Study first to link weed killer Roundup to convulsions in animals
phys.org
phys.org
Glyphosate discussions always brings out people with strong opinions, but the product is studied extensively by researchers and the majority of studies have not shown harm. That doesn't prove it's safe of course, but it's where we're currently at.
Because Roundup is such an important part of our agricultural industry, it should continue to be studied in depth. This study and others like it are important to ensuring that farming at scale remains safe for human consumption, as well as minimizes environmental impact.
However, RoundUp is glyphosate + surfactants (oily lipid-type molecules) which are needed to dissolve the waxy leaf surface so that the glyphosate can be absorbed by the plant, without which the herbicide would be ineffective.
Studies with RoundUp formulation show the disruption of cell cycle effects, which can lead to cancer in applicators who get exposed. This is a common issue with a wide variety of strong surfactants, for example see this from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, where they dumped tons of a surfactant mix called Corexit:
There have been countless studies on the matter. Even without the surfactants it's still a nasty substance.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.7639...
https://www.cornucopia.org/2014/03/gut-wrenching-new-studies...
https://www.figo.org/removal-glyphosate-global-usage
https://jech.bmj.com/content/71/6/613
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...
You would not say of an acid, "surely it is essentially vinegar", or of a base "surely it is essentially baking soda".
Fundamentally, the exact identity of the 'inert ingredients' in Roundup and similar products should be exposed on the label. Currently that's proprietary information, but there's a wide range of toxicity of such substances.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30951798/
> "(2019) As glyphosate-based-herbicide composition is legally classified as confidential commercial information, confusion concerning the identity and concentrations of co-formulants is common and descriptions of test substances in published studies are often erroneous or incomplete. In order to resolve this confusion, laws requiring disclosure of the chemical composition of pesticide products could be enacted. Research to understand health implications from ingesting these substances is required."
That they carefully exclude them from every toxicity test they commission suggests so more strongly. Why are the concealing "soap", and carefully not testing the product with it?
Which researchers and funded by whom? This is the line Monsanto brings out every time. It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.
And it's not just roundworms https://sites.psu.edu/soilmicrobiology/projects/glyphosate-i...
This chemical is bad news and the only reason it's legal is regulatory capture by Monsanto/Bayer.
What makes you think a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better qualified to make conclusions on the available evidence than scientists?
That doesn't answer the question. What makes you think that a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better able to determine the truth from 2 conflicting teams of experts, than a team of experts versed in the relevant field?
>Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to suggest.
They seem to be uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, according to wikipedia.
>The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity. [...]
there's more but I'm not going to quote the whole paragraph
> The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment toxicology review in 2013 found that with regard to positive correlations between exposure to glyphosate formulations and risk of various cancers, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, "the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing".[11] A meta-analysis published in 2014 identified an increased risk of NHL in workers exposed to glyphosate formulations.[12] In March 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic in humans" (category 2A) based on epidemiological studies, animal studies, and in vitro studies.[8][13][14][15] In contrast, the European Food Safety Authority concluded in November 2015 that "the substance is unlikely to be genotoxic (i.e. damaging to DNA) or to pose a carcinogenic threat to humans", later clarifying that while carcinogenic glyphosate-containing formulations may exist, studies "that look solely at the active substance glyphosate do not show this effect."[16][17] In 2017, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen, a mutagen, toxic to reproduction, nor toxic to specific organs.[18]
Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the *European Chemicals Agency* over a company with a vested interest in keeping their product on the market.
I'm glad that you quoted the whole paragraph, but this seems to put a damper on your conclusion
>"the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing"
>Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the European Chemicals Agency over a company with a vested interest in keeping their product on the market.
Their conclusion is:
>the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen
How is that any better, considering you just have more scientists that may randomly lean one way or another.
Just look at the junk science of the FBI crime labs - and that stuff is being measured at the higher "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.
no, their budget is capped at the amount that they're suing for. If you're getting sued for $1M there's no point in spending more than $1M on lawyers.
>versus this school groundskeeper and their case was so bad they still lost.
