Roundup herbicide ingredient connected to epidemic chronic kidney disease
phys.org
phys.org
In conventional/industrial agriculture, its used after harvest and before seeding. In intelligent agriculture , it's used a day before seeding.
So, why Monsanto went all the trouble of developing GMO crops resistant to it, if it is intended just for the weeds?
There are no roundup-ready vegetables that I am aware of, or fruits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation#Systemic_desi...
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.
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.
But the problem is that since as the safety improves so does how people use it. More safe means we can use more since it's not as scary.
It's so safe we can spray it on the wheat two weeks before harvest to make sure it's good and dry. Hopefully it doesn't rain!
Like what? What impact would that have on food prices? Glyphosate costs $10 / acre, or maybe 15 cents per bushel of wheat.
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.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/12/5/707
"Abstract:
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."
Other:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=human+microbiome+glypho...
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"
That's crazy.
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.
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.
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.
"iPhones are used for one reason, it's profitable for Apple"
"pizzas are eaten for one reason, it's profitable for Pizza Hut"
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.
It only introduces the aspect that it might be associated to kidney disease.
Everything is toxic to humans at the right dose, even water.
It sounds like they evaluated the chemical itself but didn't evaluate what could happen to the chemical once it was in the environment.
I bet that's most of evaluations and it's probably not even required to take into consideration the environment and how it can change the response...
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.
Has their marketing stance changed? Or does Glyphosate continue to be marketed as a relatively safe solution?
Roundup is still for sale at Home Depot, they sell massive quantities of it every day.
>"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."
"Safe and effective"
To a layman, this may be heard as “Roundup can cause cancer.”
To a scientist, this may simply mean “There isn’t sufficient data to make a strong claim.”
Same words, two very different interpretations. That’s why lawyers fight so hard for jury selection.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/roundup-ready-crops/
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?
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic....
Eat organic.
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.
-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.
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.
In the US, 40% of this food is wasted.
Over the medium and long-term, the constraints change.
If people were wiser, {technological development, economics, and policy} could have led us to a better place.
Perhaps one with a better mix of agricultural offerings: a range of calorie dense & nutrient dense & combinations of both. All at prices that people are willing to pay, which of course depends on subsidies, earning power, and personal values.
Forgive me, but I’m going to preempt one kind of knee-jerk response someone might feel they need to write next: I’m describing a range of possible future outcomes, not a particular political philosophy.
Remember, my point is to reject the false choice. The tiresome (but classic) “next move” for someone would be to move the goalposts and criticize some particular policy they think I’m recommending. I’m not recommending a particular policy. I’m simply saying there are other possible futures that are available to us.
I challenge everyone on (and off) Hacker News to not fall into the obvious ‘debate’ patterns that add minimal value. I’m done with debate. I want to learn, and I want to teach. I’m not here to score points.
Synthesize. Be curious.
What do you all think are the most likely technological advancements that could revolutionize food?
This is a cliché for a reason. Groan. See my other comment.
When the synthetic inputs disappear (due to, say, war or supply chain disruption) or the soil is simply too exhausted & eroded altogether, lots of people starve.
People want "sustainable" agriculture so that the system is resilient to shocks. It's possible to have this and feed the same amount of people. Maybe even for a lower percentage of GDP. But it requires a drastically different approach to the problem.
"Cheap calories" are what keeps the world from starving to death, and incidentally what allows some of us to be software engineers, novelists, and YouTube "influencers", rather than 95% of us being either agricultural serfs or foot soldiers.
Let's start with this part:
> That comment doesn't really say anything other than
Three things. / First, this comes across as dismissive to many readers. I hope you are aware of this, and I hope you would choose different phrasing next time. / Second, it is a mischaracterization of my comment -- my comment isn't a mere statement of what I believe. There is considerable support for my claims about the _reality_ of how the world works (technological changes, economics, values, etc). / Third, writing one sentence in reply doesn't seem like a good way to make discussion more substantive as it progresses (per HN guidelines).
Now on to this part:
> but since that's an extraordinary claim, the onus is on you to provide evidence.
I get your reference to Russell's tea pot; it is unfortunate you went there; I'm not foisting some made-up thing as real. Nor am I positing some vague extraordinary belief.
Let's me flip this part of your comment on its head:
> the onus is on you to provide evidence.
My comment was lengthy and substantive. As such, it contains plenty of material to dig into. Have you dug into the area I discuss? If so, tell me what you've learned. In particular, why would there be a hard rule across all history and future states suggesting calories and cost are "at odds" with each other? When I state it this way, I think you can see your claim is the harder one to believe.
