At least one part of TFA plays rather fast and loose with the numbers...
“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.
30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.
Yeah, check the references also.
First off links to news sites, not studies, then the links just point to the front page.
We have this statement in the article:
"Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5"
This one:
5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016)
That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water.
Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.
These 30,000 acres are are not continuous. You don't have one farmer that owns 30,000 acres in one big block. There are a bunch of other farms owned by different people within an area, there might be some small towns in there, etc. Really big farms are more like distributed operations over large areas, with crews of guys, contract harvesting, etc.
This comes up on HN like quarterly, so for anyone else who is always confused when it does:
Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US.
Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way.
And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.
Seems like the lede was buried... the "acceptable" levels of RoundUp in U.S. food has been increasing from 100 percent to 2,000 percent.
"According to the EPA, between 1993 and 2015, glyphosate MRLs increased by 100 percent to 1,000 percent in the U.S., depending on the crop."
"Current MRLs for glyphosate range from 0.2 ppm to more than 300 ppm, depending on the crop. Between 1993 and 2015, the U.S. EPA glyphosate tolerance levels have increased by a factor of 50 for corn, and 2,000 for alfalfa."
So even without desiccation, we're still "allowed" to ingest several orders of magnitude more probably-carcinogen-related herbicides which screw with our cells and gut microbiome.
> Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US
Or Eastern Canada. As a wheat grower in Ontario, harvest is typically in mid-July. Many months before weather becomes a factor. Really, the only crop we do sometimes desiccate in this part of the world are edible beans. A far cry from the "almost all crops" claim in the article.
Having grown up on a farm in Canada, I'm not sure that using round-up to "ripen" crops is all that common in Canada, either. Certainly, my father never did it, and I don't know of anyone who does. He typically swaths the canola, and he has taken to straight cutting the wheat in recent years.
I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies and agricultural practices we've adopted. Everytime I read about modern, large scale farming I'm a little more disturbed by the norms we're establishing. Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable.
I say the US specifically because unfortunately we seem to be the origin for almost all of the modern, disturbing practices that have become ubiquitous. We've been setting the standard and hopefully we'll make a 180 and start raising the bar.
> I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies and agricultural practices we've adopted.
As someone that grew up on a farm, can you explain why? And also explain why the practices, aka fallow fields, are incorrect? A lot of the subidies and practices we have in place today are direct results of things like the dust bowl.
> Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable.
Have you validated such assumptions? I can guarantee that large scale farming is a lot more nuanced than one can assume in an arm chair style.
Until you've seen what pests can do to a field that hasn't been treated with fertilizer or say herbicide, its really hard to understand why they get used. It is the difference between having a crop to sell, and going out of business and selling off your farm.
This black and white thinking that comes from people that haven't any experience in the chosen field is honestly more annoying. Should we improve? Sure, no farmer would disagree, but would you be ok with increasing your food costs by 5x? 10x? even more? These are the things you ultimately have to consider when you knock modern practices.
There is no free lunch (pun intended) if you ban modern practices. There is a good chance that requiring the things you want makes large scale farming impossible, and results in more people without food at all. I'm not sure that is an overall net positive.
I think subsidies are a good thing, however our current application of them is definitely backwards. Corn is one of the worst crops to subsidize, the whole reason we grow corn is because how absolutely robust and resilient it is as staple crop. However the trade off for being such a strong crop is poor input-output efficiency. I think subsidies need to be applied to more vulnerable crops, some should go to staple crops other than corn, but I think the larger portion of it should go to fruit and vegetable production. I would also like to see some of it given to more sustainable farming practices, with an emphasis in reducing artificial irrigation, reducing artificial fertilizer usage, and maintaining or increasing topsoil depth and soil health, although I have no idea how to properly implement those practice.
Unfortunately I think this will only arise if/when we have a major crisis that results in a large amount of Americans being poisoned. We're really, really bad at preventative measures instead opting for short term profit over long term stability and health.
The amount that farms end up poisoning local rivers, streams etc I thought would be enough of a wake up call but I guess I was too optimistic. Organic foods aren't the answer either sadly, since a lot of the time that's the result from unfounded fears.
