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Comment by underbluewaters | Hacker News Reader

For many tasks involving herbicide, there's a choice between these chemicals or labor intensive and exhausting use of heavy machinery and hand tools. There may some day be a proven link between Roundup and cancer. But there is a known high risk using more labor intensive methods. Agricultural work is one of the most dangerous occupations and it's due to tractor rollovers, falls, and lacerations. Suspending the use of herbicide would mean hundreds (thousands?) more gruesome deaths per year.

I've got a small coffee farm with some wild areas that I'm clearing and I started out wanting to do everything "organic". After 1 year it was clear that prepping land the old fashioned way would be significantly more hazardous.

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This is missing the point. The choice you pose can only be made if we're all well informed and make that risk assessment, but we haven't been, so can't. Unless you can tell me how many people have died as a result of exposure to Roundup ( no one knows ), then I don't think your argument has any weight. As an aside, the farmers using these chemicals are the ones most at risk.

Companies claiming their products are safe, when they are not is the real story here, and how even when scientists were warning of dangers in 2001, those warnings were not heeded by regulators in a serious enough manner that it's taken this long to "prove" that the chemicals are unsafe.

What is your definition of "Safe"? Because, to a farmer, a huge piece of machinery that will shred you to pieces at a moments notice is much less safe than a chemical that might give you cancer in a few years.

The huge piece of machinery will come with a huge warning telling you it will cut you to shreds.

When you're well informed about the risks you can take precautions or change your behaviour.

Monsanto has taken California to court to prevent such warnings on Roundup.

> Monsanto has taken California to court to prevent such warnings on Roundup.

Source for this?

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-monsanto-glyphosate-id...

Aside: I get the sneaking suspicion that some high amount of "source?" requests are a more polite way of calling BS.

...especially when it would have taken roughly the same amount of effort to compose the comment as to type "monsanto sues california" into Google.

That link doesn't say that Monsanto has sued California for not wanting that users are waring about Roundup risks.

>...especially when it would have taken roughly the same amount of effort to compose the comment as to type "monsanto sues california" into Google.

Oh, no, I have done that, and the only thing that has appeared is that Monsanto has sued California because they don't want Roundup being classified as carcinogenic.

It is a totally different thing.

So, I ask for the source, because I don't find anything.

So, I repeat, source?

That link doesn't say that Monsanto has sued California for not wanting that users are waring about Roundup risks.

FTA: A listing would also require Monsanto and others offering products containing glyphosate to provide a "clear and reasonable warning" to consumers that the chemical is known to cause cancer, damaging Monsanto's reputation and violating its First Amendment rights, the company said.

This seems pretty simple. Monsanto sued California because of bad testing results on Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate. If the chemical gets added to the CA registry, then Monsanto would have to put the ubiquitous 'known to the state of California to cancer' notice on anything that contains it.

Therefore, they sued to stop this from happening.

Am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing that is not the same "Monsanto doesn't want consumers warned" and "Monsanto doesn't want its products to be listed as carcinogenic and put labels that say it causes cancer".

Surely Roundup and other pesticides have instructions and safety warnings and procedures, isn't?

Agricultural workers die all the time using heavy machinery. If the increased risks from chemical exposure were similar in magnitude they would show up in epidemiological studies (which have been done).

I don't doubt that these chemicals could cause cancer, but if they do it's at a rate that prevents easy detection.

[Edit] -- And to be clear, I'm not advocating that Roundup is safe. Like everything in our food system it should be scrutinized and studied, trade secrets be damned.

"Agricultural workers die all the time using heavy machinery. If the increased risks from chemical exposure were similar in magnitude they would show up in epidemiological studies (which have been done)."

The heavy machinery that you speak of is used for a great many other things than simply weed/foliage control.

So aren't you going to have that infrastructure, and those risks, regardless of what you do with your weeds ?

The more serious problem with this line of reasoning is that the risks of the machinery are confined to the people doing the work, whereas the (possibly much smaller, but less understood) risks are potentially borne by the entire population around their use.

What if your neighbors don't share your risk analysis ?

The people who volunteer to be subject of those long-term studies tend to have little overlap with the demographic exposed to said chemicals. I.e., your average seasonal migrant who's going to work 8 years here then return to their South or Central American home. If they do stay here, they're more often than not seasonal migrants, sans documentation, not the type who'd volunteer to come into a university building twice a year for 20 years to be a medical subject of a study. (These guys likely don't even have base-level medical healthcare).

...or patience works, too. We have been slowly prepping our land by cutting the plants we don't want as soon as they flower. That way, all the non-germinated seeds from prior years are used up, so we don't have a resurgence when we get a good rainfall. And no more seeds fall, as we kill them plants at that sensitive point in their lifecycle when they have expended all their energy, but not yet produced new seeds.

Over 3 years, the weeds are mostly gone, leaving us just with what we have sown, and doing it this way builds plants that naturally "win" vs. weeds, in our particular soil and microclimate.

Yes the only problem is that all it takes is a field near you with some weed and wind to make all that hard work futile.