Also, why is the onus on me to write more? Why is not the onus on you to research more? Or at least write more?
I have one more thing to say about this pazt:
> but since that's an extraordinary claim
You've got it backward. Broadly, it is a much stronger claim to say "X and Y" are mutually exclusive than to say "over the long run, with technological changes, they don't have to be." That's what my comment said.
Again, to drive the point home, I'll state it a slightly different way: given many possible universes with various configurations, consider two quantities X and Y, it would be _much_ less likely for "X and Y" to be mutually exclusive. Do you understand what I'm getting at? This is a fundamental thought experiment based on probabilities.
If you can comment in detail and turn down the dismissiveness, I think a better discussion is possible.
Can you vouch that you have no ulterior motive or conflict of interest on this topic? I have no conflict of interest. My primary goal is rational, high quality, substantive discussion. My ulterior motive, so to speak, is that I believe people don't have to agree, but at the very least we can try to share and maybe even learn from each other.
Cheap calories = people don't starve to death.
"Organic", "free-range", etc. stuff is a luxury for the wealthy.
But it seems to me that the populations of those who oppose herbicides like glyphosate, and those who oppose genetically modified crops with say extra niacin or vitamin D, overlap very heavily.
We have a new mental illness, generalized antiscience disorder. Motto: "It is better that a hundred million die of famine or epidemic disease than one person die of cancer."
The precautionary principle is one.
Not wanting agribusiness to create patented crops is another.
Recognizing that what we mean by nutrient-dense foods are more than just synthesizing more vitamin D or niacin in a plant.
But sure, there is plenty of irrationality to go ‘round too. Just be rational yourself in understanding why people oppose some of these ideas.
I didn’t say that. Please reply to my comment in the context it was offered if you want to discuss.
Precautionary principle is also used by them a lot.
Glyphosate has been used for a long time with massive benefits to humanity.
I would guess it would compare pretty favorable in terms of percent exposed having issues to vaccines.
Part of the problem more generally is that people literally lose the thread, but another part of the problem is that Hacker News doesn’t really encourage it nor design for it.
Lumping anti-vax people with people that have rational anti-big-agricultural perspectives is muddled thinking. There may be some similarities, but it is an overreach to claim these are the “exact same” principles.
I’d suggest reading some argumentation (such as policy proposals from think-tanks) by rational, pro-science people who criticize the current state of agriculture. After you do this, unless you select some obviously flawed example or fall prey to confirmation bias, you will learn they are _quite_ different than the prototypical anti-vaxxer.
The argument you are making suffers from the false equivalence fallacy. This is the kind of thing that Monsanto would do (and probably does, but I’d need to find proof). By conflating an extreme, poorly-supported viewpoint (anti-vax) with a reasonable one (rational concerns about the state of modern agribusiness), an instigator creates confusion and muddies the waters of public debate.
In the paper we have a tenuous chain of correlations with no causal mechanism described.
Glyphosate has unambiguously improved crop yields and quality for decades. The causal mechanism is well understood: it kills weeds that would otherwise outcompete crop plants.
I don't care what other reasons there might be for not wanting GM crops; I was making an observation about populations.
There’s a meme on social media where people think studies break down into association studies vs casual studies or something.
So I agree with the GP post, I want to see them modeling & testing causality here.
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).
Meanwhile humans have been eating grains for millennia.
- 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?
>* 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).
(source water from a ~100ft deep water table next to a large ag plot at a property, have both pre and post filter water tested to validate filtration effectiveness)
https://www.nifa.usda.gov/about-nifa/how-we-work/extension
https://www.isws.illinois.edu/health-environmental-applicati...
Go on.
According to new research from Duke University, while it was always thought that glyphosate would break down very quickly in the environment, it seems to stick around a lot longer than we expected when it complexes in hard water.
This new research found that 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 7 years in water and 22 years in soil.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-roundup-herbicide-ingredient-e...
No, not toxic; you are correct.
we know that it can cause issues. there are also issues that have not been measured.
a lot of folks forget that unless the outcome of X is death or cancer etc ... it is often not studied. your quality of life can be greatly reduced by something but if it doesn't kill you then no one is looking at it.
A tiny amount of fluoride is helpful for bones and especially teeth. Fluoridated toothpaste covers this need perfectly, but many people don’t use it. Fluoride in drinking water covers this need also but (arguably) brings along small risks of symptoms of slight excess fluoride consumption.
