Remember when Bayer (who now owns Monsanto) intentionally sold HIV infected blood in South America? The people that own these companies would sell their own grandmother for $5. They’re poisoning the world, as science and litigation they couldn’t buy their way out of has evidenced, and we get people on here “hacktually”ing their defense. Glyphosate is used for only one reason, it’s profitable for Monsanto.
Farmers used to plough fields after harvest. This kills weeds. It also uses a lot of power, so burns a lot of diesel and releases CO2. Ploughing also allows carbon trapped in organic material in the soil to break down and releases yet more CO2 as well as destroying soil structure.
Low/no till farming seeds directly into last year's stubble. This uses much less diesel so releases much less CO2. Organic matter in the soil builds up, trapping more carbon, and improving soil health. But now the weeds grow unchecked and destroy the crop.
A common variation of the above low till method it to 'cultivate' (sort of scuff up) the surface of the soil after harvest. This causes weeds to germinate. Then you spray them with glyphosate (Roundup), and can almost immediately start sowing your crop. This allows you to farm with much less carbon released, lower fertilizer usage (also reducing carbon).
Roundup allows farming with lower inputs and better soil health and less carbon released. That is why so many people defend its use.
Yes, but it causes cancer and chronic disease on a massive scale. I am a farmer who provides most of my family's food and has been for a looong time. I am shocked that you literally just claimed that roundup allows for better soil health. Roundup literally kills the soil over the long term.
> Glyphosate is used for only one reason, it’s profitable for Monsanto.
Farmers love glyphosate because it kills weeds very effectively. It’s hard to exaggerate how much of a neat thing glyphosate was considered in the agricultural world when it appeared. That’s the reason it is used. Now, the reason it is produced and sold is that it is profitable for Monsanto, and regulation hasn’t stopped Monsanto.
This sounds great, except it's been proven the glyphosate is not the ingredient that kills the most weeds, the "inert" ingredients when applied alone are vastly more effective.
I always think it's funny when glyphosate apologists come out in droves to defend their favorite poison manufacturer. Maybe they actually drank the stuff when Bayer/Monsanto said it was safe to drink?
This always takes me a lot longer to find than i hope, since "roundup inert ingredient toxicity" has, you know, hundreds or thousands of DOI attached to it.
as i've heard said - "Inert doesn't mean inactive in this context"
However, I'm still left wondering how Roundup-resistant crops work. It's not the effects of Glyphosate they are resistant to, but rather the effects of the "inert" ingredients?
Edit: Also... it turns out that glyphosate is safe?! Conspiracy theory: they found a safe chemical, glyphosate, named it the "active" ingredient, and focused all the research around that ingredient, knowing that it would be found safe. Then they were free make pesticides from unsafe chemicals, swap new ones in, etc.
re: your edit, yeah, i've often wondered if bayer/monsanto just let that chemical "tank" in the role-playing / MOBA sense, all of the negative publicity, so down the road when they are forced to show data/science - or, they release a new chemical - they can point at glyphosate and say "see, it wasn't even that bad!".
If you look at the literature, say for "roundup inert ingredient toxicity", lots of papers explain that each manufacturer (or different use pesticides from the same manufacturer) will contain different ratios or mixtures of inactive ingredients, and there's a lot of what i consider damning evidence against the surfactants.
Salt and vinegar can do the same. Chemically-intensive pollution and contamination of the food supply, air, soil, and water is a choice. But it's not a Hobson's choice. Go organic.
This is not desirable to anyone who cares about the soil microbiota, and in turn their and their family's microbiome, gut health, long-term health. As always, there is an unbelievably high price to pay for human convenience.
Why would I use inputs, when I can feed a mixed herd of goats, sheep, chickens and pigs to eat your rose and wild parsnip and turn it into food for my family, neighbors and community? But sure, if you want to pay me, I will take payment. At the end of my herd's eating and working your soil, you'll have plenty of manure, green manure (ultimately), and should be ready for planting whatever you want. This is exactly what I do with wild parsnip today. I don't eradicate multiflora rose, but instead, propagate it where I can. My hives work it with great delight, and it makes an unbelievable-tasting honey. Obviously, its also a great edible for us humans, and makes a fantastic tea.
While seasoning your weeds can be tasty and fun, it is significantly more labour intensive than Roundup. The additional hours put in to alternatives stack up quickly.
Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used agrochemical. Its use in agriculture and gardening has been proclaimed safe because humans and other animals do not have the target enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS). However, increasing numbers of studies have demonstrated risks to humans and animals because the shikimate metabolic pathway is present in many microbes. Here, we assess the potential effect of glyphosate on healthy human microbiota. Our results demonstrate that more than one-half of human microbiome are intrinsically sensitive to glyphosate. However, further empirical studies are needed to determine the effect of glyphosate on healthy human microbiota.
...
4. Conclusions
Hence, does glyphosate affect the human microbiota? Contemporary research points to the herbicide’s potential to disrupt healthy microbiomes, including the human microbiome. Several empirical studies have determined the impact of glyphosate-based products on wild- and host-associated microbiota and called to control the potentially negative consequences on environmental health and sustainability. However, further empirical studies are needed to find a “smoking gun” that determines the effect of glyphosate on the healthy human microbiota. Moreover, additional experimental and epidemiological studies are needed to determine these proposed effects of glyphosate-based products on wild and host-associated microbes to control their potentially negative consequences on human health and ecosystem functions and services."
I don't think it's quite as clear as you put it, and Bayer was by no means the worst offender in this regard. Other related scandals are linked to at the bottom of the Wikipedia page, and the Canadian Red Cross (for example) seems to have behaved even more negligently.
One would hope a company (Bayer) that arose out of history of using slave labor, medical experimentation and providing cyanide gas during the holocaust would be a little better corporate citizen than not quite as bad as the other guys.
> Glyphosate is used for only one reason, it’s profitable for Monsanto.
It's used because it's effective broad-spectrum herbicide. My understanding it's quite a bit less toxic than its predecessors, and I understand there's no equivalent replacement on the horizon.
IIRC, the problem was they marketed it as practically nontoxic to humans, which is definitely not the case.
>"We are sympathetic to Mr. Johnson and his family," Monsanto Vice President Scott Partridge said in a statement following the verdict. "Today's decision does not change the fact that more than 800 scientific studies and reviews ... support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson's cancer."
>He confirmed the company will appeal the decision "and continue to vigorously defend this product, which has a 40-year history of safe use and continues to be a vital, effective, and safe tool for farmers and others."
I can’t speak for them, but it’s possible they have more data outside of that specific instance. I don’t know the context of that previous email statement.
E.g., It could have been a statement based on a single study, meaning they can’t make that claim based on that single study. But there may be less uncertainty (meaning stronger claims is more reasonable) when you look at it in the totality of data.
I’m not trying to shill for any mega corp, but it’s important to understand that toxicity is dose dependent. By his own words, Mr. Johnson was “showered” in the pesticide as a groundskeeper and didn’t fully change his garments afterwards.
Now I think Monsanto still has a duty to determine what safe levels of exposure are, but it’s important to not extrapolate this level of risk to the average consumer.
The US lacks effective regulation and the precautionary principle with respect to chemical safety, agriculture, and food safety. Food safety in the US is mostly regulated by the FDA but it is grossly underfunded, understaffed, aspirational, and ultimately laughable. Largely the only ways consumers can protect themselves is by not buying toxic chemicals and avoiding non-organic foods because there is systemic pollution in the supply chain and a lack of safety standards for chemicals.