Futile? Not really -- we have wind and neighboring fields. And sure, some weeds pop in, so you still do have to weed gardens, and do the culling of flowering weeds each year. But their numbers do decrease each year.

> But there is a known high risk using more labor intensive methods.

Which is a different kind of risk. The kind you can mitigate against with training and safety features and the kind people can choose to opt out of. You can choose to work at Walmart instead of a farm if the farm won't compensate you more for the added risk, you can't choose not to eat food.

This argument that the alternative to using Roundup is thousands of deaths per year from tractors rolling over would be laughable, if not coming from a paid shill.

Tractor roll over deaths were eliminated by the 3-point hitch in the 1940's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_hitch

Not a medical oncologist but 2A chems are basically considered "yeah, we can't directly link this to cancer but even healthy adults will want to stay away from this stuff; don't even think about bringing children/elderly/people with compromised immune systems around it". Other chemicals that fall into 2A are tetra-{flouro|chloro}-ethylene[1] and dimethyl sulfate[2].

You can certainly do things 'organically' without having to use Roundup[3]. Some of my hippie friends decided to buy distressed properties in Maine and 'do it all by hand' co-op style. You won't be supplying Walmart and making money hand over fist, you won't be able to use all your land all the time, but at the same time you won't be practicing short-term maximization (a mentality that directly contributed to the first Dust Bowl).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2A_carcinog...

2: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfate) Dimethyl sulfate is carcinogenic[7] and mutagenic, highly poisonous, corrosive, environmentally hazardous and volatile (presenting an inhalation hazard). It is considered a potential chemical weapon.[13]

3: Note that RoundUp is a Monsanto trade-name with a chemical composition that changes nearly, if not every, year due the rapid immunity weeds tend to develop against it. While wildly lucrative, its ecological impact is not unlike the overprescription of antibiotics (antibiotics indiscriminately kill good & bad bacteria :: RoundUp will kill other plants [i.e. not just weeds] that grew in tandem with those other plants to enforce "checks and balances" with a secondary-effect of allowing the rampant proliferation of more harmful weeds)

edit: RoundUp ORIGINAL(tm)[4] (emphasis added) is primarily glyphosate. That's what you get at Home Depot at 5% to keep your lawn nice, green, and dandelion-free. Industrial RoundUp is a) ~40% b) has the warning Wear appropriate protective clothing to prevent skin contact. Applicators and other handlers must wear long-sleeved shirt, long pants, shoes plus socks and protective eyewear". (Again, that's the 'original' formulation. Farmers (at least in South America, I have no knowledge outside of that region, but I'd be willing to bet practices are similar worldwide) use special formulations, often designed for a specific region.) Regardless, glyphosate is still 2A[5] and just because you use it once a season on your lawn at 5% doesn't mean it doesn't cause cancer. If you smoke a cigarette once a year after getting sloshed on New Years eve, your odds of cigarette-related lung cancer increasing are quite slim; if you've been smoking two and a half packs of Reds for 40 years, on the other hand...

[4] http://greenhouse.ucdavis.edu/pest/pmsds/Roundup.PDF [5] https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVo...

> Note that RoundUp is a Monsanto trade-name with a chemical composition that changes nearly, if not every, year due the rapid immunity weeds tend to develop against it.

What's the point of the genetic modification to seeds if they can just breed resistant crop? Do they change the genetic modification frequently too?

The herbicide in Roundup has been glyphosate ever since they introduced the product.

Re your edit: The stuff you are calling industrial Roundup is intended for mixing with water before application. It's sold as concentrate to simplify shipping and storage.

They do seem to vary the additives they use in order to change the treatment properties of the Roundup (better absorption or faster drying time or whatever).

> Not a medical oncologist but 2A chems are basically considered "yeah, we can't directly link this to cancer but even healthy adults will want to stay away from this stuff; don't even think about bringing children/elderly/people with compromised immune systems around it

Healthy adults should want to stay away from red meat?

Also productivity, there would be a lot less food available without it, and I imagine it would be close to impossible to manage pests and diseases in a 200km wide one crop farm.

There is a huge range of pesticides. Also, the US has such a massive food surplus producing less food is a viable option.

The US won't be affected, neither would be Europe the rest of the world well....

It's all nice when we talk about organic food and about being ok with paying 10$ for couple of ecofriendly organic fair traded tomatoes but some one in India won't be able to afford that, heck many people in the US won't be able to afford them either.

Banning GMO's is all nice and dandy but all what we do is push farmers to produce "premium" crops that can be sold at 10 times the price while producing 1/4th of the amount which would leave allot of people hungry.

A framer doesn't care how many people he feeds he only cares about the button line if he can make more money by feeding less people with organic food the fact the some one will go hungry won't really be in that equation.

We produce more than a 10x calorie surplus globally, hunger is a separate issue mostly relating to livestock.

> For many tasks involving herbicide, there's a choice between these chemicals or labor intensive and exhausting use of heavy machinery and hand tools.

Or these chemicals and other, much nastier, chemicals.

This is an excellent point.

So many people forget about the human costs of agriculture.

They also forget about the energy costs and the subsidies. If we had to pay what food really costs agriculture might be considered the sexiest area to work in.

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