So the "animals" mentioned in the title refers to roundworms, a parasite that lives in soil. Not something you exactly want, but also not something you would expect to be targeted by a herbicide.
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.
This whole subject does reveal the duplicity and manipulation of Bayer-Monsanto on this topic, because they use studies on purified glyphosate to make their claims of harmlessness.
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 will always be people who believe the Bayer-Monsanto propaganda. Just like there are people who believe that burning 100m-year-old plant matter is fine. Just like people believe that there are aliens living among us.
There have been countless studies on the matter. Even without the surfactants it's still a nasty substance.
Surfactants are essentially soaps, right? So surely their safety profile is well understood already and glyphosate is the more important component to be researching anyway?
No. It's a common Monsanto/Bayer talking point to minimize these chemicals by calling them "soaps." These chemicals are what allows the active ingredient to permeate tissues. Monsanto/Bayer funds studies with only the active ingredient to mislead people into thinking RoundUp is safe to be sprayed on food.
Are they using an especially unusual choice of surfactant in roundup? Wouldn't it be trivial to just go to one with a better safety profile if it's not the active ingredient? It just doesn't seem like a plausible conspiracy to me that Monsanto would be going to such efforts to hide the side effects of the surfactant they are using. I'm not saying it shouldn't be studied, I'm just saying this doesn't seem like such a huge "gotcha" to me.
Plants have waxy leaves; surfactants which dissolve waxes allow the glyphosate to enter the plant; such surfactants tend to be highly potent (i.e, they'd effectively strip oils from skins cells and get into those cells). Soap probably wouldn't dissolve waxes.
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.
> "(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 the surfactants used are a "trade secret" seems to suggest they are not just soap.
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?
> the product is studied extensively by researchers
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.
>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.
What makes you think a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better qualified to make conclusions on the available evidence than scientists?
Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw conclusions. Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to suggest.
If someone is not qualified as an expert on a given topic themselves, they have no rational basis for evaluating competing and mutually incompatible claims generated by two parties who are each qualified experts. The process devolves into mere sophistry.
>Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw conclusions.
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
Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?
> 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.
> Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?
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
I mean what do you want, 50 scientists saying one thing, 50 scientists saying another and have 50 more scientists making the final decision on what the "truth" is?
How is that any better, considering you just have more scientists that may randomly lean one way or another.
You have no evidence of that. More likely the plaintiff had their own scientific experts who were more persuasive, that's how all technical matters are adjudicated in courts.
Nonetheless, surely the point is well-made that just because 12 jurors or 1 judge decide that a presentation is more persuasive does not say anything about the truth value of the underlying science.
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.
Another factor that makes Monsanto/Bayer look really bad here is that they lost despite having basically an unlimited legal budget with a huge team of lawyers versus this school groundskeeper and their case was so bad they still lost.
> 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.
If it affects future worldwide business, they can spend more to protect overall business.
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).
Seriously, WTF is wrong with people... we repeatedly polluted whole world with harmful substances like lead that killed god knows how many people and damaged in some way everybody else with this kind of logic, yet people have the balls to come up with "innocent until proven guilty by 100 peer reviews" mantra for... MONSANTO
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.
Choosing to blindly believe one side over blindly believing the other side is a dubious approach to these things. I care about environmental issues, and have no love for many aspects of Monsanto’s business and history, but your emotional appeal is extremely unconvincing.
> 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.
Nobody is "blindly believing" that RoundUp causes cancer. There have been numerous cancer cases. There have been studies directly linking RoundUp to cancer. The world's foremost experts on cancer classified RoundUp as a carcinogen. Monsanto has been caught numerous times falsifying studies and paying for studies to be done on only the active ingredient (leaving out the ingredients that make it permeate the cells).
> sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue
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.
It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer in humans. Similarly to tobacco companies Monsanto is subsidizing research that just happens to find no harms with RoundUp. I'm sure it's fine though, no big deal that trace amounts can be found in urine samples from 80% of Americans. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/weedkiller-g...
>It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer in humans.
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?
But only when the advent of RounUp ready crops have we started spraying RoundUp directly onto food. Previously we only consumed RoundUp in trace amounts. It's extremely misleading to exclude the facts.