Making sweeping statements like “The US lacks effective regulation and the precautionary principle with respect to chemical safety, agriculture, and food safety.” tells me nothing other than your opinion.
So there's just no way to convince you then, right? Well for my part I say that all the anti glyphosate studies (not that there are many of them) are financed by competitors in the herbicide market. Just super convenient
Another alternative is that no one did any studies because there's finite amount of people and a lot of other topics to study, topics which are better financed by various conglomerates;)
I would hazard to guess that it’s been on the market for over half a century and has been controversial for eons and mountains of independent research has been done on it by this point notably by national health orgs.
Of course Monsanto is putting its finger on the scales of both the research that is done and the research that is seen but they are not some sort of omnipotent evil.
following that, the most prevalent use for GM crops is herbicide tolerance, where glyphosate is the most common herbicide targeted [1].
If you posted on Hacker News eight years ago that you thought it was a good idea for GM foods to be labeled, you'd be roundly mocked with all the data showing genetic modification is safe (as I'm sure is about to happen here anyway).
That was never what the debate was about and it was a straw man. The debate was over things like this. Why GM was being pushed so hard, by whom, and what that genetic modification implies about the food its associated with. Consumers should have the right to opt out, or at least be aware, of when they are participating in these agricultural markets.
Well go on, don't just eldude to it. Spell it out.
My understanding is that GM is pushed so hard because while farming is the most necessary thing humans do, it's also highly undesirable labor and the pay is shit. It's also risky business, on a long enough timeline every crop fails.
Consumers should grow their own food if they are worried. See how hard it is.
My experience is that 99% of the people who are agasinst Roundup haven't ever done a day's farming.
Monsanto introduced proprietary GMO crops that were resistant to Roundup so you could easily wipe out every plant that wasn’t the crop (aka “weeds”). It was a package deal.
> In 1996, Monsanto introduced the Roundup Ready soybean, a genetically engineered crop resistant to glyphosate. In the few years after, Roundup Ready cotton, maize, and various other crops also made their debut.
Is there a shortage of farm workers ? I live in a rural agricultural town, farms have plenty of workers here who largely come from central and South America . That's like a big part of the economy here. The work being hard / low paying isn't why Monsanto pushed GM so hard, they pushed it so they could patent seeds and sell license fees, as well as a ton of glyphosate.
> My experience is that 99% of the people who are agasinst Roundup haven't ever done a day's farming.
Sounds about right[0].
> Direct on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.3 percent of U.S. employment.
Are farmers somehow not susceptible to conflicts of interest? You suggested it yourself: The work is hard enough as it is, so the last thing farmers have time for is to pressure godlike multinational corporations into investing into alternatives. Who else is supposed to complain?
Not only does it work, it's by far the safest herbicide we've used so far. People love to complain about herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, but they're the same people who would complain if their food was suddenly 8x the price because farm yields would go back to the pitiful amount it was before we had these chemicals.
I've worked in agriculture for a couple years while doing my Biology undergrad. People who used chemicals had a HUGE increase in yields vs others.
Be thankful we're not longer using things like Agent Orange and DDT.
Well, let us know if/when you or your kids get kidney disease or any of the other listed diseases associated with it. I feel knowing the dangers and using it anyway should auto opt-out one out of the class action settlement. Ever try a weed eater or gloves? Gasoline would work just as well, probably less toxic
There is roundup-ready Cotton, Soybeans, Corn and Canola, that I am aware of. My family grows Roundup-ready cotton. The other 2 are used for animal feed; in no case is any farmer going to be spraying it when it is fruiting, because once the weeds have got to that point you've already lost all the benefit of it being 'roundup ready' - where the purpose is for weeds to be killed so they don't take the moisture which is now conserved for the crop.
There are no roundup-ready vegetables that I am aware of, or fruits.
That doesn't mean it won't be applied at any other time if there's weed issues during other periods of the cycle, or that the farmer will apply it at the right time. A lot of farmers don't know when to apply herbicides, or won't until there are issues to save money.
I was working with a farmer who did most of it by hand or machine and he only needed to apply glyphosate twice in his 20 years as a farmer.
Round up or other herbicides are commonly used to uniformly kill and dry out mature wheat, corn, and other grains so harvesting and processing is easier.
Every alternative will kill even more people. Other herbicides are even more dangerous, and not using herbicide will cause food prices to go up. High food prices kill far more people than herbicides do.
There are other alternatives than use a herbicide that kills a certain number of people. The thing is that massive multi-billion dollar companies absolutely try to sabotage any consideration of the safety of their pesticides, because it's so much money to them. If you are a researcher, you'll be getting into a fraught area if you are doing a study to validate it's safety. It's similar to looking into climate science - the crazies will come for you, and probably the pseudo-non-climate-scientist people taking money from exxon.
Glyphosate is used because it is more effective and less toxic than the alternatives, and because it's straightforward to make some plants immune to it.
Let's just take a pause and consider some key information:
-This is an association study
-If we CTLR+F "cause", "causing", "causal", etc, the only mention of causation is with extremely high levels of flouride and another mention with extremely high levels of glyphosate and zebrafish
Now let's zoom way out, and consider the use of glyphosate in general. If you plot grain yields over time compared to herbicide use over time and fertilizer use over time, you can see one thing quite clearly. The use of synthetic inputs, along with plant breeding and genetic engineering, has saved humanity from starvation and allowed unhindered growth.
Any experienced agriculturalist knows this. Any experienced commodity trader knows this. All this talk about commercial farming needing to be eradicated is fantasy talk. There are trade-offs to everything.
When you consider cost/acre and calories/acre, it is also abundantly clear that for all its flaws, modern industrial farming is a technological marvel.
When you look back into the history of herbicides, you can consider glyphosate to be way better than many of the past options. So things are definitely getting better.
As for the demonization of glyphosate, I would say that most of this literature is just provocative headlines for the sake of grant funding. It's very trendy to claim that glyphosate is causing X,Y, and Z. We saw the same thing with MSG as a food additive, and are still dealing with the proliferation of bad science, bad messaging, and a sticky belief system within genpop.
> When you consider cost/acre and calories/acre, it is also abundantly clear that for all its flaws, modern industrial farming is a technological marvel.
Modern farming seems optimized for the wrong thing all too often: cheap calories. Calories are important (for basic metabolic needs) but not the whole story. Nutrient density and sustainable practices are worth promoting.
It's easy to be picky about nutrient density and sustainable farming when you have a full belly. Modern farming techniques have saved the lives of millions of people who would otherwise starve to death.
The only problem is (can’t tell if you intend it) an implied false dichotomy. Why do we have to pick abundant calories or nutritious food? This is a false choice. In the short term, it is a tradeoff given a particular set of technological and economic constraints.
Over the medium and long-term, the constraints change.
If people were wiser, {technological development, economics, and policy} could have led us to a better place.
Perhaps one with a better mix of agricultural offerings: a range of calorie dense & nutrient dense & combinations of both. All at prices that people are willing to pay, which of course depends on subsidies, earning power, and personal values.
Forgive me, but I’m going to preempt one kind of knee-jerk response someone might feel they need to write next: I’m describing a range of possible future outcomes, not a particular political philosophy.