The amounts that are actually put in drinking water do not seem to have any significant negative effects, and it seems reasonably clear that the population positive effects dominate, but being non-consensually subjected to a marginal risk of negative effect in order to achieve a positive outcome for the population is exactly the kind of thing that reliably provokes this kind of reaction from the paranoid libertarian set.
https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/basics/cost.htm
You'll notice one key thing is missing: Side by side comparison with communities that don't have fluoride in their water. That could be other countries. Or better, rural US communities that for the most part use well water. Those controls exist.
Note: Better diet also has an impact on oral health, and diet over the last 75 years has also improved.
I'm not saying not including that comparison is wrong, but as "the science" goes, it does feel odd that something so obvious is not included.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34597567/#:~:text=Excess%20a....
Yes, fluoride is toxic. The EPA limit for fluoride is 4ppm, and that is probably too high (something like 2ppm would work better). There are parts of the country where the natural incidence of fluoride in groundwater is in excess of 4ppm, and therefore defluoridation needs to be done.
Fluoridation of drinking water is done to a standard of 0.5-0.75 ppm (US Public Health Service specifically recommends 0.7). Most of the country lives in places where the natural ground water concentration of fluoride is below this level, and thus fluoridation is necessary to reach the recommended level.
What is your recommended alternative?
If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves. It is not inconceivable that commercial entities finance "peer-reviewed research" in order to support public health policies.
That said, this issue has received a lot of attention in recent years. Some articles try to put a positive spin on it but the stark truth of where we are today is that there are no standards enforced requiring data publishing (“available on request” doesn’t cut it) and reproducibility. This, combined with the amount of money in this industry and the impact that it has on public policy is an acceptable situation.
Some good coverage:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
(Lots of links to follow on this above post)
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-massive-databas...
(This one puts a positive spin on the editorial process but the fact remains that there is a massive flood of fraudulent papers being published. Going back to standards of open data plus verified reproducibility would go a long way to mitigate this problem.
(This applies to empirical sciences only. In contrast, for a mathematical paper, rigorous reviews of the formal logic are the gold-standard.)
I choose the phrase 'review' intentionally; it doesn't need to follow one of the typical [1] 'peer review' processes from a journal. There are likely alternative methods that are (at least as) or (more) effective. Some fields have seen amazing contributions from 'lay people' all across the world.
> If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves.
For a person equipped with the time, skill, rationality, and motivation, I agree. But it is an empirical question to assess how many people have these skills. I also want to push back against what might be an individualistic bias [2] in the statement above. Even if one is an individualist, it isn't optimally efficient nor practical for an individual to 'take on' all this responsibility. It is rational and efficient to place some degree of trust in others.
[1] These processes vary and should be treated with a fair bit of skepticism. I want to to dig in more; e.g. to what degree have these processes been designed to account for human realities so as to maximize quality?
[2]: See also https://so2020.isosonline.org/conference/the-individualist-b... "Individualism claims that social entities (e.g. groups, institutions) are essentially nothing but suitably arranged aggregates of individuals. This is usually tried to be demonstrated through developing accounts of reduction or supervenience. Holism, on the other hand, claims that social entities are sui generis as something over and above individuals."
And it's still for sale next to fertilizer in the home box store so you can spray your yard and poison your family.
I use Roundup very carefully to manage bindweed and Bermuda grass. It's the only method practical for home scale and timeline.
It should not be used indiscriminately at industrial scale, where cultural practices are more appropriate and important.
Seeing roundup on shelves at home depot casts a spell. Because it is, it must.
There is no reason for pesticides for residential use. The virginal lawn is an aesthetic and just that. Fads and aspirations can change. Some aspirations are vile, some are virtuous. So let's ban it there. Then, some years after, when that hypnotic waft from the orgiastic excess of Roundup bottles at the garden center has evaporated, let's see how many people will still be carrying water for its industrial use.
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?
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."
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.
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.
Any time, in the whole history of HN. One single story, where no one tries to pretend or insinuate that Roundup / glyphosate is perfectly safe, or attack people / studies / lawsuits that suggest otherwise.
The only rule is that it must have at least a dozen comments - there's no need to FUD on stories with no traction. Bonne chance!