I appreciate the correction. That said, it doesn't affect the argument that much. At best it changes "almost 5 decades" to "almost 3 decades". I think it's reasonable to say that if people aren't willing to wait 5 decades to "prove conclusively that [thing] causes cancer", that they're not willing to wait 3 decades either. Let me re-ask the question from my prior comment: should delay rolling out cell phones for a few decades just to be sure that they don't cause brain cancer?
Again very misleading argument - anybody can choose to not use phone, or have loud calls and never, ever put any phone closer to 0.5/1m from their head if they are concerned.
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.
>Again very misleading argument - anybody can choose to not use phone, or have loud calls and never, ever put any phone closer to 0.5/1m from their head if they are concerned.
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.
I have to take it at face value to a degree otherwise Monsanto can fire cannons of money at scientists and yell “the science isn’t settled!” until the end of humanity even if roundup really did cause cancer.
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.
I keep getting called for jury selection and it keeps getting called off.
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.
On the other hand, in the Americas it's an invasive species and many crops were doing fine before it's introduction so I'm not sure I'd call it critical for plants health. In the end we can compare yield in fields with roundup applied and those without and compare yields to find out the overall effect on plants.
But the dangers of it affecting other animals' nervous systems the same way it affects roundworms is a serious worry.
Hmm, I was assuming the OP was extending the c elegans result to earthworms since I've never heard of c elegans aerating soil. And now that I go google it I'm seeing lots of stuff on c elegans requiring aerated soil but none on it doing it itself so I think I'm correct in my assumption?
c. elegans help maintain the decomposition pipeline, not soil aeration.
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.
Footnote: Roundworms and Earthworms are different animals.
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.
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
If it show up in your urine, it mean it lasted too long.
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)."
Do you have a source for that? I thought the half-life in soil was 90 days. Certainly would be perplexing as to how various Roundup products work for months to a year.
Do you know if there /are/ any studies done with smaller mammals, out of curiosity? My worry is always that we're poisoning our dogs/cats, where a toxic amount I imagine is much smaller
Of course, but it's still there after drying. dogs/cats sniff the ground, lay on it, eat bugs that have interacted with it, etc. (hopefully not for all of these, but I am sure they do)
Some things completely change character after drying. Permethrin will kill cats while wet (like just after applying topically to a dog), but they wont absorb enough of it dry. And it doesn't really re-wet by just adding water (permethrin for hiking stays on clothes through 30 washes or something).
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.
you're worried about children and adults and not our global society, war abroad, disease, destitution, and human suffering?
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.
Global warming. There is a German entomologist who thinks this is the most likely explanation (or the largest contributor). Iirc the insect population declines everywhere. Also in woodland where roundup is not applied.
One factor could be land use and reduction of the overall richness of our ecosystem. That could be highways, cities, suburbs, timberland, and the coverage of monoculture crops
>Glyphosate discussions always brings out people with strong opinions
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.
Pesticides & herbecides in general are just not safe at the moment and it's been clear they having been causing lots of health problems.
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.
This site seems to promote organic agricultural practices as pesticide-safe but organic farming uses some of the most dangerous pesticides (e.g copper sulfate) precisely because of the anti-scientific requirement that anything used must be of "natural" origin, which is just the naturalistic fallacy. The bias here is clear.
Soil roundworms are not necessarily parasites. Free living ones have huge populations in the soils and sea bottoms. In ecology handbooks there is often shown a study that found more kilograms of roundworms than kilograms of deer living in the same places.
I wonder how much the effect on microorganisms has been studied. I have a small hunch that a lot of the weird reactions people have to various plants can be traced back to glyphosate and its effect on our gut biome.
It's a neurotoxin... according to whom? A search for "neuro" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate turns up 0 matches. However, the same wikipedia article does mention the mechanism of action
>It inhibits a plant enzyme involved in the synthesis of three aromatic amino acids: tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine
> "A significant finding from our study reveals that just 0.002 percent glyphosate, a difference of about 300 times less herbicide than the lowest concentration recommended for consumer use, had concerning effects on the nervous system."
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.
300 times is definitely worrying, but it still seems higher than people would be exposed to. Surely after degradation of the chemical on surfaces, water flushing plants and dilution when ingested, humans would never be exposed to a concentration that high.
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.
These studies always bring out knee-jerk reactions in genpop, but you have to understand what herbicides and GMO crops have done to alleviate global hunger and malnutrition.
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.