Remember, my point is to reject the false choice. The tiresome (but classic) “next move” for someone would be to move the goalposts and criticize some particular policy they think I’m recommending. I’m not recommending a particular policy. I’m simply saying there are other possible futures that are available to us.
I challenge everyone on (and off) Hacker News to not fall into the obvious ‘debate’ patterns that add minimal value. I’m done with debate. I want to learn, and I want to teach. I’m not here to score points.
Synthesize. Be curious.
What do you all think are the most likely technological advancements that could revolutionize food?
If there was no modern industrial agricultural, probably fewer people would have been born to be at risk of starving to death.
When the synthetic inputs disappear (due to, say, war or supply chain disruption) or the soil is simply too exhausted & eroded altogether, lots of people starve.
People want "sustainable" agriculture so that the system is resilient to shocks. It's possible to have this and feed the same amount of people. Maybe even for a lower percentage of GDP. But it requires a drastically different approach to the problem.
But it seems to me that the populations of those who oppose herbicides like glyphosate, and those who oppose genetically modified crops with say extra niacin or vitamin D, overlap very heavily.
We have a new mental illness, generalized antiscience disorder. Motto: "It is better that a hundred million die of famine or epidemic disease than one person die of cancer."
Why don't you want agribusiness to create patented crops? Nobody's making you plant them. The stories of people unwittingly or unwillingly planting Roundup-Ready crops are easily debunked.
Applied science is all about the balance of harms.
In the paper we have a tenuous chain of correlations with no causal mechanism described.
Glyphosate has unambiguously improved crop yields and quality for decades. The causal mechanism is well understood: it kills weeds that would otherwise outcompete crop plants.
I don't care what other reasons there might be for not wanting GM crops; I was making an observation about populations.
I’m not confident that you see the purpose of my comment in the context it was offered. My point was that “anti-science” is not the sole nor best description for people that have differing viewpoints w.r.t. modern agricultural practices.
Part of the problem more generally is that people literally lose the thread, but another part of the problem is that Hacker News doesn’t really encourage it nor design for it.
Lumping anti-vax people with people that have rational anti-big-agricultural perspectives is muddled thinking. There may be some similarities, but it is an overreach to claim these are the “exact same” principles.
I’d suggest reading some argumentation (such as policy proposals from think-tanks) by rational, pro-science people who criticize the current state of agriculture. After you do this, unless you select some obviously flawed example or fall prey to confirmation bias, you will learn they are _quite_ different than the prototypical anti-vaxxer.
The argument you are making suffers from the false equivalence fallacy. This is the kind of thing that Monsanto would do (and probably does, but I’d need to find proof). By conflating an extreme, poorly-supported viewpoint (anti-vax) with a reasonable one (rational concerns about the state of modern agribusiness), an instigator creates confusion and muddies the waters of public debate.
Tell me you've never had trouble affording enough calories to survive without telling me you've never had trouble affording enough calories to survive.
"Cheap calories" are what keeps the world from starving to death, and incidentally what allows some of us to be software engineers, novelists, and YouTube "influencers", rather than 95% of us being either agricultural serfs or foot soldiers.
That comment doesn't really say anything other than that you believe cost vs. calories is a false dichotomy, but since that's an extraordinary claim, the onus is on you to provide evidence.
> That comment doesn't really say anything other than that you believe cost vs. calories is a false dichotomy, but since that's an extraordinary claim, the onus is on you to provide evidence.
Let's start with this part:
> That comment doesn't really say anything other than
Three things. / First, this comes across as dismissive to many readers. I hope you are aware of this, and I hope you would choose different phrasing next time. / Second, it is a mischaracterization of my comment -- my comment isn't a mere statement of what I believe. There is considerable support for my claims about the _reality_ of how the world works (technological changes, economics, values, etc). / Third, writing one sentence in reply doesn't seem like a good way to make discussion more substantive as it progresses (per HN guidelines).
Now on to this part:
> but since that's an extraordinary claim, the onus is on you to provide evidence.
I get your reference to Russell's tea pot; it is unfortunate you went there; I'm not foisting some made-up thing as real. Nor am I positing some vague extraordinary belief.
Let's me flip this part of your comment on its head:
> the onus is on you to provide evidence.
My comment was lengthy and substantive. As such, it contains plenty of material to dig into. Have you dug into the area I discuss? If so, tell me what you've learned. In particular, why would there be a hard rule across all history and future states suggesting calories and cost are "at odds" with each other? When I state it this way, I think you can see your claim is the harder one to believe.
Also, why is the onus on me to write more? Why is not the onus on you to research more? Or at least write more?
I have one more thing to say about this pazt:
> but since that's an extraordinary claim
You've got it backward. Broadly, it is a much stronger claim to say "X and Y" are mutually exclusive than to say "over the long run, with technological changes, they don't have to be." That's what my comment said.
Again, to drive the point home, I'll state it a slightly different way: given many possible universes with various configurations, consider two quantities X and Y, it would be _much_ less likely for "X and Y" to be mutually exclusive. Do you understand what I'm getting at? This is a fundamental thought experiment based on probabilities.
If you can comment in detail and turn down the dismissiveness, I think a better discussion is possible.
Can you vouch that you have no ulterior motive or conflict of interest on this topic? I have no conflict of interest. My primary goal is rational, high quality, substantive discussion. My ulterior motive, so to speak, is that I believe people don't have to agree, but at the very least we can try to share and maybe even learn from each other.
No, I'm being sincere: you write long responses, which is fine, but they're full of abstractions, and when I tried to make one of them concrete (about patented crops), you fled back into the abstraction rather than confronting and resolving the issue into a concrete position. You're not making substantive points about the topic, just lengthy ones.
I believe you are sincere. One can be both sincere and insulting. Also, I've found your comments to be rather uncharitable and unkind. If I've come across that way to you, I apologize. I was hoping for a better conversation.
Your argument falls apart when you realise that grains are not in any way shape or form part of a proper human diet.
All those bellies that are filled with grains may feel full and therefore won't likely cause much trouble for the elites, but they are really just slowly rotting away and dying (and generating even more income streams for big pharma, owned by the... elites).
If you merely observe thermometers and which days feel hot, you'll see a link but won't be able to tell which way causality goes. If you set the thermometer to a high value in a cold room and notice that you don't get any warmer, you'll quickly realize which way causality flows.
So I agree with the GP post, I want to see them modeling & testing causality here.
Furthermore, evidence from recent studies shows a possible association between chronic pesticide exposure and an increased prevalence of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia.
Actually because of these lawsuits it's becoming hard to find glyphosate in stores. Most roundup has a new cocktail of herbicides which will probably end up being 10x worse than the original glyphosate.
Seeing roundup on shelves at home depot casts a spell. Because it is, it must.
There is no reason for pesticides for residential use. The virginal lawn is an aesthetic and just that. Fads and aspirations can change. Some aspirations are vile, some are virtuous. So let's ban it there. Then, some years after, when that hypnotic waft from the orgiastic excess of Roundup bottles at the garden center has evaporated, let's see how many people will still be carrying water for its industrial use.
I'm really cagey about using chemical pesticide/herbicides but Roundup will probably still be my first choice if I have to use it. It _still_ seems less bad than any of the alternatives.
Often times you're reaching for herbicides to get rid of plants that are otherwise hard to get rid of. Those same plants are ones that thrive in poor soils and conditions. Adding salt will just make the soil even worse for plants you _want_ to grow.