According to the court filings for the appeal, Johnson was represented by
>The Miller Firm, LLC Michael J. Miller, Curtis G. Hoke, Jeffrey A. Travers;
>Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, P.C.; R. Brent Wisner, Pedram Esfandiary;
>Audet Partners LLP, Mark E. Burton
Something tells me that he wasn't paying for all of this out of pocket.
If it affects future worldwide business, they can spend more to protect overall business.
The American Cancer Association doesn't list talc at all when talking about risk factors for ovarian cancer: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/ovarian-cancer/about/new-resea...
J&J is winning most of the cases in court, or having large verdicts overturned on appeal, but there are supposedly something like 38,000 cases out there and each one has an outside chance to end up being like the one they lost in Wisconsin state court which initially awarded over $4.69bn to 22 plaintiffs (reduced to $2.11bn on appeal).
I don't believe, unlike many, that they are comically evil guys. Just playing a god for profit with stuff they probably understand only in lower 90 percentile range, especially second, third etc. order effects. And probably too over-invested in direction company took decades ago, so nobody looking at bonuses as drive will change its direction dramatically.
> for Monsanto
GP isn’t making their comment “for Monsanto”, but for the sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue. You will continue to be shocked until you change your perspective on how we ought to evaluate nuanced issues. Especially when those issues have to do with global food production.
I don't disagree with you, I also don't think we should be using the product when the truth is as clouded as it is. So ban it until the truth comes out.
Okay but given that we have endless studies already, it seems like "until the truth comes out" really means "until my preferred conclusion comes out".
Glyphosate has been around for almost 5 decades. Wikipedia says "The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity"[1]. If you think this is not "conclusively" enough, how much longer/more evidence do you need? Is this a standard that we should apply to everything[2], or just chemicals made my evil multinational corporations? Maybe we should delay rolling out cell phones for a few decades just to be sure that they don't cause brain cancer?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Not something you can do with mass produced food which at this point is almost all food most people can buy. On top of that, have you seen, ever, a label on food stating that it contains ingredients on which Round up was used, how much etc?
Let's stop comparing apples to mortar bricks and have some factual discussions on such serious issues, not just random whataboutisms to divert topic.
The people with EMI sensitivity and/or oppose 5G deployments beg to differ.
>Not something you can do with mass produced food which at this point is almost all food most people can buy.
Easy choice here would be to buy organic
none of us would be alive without such mass produced food in the first place
At the same time I think there is a limit to how bad roundup can be to have fought off criticism in EVERY country and remain on the market.
People have been talking shit about jurors for 2 millennia, one of the oldest plays in history was dedicated to talking about how awful jurors were, and yet they stick around. I still value them merely on the basis of their relative resistance to corrupt influences compared to scientific institutions.
But the dangers of it affecting other animals' nervous systems the same way it affects roundworms is a serious worry.
There are a few things that if they were lost globally would greatly affect the necessary process of decomposition.
A lot of what's written about c. elegans environment has been overturned. It was thought to be a soil nematode, but it's really most common in rotting fruit.
The animals cited in this study are roundworms and belong to the Filum Nematoda, one of the most frequent animals in this planet and also one of the most overlooked.
Most of them are not parasite animals, but we know more about the parasites because they cause gross diseases in humans.
Earthworms are the common pink worms found on soil, they belong to Filum Annelida (and is true that some european earthworms invaded America a few thousands years ago).
Earthworms and humans are basically not directly linked in the trophic chain. We don't feed on them, and they don't feed on us directly or cause us diseases.
Which makes the practice above of spraying replanted forests so “the good trees grow faster” even more abhorrent
They replant with round-up ready pine, so they spray to kill aspen which is a firebreak species, and grow massive pine stands which are the opposite. It's the major reason for the massive forest fires we've had lately (and thus the massive flooding).
>The half-life of glyphosate in soil ranges between 2 and 197 days; a typical field half-life of 47 days has been suggested. Soil and climate conditions affect glyphosate's persistence in soil. The median half-life of glyphosate in water varies from a few to 91 days.[57] At a site in Texas, half-life was as little as three days. A site in Iowa had a half-life of 141.9 days
It is also a powerful chelating agent (make you lose minerals) is another concern for humans.
"Although the chelating properties are well known, this potential additional environmental risk was never adequately considered in the regulatory risk assessment (EFSA 2015a, 2015b)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5823954/#:~:tex....
