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.