Take this article as an example, people are drawing some quite radical conclusions from it when if you read the original paper, the data isn't strong and the stats are incredibly weak. The authors are hypothesising a quite long pathway from glyphosate in a country with a ban to water contamination to glyphosate-metal complex to kidney disease. Given the lack of existing compelling literature for this chain (and kidney disease in Sri Lanka has seen a lot of study), I'd want to see some compelling evidence, but this paper isn't it. I'm sure you don't want to argue over one specific case but it does bother me how they brush off the far more significant fluorine so easily, treat glyphosate differently in the analysis to all other contaminants, and didn't consider a dose response calculation over all wells between glyphosate and kidney disease.
This isn't me deflecting or gaslighting. Just disagreeing and trying to do it as intellectually honestly as I can on a subject which is massively important to the modern world.
Some people can’t detect astroturf - that’s why it works. Consider that you may be one of them.
> I've defended glyphosate in plenty of threads
Can I see an example? Google couldn't find your name + glyphosate, or + roundup together anywhere.
> I've seen no compelling evidence of any significant danger from it in general
Respectfully, I don't have any idea who you are. I’ve seen compelling evidence. So have many judges, and respected scientists, and health groups.
> This isn't me deflecting or gaslighting.
The way you blow off the link between glyphosate and kidney disease is concerning, tbh, but let's say you’re on the level. That does nothing, absolutely nothing, to dispel the notion that a giant corporation with a long history of evil and greed might employ PR goons to spread FUD and manipulate votes to warp a narrative and protect profits.
Sure, if you find a comment section spammed by new accounts with thin histories that look synthetic, call that out. I'm not even trying to persuade you that it doesn't happen (though to me it would feel like a misallocation of resources to do it to HN if you were going to do it). Maybe I'm bad at detecting it as you say.
As for examples, I've mixed up message boards a bit as well as glyphosate/Monsanto, but here's me from 2017 implicitly arguing that controversy over Monsanto suing farmers is a bit overblown (no pun intended): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794627
From around the same time here's me saying that Monsanto's editing of a paper related to roundup safety was dumb but didn't concern me as far as glyphosate safety: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14974180
In that second link in the wider comments Dang replied to a flagged comment: 'Someone holding a different view than you do is not evidence of bad faith, and the internet trope of you-must-be-a-shill is poison'. I agree with him and it's part of why I enjoy the HN community where this isn't the typical mode of reply.
> All of the science still says glyphosate is safe in the concentrations we encounter it in.
What makes you qualified to say that? "Skimming a few papers"?
The kindest thing I could say about that is that it's a dangerous oversimplification, on a thread where Monsanto have been caught red handed doing something "stupid" and immoral.
The interactions between chemicals in Roundup can do much worse than glyphosate on its own - synergistic effects, increased bioavailability, etc. Then there's buildup from constant exposure. Then there's unexpected interactions with minerals in the environment, as suggested in the linked study, etc. And so on.
There's WAY too much smoke to declare a total lack of fire, speaking on behalf of "all of the science", even if you were the head of the IARC (who call out a link to cancer, btw).
> Someone holding a different view than you do is not evidence of bad faith
I don't go around here accusing people with different views of acting in bad faith. But every time - every single time - the topic of glyphosate comes up, I see evidence of shenanigans. Fucky voting, misrepresentations, toxicity, distraction, FUD, outright lies, smears, etc etc. Look for it, and you might start to see it.
It's all just pointless name calling.
There are lives at stake, and you're dismissing all the research that's a mere Google search away as name-calling - it's abhorrent.
Thanks for the handy example of bad faith sea-lioning though - I had actually forgotten to add that to the list of astroturfing strategies.
At this point I’m utterly convinced that Monsanto doesn’t hire any shills and instead just does straightforwards propaganda work where they just convince people with slanted studied that they push to the top of Google search that sway people with reasonable sounding arguments (roundup makes food cheap!) and just wait for them to parrot these arguments and then for them to be accused of shilling making Monsanto’s opponents look unhinged. As evidenced by the plenty of actual evidence that they promote pro-roundup research and the plenty of actual evidence that they advertise stores that make roundup sound more safe.
Do you realize how self-sustaining contrarianism is when people consistently feed the contrarians ego by consistently, and wrongly, accusing them of being shills? Irrespective of who is right or wrong on the broader issue, the people accused of being shills are right that they aren’t shills so it’s basically a dopamine slam dunk to just side with Monsanto and have people line up to give a blatantly wrong opinion (that you are a shill). Which only causes a feedback loop because as the number of people seeking this dopamine hit grows, so does the EVIDENCE of SHILLS EVERYWHERE! Monsanto is best off just sitting back and eating popcorn and not spending a dime on shills.
