At least one part of TFA plays rather fast and loose with the numbers...
“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.
30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.
Yeah, check the references also.
First off links to news sites, not studies, then the links just point to the front page.
We have this statement in the article:
"Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5"
This one:
5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016)
That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water.
Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.
These 30,000 acres are are not continuous. You don't have one farmer that owns 30,000 acres in one big block. There are a bunch of other farms owned by different people within an area, there might be some small towns in there, etc. Really big farms are more like distributed operations over large areas, with crews of guys, contract harvesting, etc.
It’s still a bizarre statement, as harvesting is a parallelizable operation and harvesting one big farm is no different from harvesting many small farms covering the same area.
“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.
30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.