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Comment by kickout | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely nothing about organic production implies less pesticide. Opposite is true actually.

Except a lot of data, and stricter rules

See: https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/cocktails-of-pestici....

Your linked source is specific to Europe which tends to have much stronger regulations on pesticides. While the parent didn't state it explicitly I believe their statement was about the US since - yea, in America the organic label doesn't change the volume of pesticides you can use but rules out some of them.

The best tactic you can follow in the US is to try and buy imported produce from countries with stricter pesticide laws.

Well this is about soil, it might also just be that organic pesticides break down better.

I don't know much about the US rules. But I also know here it's popular to say "well just because it's organic, doesn't mean it's without pesticides".

But in general the few times I've checked different researches on pesticide residue organic scores consistently better.

In fairness organic is defined very differently in different countries. Wild fish are not organic in UK but farmed fish can be. Taken literally all food is organic apart from a few mineral supplements like iron tablets.

Organic dangerously commits the natural fallacy.

Up until very recently, organic included the use of rotenone, which is a 'naturally occurring' poison that causes parkinson's in mammals.

Modern synthetic pesticides are far, far from great but they're still better than their natural counterparts.

> Modern synthetic pesticides are far, far from great but they're still better than their natural counterparts.

Far too much generalisation there. There are thousands of synthetic pesticides, and dozens (hundreds?) of "natural" ones (ranging from gelatine to roteome).

A broad brush comparison is useless

It's not a pointless comparison when organic farmers used harmful rotenone so much that it had to become banned outright.

Needing to ban a 19th century pesticide in the 21st century is not a broad brush, but proof of the growing common misconception that naturally occurring means safer than synthetic - the entire basis of the Organic label.

Pesticide is a big category and a lot of pesticides are themselves organic and non-toxic. Presumably the troubling pesticides from the study are more along the lines of Roundup and less along the lines of horticultural vinegar, but they don't say so explicitly in the abstract. They do quote another study, "interventions switching individuals from conventional to organic diets result in a dramatic decline in urinary pesticide metabolites".

Roundup is an herbicide. Or did I misunderstand?

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

"This includes herbicide, insecticide, nematicide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, microbicide, fungicide, and lampricide."

Thanks. I was not aware that pesticide included all of that.

organic production implies less/no synthetic pesticides

https://www.global-organics.com/post.php?s=2018-02-02-are-pe....

I'm not sure about opposite, but there's this (an undergrad discovered traces of DDE on organic carrots in 2005):

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/food-for-thought/organic-do...

I'm curious, can you link to any details of this?

Pesticide use in conventional system can use synthetic chemistries whereas organic can only use 'natural' formulations. Thus, it is extremely difficult to compare apples to apples and most studies are flawed. Because the 'natural' formulation aren't as effective (usually), this needs to higher nominal rates.

Again, it's very dicey comparison. I'm not advocating convention > organic, but feel the need to pushback on people that think organic > conventional

This article (if read completely) highlights the extreme lack of data on this subject and mostly does a good job explaining how each metric is 'loaded' (toxicity, nominal application amounts, off-target movements, etc.)

This is a very grey subject and it should be debated as such.

ETA: link, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25502-w

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