I'm not sure if it chemically changes or if it starts out in some kind of emulsion or something that can't be recreated by just rewetting with water.
see what I did there? I presumed you didn't care about anything not explicitly mentioned -- was I accurate? I bet not.
humans tend to (generally) wait until the produce is washed and on a dinner plate before they try licking it -- animals (and certainly some humans, too) may not.
The specific worry may be towards the danger of the high volumes of raw chemical on the plant itself rather than the underlying danger of treating a plant with that chemical before preparation and wash.
It is my understanding that the produce assimilates the chemical internally
That's funny, I've experienced this first hand. There's a guy who comes into the vet clinic I frequent who's dog died of cancer and he drives around with giant decals pasted all over his white van saying that Roundup killed his dog and to stay away from it. He claims that the gardener sprayed his dog deliberately and that his dog died as a result. He is very passionate about it and spends a lot of time evangelizing this cause.
A lot of people, especially the farmers themselves & people living close to the farms get way too high amounts of pesticides in their system. And I also don't trust the safe amounts allowed are actually properly tested over a lifetime.
Causing all kinds of issues, among parkinsons and such, take France for instance: https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/06/vineyard-...
They are highly influential in fertile soils.
If roundup or glyphosate had these effects on c. elegans I'd expect a large-scale visibly noticeable impact on crop yields.
>It inhibits a plant enzyme involved in the synthesis of three aromatic amino acids: tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine
which seems decidedly not a neurotoxin.
Many toxicity studies feed animals millions of times more of the substance than a human would ever be exposed to, in order to produce a result. This is not the case here. Also, it seems to target the GABA-A receptor, which is pretty stable across species.
The highest levels recorded in people in the US is ~2 µg/L [0]. It's probable that it still affects GABA receptors at this level but I'm hoping it has negligible effects.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/whats_new_071922_1.html
In the most developed countries, we spend 7-15% of our income on food. The poorer you are, the higher that percentage is. In some African countries, families will spend upwards of 70% of their income for not just food, but for bags of rice. The bare minimum.
In the past 4 decades, we've increased our crop yields by 4x. This is because of intensive farming.
Now, is it destructive to the environment? Yes
Does it create fragility in our food systems and supply chains? Yes
Should we immediately stop using herbicides and large-scale monoculture systems? Think carefully about that one.
When people say, we need to implement regenerative agriculture, or organic practices, or stop eating meat, etc, they rarely have a full understanding of how our agrifood system works.
I'm an advocate for improving these systems, reducing herbicide use, and implementing sustainable practices (whatever that means at this point). But please, please, please try to fully understand how our food system really works. Try to understand the magnitude of cost reduction our current system has provided. Try to understand how global life expectancy has increased by >20 years due to these practices.
Due to the higher profitability of regenerative agriculture I am confident that the majority of farms will shift to regenerative in the decades to come. The only thing that can stop the transition is government intervention to try to "save" chemical farmers by subsidizing their chemical inputs. We just have to stay out of the way and let the transition happen.
That might be true today, but will it hold into the future? Organic agriculture is also more profitable than conventional agriculture, even though it's less productive and has higher costs. The only reason it's more profitable is that people are willing to pay a premium for it. Obviously that's not something that's scalable. You might be able to convince a good chunk of bay area professionals to buy your organic/regenerative agriculture crops at 3x prices, but once you saturated that market you'll have much more trouble convincing the rest of the country to into paying 3x (or whatever) for their produce.
Is it true? "Chemical farming" only happened because the yields were better. Much better. What were farmers doing wrong?
This sounds like another "we don't count fallow fields in the divisor" hustle. I'd love to be wrong.
> Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are not needed
How do you control for herd immunity? One pesticide-free field will never see a locust plague, a thousand pesticide-free fields absolutely will.
> government intervention to try to "save" chemical farmers by subsidizing their chemical inputs
Is this really an anti-intervention argument or is it an attempt to frame the absence of steep fines on fertilizers and pesticides as a subsidy?
Pesticides destroy the food chain. They kill pests and their predators which makes it easier for the pests to thrive. Predators keep pest populations in check but do not eliminate them.