I have read somewhere, and i agree with the argument, that the subsidies given to farming in the US is partly in place in order to secure food in case of imported foods not being an option due to sanctions, war or any other reason.
So as long as the farms in the US fulfills this criteria there is no urgent reason for the government to restructure the subsidy criteria, incentives and payouts.
That will never happen unless people start voting with their feet. Look into CSAs in your area. The guy that runs mine is fanatical about using traditional practices—“just compost and hard work”. It’s incredibly satisfying.
I knew of this practice and it always bothered me regarding flour. With fruit, for example, I can wash off any herbicide or pesticide applied to the plant during its growth. However, how do I wash glyphosate or 2,4-d off a bag of ground flour?
I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.
> I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.
There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.
The article notes that Glyphosate is a 'non-contact' herbicide, which means it doesn't kill on contact. It is absorbed into the plant. So in theory your fruit can also contain it, especially if its a Glyphosate-resistant variety.
Unfortunately you just have to avoid it. Wheat, flour and bread isn't processed well in the US. For grains and beans, soak them for 10 minutes in baking soda or 5 minutes in activated charcoal. It doesn't get rid of everything, but it's a solution.
I have to be very careful about wheat products. If I eat the wrong stuff, I get acid reflux, and nasty acne. Some people tell me that I'm allergic to gluten. Others say yeast, because it's mainly crackers and noodles that I can eat. But not all wheat crackers are OK. The only one that I'm sure of is Stoned Wheat Thins, from Canada.
I wonder if it's glyphosate, or some other pesticide.
An interesting topic but there were some really silly speculations that ruined a lot of the piece. Big farms can't combine in stages because they have more diverse terrain? Multiple combines harvesting together are a picture from a horrible dystopia?
I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done.
If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.
The same is true of most businesses, for example, big retailers are more efficient than many smaller retailers. Though I don't think I'd want to live in a world where I can only shop at Amazon or Walmart any more than I'd want to live in a world where only a few corporate farms produce all food.
Efficiency isn't always what's best for the market, and doesn't mean lower prices for consumers.
I haven't taken the need to buy organic that seriously before but this is rather terrifying.
Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.
I agree. I had mostly preferred organics in recent years because I wanted politically to avoid Monsanto, et al. and support a more regional food system. I didn't believe that industrial-scale organics were demonstrably healthier than conventional crops. But this research and a handful of other studies that have appeared on HN recently have changed my thinking. There seems to be more and more evidence that conventionally grown crops are essentially bathed in chemicals that are at best questionable with regard to human health.
Anecdotal I know, but a friend in the crop spraying business told me that plenty of food sold as "certified organic" (at least here in the UK) has been dessicated with glyphosphate too.
There's no real regulation of the organic label, at least in the US. So buying organic just means a larger price tag for dubious quality of produce. You may be getting something totally organic or something using 60 year old pesticides. There's no way to know based on the label.
a couple of weeks ago i heard that people who move to the us lose ~30% of their gut bacteria diversity - here's one paper https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(1831382-5.pdf . most sources claiming a monotonic diet lacking in fibre. could the influence of glyphosat also play a role in this?
Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster. From meal habits, to crop to cattle, to sugar, and obesity. This society is in self destruction mode, and the only good side of it is that as a consequence your pharmaceutical industry is a huge economy that’s discovering new drugs that benefits to the rest of the world.
I wouldn’t expect this to be a sustainable model for too long though.
I think I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to navigate what is actually healthy to eat, and more importantly, what is healthy for my children to eat.
Is there a single, trustworthy authority that can tell me which brands are safe, knowing full well designations like "USDA Organic" are being gamed by companies?
I'm not aware of any such authority. And maybe worse, I doubt that there could be, at the national level. It's not just that designations like "USDA Organic" are gamed. Stuff is just too complicated, and there's inadequate data.
Over the past century, the chemical industry has commercialized numerous novel compounds, maybe 10^5 to 10^6 or more. Although there's been some toxicity testing, of course, we are basically living in the only large-scale, long-term test.
Anyway, to be safest, your best bet is growing your own food, or buying from trusted local producers. And yes, I realize how impractical that is for most people. But no matter where your food comes from, it's arguably safest to eat as low on the food chain as possible.