I regularly advocate for regenerative agriculture. I have studied and practiced, on a small scale, regenerative methods. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are not needed for the abundance and we would be better off not using them. However, the shift from chemical farming to regenerative practices cannot be forced or rushed. It takes about 3 years to bring the soil back to life and get it working as the plant's stomach and yields to match or beat chemical farming. Forcing a change in land management practices is a recipe for absolute disaster of famine and likely war.
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.
>Due to the higher profitability of regenerative agriculture
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.
Chemical farming happened because the bomb makers wanted to continue selling ammonia and giving ammonia to plants does make them grow big. But, it is a shortcut and destroys the symbiotic relationship with the soil life. Initially the soil still had a lot of organic matter and life in it and it only took a small amount of fertilizer. After killing the soil life there is no nitrogen, carbon, or phosphorus cycle, the OM erodes away, and the remaining dirt becomes compacted. As the soil degrades it has taken continually more fertilizer to keep yields up.
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.
Edible calories per acre per season are one thing. Labor cost per acre are another, and that's the key element we need to figure out if we want to transition. Right now the economics don't work out.
Sri Lanka is an interesting case study. President Rajapaksa suddenly banned using pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. It caused significant reductions in crop yields and ended up costing the country a great deal of money. This article in Vox seems to cover it in a pretty balanced way (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...).
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.
Maximum profit works best if you don't starve to death, and thus continue eating year after year. Even better if you decide you can afford to have a few kids (importantly feed them)
> These studies always bring out knee-jerk reactions in genpop, but you have to understand what herbicides and GMO crops have done to alleviate global hunger and malnutrition.
"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).
Everything involves some harm to people. For example, if you use a tractor to plough that land, you'll be emitting some diesel particulates giving the people in the area worse health.
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.
OTOH how many offspring will you manage to have without these techniques? Probably a lot fewer. Corn yields have gone up 10 fold over the past 100 years. If we use that as proxy for other crops, then the population would be literally decimated (reduced to 1/10th). Assuming no exports and other things that are certainly at play here of course.
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.
This is possibly the first study demonstrating adverse Roundup effects I've read that doesn't have any immediately obvious issues. There could be some, obviously, but it's nothing like using animal strains prone to cancer.
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.
Just to be sure, biologists use a number of model organisms which are well understood. C. Elegans is a model organism for studying genetics and neurophysiology.
Side question: any sign of at least borderline-viable farming techniques without pesticides or herbicides? By viable I mean, as a complete replacement for current agriculture.
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.
If we're willing to accept higher labor intensiveness, there's plenty of very realistic farming techniques that could be reintroduced. For example:
- 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.
Florida farm workers got McDonald's to agree to paying a penny per pound extra for tomatoes where the penny was to go directly to the farm workers' wages. This resulted in a 71% increase in farm worker pay.
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.
Current industrial agriculture isn't physically sustainable in the long run for many reasons (soil loss, depleted aquifers, salinity), so the status-quo isn't a long-term option. Either we figure out how to feed billions of people sustainably, or things will get rather unpleasant in the future.
The problem with the word “costs” is that it’s too easy to conflate this with money, and just think it means spending more of an abstract and essentially unlimited resource (money).
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.
Literally all of societal progress is built on the back of "that thing we used to spend a bunch of time/money on, well we made it cheap and can now redirect that productivity and resources elsewhere" for every conceivable value of "thing", food, clothes, written communication, transportation, energy, consumer junk.
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.
There are several companies that are using machines with computer vision to identify weeds and then either squirt a tiny amount of herbicide (Blue River/John Deere) onto them, or burn them with a laser (Carbon Robotics, others).
Farming is a competition between pests, weather, consumer demands for perfect looking fruit, prices undercut by places with less regulation (or more subsidies), and your actual skill in caring for the farm. It’s a real gamble every year for farmers. This at baseline would raise the costs of food as you’d get less crops per acre or end up seeing retailers go for vendors abroad who still use the chemical and made a larger crop.
I wonder what the energy budget look like for an operation like that. The argument against urban farming is that it is energy intesive and not really space efficient if you include the space needed for the extra energy production.
It would be interesting to see a comparison with conventional farming where the energy to produce fertilizer was included.
More than borderline, there are many many examples these days of people practicing forms of ecologically-informed agriculture that match or exceed the yields of destructive systems and methods.