Fining the use of fertilizers and pesticides would be disastrous. If fertilizers and pesticides are seen as the sole way to grow all of our food the government will absolutely try to step in and pay for a portion or all of the fertilizers and pesticides as prices increase. This is the only way that chemical farming will remain dominant. It is simply becoming too costly to continue chemical farming.
Like I said before, the best course is to just let the transition happen at the rate that it happens.
I like organic farming. I use an organic approach for my home garden. But yields are lower than with conventional farming. Even the most positive studies agree on that (see https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/12/09/organic-conventional-fa...). It also takes more effort, which means more people would have to be farmers than currently.
You can seek profit AND help make food less scarce at the same time.
"I am too young to remember flipper babies."
To an older, educated portion of the 'genpop' your post is just carrying water for Monsanto and has zero to do with GMO as a concept. You've typed up a manifesto stating the obvious and missing the point. Ask yourself why people would "oppose GMO" if they agree with every point you make here.
But what we should be asking is "does use of this chemical have benefits to humans that outweigh the disadvantages to humans".
A weedkiller that harms people might still be a good thing if it has overwhelming benefits too, like for example it saves far more peoples lives through greater food production.
Regulators never seem to see this bigger picture - instead we allowed things that have small benefits and large known harm (eg. leaded fuels), and disallow things that could have huge benefits and tiny harm (gm crops).
Regulators need to be the ones seeing the bigger picture, because the people getting the benefits (eg. farmers) are rarely the ones taking the downsides (eg. cancer risk of those eating the produced food).
If you ban machines and plant everything by hand, someone's going to get a bad back.
Every option involves some harm. The trick is to minimize it.
https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/ar...
Who is "we", and why are you including yourself in this?
It's one thing to state that. It's quite another to go and do it.
The farm industry has made a choice. What are you going to do to make them change that? Offer to pay more? Get lawmakers to side with you? Purchase different things at the grocery store?
I think we'll still be talking about glyphosate in another twenty years and that not much will have changed.
Are you a commercial farmer? What crops, what volume?
In this case the worms are mutants, but the strains are not noted to be more prone to convulsions. They still had electrocute them, but the time to recovery did seem to relate to chemicals administered.
I know next to nothing about this, but have had some shower thoughts that a different agriculture system could be viable if we increased our expectations for farming's labour intensity. I probably got the idea from permaculture videos, because they seem to get impressive results, but it also requires some skill and a lot of work.
I'm half-expecting a hail of downvotes, but maybe I'll find other people that have been wondering the same.
- Off-season cover crops like legumes, etc both can fix nitrogen and out-compete weeds.
- Intercropping, where different crops are planted in proximity (like alternating rows). This is less susceptible to pests and disease than monocultures, and the plants can be chosen to mutually enhance each other's fitness.
In general, a lot of these techniques also give a healthier ecosystem, with more pollinators and predators of pests. The yields can be excellent and sustainable, but it is more labor. However, there's plenty of bullshit jobs[0] out there, and many people in them might find this kind of work more meaningful. I think a future society would do well to allocate labor with these goals in mind.
In general will translate to
>If we're willing to accept higher costs
We may be willing to accept the first one, but I am absolutely not convinced of the second.
It appears that labor costs are not a significant portion of the price of produce. Of course, this would not apply if automated harvesting had to be replaced by manual labor.
I don't disagree with you though.
The reality is that it means we will HAVE LESS STUFF, food or otherwise, because we are increasing the effort required to generate a unit of food.
It would seem that altermatives which are much more friendly to the planet involve lower yields but of arguably higher quality.
This would mean food would be more expensive, although most western nations eat too much anyway and should appreciate that something as simple as food isn't cheap by definition, especially when we are effectively paying someone else to do all the work.
The other big question is about eating meat (or at least as much meat as we do) since if we could reduce wasted land for animals, we would have more space to grow crops which could make up the shortfall of the lower yields.
Space isn't an issue caused by meat consumption. Further cows often eat the parts of crops we won't like corn stalks.
Cows and other ruminants are kind of miracles and absolutely need to be part of our food supply.
What you are arguing for is a non-starter. Society will not accept higher costs for any duration of time. Some route around the problem that is driving up prices will be found.
