Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees
pnas.org
pnas.org
I'll say! What a damning line. How many trial replications does it take to create resultant certainty when each trail loses >80% of it's data?
One question is whether recoverability depends on the effect of the glycophosate.
I heard the main difficulty is being able to do experiments, and it might be too difficult to reproduce the conditions to observe it.
No, it exists in many clades, which include many bacteria. It's most notable for being absent in Animalia. "exist" doesn't need to be in scare quotes, it simply means that animal genomes don't have the genes that encode for this pathway.
The basic premise of the paper - that glyphosate may be affecting animals indirectly via their gut microbiota - is sound enough, but the paper itself is of very poor quality. It follows a pattern of dubious papers critical of glyphosate (e.g. Seralini) that 'throw data against a wall and see what sticks'.
* 20% recollection rate of already small samples (n=80 IIRC, so just over a dozen to compute statistics on, patently absurd).
* No dose response: 10mg/L exposure shows no results, while 5mg/L does.
* The affected microbes appears random and likely a result of poor sampling and multiple comparisons.
The paper is a joke. A bad one. Any of those three issues should result in immediate rejection. Think whatever the hell you want about glyphosate, Monsanto, etc., but science matters and this isn't fucking science.
[1] http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.commonwealthcl...
During the search, I saw bobs had a supplier “pre-treating” fields with glyphosate prior to seeding.
Certification can certainly miss things (hence the lawsuit). But I don’t think you can get much closer to glyphosate-free than organic, except by growing your inputs and the final product yourself.
https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/us-and-monsanto-domi...
Monsanto pretty much dominates the global seed market. I'd be surprised if there is still any truly nature wild seeds in human operated farms. It's simply not economical for farmers to farm on wild seeds any more, which is sad. And I don't trust Monsanto for their seeds either.
https://ejatlas.org/featured/seeds
> Seeds are under attack everywhere. Under corporate pressure, laws in many countries increasingly put limitations on what farmers can do with their seeds and with the seeds they buy. Seed saving, a millenia old practice which forms the basis of farming, is increasingly becoming criminalised.
> This map gives a picture of of the situation across the world today.
I'm not going to debate GMO, but this has zero to do with avoiding residual glyphosate in organic produce.
I don't know - and won't debate, since I don't know - if there is any risk to GMOs.
I don't know what risks there are to persistent glyphosate or AMPA exposure.
But I do know that pesticide resistance is different that pesticide producing in very fundamental ways.
Ruby Red Grapefruit? They made that by putting a nuclear radiation source in the middle of an orchard and seeing what happened. Killed some trees, but somewhere was a grapefruit that tastes better. No scientific study was done.
Organic - random mutations happen every generation, and none of them have ever been studied.
Just some musings from a non-expert.
Looking at it's structure, it's relatively stable. I found many links on it's halflife; ~10-100 days in the environment. If low levels matter, then 10 halflifes might still be a problem.
As a former organic farmer, I can tell you that's incorrect.
But food for consumption isn’t certified alone, the whole farm production system is.
And farms that have recently used glyphosate on a given plot of land generally cannot be certified organic in the USA.
Are you claiming to be a certified organic farmer in the US who has used glyphosate on cropland before planting, been honest with your certifier, and then had your crop successfully certified?
To be certified organic, a formerly non-certified field must have been under an organic plan for a minimum of three years, which specifically must not be marketed as organic, and must not use any synthetic herbicides (again, explicitly, glyphosate is called out as the most common herbicide which must be completely eschewed on that plot of land [0]).
I can’t tell, from a distance, whether the owner of the farm you worked on was concealing their glyphosate usage from their certifier (surprisingly hard, the certification process is pretty intense), or if this farmer was doing uncertified work which is often marketed as “pesticide free” or “no spray”.
Alternatively, some people market crops as “organic (uncertified)”, which doesn’t really mean anything legally, and so a farmer can pretty much do whatever they want as long as they’re not poisoning their customers.
[0] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/GuideForO...
We used glysophate because it technically "doesn't touch the plants meant for consumption", therefore it doesn't matter if it's not organic.
Wind and soil leeching obviously make this untrue, but legally our product was still "organic" as long as we didn't directly spray our crops.