The Weeds Are Winning
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
I buy 30-45% concentrate depending on what is on sale, and dilute to around 10% for new weeds and 20% for full grown weeds. A little dish soap in there helps it wet down the leaves. For lawn weeds, once they are under control, I've been able to keep up with a 1/4 acre lawn with just manual weeding. Good tools help, I have tried a lot of weed pulling gadgets. Using a push mower means I go slow enough to spot them, and if they get too big they jam the mower so I am motivated to pull them while they are still small.
At least I’m curious now..
People have been avoiding learning the smell and taste of several kinds of poison with a great amount of success for thousands of years. Be one of the successful ones.
Anyway, I don't think anybody ever tested that, because that will hurt your nose before you get the chance to drink it.
You may find after a few tries that it smells just like the split second before vomiting.
The only problem is that vinegar destroys spray machines. Even though I rinse through after every use.
Boiling water is really useful too, since the boiling damages the plant in a way that pathogens can enter the plant, which then eat/destroy the roots which usually result in regrowth.
Just today, in that area, two silvery eyes where looking at me. They weren't followed with an animal face or body. Just a weed background, like if an invisible master of mimicry were hiding at plain sight. But if was not an animal, it was a weed. A weed with eyes. True history. The world is full of surprises.
The deploying leafets of an Aquilegia created perfectly symmetrical cups at each side of the stem. Sit in the cups, two identical balls of pure dew looking at me like a baby. It was just a seedling in a crevice when I picked it by a tiny leaf and found a new home for the poor thing. Today it rewarded me with some magical seconds for that.
I would loathe having a garden that smells like vinegar and melted rotten leaves. Things don't need to be like this. There is a lot of fun waiting in the unplanned and untamed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_grain
As far as maintaining fields, area spraying of pesticides and herbicides will be replaced with robots wielding lasers and using AI image recognition to catch pest infestations before they take over entire fields.
That's a very confident prediction for something that sounds quite unlikely to me.
How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
It has a guidance system that is connected to a wheel that is friction attached to the steering wheel and turns it on an old tractor. A newer system with an old tractor - https://youtu.be/t0uIYjOds_o
Newer tractors have this built in. The modern tractor cab is a mini data center. https://youtu.be/ZhOvchjeqgM (and you can see that he's not touching the wheel most of the time)
Laser wielding AI robots already exist, and are being used commercially.
> How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
Aside from these not currently existing, they also have far worse failure modes than robots with lasers. Introducing species for biological control methods have a long and storied history of becoming a problem as bad as or worse than the original problem.
> It’s not just chemicals. Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method. In a classic example from China, a weed called barnyard grass evolved over centuries to resemble rice and thus evade hand weeding.
To Xcode i go!
And I now have an excuse for a new M4 Mac mini.
You’re a genius Navark!
I've been playing with llama-3.2vision-11b and it can't count more than 4 dots.
Which makes way more sense to me as this needs to run on device.
You could also extend it to just tell you the fauna and species of grass in your field etc. I've been looking at mapping a field at my home before starting a permaculture project on it, so a tool like this would be super useful. Image upload would be fine instead of a live video.
Not sure if they'll preferentially target the plants you want gone, but could save on labor.
Well, I'm sold. Where do I buy Palmer amaranth? What about water hemp - is it edible?
Waterhemp is also an Amaranthus species and thus most probably highly edible, though I have no idea if it's palatable.
— R. L. Carson
Weeds are creatures more misunderstood than evil. We should be able to find an use for something that grows fast, digs deep breaking the soil, moves nutrients from deep layers and can live without water. Seems created to feed it to cattle and make humans happy.
The technology we have today isn't too far off from this... weeds are certainly easier than bugs, but both should be feasible.
I've started noticing that this happens all the time, across all fields. Experts disagree, the expert with the most positive outlook is the one whose opinion wins out, and we find ourselves in trouble years/decades later.
I've adopted a "treat every expert as a lawyer" mindset now that has helped illuminate some of this for me. I prefer to listen to podcasts where people in the field talk to each other, rather than someone presenting the information to the layperson. There's a lot of jargon but you can very easily get a sense of (1) what issues does everyone agree on (2) what issues are they bickering on, and what their reasons are
I think the confusion is always the same, laymen listening to industry or company spokesmen who have a profit motives, the scientist have no such confusion.
> Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, "the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant" to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for Monsanto's efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/03/11/148290731/wh...
You can eat weeds, and they turn back into plants or crops.
It's just some word trickery.
There are a lot of benefits to quality, nutrition, environment, and community to growing food at smaller scale, but it is certainly more expensive.