I've tried almost every home remedy available combatting Japanese Knotweed for years, and targeted glyphosate and careful mechanical removal are the only methods that even make a dent.
The goal is to get the grass to generate roots and then this will turn into a nice lush carpet. The thicker the carpet the more competition for resources.
I mow at 6" to keep germinating weeds from getting easy sunlight.
Oh that sucks. Luckily here the city even has flyers on how to have more natural lawns, which works naturally against grubs etc.
We have lots of dandelions, especially close to the street. So do the neighbors though they are the religious once a week mowers.
The trick I find is to let them be beautiful while it's mostly a sea of yellow and then mow as it turns into just ugly stalks with blown away seeds. And have a hedgerow so that you only need to mow the part between that and the street.
I've also sown in clover on purpose. Something many will try to eradicate. Stays green much longer and better in summers when the grass just turns brownish. Some neighbors around us irrigate. I refuse to do that. Very sandy soil to begin with (there's sand pits around) and grass on top of the septic system just doesn't thrive in hot dry summers. So we either get clover green, white and red or brown. Their choice.
Dandelions are pretty and seem to survive far better in my lawn than grass does. So dandelions it is. Can't imagine having neighbours that would complain.
Yes, I have close family that relies upon this method to clear weeds from between brick pavers. "Divided" describes my position well: the vinegar kills some of it, but the walk never gets fully clear. Contrast that with round-up, which would cause the weeds to whither and fall out and leave it clear for a few months.
It definitely smells better than round-up, and you don't have to think twice about it affecting pets...
You can also just use boiling water. Killing above ground vegetative structures is easy.
The problem for most people are perennial weeds with deep storage structures. It's very hard to kill those without a metabolic poison (or lots of labor over long times)
The safety data is clear, that mix is more toxic to humans. Vinegar works in high concentrations that are hard to buy because of how toxic it is. Dish soap generally doesn't biodegrade, so it builds up. Salting the earth is something you do to enemies when you want to starve them out and ensure their land is never useful again.
Yes, it will kill most things. Not great in the fields that need to grow grass for the horses to eat but works on most other things. I also use a propane torch mini flamethrower which is most fun on the Henbane. My disclaimer should I post incoherent comments at times...
It seems like the half-life in water is less than that in soil:
>* From literature studies, glyphosate’s half-life in surface waters and soil ranges from 2 to 91 days and from 2 to 215 days, respectively (Battaglin et al. 2014; Castro Berman et al. 2018).
>glyphosate’s half-life in surface waters ranges from 2 to 91 days
According to new research from Duke University, while it was always thought that glyphosate would break down very quickly in the environment, it seems to stick around a lot longer than we expected when it complexes in hard water.
This new research found that when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to 7 years in water and 22 years in soil.
An actived carbon filter will remove ~99.9% of Glyphosate from water, if for human consumption.
(source water from a ~100ft deep water table next to a large ag plot at a property, have both pre and post filter water tested to validate filtration effectiveness)
Your local university extension should be able to provide this service at a reasonable cost ($100-$500, depending on what is being tested for). There are commercial water testing firms, but I do not have experience with any that I could recommend.
A quality iron/hydrogen sulfide water filter sets you back about $2k, and will last ~10 years or ~500k gallons. If you do not have this in your water, you can safely skip. High iron can lead to iron reducing bacteria scumming up fixtures and, more importantly, rapidly dissolving a hot water heater tank. If you smell sulfur in your hot water when you shower on a well, that bacteria is eating up your tank's anode rod quicker than normally would (I also suggest a powered anode rod, good for 20+ years to keep a tank tip top vs having to replace consumable anode rods, but that is another topic). A three cartridge system will cost you a few hundred dollars for setup, replacing the cartridges roughly every year after ~100k gallons of water has passed through them (~$100-200/year, depending on cartridge filter selection). You can mix and match cartridges for your specific water contaminant filtering needs (sediment, iron, heavy metals, VOCs, pesticides, etc). I would agree with optimizing for use case, but RO systems can be costly and high maintenance depending on the demand put on them. They are ideal for low demand, low flow applications like a kitchen faucet or refrigerator water supply for water and ice. Design accordingly.
Do you measure concerning levels of glyphosate in the pre-filtration water? I've always been curious about this for the sake of my friends who live in rural areas near pesticide dependent farmers.
I send both a sample of raw water right off the well pump before going through any filtration as well as a sample of the filtered water that has gone through a 50 micron spin down filter, an iron and hydrogen sulfide filter, and then a three stage cartridge filter system (containing a 1 micron sediment filter, heavy metals filter, and active carbon filter), the output of which gets sent off as water supply to fixtures, appliances, etc. I have not noted concerning levels of glyphosate, but impurities can fluctuate and water tests are a snapshot in time of water quality.
“Found in drinking water” tells me nothing since current analytical techniques can detect compounds down to parts per trillion or better.
So you’re looking at 1 microgram in a liter of water.
Ok. But does it have any impact at levels like that? Is the impact more or less than the arsenic, mercury and other naturally occurring toxins in drinking water?
If there is one piece of scientific literacy that I wish the entire world had, it was the concept that toxicity is a function of dose.
Yes, fluoride is toxic. The EPA limit for fluoride is 4ppm, and that is probably too high (something like 2ppm would work better). There are parts of the country where the natural incidence of fluoride in groundwater is in excess of 4ppm, and therefore defluoridation needs to be done.
Fluoridation of drinking water is done to a standard of 0.5-0.75 ppm (US Public Health Service specifically recommends 0.7). Most of the country lives in places where the natural ground water concentration of fluoride is below this level, and thus fluoridation is necessary to reach the recommended level.
the real debate is on whether the toxicity of fluoride outweighs the benefits of using it to prevent tooth decay.
we know that it can cause issues. there are also issues that have not been measured.
a lot of folks forget that unless the outcome of X is death or cancer etc ... it is often not studied. your quality of life can be greatly reduced by something but if it doesn't kill you then no one is looking at it.
I won't argue about that being the best solution, but as someone that did not start to take dental health seriously until their 30's I don't think I'm in any position criticize others for their failure to do so.
It is toxic, it's rat poisoning. Do the lower levels of tooth decay outweigh the risks? So far they have decided yes in many places but that is changing (like lead pipes)
Fluoride in drinking water is a kind of truly marginal level of harm that’s perfectly designed to trigger paranoid libertarians.
A tiny amount of fluoride is helpful for bones and especially teeth. Fluoridated toothpaste covers this need perfectly, but many people don’t use it. Fluoride in drinking water covers this need also but (arguably) brings along small risks of symptoms of slight excess fluoride consumption.
The amounts that are actually put in drinking water do not seem to have any significant negative effects, and it seems reasonably clear that the population positive effects dominate, but being non-consensually subjected to a marginal risk of negative effect in order to achieve a positive outcome for the population is exactly the kind of thing that reliably provokes this kind of reaction from the paranoid libertarian set.
You'll notice one key thing is missing: Side by side comparison with communities that don't have fluoride in their water. That could be other countries. Or better, rural US communities that for the most part use well water. Those controls exist.
Note: Better diet also has an impact on oral health, and diet over the last 75 years has also improved.
I'm not saying not including that comparison is wrong, but as "the science" goes, it does feel odd that something so obvious is not included.
Peer-reviewed research isn’t a great standard, imo, for many reasons. There are sources available, ultimately it seems to turn into an ideological battle. FAN [1] probably has the most links out to different sets of research. Really it comes down to making your own decision, which is why I don’t think it should be automatically added to the water supply. Fortunately there are options to remove it.
