industry in a hurry because most of it is also not sustainable from an economic point of view and very dependent on subsidies. That's the tool to use to fix this.

E.g. US corn subsidies are an anomaly. The world does not need so much corn and biofuels are a particularly lousy excuse to grow that much corn. Corn syrup is not an ingredient that is either common or high in demand outside the US. It's a market that only exists because of corn subsidies. In the same way, we're subsidizing soy, which gets exported from Brazil and from freshly burned down rain forest. The US is a close second for this stuff. Again subsidies combined with mostly very unsustainable styles of farming. Both industries depend on large scale use of pesticides and a few other unsustainable practices and exports to countries that look the other way.

If you are a vegetarian and want to save the planet, stop eating unsustainably grown soy. If you are a meat eater, stop eating unsustainably grown meat where the animals grew up eating unsustainably grown corn and soy. At a macro level it's multiple layers of unsustainable practices that we subsidize so we can have some artificially cheap food that probably isn't that good for you. It's not cheap at all. You just pay for it via your taxes. And we're leaving the damage cleanup for future generations. We're just really good at allowing people to dodge the real cost of things.

The Netherlands has a nice ongoing debate about reducing nitrogen emissions from mostly cattle and traffic. The reasoning goes as follows: high nox concentrations are bad for health (fact), therefore building close to where the concentrations are high is no longer allowed (because it kills people). This simple ruling basically shut down construction next to highways, which is where a lot of prime real estate is in the Netherlands. That is causing a lot of farmers to adapt their behavior because the communities they operate in are not cool with the high nox concentrations any more. They even reduced maximum speeds on the highways from 130 km/h to 100 km/h to cut down on the emissions and thus allow construction projects to resume.

That basically happens when you put numbers on the damage, change the incentives, and put some simple rulings in place. This btw. happened under a mostly conservative right leaning government too. Headed by the party that not so long ago championed the raising of the speed limit to 130 km/h (VVD). The current government is more or less the polar opposite of tree hugging hippies. Highway loving VVD and farmer friendly CDA are two of the coalition parties. And they got this done.

We should do the same with pesticides. There's plenty of good reasons to stop killing our environment like that. The least we can do is stop subsidizing that.

Science found out: Field poisons are toxic.

Thanks for the quotable reference.

We have solutions to this for most (maybe all) contexts, at least as far as agriculture is concerned, in regenerative agriculture[0]. It requires a paradigm shift from the dominant type of agriculture taking place in the US and many other parts of the world, but it is not only better for soils and ecosystems – it's probably much better for our health as consumers, potentially more profitable for farmers, and can have an enormous positive impact in reigning in climate change.

It can seem too good to be true, but consider that when we mess with one aspect of nature by say, growing mono-culture crops rather than poly-cultures, we end up needing to intervene in many other aspects of ecosystems. The choice to annually till fields and grow acres upon acres of single crops year after year means we also need to recreate (poorly) natural systems of fertility (fertilizers), competition defense (herbicides), pest defense (pesticides), and disease defense (fungicides).

This model has other negative externalities as well, such as soil erosion, poor natural water infiltration and holding capacity, leaching of fertilizers and *-icides into surrounding areas and bodies of water which interrupt natural processes and are detrimental to life and health elsewhere, poor carbon sequestration, etc, etc.

The core principles of regenerative agriculture are to mimic nature and take advantage of natural processes rather than fighting them at every step, and to avoid intervening whenever possible. In the same way that the fastest and most maintainable line of code is the one you don't have to write, the cheapest and most effective agricultural practice is the one you don't need to do.

For those interested in a deep dive with a farmer from North Dakota who is very successfully putting these ideas into practice, see Gabe Brown[1] (who I first heard about here on HN, and for which I'm very grateful). If you're interested in agriculture, farming or even just gardening, I highly recommend watching the whole video. For a higher level and more accessible take, check out the documentary Kiss the Ground[2].

I've been trying to put these ideas into practice in my own ~100sq ft of growing space in NYC and, while it's still early in the growing season and hard to distinguish variables year-to-year, my garden is looking dramatically better this year[3] than at the same time in years past. Some of it for sure is a better sense of timing on my part and early warm weather here, but there are a lot of promising signs and I'm looking forward to seeing the state of things towards the end of the season when last year I had lost most of my tomato plants to pest pressures.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExXwGkJ1oGI

[2] https://kisstheground.com/

[3] https://imgur.com/a/ybquJIX

Edit: The article specifically mentions regenerative agriculture, but says "pesticide companies know that these practices are often accompanied by increased pesticide use." I think it's a misnomer to call something regenerative agriculture when pesticide use is even higher than in conventional agriculture.

Capitalism needs to be fixed immediately! The root cause is that short-term profits are more important than sustainability. Using pesticides is just one of many symptoms.

The much demonized Roundup actually greatly reduces pesticide volume needed compared to older pesticides. Save the environment, love Monsanto.

Glyphosate 100% has an affect on the soil creatures. If you read the papers that aren’t Monsanto/Bayer propaganda a picture starts to form.

in other words: greatly more toxic.

No, less toxic.

let me correct: poisonous. Toxicity is harm to humans, right?

But what would Henny Penny and Chicken Little have to say about this? At least SA still has the integrity to admit this is an opinion piece.

Remind me to buy a pack of cotton t-shirts with "Stop pesticides" logo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_cotton#Ecological_foot...

Interesting new fabric tech such as Tencel "cotton" (from fast growth drought resistant trees such as Eucalyptus) and Piñatex leather (food waste of pineapples) are hopeful alternatives.

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