Glyphosate: A low toxicity herbicide is the target of a disinformation campaign

Glyphosate suffers from the "superstar" effect. It's so good at what it does that its success draws attention. No one bothers to compare it to alternatives.

A way an orchardist put it to me once: "Making poison is easy - salt and vinegar. The point of using herbicide is to make something less dangerous than what you can make in your kitchen."

However, my understanding is that glyphosate is on its way out the door naturally - it's not so much that the toxicity or public campaigns that did it in so much as it is the rise of resistant weeds. Farmers are moving back to more toxic herbicides like dicamba.

Plants easily become resistant to glyphosate thus requiring farmers to increase the amount they apply to their fields. This increases the environmental concentration turning your "relatively safe" poison into more of a concern.

Anyone remember Michael Clayton? Great film.

>They’re also not applying glyphosate to finished produce items; glyphosate is applied to plants early in the growth phase, well before the actual product (corn, soybean, etc) has been produced.

It's hard to take this person seriously given their ignorance on actual practice (I'll ignore the absolutely asinine comparison of the toxicity of glysophate to acetic acid).

They do spray glysophate on crops after the cereal or seed has been produced. It's called crop dessication. They spray glysophate, diquat, glufosinate, or other herbicides (but primarily glysophate) on mature crops to kill the plants ("dry-down") to speed up and regulate the harvest window.

Of course, Monsanto assures the grower that "when the bulk seed/ grain moisture content is below 30% then residue levels are minimal as at this moisture level there is no longer translocation into the seed/ grain."[1]

But I have my doubts.

Crop dessication has become an increasingly common practice in the United States and Canada since it began in the 1990s with dessicating wheat and barley.

Non-celiac "gluten intolerance" began becoming a "fad" ailment in the early 2000s. There are also voluminous online self-reports of Americans with non-celiac gluten intolerance that have no such reaction in Europe. For some reason.

It is also highly suspicious that cereal crops continously grown for over ten thousand years suddenly starts to trigger symptoms in the general population in the last twenty.

After wheat and barley in the 1990s, crop dessication also started to be performed on canola and soybeans in the 2000s and went on to include sunflowers in the 2010s.

I don't think it's a coincidence that "seed oil" hatred emerged when it did.

Even further, the problem is not even necessarily glysophate in isolation but Roundp specifically. The ingredients of any Roundup formulation are commercially confidential and are not available to the public, but one commonly known and used adjuvant is the surfactant polyoxyethylene amine (POEA).

Experimental studies suggest that the toxicity of POEA is greater than the toxicity of glyphosate alone and commercial formulations alone.

Transparency and the precautionary principle should dominate any discussion of what happens to the global food supply as it is the foundation for human flourishing. Attacking skeptics as "anti-progress chemophobes" is exactly what I'd expect someone on the Monsanto payroll to say.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170904155703/https://monsanto....