Depends on the topic. If you're trying to prove (or, more accurately, fail to falsify) a certain set of results or a discovery, open data plus reproducibility should be the gold standard.
If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves. It is not inconceivable that commercial entities finance "peer-reviewed research" in order to support public health policies.
A small but important reframing: I agree that (open data) + (reproducibility) + (review) is a better bar than any one in isolation.
(This applies to empirical sciences only. In contrast, for a mathematical paper, rigorous reviews of the formal logic are the gold-standard.)
I choose the phrase 'review' intentionally; it doesn't need to follow one of the typical [1] 'peer review' processes from a journal. There are likely alternative methods that are (at least as) or (more) effective. Some fields have seen amazing contributions from 'lay people' all across the world.
> If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves.
For a person equipped with the time, skill, rationality, and motivation, I agree. But it is an empirical question to assess how many people have these skills. I also want to push back against what might be an individualistic bias [2] in the statement above. Even if one is an individualist, it isn't optimally efficient nor practical for an individual to 'take on' all this responsibility. It is rational and efficient to place some degree of trust in others.
[1] These processes vary and should be treated with a fair bit of skepticism. I want to to dig in more; e.g. to what degree have these processes been designed to account for human realities so as to maximize quality?
[2]: See also https://so2020.isosonline.org/conference/the-individualist-b... "Individualism claims that social entities (e.g. groups, institutions) are essentially nothing but suitably arranged aggregates of individuals. This is usually tried to be demonstrated through developing accounts of reduction or supervenience. Holism, on the other hand, claims that social entities are sui generis as something over and above individuals."
Peer review means someone knowledgeable about the subject read the paper and didn't spot anything wrong. They almost never attempt to reproduce anything.
Do you have a peer reviewed source on that? Major usually implies 50%+ . Are you saying that 50%+ of the peer reviewed scientific papers out there bogus and fraudulent?
I don’t think 50% or greater is a good standard for defining what we would consider to be a major problem with scientific fraud. I’m sure you’re well aware that “major” can refer to relative impact depending on the context of the issue being discussed. In the case of scientific publishing, I would argue that even 5% fraud rate would be grounds for labeling this as a major problem.
That said, this issue has received a lot of attention in recent years. Some articles try to put a positive spin on it but the stark truth of where we are today is that there are no standards enforced requiring data publishing (“available on request” doesn’t cut it) and reproducibility. This, combined with the amount of money in this industry and the impact that it has on public policy is an acceptable situation.
(This one puts a positive spin on the editorial process but the fact remains that there is a massive flood of fraudulent papers being published. Going back to standards of open data plus verified reproducibility would go a long way to mitigate this problem.
Replicated research. Peer review is when journals ask other researchers to look at a paper and determine whether it's suitable to be published. Attempting to replicate the findings is typically not part of the peer review process, peer review is a sniff test.
It’s fine to disagree, but please add something to the discussion. Remember, HN guidelines say the conversation should get more substantive as it goes on, not less.
This is not a very convincing connection. All they established is that glyphosate is hanging around in water wells longer than expected. There was no causal connection found, no dose-response, nothing. They didn't even test water sources in regions without the CKDu epidemic to falsify the hypothesis.
>They didn't even test water sources in regions without the CKDu epidemic to falsify the hypothesis
They did... "the researchers found significantly higher levels of the herbicide in 44% of wells within the affected areas versus just 8% of those outside it."
Ah thank you, I missed that in my reading of the piece. I will need to dig into the study itself to see how significant the "higher readings" are and how closely they track CKDu, I won't have time for that until later today.
Roundup is a glyphosate-based herbicide used to control weeds and other pests. Because it is supposed to break down in the environment within a few days to weeks, its use is relatively under-regulated by most public health agencies. But when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to seven years in water and 22 years in soil.
Similarly: International aid groups dug wells in Pakistan to alleviate sickness from contaminated surface waters, such as rain water collection. It was successful and dramatically reduced incidence of illness and death from that cause.
It also led to widespread arsenic poisoning from many of the wells.
Actually improving things is tough and even if you succeed, people will focus primarily on any unintended and undesirable consequences. People almost never mention that the wells in Pakistan achieved the intended goal and I full well expect to be met with open hostility and accusations of some sort (apologist, downplaying).
There may well be good reasons to not be more even handed in presenting such info. Or there may not be.
When we start with a presumption of guilt and looking for someone to blame for presumed intentional malice, it frequently interferes with moving towards solutions. Even if you can find someone to blame and successfully indict, it typically doesn't fix the problem.
Few people focus on fixing the problem and trying to discuss solutions is often met with vastly more hostility than finger pointing.
It's a reference to the climate crisis but could very well be a reference to industrial agriculture. Then again, the climate crisis is largely rooted in our agricultural industrial complex. It's wild when I see folks defending the use of glyphosate... the movie does a great job demonstrating this sort of predicament.
edit: looks like I am already being downvoted. outstanding.
I know we're supposed to all pretend they don't exist and never talk about them, per the site "guidelines", but there is no doubt in my mind that Monsanto / Bayer / Roundup / Glyphosate goons are all over this right now.
They swarm over stories like this. They gaslight and toxify, flag and bait.
They're going to hit this one especially hard, because it's so important.
I supposed you could prove me wrong: Try to find a HN thread about glyphosate where no one gaslights, deflects, toxifies or baits.
Any time, in the whole history of HN. One single story, where no one tries to pretend or insinuate that Roundup / glyphosate is perfectly safe, or attack people / studies / lawsuits that suggest otherwise.
The only rule is that it must have at least a dozen comments - there's no need to FUD on stories with no traction. Bonne chance!
> Try to find a HN thread about glyphosate where no one gaslights, deflects, toxifies or baits.
That's an impossible barrier. Not only are those complete subjective traits, that stuff is going to appear in nearly every online discussion, especially one with any sort of controversy attached.
It seems fairly clear to me that the harmfulness of glyphosate (when used as directed) is somewhere between none and inconclusive. Even in cases where it's been grossly misused, any "link" has come significantly short of a causal link since it's usually just a guy who got cancer and also used to work on a farm. Given the prevalence and duration of glyphosate use, compelling evidence should be readily available, just like it was with lead or asbestos. Absence of evidence is very much not evidence of absence but glyphosate has to be the number two most studied chemical behind aspartame, another chemical that's been routinely attacked and routinely proven to be safe.
Given that most of the assertions of glyphosate's harm is coming from the lawyers of people filing lawsuits, I'm not too swayed by their unsupported arguments.
> > Try to find a HN thread about glyphosate where no one gaslights, deflects, toxifies or baits.
> That's an impossible barrier.
I know, right?
The notion Monsanto and Bayer would never stoop so low as to employ propagandists to protect their profits is literally unbelievably naive. As in, I don't believe that you believe that.
> Given the prevalence and duration of glyphosate use, compelling evidence should be readily available, just like it was with lead or asbestos.
You'll never guess what people who sold lead and asbestos used to say about lead and asbestos. Also see the denials of PFAS dangers. And fracking. And lobotomies, thalidomide, tobacco, mercury, etc etc.
> You'll never guess what people who sold lead and asbestos used to say about lead and asbestos. Also see the denials of PFAS dangers. And fracking. And lobotomies, thalidomide, tobacco, mercury, etc etc.