They grow foods in hydroponic warehouses with no soil and no pesticides. You can find them in Whole Foods.
I'm a huge fan of urban farming like this.
It would be interesting to see a comparison with conventional farming where the energy to produce fertilizer was included.
When I first heard about Permaculture in the late 80's it was still pretty obscure, and regenerative agriculture in general was "hippie-dippy". Nowadays there are thousand of projects with videos on the youtube, and people are practicing ecologically harmonious farming all over the world. See especially Gabe Brown's talk linked below, he's not replacing current agriculture, just updating it with scientifically-grounded techniques that improve the volume and vitality of his topsoil while being more profitable.
Quoting from some notes I've been keeping:
There's the "Grow Biointensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.
=> http://growbiointensive.org/ Grow Biointensive
(These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.)
## Permaculture
Permaculture could be called "applied ecology" (with a kind of hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative.
For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
=> https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...
=> https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...
There's a very lively and civil forum at
## Syntropic agriculture
=> https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ Syntropic agriculture
(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.)
I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example:
=> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ "Plant Abundance" (youtube)
## Growing Power
If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) *Growing Power* model:
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power
=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4
=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng
They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.
## Regenerative Agriculture
Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of *Regenerative agriculture*, e.g.:
=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" (youtube)
=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU "Symphony Of The Soil" Official Trailer (youtube)
This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather than washing away in erosion.)
## Miyawaki method
For regenerating native forests, not agriculture per se.
What we need are more massive farms, with just one crop, roundup ready seeds, imported fertiliser, etc - all owned by charitable (tax-free!) billionaire foundations for the betterment of us all! Get with the program!
PS I'm being downvoted - but what's the problem? Bill Gates "owns less than 1 percent of the nation’s total farmland" (from https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/bill-gates-purchase-of-north-d...).
"Dacha gardening accounts for about 3% of the arable land used in agriculture, but grows an astounding 50% by value of the food eaten by Russians." (from https://smallfarmersjournal.com/russian-dacha-gardens)
the bottleneck is not exactly land, but cost, manpower, etc. that's why industrial farming dominates the food and feedstock sectors.
It seems to me that people think that if the first farm is more efficient in converting labor, dollars and cheap fuel into food than the second farm, then the first is the most efficient farm across all categories including land use. When one of the pieces changes (for instance fuel costs) then the formula needs to be revisited.
Realizing that personal, scientific and careful management of land yields more food per acre without agri chemical products is an important first step to thinking about the picture even if the low cost of fuel is a current reality.
What I think is important to add to that equation is some dynamism of those prices/costs. Because even though fuel (fertilizer) costs are rising now, it's unlikely that they'll stay high, and changing from one form of industrial scale agriculture to some other is likely even more costly (than bearing years of high fuel costs).
One quite possible scenario is that if fossil fuel use falls so much that production becomes so uneconomic that prices still rise (or remain relatively high).
Of course, eventually as with everything that is eaten by technological progress it's likely that we'll start using a lot more energy (just not from burning fossil fuel) to have better controlled production. (Call it 'vertical farming', but it might look completely different, maybe big domes or ... who knows.)
I have seen quite some permaculture farms, but abundance of food I have never wittnessed, compared to conventional (organic) farming. Rather big talks and low yield.
Don't get me wrong, I believe we could feed the world without the need of mass scale poison, but not while blinded by dogma.
We got through the 20th century without sustainable farming. I'm OK with that, it led to things like me existing. Now it's time to focus a little more effort on doing the job properly.
But I've spent around 10 hours walking behind a weed whacker in the last month. That's not my favorite chore and I'm willing to take some risks to trim it down a bit.
I think that most of the "weeds" are beautiful, I have pictures of many of their flowers on my walls. But I can't afford that beauty near the house in wildfire country. And I'd like to keep my gravelled areas clear, including the driveway and around the structures, and asphalt or concrete aren't options.
If you don't want to use glyphosate that's totally fine, but just know that residential use is essentially a non-factor in these studies.
And there's plenty of wind constantly bringing more volunteers. This time of year I can almost see them growing.
Should that change my weeding strategy?