Short answer: no. Longer answer: buy from farmer's markets, preferably places where you have seen the farm or met the farmer. You can't inspect everything they do, but you can ask yourself, "does this seem like the kind of person who is trying to do things right?" But, also, refer to the short answer, above.
The Organic "designation" has to be adequately enforced for international trading purposes, as well as your own consumer confidence. How did you come to the belief that it is being significantly gamed? Besides rumor and anecdote, have you seen any evidence or quality journalistic reports on the gaming of organic certification?
The article took a long time to get to the point. The idea is that desiccation, if done badly can result in more glyphosate ending up in the grain. There is an idea floating around that glyphosate can affect gut bacteria in humans. No one has tested that so it might be a good idea to do some research.
>Cattle are fed low dose antibiotics in feedlots—not to stave off disease, but because it makes them gain weight more easily than an antibiotic-free cow. It changes their gut microbes so that they grow fat on less food.
Curious if we're externalizing the costs of producing desiccant-free food into our healthcare system. CDC says obesity will cost us $147 billion this year[1]. Does glyphosate save the agriculture industry that much? Has the link even been examined?
Obesity is generally caused by eating too many calories. The real cause of being fat is too many calories and not enough movement. The fault is at the fork, not the farm.
Swathing is definitely still used for alfalfa and grass hay. It may be called "mowing" or just "cutting hay"; it's definitely not chemical desiccation.
Farming is an incredibly inefficient way to keep people alive. The way we have been feeding ourselves must stop. 1. Taking some Ag indoors would help 2. Making synthetic and customized ‘food’ would also make sense. We eat too much and not right. 3. Enormous wastage in the industry. We treat Ag like industry and supply chain is very leaky. 4. It’s imbecility to dig up fossil fuel and release it to create food and use it as fodder to eat more. We are just a fart’s way to create another fart. 5. We need to think of food as fuel and food as pleasure. Let’s farm to create food for pleasure. In a sci-fi world, we should be able to synthesize our own nutritional requirements...but realistically it’s possible to customise individual food needs at diff life stages and consume synthetic food. 6. If I were to imagine a world where this is possible..one could go to a health center once a month and assess nutritional/calorific needs based on health requirements. A monthly supply of food-meds should sustain us. ‘Food’ as we know it now would be for hedonistic purposes. Why shouldn’t this be possible in our lifetimes? I am appalled and horrified and disgusted by what we are doing to this planet in the name of farming. One can’t say one word against large scale farming without being shamed and called anti-science...and then being accused of not knowing the reality of ‘feeding the billions’. Farming has NOT made our lives and our planet better. I am hoping robotics and AI and automation would perhaps make things better by nudging us towards a diff way to farm. Not sure if it will happen in my lifetime. I just think of sci fi story plots instead.
Robotic farming where traverse the fields and selectively nips the weed and kills the unwanted bugs, could probably be done with no chemicals at all. Fertilized could probably also be added very selectively this way.
[+] [-] jessaustin|7 years ago|reply
“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.
30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.
[+] [-] benj111|7 years ago|reply
We have this statement in the article: "Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5"
This one: 5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016)
Googling that gets to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-...
That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water.
Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.
[+] [-] MegaDeKay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Codemonkeyism|7 years ago|reply
Otherwise it would not go on with
"A farm that big would have different soil types [...] It would be hard [...]"
but use "has" and "is" instead of "would have".
[+] [-] Jill_the_Pill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saalweachter|7 years ago|reply
Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US.
Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|7 years ago|reply
Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way.
And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|7 years ago|reply
"According to the EPA, between 1993 and 2015, glyphosate MRLs increased by 100 percent to 1,000 percent in the U.S., depending on the crop."
"Current MRLs for glyphosate range from 0.2 ppm to more than 300 ppm, depending on the crop. Between 1993 and 2015, the U.S. EPA glyphosate tolerance levels have increased by a factor of 50 for corn, and 2,000 for alfalfa."
So even without desiccation, we're still "allowed" to ingest several orders of magnitude more probably-carcinogen-related herbicides which screw with our cells and gut microbiome.