It's not about who said it was safe. It's about who proved it wasn't.
It fucks up ecosystems. It lingers on our food. It bonds with abundant minerals like calcium and magnesium and does unexpected shit. It comes in Roundup with a cocktail of chemicals that increase bioavailability and toxicity. It has links to chronic kidney disease and cancer.
That's scientists saying all this; not just me, and not just "greedy lawyers" as you claimed elsewhere.
If this fits your definition of safe, you have a very unusual one imo.
You're the one who claims to have seen the evidence. If you've seen it, but won't show it to anyone, I'm not going to be convinced of anything other than being suspicious it doesn't exist.
You made several assertions a post ago and I'm skeptical about all but one of them and the one I'm not skeptical about has an implication I am skeptical about.
> It fucks up ecosystems.
In what way?
> It lingers on our food.
Agree but I've not seen this shown to be an issue.
> It bonds with abundant minerals like calcium and magnesium and does unexpected shit.
For example?
> It comes in Roundup with a cocktail of chemicals that increase bioavailability and toxicity.
So glyphosate is not harmful without this cocktail? I don't understand the implication here. It sounds like _Roundup_ is the issue, not glyphosate.
> It has links to chronic kidney disease and cancer.
Cookies have links to chocolate chips. It doesn't mean cookies cause chocolate chips.
"Links" are just that, links. What you want to prove are _Causal Links_. Links require further research and don't prove anything.
If you think that people saying that glyphosate is safe are arguing in bad faith I can see why you'd think there's a lot of disingenuousness around here. I can't speak for other people but I've defended glyphosate in plenty of threads simply because I've seen no compelling evidence of any significant danger from it in general and the specific stories we're discussing are often even weaker, with the comments sections drawing massive conclusions from equivocal evidence.
Take this article as an example, people are drawing some quite radical conclusions from it when if you read the original paper, the data isn't strong and the stats are incredibly weak. The authors are hypothesising a quite long pathway from glyphosate in a country with a ban to water contamination to glyphosate-metal complex to kidney disease. Given the lack of existing compelling literature for this chain (and kidney disease in Sri Lanka has seen a lot of study), I'd want to see some compelling evidence, but this paper isn't it. I'm sure you don't want to argue over one specific case but it does bother me how they brush off the far more significant fluorine so easily, treat glyphosate differently in the analysis to all other contaminants, and didn't consider a dose response calculation over all wells between glyphosate and kidney disease.
This isn't me deflecting or gaslighting. Just disagreeing and trying to do it as intellectually honestly as I can on a subject which is massively important to the modern world.
> If you think that people saying that glyphosate is safe are arguing in bad faith I can see why you'd think there's a lot of disingenuousness around here.
Some people can’t detect astroturf - that’s why it works. Consider that you may be one of them.
> I've defended glyphosate in plenty of threads
Can I see an example? Google couldn't find your name + glyphosate, or + roundup together anywhere.
> I've seen no compelling evidence of any significant danger from it in general
Respectfully, I don't have any idea who you are. I’ve seen compelling evidence. So have many judges, and respected scientists, and health groups.
> This isn't me deflecting or gaslighting.
The way you blow off the link between glyphosate and kidney disease is concerning, tbh, but let's say you’re on the level. That does nothing, absolutely nothing, to dispel the notion that a giant corporation with a long history of evil and greed might employ PR goons to spread FUD and manipulate votes to warp a narrative and protect profits.
I think we're talking past each other a bit. In this moment I'm not trying to persuade you of anything about glyphosate though I obviously disagree with you, just saying that there are plenty of us out here who do argue in good faith and asking you to consider that what may look like astroturfing is just honestly held opinions by people who disagree with you. In this case, I read the article, the paper, skimmed a couple of citations from the paper, the Wikipedia article, and a paper cited in Wikipedia on contaminants, especially fluorine, and kidney disease in Sri Lanka. I found it all quite interesting and didn't do it out of a desire to blow off a link (blowing off work on the other hand...).
Sure, if you find a comment section spammed by new accounts with thin histories that look synthetic, call that out. I'm not even trying to persuade you that it doesn't happen (though to me it would feel like a misallocation of resources to do it to HN if you were going to do it). Maybe I'm bad at detecting it as you say.
As for examples, I've mixed up message boards a bit as well as glyphosate/Monsanto, but here's me from 2017 implicitly arguing that controversy over Monsanto suing farmers is a bit overblown (no pun intended): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794627
From around the same time here's me saying that Monsanto's editing of a paper related to roundup safety was dumb but didn't concern me as far as glyphosate safety: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14974180
In that second link in the wider comments Dang replied to a flagged comment: 'Someone holding a different view than you do is not evidence of bad faith, and the internet trope of you-must-be-a-shill is poison'. I agree with him and it's part of why I enjoy the HN community where this isn't the typical mode of reply.
Your linked comment is a good example of something I'd perceive as either written by a shill, or someone convinced by shilling. You say:
> All of the science still says glyphosate is safe in the concentrations we encounter it in.
What makes you qualified to say that? "Skimming a few papers"?
The kindest thing I could say about that is that it's a dangerous oversimplification, on a thread where Monsanto have been caught red handed doing something "stupid" and immoral.
The interactions between chemicals in Roundup can do much worse than glyphosate on its own - synergistic effects, increased bioavailability, etc. Then there's buildup from constant exposure. Then there's unexpected interactions with minerals in the environment, as suggested in the linked study, etc. And so on.
There's WAY too much smoke to declare a total lack of fire, speaking on behalf of "all of the science", even if you were the head of the IARC (who call out a link to cancer, btw).
> Someone holding a different view than you do is not evidence of bad faith
I don't go around here accusing people with different views of acting in bad faith. But every time - every single time - the topic of glyphosate comes up, I see evidence of shenanigans. Fucky voting, misrepresentations, toxicity, distraction, FUD, outright lies, smears, etc etc. Look for it, and you might start to see it.
If you'd read any of my comments you'd see that there are scientists and institutions with very little to gain coming out against cancer links and kdney disease connections. You could even have simply read the linked OP.
There are lives at stake, and you're dismissing all the research that's a mere Google search away as name-calling - it's abhorrent.
Thanks for the handy example of bad faith sea-lioning though - I had actually forgotten to add that to the list of astroturfing strategies.
I have heard rants about Monsanto’s shill army for over a decade now, not just on HN but on every mid-sized or larger internet community I have ever been on, and not once have I actually seen a single person produce a shred of hard evidence substantiating it. I also notice right, if shills are so common every company ought to be sending their shills to influence HN, but I only ever hear Monsanto, no other big company, and no other big ag company accused of this. It’s not exactly easy to keep a massive long-term shilling operation secret when journalists would be chomping at the bit for a “Monsanto shill army proven” story and be willing to pay for proof.
At this point I’m utterly convinced that Monsanto doesn’t hire any shills and instead just does straightforwards propaganda work where they just convince people with slanted studied that they push to the top of Google search that sway people with reasonable sounding arguments (roundup makes food cheap!) and just wait for them to parrot these arguments and then for them to be accused of shilling making Monsanto’s opponents look unhinged. As evidenced by the plenty of actual evidence that they promote pro-roundup research and the plenty of actual evidence that they advertise stores that make roundup sound more safe.