My cats eat plants that somehow seem to grow out of concrete. I have no idea how a plant can even grow out of concrete at all, but it totally works.
It probably has some minerals in it. Is it very nutritious? Probably not.
You can also just eat stinging nettle. Make soup out of it. Free meal. One of the most nutritious plants that is available in almost all western countries, and probably grows outside of western countries too.
It's... I dunno why people don't trust nature or the wisdom in their bodies anymore.
Another example. Eat an apple. You're fine.
Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat that paste, you will die.
Yet we eat apples all day. We trust apples. If something looks, feels and smells edible? Probably fine. Maybe ask a few locals like some birds, cats and dogs because they know nature a little bit better than you do probably.
If you eat in the same way that Werner Herzog makes films, you'll be invincible.
Only if you eat a couple pounds of the seeds. I eat one apple's worth of seeds every time I eat an apple, it's fine.
The resistant gene was isolated from an Agrobacterium strain. And these bacteria have been doing gene editing in plants for hundreds of millions of years, completely naturally. So it was just a matter of time until weeds gained the resistant genes from it. Or evolved them via a different mechanism.
Still, glyphosate bought us at least six decades of relatively weed-free agriculture for staple crops. Resistance is still not universal, so glyphosate will continue working for a while, helping to lower the price of food.
And I'll continue to choose the version grown without glyphosate even though the price is higher.
The EPA says it's not an endocrine disruptor. Numerous studies and experts suggest that it is, although I can't find any major government or NGO that agrees.
I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
EDIT: I'm not religious about this, presumably all the restaurant food I eat is grown with glyphosate. But my local grocery store only has organic produce, I usually buy that since it's convenient and the cost difference is not a big deal.
No, it doesn't.
> I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
Yeah, and I tuned my car to emit extra black smoke for better motor vibration. It now ROARS and consumes more gas, helping to stimulate the economy!
The International Agency for Research on Cancer is part of the WHO.
https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-new...
What am I missing?
High concentration and quantity and long term exposure to glyphosate is probably bad for the farmers spraying, but their listing of glyphosate is completely irrelevant for the consumer buying a crop that was sprayed with it. They never once mention any danger to consumers in that entire article.
Even in that limited case (occupational hazard), the data is mixed, and the IARC says that the US AHS study of 50k pesticide applicators did not find a correlation between cancer and glyphosate. They say that doesn't overrule the other findings.
They are being hyperconservative for the safety of workers. That literally doesn't apply to you, the consumer.
This category includes: carpentry, bracken ferns, aloe vera extract and traditional Asian pickled vegetables, magnetic fields, radio, coffee.
I'm not kidding, go see yourself: https://monographs.iarc.who.int/list-of-classifications (group 2B).
This agency has zero credibility now. No serious agency (EPA, EFSA, etc.) classifies it as dangerous: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2023-07/glyph...
It's like I can cite the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation to say that we should ban electric cars, because they are polluting the air with brake dust.
Specifically,
> A cancer hazard is an agent that is capable of causing cancer, whereas a cancer risk is an estimate of the probability that cancer will occur given some level of exposure to a cancer hazard. The Monographs assess the strength of evidence that an agent is a cancer hazard. The distinction between hazard and risk is fundamental.
> The identification of a cancer hazard should trigger some action to protect public health, either directly as a result of the hazard identification or through the conduct of a risk assessment.
The key thing to recognize here is they are making preliminary assessments of existing lines of research, looking for studies into whether an agent has been associated with cancer in humans, animals, or mechanistically, and characterizing the strength of such evidence, as to whether or not something can cause cancer.
The purpose of doing this is so that other standards bodies can assess the actual dose/response relationship and your probability of getting cancer from levels of exposure. Glyphosate in in group 2A, along with things like being a barber, night shift work, hot beverages, red meat. Lots of things the EPA does not ban.
Why? Because as the organization itself says, hazard does not mean risk. The fact that studies show a robust association between one thing and some increase in cancer incidence, at any dose, does not mean the level of exposure any regular person experiences raises their probability of getting cancer by any meaningful amount we should care about or regulate.
The problem here is you're almost certainly not actually reading the publications of either IARC or the EPA, which are not in conflict with each other. You're reading science journalism, which almost universally presents this in the most misleading, fear-mongering fashion possible to attract eyeballs.
Basically they conclude that the chemical has the potential to increase cancer incidence in some dose. But they are not making any statement about whether glyphosate as used in agriculture increases cancer risk?
