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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
“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?
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."
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] user3939382|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimnotgym|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OfSanguineFire|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nickff|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tivert|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gruez|2 years ago|reply
"iPhones are used for one reason, it's profitable for Apple"
"pizzas are eaten for one reason, it's profitable for Pizza Hut"
[+] [-] zzzeek|2 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops#Gly...
[+] [-] jaredhallen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6nf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bongoman37|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] algoatecorn|2 years ago|reply
-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.
[+] [-] xpe|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mbrochh|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] codingdave|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|2 years ago|reply
There’s a meme on social media where people think studies break down into association studies vs casual studies or something.
[+] [-] Podgajski|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] candiddevmike|2 years ago|reply
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486281/
- https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/risk/...
The common message is Glyphosate has a very short (ish) half life in soil. What happens when it enters the water table first?
[+] [-] imglorp|2 years ago|reply
And it's still for sale next to fertilizer in the home box store so you can spray your yard and poison your family.
[+] [-] sokoloff|2 years ago|reply
>* 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).
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8827352/
[+] [-] cbmuser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] vondur|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgrieselhuber|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvdtnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|2 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] gniv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mandmandam|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] improv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuckerconnelly|2 years ago|reply
Isn't basically all water outside hard water? How did public health agencies miss this?
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-mo...
- https://ahrp.org/a-profit-enhancing-policy-shift-trumps-publ...
- https://corporateeurope.org/en/2016/10/monsanto-lobbying
- https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/youll-never-guess-how-much-b...
[+] [-] gniv|2 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] oasisbob|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] plussed_reader|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|2 years ago|reply
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."
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bayer
[1] https://www.bayer.com/en/history/1925-1945
[+] [-] LesZedCB|2 years ago|reply
kill your lawn. plant native shit.
[+] [-] lpernille|2 years ago|reply
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.
I wish there was another way.
[+] [-] stevev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diogenescynic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olyjohn|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tmaly|2 years ago|reply
I had my doubts
[+] [-] tomohawk|2 years ago|reply
https://www.leafscore.com/grocery/glyphosate-free-oatmeal-ev...
[+] [-] declan_roberts|2 years ago|reply
They'll spray a whole field of wheat with the stuff to dry it out. It's not like you can simply wash off your flour before using it.
[+] [-] jonbischke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imchillyb|2 years ago|reply
Nothing is without toxin, all things are toxic. It is only the dose that makes the poison.
'ne quid nimis' Nothing in excess.
There is a reason modern day pharmacology has its roots in these statements. Truth is, even drinking an excess of water will unalive a human.
[+] [-] beeforpork|2 years ago|reply
https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/full-short-term-ban-on-gly...
Or whyelse is it still not forbidden?