Do you realize how self-sustaining contrarianism is when people consistently feed the contrarians ego by consistently, and wrongly, accusing them of being shills? Irrespective of who is right or wrong on the broader issue, the people accused of being shills are right that they aren’t shills so it’s basically a dopamine slam dunk to just side with Monsanto and have people line up to give a blatantly wrong opinion (that you are a shill). Which only causes a feedback loop because as the number of people seeking this dopamine hit grows, so does the EVIDENCE of SHILLS EVERYWHERE! Monsanto is best off just sitting back and eating popcorn and not spending a dime on shills.
Buddy, Exxon were caught astroturfing with the entire planet at stake, and suffered no real consequence. Big tobacco did it for decades, and those same companies are still marketing and selling to children in developing countries.
So why do you think "Monsanto" (it's Bayer now, keep up) would be scared of getting caught? Do you think they can't use a VPN, or subcontracting, or any of a hundred well developed ways to maintain plausible deniability? Do you really think "no other big company" gets accused of astroturfing?
You don't seem to have given any of this much thought tbh. Even if it's as you say, lol, why would you be happy with them doing "straightfowards propaganda work"? Have you followed the logical conclusions of your "contrarianism" theory more than a single step? Good luck to ye
The unfortunate overlap between hackers and monsanto is that the climate corporation (owned by them) is actually a pretty big user of the Clojure language.
Indeed, there are many who make so much noise made about how unsustainable and environmentally toxic industrial cattle farming is, but then it's crickets when it comes to how unsustainable and environmentally toxic industrial agriculture is.
This could well be a regional thing, but where I’m from most who decry industrial cattle farming do so along with industrial agriculture. The thinking is that a disproportionate amount of industrial agriculture is done in support of cattle farming. Less industrial cattle farming means less industrial agriculture.
> edit: looks like I am already being downvoted. outstanding.
Either your point stands or it isn't contributing anything. Pointing out that it's being voted one way or the other is frowned upon (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, near the bottom). It might be read that your motivations are emotionally based. Either way, it doesn't make the situation on HN or in the world, any better. +1, because I think that your post is important. Pointing out how this can be a way to characterize Don't Look Up never occurred to me.
I wish HN took place in a physical arena because it would be much easier to identify friends who are operating outside the bounds of honesty, healthy debate and Socratic dialogue - and are just here to praise corporate overlords and protect the popular narrative. This is why I make reference to being downvoted as I genuinely feel a valid criticism is being oppressed by folks with an ulterior motive.
Someone recently asked on a thread - "where have all the hackers gone?" I often ask myself the same question.
My sense is, based on comments I've made and have been down voted, is that every _______ Industrial Complex has actors on HN. Some are likely employees who will naturally stick up for their industry and employer. However, there are plenty of hired-gun PR types who use the down vote to help influence the narrative.
> But when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to seven years in water and 22 years in soil.
Isn't basically all water outside hard water? How did public health agencies miss this?
It's even worse than that. Those are the half-lives. From the paper:
"These glyphosate-metal complexes
increase the half-life of the herbicide dramatically, from 90
days to 7 years in water and 47 days to 22 years in soil."
On the plus side, things should get better soon: "In 2012, Sri Lanka imported >5 million kg of glyphosate until a ban was imposed since 2014."
No, many surface water sources are soft. eg, Seattle and Portland municipal water supplies are both drawn from rivers in local watersheds, and have no appreciable mineral content.
> To this point, Ulrich also found elevated levels of fluoride and vanadium—both of which are linked to kidney damage—in the drinking water of most all of the communities with high incidence of CKDu.
How much of the damage is actually from the hard water and the high glyphosate is a correlation (because of the hard water) and not causation?
The same company that gave us fluoroquinolones such as Cipro, one of the more vile groups of drugs ever mass prescribed to people.
Before that they helped the Nazis perform experiments on prisoners, among other things. Their history is particularly shocking. It makes sense that such an evil corporation would want Monsanto. We're probably lucky they're not directly dumping Roundup into the water supply. [0][1]
[0] "Bayer was particularly active in Auschwitz. A senior Bayer official oversaw the chemical factory in Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Most of the experiments were conducted in Birkenau in Block 20, the women's camp hospital. There, Vetter and Auschwitz physicians Eduard Wirths and Friedrich Entress tested Bayer pharmaceuticals on prisoners who suffered from and often had been deliberately infected with tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other diseases." ...
"Bayer, however, did little to come to terms with its Nazi past. Fritz ter Meer, convicted of war crimes for his actions at Auschwitz, was elected to Bayer AG’s supervisory board in 1956, a position he retained until 1964."
Uh, why is Cipro bad? From the wikipedia article about Cipro: "It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. The World Health Organization classifies ciprofloxacin as critically important for human medicine. It is available as a generic medication. In 2020, it was the 132nd-most-commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 4 million prescriptions."
FDA now advises against using fluoroquinolone antibiotics for the treatment of common infections like acute sinusitis, acute bronchitis, and urinary tract infections (UTI) without complications. The agency made this decision because the chances of serious side effects outweigh the benefits for most people.
Some people who take these medicines may develop disabling and potentially permanent side effects of the tendons, muscles, joints, nerves, and central nervous system.
About half of the patients who had serious side effects from fluoroquinolones said the side effects began after the first or second dose and included:
Long-term pain
Pain, burning, tingling, numbness, weakness
Symptoms affecting tendons, muscles, and joints, including swelling, pain, and tendon rupture
Symptoms that lasted longer than a year
Depression, anxiety , or other changes in mental health
Sensation changes or nerve damage in hands, feet, arms, or legs
Dramatic impact on quality of life such as job loss, financial problems, and increased family tension
Even at industrial scale not much is used on any farm. The standard dosage is measured in ml per hectare. It is heavily diluted with water and then misted on.
people don't spray glyphosate on their lawns. it's a systemic non-specific herbicide that will kill your grass (or any other plant)
you might be thinking of dicamba or 2,4d which are much worse for the environment (and probably for you) and target broadleaf plants only (e.g. dandelions)
glyphosate is most used for cash crop farming, large quantities sprayed on "roundup ready" corn and soy that has been engineered to be immune to it
Yeah, though there are other contact herbicides that tend to work better for that.
Definitely "mini" or "new" potatoes is where this happens a lot. Kill the plant before full maturity so that the tuber stops growing and accumulates starches, then harvest. The potato farms near me do it, it's kinda gross.
I need a ground cover my kids can play on. Clover is a really nice option. The tragedy is that it spreads like a weed, which means my neighbours must accept my choice or install some ridiculous barriers, harming the existing characteristic of us all using each other’s lawn as a common play area.
It would be nice if clover was just kind of the de facto standard.
It tolerates moderate treading (i.e. a family walking on it on occassion or kids playing but not vehicles or wheeled stuff), it uses practically no water, it grows slowly so it rarely needs to be cut, and it only grows a few inches in height at most so often it doesn't need to be mowed at all, and blooms in the spring with tons of tiny little flowers spotted all over your lawn.
It comes in a handful of varieties that all grow between 2-6 inches in height and have a variety of textures or flower colors.
There's nothing wrong with growing grass mixed with clover. Clover on its own tho won't form a complete groundcover.
There's nothing wrong with having a lawn if you don't live in a drought-prone area. It's a lot less work than anything else people suggest. Just run a mower over it every couple weeks. And just plant with grass seeds adapted for your area, mix with clover, and ignore your stupid neighbours.