Using this mix with a battery-powered backpack sprayer is AWESOME.
Edit: Make sure you rinse the sprayer real well afterwards though, vinegar and salt aren’t great for the seals/pump.
I’m under the impression that the roundup from 15 years ago is completely different than what’s in stores today.
Roundups active ingredient is glyphosate and they have added or removed other supplementary ingredients over the years for different reasons. Some are emulsifiers. Others are additional herbicides which may cause quicker "browning" to please the customer
It's an extremely intensively-studied chemical.
Of course while that helps erosion, it doesn't fully solve the problem, and it also took down the flood control benefits the erosion mitigation efforts gave us, too.
That's a bit of a stretch. Really depends on location and crop type. At least around this local village, lots of hills, it is still an issue. As in: every rainfall which is like a tad rougher than average results in several streets being flooded with mud. Totalling several metric tonnes (official measurements, weird these numbers are weight, not volume) of soil disappearing from only a couple of km^2 of farmland every single year. This isn't the type of issue Roundup or anything like that is going to solve, it really need thorough systematic change.
Great point; around me they let the small fields on the hills go back to forest and stopped building little dams. Can still find traces of the horse drawn plowed fields, further up the hills, where they turned furrows to be terraces. Those last got plowed 100+ yr ago in some cases and now stand out from the gullies below them.
I guess nearly every single of the "hardly anyone" are near me. Pretty much every field seems to be tilled every year or every other year.
New chemicals can be introduced and are considered innocent until proven guilty.
This was the entry point for forever-chemicals.
But starvation is less of a problem anymore, largely because of agricultural advances like fertilizers, machinery enabling better practices (like no-till farming) and yes, herbicides and pesticides.
Undoubtedly there are harmful side effects but they need to be viewed with a sensible cost-benefit analysis.
The gluten-free movement, the autoimmune diseases we're seeing, the continuing rise of neurological disorders like ADHD and autism.. they're caused by factory farming. The literature may not have reached consensus on that yet, but the trends are obvious and unmistakable now.
My peer group called this out back in the 90s before it went big, but nobody ever listens to us because 1) I was a teenager and 2) the people I listen to and admire are all poor academics. There was profit to be made!
It took 3 years, but I was finally able to get my digestive troubles into remission. I believe what happened is that my enteric nervous system got disrupted with neuropathy when I went through profound burnout in 2019. So the valves in my digestive system were opening and closing at the wrong times and I developed all kinds of food sensitivities. The cure is to take a B complex every day, specifically B1 (thiamine) and saturated fat to heal the nerves, so bacon and eggs is one of the best things I've found. I take a "stress" B complex that's less concentrated so I can have it every day. I've regained the ability to eat nightshades, but wheat/legumes/milk/nuts are still a problem.
Does anyone know of any startups working to isolate and remove the GMO contamination from crops? There would be considerable money in bringing back pre-GMO crop varieties, since such a large percentage of the population can't eat what's on store shelves now. If we do, our digestion shuts down, we get severe inflammation, we get metabolic syndrome, we get diabetes, our quality of life diminishes to effectively nothing.. you see what I'm saying. They could call the crops heirloom or organic and charge twice as much and I and millions of other people would gladly buy them.
Edit: since science is letting the population down at a level approaching conspiracy, I've embraced magical thinking in my own life. I find that holistic models simply perform better. I learned about the neuropathy issue here (no affiliation):
But the big thing is that they use glyphosate to dry crops like wheat and oats before harvest, which increases the odds of eating a high dose of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation#Systemic_desi...
Basically what's going on is that as they play with crops to make them more resistant to pests, the husks become more and more toxic to humans and at the very least our gut flora.
Which is why I believe that the increased quantity of whole wheat and oatmeal I ate for my weight training over a 20 year period damaged my digestive system. Now there were other causes grant you, like I'm no teetotaler, but the way in which my body started collapsing in 2018 opened my eyes to how things go wrong fast once the immune system is triggered.
Now, the cost of generating GMO seeds is much lower. We have more firms creating GMO with traits beyond herbicide resistance. These genotypes will have value for processors, retailers, and consumers. Be careful to not tarnish the reputation of GMO seeds before we realize their true potential.