[+] [-] randomdata|7 years ago|reply
Or Eastern Canada. As a wheat grower in Ontario, harvest is typically in mid-July. Many months before weather becomes a factor. Really, the only crop we do sometimes desiccate in this part of the world are edible beans. A far cry from the "almost all crops" claim in the article.
[+] [-] goodcanadian|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: anecdata, I know.
[+] [-] gadders|7 years ago|reply
https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/three-options-for-osr-desiccati...
(Interesting to hear the UK described as the Far North as well :-) )
[+] [-] brd|7 years ago|reply
I say the US specifically because unfortunately we seem to be the origin for almost all of the modern, disturbing practices that have become ubiquitous. We've been setting the standard and hopefully we'll make a 180 and start raising the bar.
[+] [-] mitchty|7 years ago|reply
As someone that grew up on a farm, can you explain why? And also explain why the practices, aka fallow fields, are incorrect? A lot of the subidies and practices we have in place today are direct results of things like the dust bowl.
> Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable.
Have you validated such assumptions? I can guarantee that large scale farming is a lot more nuanced than one can assume in an arm chair style.
Until you've seen what pests can do to a field that hasn't been treated with fertilizer or say herbicide, its really hard to understand why they get used. It is the difference between having a crop to sell, and going out of business and selling off your farm.
This black and white thinking that comes from people that haven't any experience in the chosen field is honestly more annoying. Should we improve? Sure, no farmer would disagree, but would you be ok with increasing your food costs by 5x? 10x? even more? These are the things you ultimately have to consider when you knock modern practices.
There is no free lunch (pun intended) if you ban modern practices. There is a good chance that requiring the things you want makes large scale farming impossible, and results in more people without food at all. I'm not sure that is an overall net positive.
[+] [-] AngryData|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fzeroracer|7 years ago|reply
The amount that farms end up poisoning local rivers, streams etc I thought would be enough of a wake up call but I guess I was too optimistic. Organic foods aren't the answer either sadly, since a lot of the time that's the result from unfounded fears.
[+] [-] thecopy|7 years ago|reply
So as long as the farms in the US fulfills this criteria there is no urgent reason for the government to restructure the subsidy criteria, incentives and payouts.
[+] [-] hyperbovine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomdata|7 years ago|reply
Like the 2014 Farm Bill? I farm outside of the US, but from an outsider’s perspective that seemed like a huge change.
[+] [-] dev_dull|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|7 years ago|reply
There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.
[+] [-] kristianp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reshambabble|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if it's glyphosate, or some other pesticide.
[+] [-] tyu1000|7 years ago|reply
I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done.
If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.
[+] [-] Johnny555|7 years ago|reply
Efficiency isn't always what's best for the market, and doesn't mean lower prices for consumers.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|7 years ago|reply
Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.
[+] [-] cardamomo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorblumesea|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaul|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn’t expect this to be a sustainable model for too long though.
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|7 years ago|reply
Is there a single, trustworthy authority that can tell me which brands are safe, knowing full well designations like "USDA Organic" are being gamed by companies?
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
Over the past century, the chemical industry has commercialized numerous novel compounds, maybe 10^5 to 10^6 or more. Although there's been some toxicity testing, of course, we are basically living in the only large-scale, long-term test.
Anyway, to be safest, your best bet is growing your own food, or buying from trusted local producers. And yes, I realize how impractical that is for most people. But no matter where your food comes from, it's arguably safest to eat as low on the food chain as possible.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strainer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] upofadown|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omegaworks|7 years ago|reply
Curious if we're externalizing the costs of producing desiccant-free food into our healthcare system. CDC says obesity will cost us $147 billion this year[1]. Does glyphosate save the agriculture industry that much? Has the link even been examined?
1. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrispeel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arnoooooo|7 years ago|reply
I don't know the impact this specific technique has on soil life, but I'd wager it can't help.
If we want to keep the soil fertile, and restore CO2 absorbtion to the soil, we need healthy soil !
[+] [-] blueprint|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobush|7 years ago|reply
Robotic farming where traverse the fields and selectively nips the weed and kills the unwanted bugs, could probably be done with no chemicals at all. Fertilized could probably also be added very selectively this way.