So why do you think "Monsanto" (it's Bayer now, keep up) would be scared of getting caught? Do you think they can't use a VPN, or subcontracting, or any of a hundred well developed ways to maintain plausible deniability? Do you really think "no other big company" gets accused of astroturfing?
You don't seem to have given any of this much thought tbh. Even if it's as you say, lol, why would you be happy with them doing "straightfowards propaganda work"? Have you followed the logical conclusions of your "contrarianism" theory more than a single step? Good luck to ye
That's an impossible barrier. Not only are those complete subjective traits, that stuff is going to appear in nearly every online discussion, especially one with any sort of controversy attached.
It seems fairly clear to me that the harmfulness of glyphosate (when used as directed) is somewhere between none and inconclusive. Even in cases where it's been grossly misused, any "link" has come significantly short of a causal link since it's usually just a guy who got cancer and also used to work on a farm. Given the prevalence and duration of glyphosate use, compelling evidence should be readily available, just like it was with lead or asbestos. Absence of evidence is very much not evidence of absence but glyphosate has to be the number two most studied chemical behind aspartame, another chemical that's been routinely attacked and routinely proven to be safe.
Given that most of the assertions of glyphosate's harm is coming from the lawyers of people filing lawsuits, I'm not too swayed by their unsupported arguments.
> That's an impossible barrier.
I know, right?
The notion Monsanto and Bayer would never stoop so low as to employ propagandists to protect their profits is literally unbelievably naive. As in, I don't believe that you believe that.
> Given the prevalence and duration of glyphosate use, compelling evidence should be readily available, just like it was with lead or asbestos.
You'll never guess what people who sold lead and asbestos used to say about lead and asbestos. Also see the denials of PFAS dangers. And fracking. And lobotomies, thalidomide, tobacco, mercury, etc etc.
It's not about who said it was safe. It's about who proved it wasn't.
Who proved glyphosate wasn't safe?
That's scientists saying all this; not just me, and not just "greedy lawyers" as you claimed elsewhere.
If this fits your definition of safe, you have a very unusual one imo.
Please link to the science, then we can form our own judgement
You made several assertions a post ago and I'm skeptical about all but one of them and the one I'm not skeptical about has an implication I am skeptical about.
> It fucks up ecosystems.
In what way?
> It lingers on our food.
Agree but I've not seen this shown to be an issue.
> It bonds with abundant minerals like calcium and magnesium and does unexpected shit.
For example?
> It comes in Roundup with a cocktail of chemicals that increase bioavailability and toxicity.
So glyphosate is not harmful without this cocktail? I don't understand the implication here. It sounds like _Roundup_ is the issue, not glyphosate.
> It has links to chronic kidney disease and cancer.
Cookies have links to chocolate chips. It doesn't mean cookies cause chocolate chips.
"Links" are just that, links. What you want to prove are _Causal Links_. Links require further research and don't prove anything.
Either your point stands or it isn't contributing anything. Pointing out that it's being voted one way or the other is frowned upon (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, near the bottom). It might be read that your motivations are emotionally based. Either way, it doesn't make the situation on HN or in the world, any better. +1, because I think that your post is important. Pointing out how this can be a way to characterize Don't Look Up never occurred to me.
Someone recently asked on a thread - "where have all the hackers gone?" I often ask myself the same question.
Why is that the thinking?
I've read that 86% of cattle feed is byproducts from industrial agriculture that is inedible to humans.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6c...
Isn't basically all water outside hard water? How did public health agencies miss this?
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.
- 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...
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."
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."
Some people who take these medicines may develop disabling and potentially permanent side effects of the tendons, muscles, joints, nerves, and central nervous system.
About half of the patients who had serious side effects from fluoroquinolones said the side effects began after the first or second dose and included:
Long-term pain
Pain, burning, tingling, numbness, weakness
Symptoms affecting tendons, muscles, and joints, including swelling, pain, and tendon rupture
Symptoms that lasted longer than a year
Depression, anxiety , or other changes in mental health
Sensation changes or nerve damage in hands, feet, arms, or legs
Dramatic impact on quality of life such as job loss, financial problems, and increased family tension
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/fluoroquinolones-safety-r...
kill your lawn. plant native shit.
you might be thinking of dicamba or 2,4d which are much worse for the environment (and probably for you) and target broadleaf plants only (e.g. dandelions)
glyphosate is most used for cash crop farming, large quantities sprayed on "roundup ready" corn and soy that has been engineered to be immune to it
Definitely "mini" or "new" potatoes is where this happens a lot. Kill the plant before full maturity so that the tuber stops growing and accumulates starches, then harvest. The potato farms near me do it, it's kinda gross.
