Edit: I'm talking about farming, not lawns. RTFA
Similar to the rohip whatever chemical is given to some beef when it close to slaughter to magically make it gain weight.
Apparently when you spray this stuff on the plants a couple days before harvest, they know they are being killed / dieing - so they put all their energy in to the buds to give the seeds / fruits a better chance at living - so the sell weight is higher.
So it's not just being used to kill weeds, it's actually being used to cover the food a short time before it's cut and sold.
I guess tech+ban is the only way to go, unless we're okay forcing ourselves to play the cancer lottery with worse odds.
Glyphosate blocks the action of an enzyme that is necessary for plants to grow.
Crops are frequently sprayed with desiccants to speed harvest once they are mature. Glyphosate is used that way.
https://medium.com/@dcvc/john-deere-acquires-blue-river-tech...
There were so many layers to that medium post. It’s like an incestuous orgy in a glyphosate teacup.
First..There once was a company called Climate corp..that sold a neat little box called Fieldview that was slapped under a tractor. When the farmer harvested corn, Fieldview harvested data. All kinds of data. Useless data that the farmer didn’t need and know that he had. Climate was amassing crap ton of data from thousands of acres of American fields.
This caught the eye of John Deere. They wanted Climate. But what Climate had was nothing short of a treasure chest. Monsanto wanted that too. At the end, Monsanto got the prize. They purchased Climate.
Climate under Monsanto went on to create Precision Planting and they were going to sell that arm to John Deere. But due to anti trust concerns, the courts put several road blocks. As if Monsanto and John Deere already don’t control American Ag..
So finally Bayer purchased Monsanto but not all parts of it. Climate was spun off and Monsanto’s investment arm Monsanto Growth Ventures was shut down and the portfolio went on to populate DCVC.
Blue River Tech was a small company that came up with a ‘See and Spray’ tech to identify weeds in the lettuce fields of California with AI and sprayed it with an organic fertilizer high N concentration that burnt emerging thread stage weeds. DCVC was investor in Blue River.
John Deere bought out Blue River because they gave up on buying Climate from Monsanto for $305 million. Blue River tech that was using its See and Spray AI in organic lettuce fields now uses the tech for GM cotton etc and is part of JD’s Agtech offerings as AI full stack.
And yes, they use glyphosate. I will tell the fairytale of how Monsanto used to sell seeds, fertilizer, herbicides. Sterile GMO seeds that can only grow with Monsanto inputs and need their magic sauce with glyphosate.
But for now..Blue River doesn’t use drones.
It is like relying on aliens to bring peace on Earth.
Outlawing glyphosate would fix it (people did agriculture before 1974 (without drones)). Though it is almost as unlikely as aliens.
We've added about 3.8 billion people to the planet since then.
I'm not saying that we can't feed the world without glyphosate, but "Let's just do it like we did in '74!" doesn't account for the fact that we need a lot more food today.
We can support the population without chemical inputs if we manage the land differently. It takes about 3 years to transition to a regenerative management style. That is how long it takes to bring the soil back to life. After the transition period inputs are minimal and yields are similar to chemical farming.
Regenerative management is more profitable for farmers so it is going to happen regardless of what governments want. You just can't force it.
Had it been planned, with subsidies, education, multi-year transition, it probably wouldn't have ended in a disaster as it did. But anyways, that's not the only reason for Sri Lanka's demise (lots of stupid money wasting in useless infrastructure, lots of corruption, and Covid). It was just lots of incompetence from very stupid people.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/11/02/self-dr...
Pretty cool demo here: https://youtu.be/lLaV15vpSJM
> It's ridiculous that we put up with spraying sketchy chemicals on our food.
Yes, but it's also ridiculous to treat the symptom instead of the disease.
Farming existed before pesticide.
Humanity has gotten very good at it and weedkilling is a big part of it. But, wild plants propagate quite well on their own, spending seeds of things you want more of results in more of that species. Preparing the environment and selecting seeds ca push that much further but the absolute minimum threshold is very low. Toss eaten apples into your yard, and eventually you get apple trees.
