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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Still probably the safest herbicide, mainly because the competition (organophosphates, etc.) is so much worse.

From an environmental perspective you are probably right. One of the nice things is that glyphosate, unlike most herbicides, is broken down quickly by soil bacteria.

The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.

I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.

I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.

And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.

It's a matter of when, not if, and that _when_ was more than a decade ago. Round-up resistant Kochia (a weed) has spread across Western Canada and was first observed in 2011. Pretty difficult stuff to get out of your field once it takes root.

As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).

https://saskpulse.com/resources/kochia-resistance-update-res...

I have no idea why this is downvoted because it's exactly right. Unlike antibiotic resistance where the consequences can be measured in human lives, it just doesn't matter for weed killers: and the iteration time on new compounds is much faster.

It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry

Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)

Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.

The one I'm seeing now for crops (along with GMO crops to resist it) is Liberty, generic name glufosinate. What's interesting about it is that it's a natural product (although obtained in bulk by synthesis) produced by several species of Streptomyces soil bacteria.

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

What point are you trying to illuminate with this comment?

A 22 caliber is safer than a 40 caliber. But, I still wouldn’t a hole made in me from either.

That people would be on the whole less healthy had glyphosate not been on the market, because other herbicides, all of which were and are in common use, are worse.

It's not a complicated argument.

The alternative is mass starvation.

No, mass starvation would not ensue from having to fight weeds using mechanical means. It would take more work and more fuel, but it is eminently doable if the need is there. Especially if the change would be gradual.

Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.

Increased fuel means a lot more CO2. That is a very significant factor you cannot ignore.

Perhaps if herbicides weren't viable, more work would've gone into developing the mechanical alternatives and we'd have had solar-powered machines removing weeds from fields.

Soil resistance is worse than air resistance, but similar concept. It needs a lot of energy to overcome.

More CO2 compared to what tractors use today, yes. But that is not a lot compared to the rest of the human civilization spend on transportation.

So no, it is not a very significant factor.

Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.

So anything that effects food prices, regardless of magnitude, causes mass starvation?

No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.

Then it's a discussion about magnitude and jumping to starvation is unfounded.

Price increases due to disruption of Ukrainian grain shipments from the war substantially threatened African food stability.

Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).

People are already starving in the world. With higher prices the amount of people starving would be more. It's gonna be ten thousand more or a million more? That's up for debate.

Anything that causes food prices to rise a lot causes starvation yea, when prices go up people consume less.

We have resources for plenty of nonessential expenditures that could be diverted if avoiding starvation was our collective goal. I’m not always sure it would be, but the constraint isn’t a death sentence on its own.

I don't think that is the only alternative. If the end goal is to preserve life for humans, completely nuking the soil into a wasteland, treating it with carcinogens and then allowing a company to genetically modify seeds and copyright them is a pretty bad and short sighted strategy.

Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.

If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.

> If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.

Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.

If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.

I think you meant to write herbicide rather than pesticide.

Ah you're right, glyphosate is the herbicide. We also need the pesticides to keep the yields up.

You both have premises that are too far apart to debate productively; what you're really debating is naturalism vs. technology, scale vs. degrowth, humanism vs. environmentalism. All worthwhile philosophical debates, but you won't get anywhere sniping at each other about them.

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