My favourite is this creeping Charlie vine. It’s so satisfying to get an end up and just gently pull like eight feet of it off mine and my neighbour’s lawn.
If you believe glyphosate is relatively harmless (as compared to a series of 6-10 applications of selective herbicides to achieve not quite as good as the same end result), it's easy to understand why people are inclined to declare bankruptcy on their mess of a lawn and start fresh. Applying it in August, you could have a high-quality uniform lawn by October. (If it's far from harmless, then the series of selective treatments might be better.)
Rototilling to start over just surfaces a bunch of latent weed seeds that are in the top few inches of soil always. To start over, you want to kill everything growing without disturbing the soil and surfacing the weed seeds.
This is true but I get the impression that most urban lots are just using rolls of sod anyways.
Or a little round up and plant grass seed over the top. Much less CO2, and the soil and organic matter stay in place.
I have a growers pesticide applicators license and a big jug of glyphosate in the barn. But I don't use it for that kind of thing because it drifts and damages the perennial plants I care about, and I just feel ... ehh.... about it. And if I grow stuff for market, it's good for pricing and marketing to be able to say it wasn't sprayed.
I have a rototiller for the tractor and I use it sparingly to break ground and then amend with manure and other organic matter, then cover in straw or wood chip. I get a lot of weeds (mostly crab grass and goosefoot), but that's just kind of how it is.
I have another herbicide which targets only grasses, and I use that here and there to try to control crab grass, but not for food plots.
I gave up on having a beautiful weed-free lawn a long time ago. The cost and time it takes to keep one is just not a good value for me. So whatever grows, grows. I mow it every couple of weeks.
It would be nice if clover was just kind of the de facto standard.
There's nothing wrong with having a lawn if you don't live in a drought-prone area. It's a lot less work than anything else people suggest. Just run a mower over it every couple weeks. And just plant with grass seeds adapted for your area, mix with clover, and ignore your stupid neighbours.
It’s sad that some people don’t.
Crab grass and creeping charlie is the problem here. Chokes out everything else.
Maybe it's climate/region dependent, but clover is probably one of the most innocuous things growing here. Fixes nitrogen, is kind of pretty if left to flower, and attracts pollinators.
It tolerates moderate treading (i.e. a family walking on it on occassion or kids playing but not vehicles or wheeled stuff), it uses practically no water, it grows slowly so it rarely needs to be cut, and it only grows a few inches in height at most so often it doesn't need to be mowed at all, and blooms in the spring with tons of tiny little flowers spotted all over your lawn.
It comes in a handful of varieties that all grow between 2-6 inches in height and have a variety of textures or flower colors.
I remember how I grew up. I want better for my kids, while recognizing that plenty of things were fine enough and that scrapes heal.
Also, grass is native in a lot of places.
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.
Except most people don't know jack about modern food systems and its history. All they know is: big pharma bad, big ag bad, big food bad.
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?
Our livers and such do filter such things out, but we are injured before/during that filtering.
A vegetable that is coated in some preservative chemical to keep its shiny coating does not filter that chemical out. Additionally, herbicides and pesticides that are sprayed on the plots may or may not be picked up by the crops and may or may not be filtered by those crops before they get to us. Or may or may not be converted to some other chemical that isn’t the same!
It’s such a complex scenario that we cannot know whether we are dosing ourselves with health or behaviour -affecting chemicals unless we spend far, far more money on research (both wide-spread statistical research and hyper-focused chemical pathway research).
Carnivore seems like a good way to get some filtering? It’s hard though, it’s expensive, questionably healthy, and questionably unethical.
> 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?
That's disingenuous as well. The liver isn't made to filter chemicals that are constantly ingested over a long time, because they tend to accumulate and cause damage. Additionally, how can a human liver have evolved to filter chemicals we have invented in the past 100 years?
I had my doubts
https://www.leafscore.com/grocery/glyphosate-free-oatmeal-ev...
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.
But I would not doubt someone thinks this is a good idea to speed to-market for extremely large fields. Most of those use contract harvesters on very tight schedules.
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.
https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/full-short-term-ban-on-gly...
Or whyelse is it still not forbidden?
Brilliant 2018 article from nautilus https://nautil.us/herbicide-is-whats-for-dinner-237256/