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.
(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:
(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:
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:
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.
Cheers! I'm working up a kind of catalog or directory of "ecological living". It really seems like we have all the solutions, we just need to "get 'er done!"
You can't run the corporate governance system on permaculture! People managing a small plot of land and getting an abundant amount of clean, good food won't fly.
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!
You are right on target however I am not seeing people here understanding that the tight spot is not land but manpower.
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.
Yeah, people are just completely inoculated against all forms of nuance :D
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.)
that isn't a fair comparison though. Small farms grow high value crops that need a lot of labor, large farms that grow the same crops are even more productive (not by much though), except that there isn't enough demand to support a large farm growing those crops. There is a large demand for corn, so a lot of large farms grow it.
"You can't run the corporate governance system on permaculture! People managing a small plot of land and getting an abundant amount of clean, good food won't fly."
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.
The animal in question is C. elegans, a soil-dwelling roundworm. So, undeniably an animal, but probably not among the first 50 animals that the headline is likely to conjure in the reader’s’ imagination.
In the thread: bunch of tech workers acting like 19th century small farmers. The story here is that chemistry is a blunt tool and in 50 years we won't need it for agriculture. Biocontrols will have totally taken over. In the meantime anything we can do to remove incumbent chemical technologies and create economic room for their replacements is.. important. Why? cause we're gonna need those biocontrols anyway to keep farming at current yields under an evolving pest/weed regime.
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.
Biocontrols have potential, but they have certainly not taken over. We will always use a combination of herbicides, genetic engineering, RNAi, and biocontrols. The key will be finding a balance between these technologies.
We're having a wet year and the weed growth is impressive. I've considered spraying Roundup to help control them but I'm concerned about the affect on my pets. Then I talked to my neighbor who regularly uses Roundup. He said that he sprayed a few weeks ago, and his weeds "just kinda look a little tired" instead of gone. If that's all the result I'd get why take the risk.
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 recommend reassessing what you consider a weed as well. I only pull up stuff with thorns that don't produce edible fruit and anything that might compete with that I've intentionally planted. That means the rest of my yard has dandelions, violets, clover, creeping Charlie, other random wildflowers throughout the grass. Mowing occasionally deals with the baby trees.
Anything growing up through the gravel is a weed. Anything growing more than a few inches tall under a tree near the house, with the potential to be a fire ladder, is a weed.
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.
Glyphosate can take up to 3 weeks to take full effect. There are a handful of resistant weeds. Palmer amaranth (pigweed) is one. Otherwise it is very effective.
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.
What did you do after weed whacker usage? If you didn't remove all cuttings, there's your main problem. (also: 10 hours? how large is that piece of land?)
I removed the cuttings in past years, but it doesn't seem to have an effect. I think every inch of soil is throroughly saturated with a large variety of seeds. After whacking it down it's just a smooth carpet of green. So I gave up on the removal as not worth the effort.
If you leave the cuttings they'll decompose and fertilize the soil, giving advantage to fast growing weeds. Possibly also add nitrogen deposition from surrounding industry/agriculture to that, and you have an ideal cycle for lots of biomass. Mowing like twice a year and removing cuttings on the other hand can and usually does break that cycle, can take some years, resulting in less fierce growth, and more slow-growing species.
Is this a garden of a yard you are maintaining? Cultivating a garden before you see weeds cuts down on the weed seed bank. One of those things that takes rigorous practice for a year or more before it is obviously having a long term positive impact.
It's the opposite of a garden, it's a rural lot next to several million acres of wilderness forest. Everything growing here is a volunteer, there is no lawn, I've planted nothing.
And there's plenty of wind constantly bringing more volunteers. This time of year I can almost see them growing.
I’ve had great luck with a mixture of high-concentrate vinegar, a little dish soap, and some salt. It absolutely puts Roundup to shame. This mix is non-selective though so be careful around the plants/grass you want to keep.
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.
It just depends on what you buy. Read the label, as it's what the law requires anyway.
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
If the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the authority to regulate industrial chemicals along the lines of the FDA's regulation of pharmaceuticals, this type of clinical study would have been required before Roundup ever hit the shelves.
This is not exactly the first study on glyphosate. There are 857 studies on links on the links between glyphosate and Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma alone. Pubmed finds 4,585 studies mentioning glyphosate, going back to 1975.