Clover invades garden beds. It will choke out an edible garden and destroy the aesthetics of an ornamental garden. It will prevent seedlings from thriving. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting clover to invade your garden beds.
Beyond that, they don’t need a reason at all. Imposing one’s beliefs and opinions on a neighbour is the kind of intellectually stunted behaviour that we’re struggling with as a species.
I have 6 acres and deliberately seed all over with white and red clover as a cover crop. Never had a problem with it choking out anything, it's easily managed.
Crab grass and creeping charlie is the problem here. Chokes out everything else.
Maybe it's climate/region dependent, but clover is probably one of the most innocuous things growing here. Fixes nitrogen, is kind of pretty if left to flower, and attracts pollinators.
Yes Roundup will kill your whole lawn, if you apply it to your whole lawn. It will also spot-kill weeds if you apply it just to the weeds. You'll be left with a little dead patch that you can re-seed after a week or so.
I gave up on having a beautiful weed-free lawn a long time ago. The cost and time it takes to keep one is just not a good value for me. So whatever grows, grows. I mow it every couple of weeks.
I just searched for "remove weeds from lawn" and while they do admirably suggest manual removal methods first, the last resort measures are indeed chemical herbicides, including specifically glyphosate
FWIW I have a pristine play lawn without any herbicides. The trick I found was to foster growth of really dense, healthy grass. Theres nowhere for weeds to establish so I have to hand-pick a few dozen in a year.
My favourite is this creeping Charlie vine. It’s so satisfying to get an end up and just gently pull like eight feet of it off mine and my neighbour’s lawn.
It's commonly used in a renovation situation: fertilize and water well in early August to get everything growing, then hit it with two applications of glyphosate spaced about 2 weeks apart to kill everything, then scalp it as low as you reasonably can and seed with quality seed of whatever variety/varieties of grass you want to grow.
If you believe glyphosate is relatively harmless (as compared to a series of 6-10 applications of selective herbicides to achieve not quite as good as the same end result), it's easy to understand why people are inclined to declare bankruptcy on their mess of a lawn and start fresh. Applying it in August, you could have a high-quality uniform lawn by October. (If it's far from harmless, then the series of selective treatments might be better.)
Rototilling to start over just surfaces a bunch of latent weed seeds that are in the top few inches of soil always. To start over, you want to kill everything growing without disturbing the soil and surfacing the weed seeds.
Rototill is much worse for the environment. You have all the CO2 released from the effort. Plus bare ground that will erode away in wind or rain. Then you have all the organic matter in the soil you destory.
Or a little round up and plant grass seed over the top. Much less CO2, and the soil and organic matter stay in place.
I have a growers pesticide applicators license and a big jug of glyphosate in the barn. But I don't use it for that kind of thing because it drifts and damages the perennial plants I care about, and I just feel ... ehh.... about it. And if I grow stuff for market, it's good for pricing and marketing to be able to say it wasn't sprayed.
I have a rototiller for the tractor and I use it sparingly to break ground and then amend with manure and other organic matter, then cover in straw or wood chip. I get a lot of weeds (mostly crab grass and goosefoot), but that's just kind of how it is.
I have another herbicide which targets only grasses, and I use that here and there to try to control crab grass, but not for food plots.
I own about 15 hectares of agricultural land in SE Asia and recently have given up on our manual battle against weeds and have temporarily opted to go for herbicides.
We are presently planting a new batch of trees and the weeds have grown faster than our farmhands ability to keep up and have strangled our saplings. Hopefully after the trees have matured, the amount of sunlight hitting the ground would reduce and this should in turn reduce the weeds ability to grow.
I am fortunate in that I can support the farming from other income sources, but a typical debt ridden farmer in this region would be completely unable to do so.
But using herbicide makes me a bit sad, from a lush biodiverse field we now have something I would describe as a barren wasteland minus our monocrop.
If you discuss this on the internet, shills come out of the woodwork immediately to promote glyphosate. I've never seen such astroturfing for any other topic. For example, there are a handful of super user accounts on reddit that pop up at all hours and only discuss this topic and use extremely well researched talking points and citations.
Except astroturfing is coordinated. It's not a conspiracy. The shills you mention are just people who are well-informed on nuanced topic. A topic that that seemingly affects everyone (because food), and therefore everyone chimes in.
Except most people don't know jack about modern food systems and its history. All they know is: big pharma bad, big ag bad, big food bad.
I disagree that these are just people who are well-informed. The frequency and rapid follow up comments by these shills/power users make it nearly impossible for these people to be doing anything else--it's clearly their full-time job. More likely, it's a shared account that some public affairs/relations company shares and they get alerts via keywords and immediately reply. It's very clearly a highly organized machine.
Then we wonder why people feel so good on ultra-restrictive diets like carnivore. Animals benefit from having a chemical filtration system, called a liver, while all the vegetables and fruits claimed to be healthy are treated with all sort of nonsense that cause long term chronic disease, because we value perfect looking, plump vegetables.
Also lots of people are really susceptible to placebo. The people I see on carnivore diet who feel "so amazing" now, are the same ones who feel so amazing every time they try a new diet.
If the liver is so amazing at filtering all this out of the animals we eat, when why doesn't our liver do it when we eat?
If an animal consumes poisonous food, is injured by the poison (but not killed), then is butchered and none of the poison remains in the meat, then the animal has “filtered” the poison for us.
Our livers and such do filter such things out, but we are injured before/during that filtering.
A vegetable that is coated in some preservative chemical to keep its shiny coating does not filter that chemical out. Additionally, herbicides and pesticides that are sprayed on the plots may or may not be picked up by the crops and may or may not be filtered by those crops before they get to us. Or may or may not be converted to some other chemical that isn’t the same!
It’s such a complex scenario that we cannot know whether we are dosing ourselves with health or behaviour -affecting chemicals unless we spend far, far more money on research (both wide-spread statistical research and hyper-focused chemical pathway research).
Carnivore seems like a good way to get some filtering? It’s hard though, it’s expensive, questionably healthy, and questionably unethical.
It's disingenuous to ascribe health benefits over years to placebo. Placebo works on individual experiments, not in the long-term, because it would not be placebo any more, would it?
> If the liver is so amazing at filtering all this out of the animals we eat, when why doesn't our liver do it when we eat?
That's disingenuous as well. The liver isn't made to filter chemicals that are constantly ingested over a long time, because they tend to accumulate and cause damage. Additionally, how can a human liver have evolved to filter chemicals we have invented in the past 100 years?
When oats are harvested (in most of North America), they are first killed with glyphosate. This ensures that the harvest time is not left to chance, where a rain storm could ruin it. The result is that most things with oats have unacceptable levels of glyphosate. Even organic oats have been tested to be contaminated.
I have never seen that application, as I live in farming central of Michigan.
But I would not doubt someone thinks this is a good idea to speed to-market for extremely large fields. Most of those use contract harvesters on very tight schedules.
Terrifying as someone who has well water. I don't use chemicals to control the weed on the lawn, but who knows what my neighbors are doing. Guess I'm going to switch to bottled water. :-/
Depends on your definition, the smart ones made a killing (literally and probably figuratively) convincing people this stuff is safe. These people will never receive any consequences for their actions, aside from the ones we all collectively face.
Yeah, it’s sarcasm. we put chemicals that miraculously kill biological matter (grass) and then are surprised that bees and kidneys fail. It’s like all the people who need a proof that if you throw garbage into a river it will become dirty and affect the environment.