IARC's piece in this puzzle is to aggregate research showing something is a carcinogen, but this includes a lot of things that are harmless or even healthy in low doses. Sunlight, for instance, is obviously a carcinogen, but the amount of exposure you want is not zero. X-rays can cause cancer, but the optimal lifetime exposure to x-rays is not zero. Once IARC classifies these things, the purpose is to recommend to other researchers to now go look into these to find dose/response curves in animal to see what a safe and unsafe level actually is.
As far as the EPA has been able to tell, glyphosate at the level any human would ever get exposed to from its use as a pesticide, is safe, even though it's a carcinogen. Think of like being in the same city as smokers exposes you to cigarette smoke in the shared air, but at levels nowhere near enough to meaningfully raise your cancer risk in spite of the fact you're regularly breathing in carcinogens. Living in the same room with a smoker is a lot worse. Actually smoking is even worse than that. Probably don't drink straight glyphosate on a regular basis.
Similarly, you don't want to drink bleach, but cleaning your counter with bleach and then eating off of it is not only perfectly safe, but arguably even better than just eating off the counter beforehand, because bleach disinfects it.
No effects. Weak evidence shown in in-vitro studies is not supported by the animal experiments or statistical data.
And a sidenote, a murine model study with less than 100 specimens in each group is trash-tier, unless the effect is on the level of "We tested it on animals, and none of them survived".
My own feeling is that reducing the amount of farming would also reduce the carbon footprint of farming. I love meat as much as the next person, but widespread meat consumption is not particularly ecological.
Lab-grown meat is probably the quickest route forward that maintains normalcy whilst solving the sustainability issues.
Also, chances are the livestock partly is fed from imported food, for example in winter.
I saw corn fields when I visited England recently. Don't know the extent.
The people like me, willing to eat lab grown meat, already are willing to pay more for more carefully grown meat and just eat less meat in general. We are the minority.
The fake meat industry is currently failing. Probably because their products were hyper processed trash that was usually less palatable than a comparable meat replacement, not healthier in general, and somehow STILL more expensive than real meat.
I agree with you and vouch that I am one such person. I am already in the middle of changing my lifestyle so that in some worst case scenarios I could raise my own hogs and cattle and slaughter them myself. Will be teaching my children and grandchildren to do this.
"Lab grown meat" disgusts me, and though it's hard to say exactly how I'd behave were my ribs visible, right now I think I'd prefer to starve than eat it. Those who say they would eat it seem bizarre to me, and when I'm generous I just assume they haven't given it much thought.
I do not feel as if this is tied to identity politics, I assume that there must be people like me both on the left and right, but also that there are people who would be enthusiastic about it on both sides as well. If I'm mistaken in that regard, then I must say that I have zero insight as to why that would be the case.
Steaks are likely not going away any time soon, but they are not a staple food.
On the other hand, it is pretty certain that it is possible to produce high-quality animal proteins, like whey protein or egg white protein, in a sustainable way and at a lower cost, by cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which can be fed with cheap carbohydrates from cereals and with minerals, unlike the animal cells which require a very complex food.
The company that has achieved the low price quoted above has done this by replacing the animal food that was given previously by everybody to the cultivated cells (e.g. serum and albumin) with some mixture of substances extracted from various vegetables.
It is unlikely that it will be ever possible for the food given to cell cultures to be cheaper than the food given to real chicken. The only chance for lab-grown meat to become cheaper than real chicken meat is given by the fact that only the edible part of a chicken is grown, i.e. the equivalent of a breast or thigh, instead of growing the entire chicken body with many parts that have a low value.
While fungal cultures would be much more efficient than any lab-grown meat, they could provide only protein powder, which could enrich in proteins any vegetable food, but from which it would not be easy to make something resembling a steak.
If it's grown in a lab and tastes like meat, it's lab-grown meat. It doesn't matter if it uses animal cells.
You may not even be able to call it "meat", it still makes no difference. Some people will be extremely offended by the difference, but if you don't force anything most people are always ok with anything that tastes good.
Looks like it’s used for some fruits and vegetables too, but it’s mostly for the ones I listed above.
Do you mean DEKALB, a subsidiary of Bayer Crop Science? Monsanto doesn't sell anything. They closed up shop years ago and sold the assets to Bayer and BASF.
That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Cheaper too and leads to better no-till practices. Despite all the anti-GMO FUD around it, it's just a superior way to farm by basically any metric you look at.
No, not by any metric. Area productivity is smaller, the plants take slightly longer growing, it creates dependency on a greed corporation that showed they will trow you under the bus if they wish...
But it's cheaper.
Yeah none of that is true. Nice try though.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-cl...