When Roundup first hit shelves, "soil erosion" was the big concern and it was a miracle chemical that enabled "no till" agriculture. Now erosion is not a concern anymore, hardly anyone does more than disc their fields once a decade.
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.
Now erosion is not a concern anymore, hardly anyone does more than disc their fields once a decade.
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.
not weird at all the the measurements are in mass. Mass is conserved, volume is not. For instance what do you get when you add half a yard of silt to a yard of pebbles? thats right, a yard of silty pebbles
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.
This comment made me chuckle and I think is an excellent illustration.
There's a lot of people in these threads that don't understand how farming works and the sheer scale of the problem with growing plant matter for food and industry. There are people seriously encouraging manual farming as a solution to the worlds food/pest issues. It boggles my mind--have these people have hand worked a field? Even maintaining an acre of garden as a single person would illustrate the amount of effort you have to put in and the low amount of yield you get in return. I'd love to know how people would get 'selected' as field workers. Because I doubt you'd have people rushing out to till fields by hand unless they're pressed into service.
Personally I'd rather deal with a little extra chemical buildup than reinventing a modern slave class.
Nobody would drink a glass of offered liquid from somebody who is clearly acting antagonistically towards them. Beyond that, there's clearly a difference between something being appealing and safe to drink. The way anti-GMO people tout this as a slam dunk is just intellectual laziness.
There it is. The implication that anyone who isn't unquestionably pro GMOs, is against them, no matter the modification or the company pushing it.
I mean, what kind of an anti-science rube uses "intellectually lazy" arguments, such as "asking a guy who said Roundup is safe to drink to actually drink some".
This, from the guy who conflates RoundUp with it's active ingredient glyphosate. Scientific evidence showing RoundUp is significantly more toxic - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17537-w- Hmm, that study was easy to find ...
This, on an article which explicitly calls out how little we know of glyphosate's effect on the nervous system.
This, on an article which notes the terrifying fact that 80% of US urine samples, children included, contain glyphosate.
RoundUp is nasty shit. And I'm not anti-science for being worried about glyphosate in my piss.
The only reasonable study linking glyphosate to bee harm was designed to mimic large-scale farming application. They used huge concentrations and only found disorientation of bees, but not a reduction in bee population.
Glyphosate is not a neonicotinoid, which is class of chemicals you are probably referring to.
I feel like Glysophate is equivalent to leaded gasoline. Everyone knows it's bad for everyone but we keep using it. With some near future where we ban it.
There is a difference. With leaded gasoline it was the chemists who study this stuff that knew it was bad trying to convince everyone else. With roundup it is the non-chemists "bloggers" and conspiracy theorists who know it is bad trying to convince everyone else.
I don't think we will ever understand the amount of death, literally, that Monsanto's products have caused. And what's worse is they were fully aware all along, and still the US government had their back.
Their products have probably caused more deaths indirectly that from the chemicals themselves. Their chemicals are a major reason starvation isn’t a problem (thus saving many lives) and have helped in growing crops so much that we use their byproducts in many things (line HFCS, etc) which has made processed food so incredibly cheap and accessible that we have a diabetes and obesity epidemic.
This is a bit hyperbolic - unless you mean excess deaths caused by obesity, heart disease and diabetes because of how abundant food has gotten.
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.
I think of the GMO/pesticide/herbicide approach like smoking. You may use it for years without issue, but then wake up one day and find yourself unable to eat whole wheat like I did.
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):
Several things, mainly that they introduce genes which create compounds our bodies have never eaten, which increases the likelihood of developing food sensitivities and autoimmune disorders.
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:
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.
But that's only because the originators of the first GMO seeds had to be firms with plenty of capital and R&D capacity ie. chemical companies. They also had the double revenue stream of seeds + herbicide. Herbicide resistance is also the most attractive seed trait in terms of farmer adoption.
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.
I'm not sure why something handling herbicides makes it problematic for eating? Is it because it will then have more herbicides on it or because you feel the incentives behind GMO are off or is their some more immediate problem?
It's more than just food for eating. For instance, in BC they plant GMO round up ready pine, and then spray clear cuts and forest fire areas with round up, so that they can plant mono-culture pine stands. This has caused massive forest fire issues which also results flooding issues, along with biodiversity issues.
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.