> people tossing specific seeds on the ground 20,000 years ago
This seems irrelevant to whether farming occurred before people.
I don't think the line is very clear cut at all, but it does involve intentional intervention by a species not the plant.
> This seems irrelevant to whether farming occurred before people.
It gets to if for example squirrels storing seeds underground is possibly farming or not. It's an intentional activity, but takes too long for a specific squirrel to see much benefit from it. IMO, it’s kind of a mind bender when you really dig into it.
I think a reassemble argument is squirrels as a species farm though individuals don’t.
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/32461-fungusfarming-ants...
As to ants, do you think they evolved that trait before or after they started farming.
Additionally, billions face food uncertainty. Not because the food is not enough.
Weed killing has been integral to farming since it's inception.^1 Chemical herbicides were popularized in the 19th century, which necessarily coincided with the modern population explosion.
^1 https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1759....
“The earliest known weed control technology in 8000 BCE was the plow and hand-weeding (which includes hand-pulling, cutting with a knife, hoes and mattocks).”
That's a very long gap till 8,000 BC.
https://imgur.com/a/Bly85h8 - these are 2 weeds that have taken over and killed a simple flowering plant from our yard. You can see there are 2 plots that we have spliced from our healthy flowers, where we have been testing weed control methodology, since the neighbors have let these weeds become their lawn. The simple solution seems to be wait until the weed is big enough to have a solid rootball and pull it up manually. This is both the common way for small gardens to be managed AND the only solution for certain invasive species like the Himalayan blackberry which can regrow from stalks or leaves after being mulched and buried - they are resilient to pretty much every pesticide, but they aren't our problem after moving out of WA.
In farmland, you can go over every inch of your acreage and try to spot treat (which won't stop proliferation) or you can uniformly treat, as modern farming currently does.
Remember we started with wild plants so a significant energy investments beyond throwing seeds may simply have been wasted effort because it’s less needed and has lower rewards. Further removing competitors is a non obvious behavor.
The benefits of a possible harvest increased after destination so the time lag between just tossing seeds and active farming could have been a very long period.
It's what people do without any training. It's not necessary to have archaeological support for instinctive behavior. There's no archaeological support people swatted at flies during that time period. Again, this is rather pointless when you're arguing that early man was less capable than a child. GL with whatever.
Tossing seeds around can however be accidental, you can easily do it without intention.
It's not clear what you mean by "learned" here. You have plants. Other plants grow next to them and they die. It's observed learning (as I showed in the photos), similar to learning fire is hot. You have been implying it's more than that and are flat wrong on this simple understanding of reality. There's nobody that can help you with that.
Second you described learning and ignored culture showing children this relationship. Looking at a prepared area doesn't exist without someone preparing the area.
Clearly you don't understand what’s going on.
> Second you described learning and ignored culture showing children this relationship.
You're ascribing some definition of "culture" when the behavior is intuitive. I can understand if you're making an assumption about how stupid ancient man was, but that is simply a bias within your own imagination.
> In effect they where growing weeds.
Weeds are competing plant life, compared to the cultivation of specific species. The dictionary doesn't do anyone a lot of favors here, but that's the common parlance.
We were talking about Farming, then cultivation, which are strictly different things. Now you've moved to "domestication" all the while leaning on some strange alternate definition, or you're trolling. I don't think I can help you any more.
"More than 200 million pounds of glyphosate are used annually by US farmers on their fields. The weedkiller is sprayed directly over genetically engineered crops such as corn and soybeans, and also over non-genetically engineered crops such as wheat and oats as a desiccant to dry crops out prior to harvest. Many farmers also use it on fields before the growing season, including spinach growers and almond producers. It is considered the most widely used herbicide in history."
If people spray glophysate on their lawns, that is what will happen. Their lawns will die. It's very easy to test, and many people have done this by accident.