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Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

nytimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#131

Post by yosamino »

parineum wrote: post #123
yosamino wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the…

> as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. Yes, because it's a good product. Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either. It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition. > This skews towards the seed supplier. Right up until someone else makes a better product.

> Right up until someone else makes a better product.

Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#132

Post by pfdietz »

chromacity wrote: post #13

It's striking how many of these "product safety" cases are decided in the court of public opinion, independent of actual scientific merit. The case of DDT was pretty interesting. More recently, we have microplastics - no one has really shown they're dangerous to humans, but there's enough hand-waving that "everyone knows" they're killing us. And aspartame, etc... Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people…

> Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with.

Glyphosate kills grass, so I would not recommend this unless you are planning to reseed from scratch (or replace the grass with something else).

Are there "Roundup Ready" grass seeds?

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#133

Post by justinclift »

pfdietz wrote: post #127
yosamino wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worded it so carefully to not have an argument, just for illustration, but... Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface. It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields. But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer a…

I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible. If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself . Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again. Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves witho…

> This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.

Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#134

Post by pfdietz »

dralley wrote: post #2

Still probably the safest herbicide, mainly because the competition (organophosphates, etc.) is so much worse.

The one I'm seeing now for crops (along with GMO crops to resist it) is Liberty, generic name glufosinate. What's interesting about it is that it's a natural product (although obtained in bulk by synthesis) produced by several species of Streptomyces soil bacteria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glufosinate

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#135

Post by XorNot »

saalweachter wrote: post #24
whyenot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an environmental perspective you are probably right. One of the nice things is that glyphosate, unlike most herbicides, is broken down quickly by soil bacteria. The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.

I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense. I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to devel…

I have no idea why this is downvoted because it's exactly right. Unlike antibiotic resistance where the consequences can be measured in human lives, it just doesn't matter for weed killers: and the iteration time on new compounds is much faster.

It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry

Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)

Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#136

Post by pfdietz »

justinclift wrote: post #133
pfdietz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible. If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself . Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again. Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves witho…

> This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again. Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?

If we got the seeds from the GMO fairy, yes.

If we have to get the seeds from expensive R&D that wouldn't occur without patent protection, then no.

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#137

Post by FarmerPotato »

themafia wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #14

As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law. Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (i…

> a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something? > glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additive…

> We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additives in farming as is possible

It's not relevant to glyphosate, but there is such a thing. It's called Integrated Pest Management. I only know it wrt fruit crops. The main idea is to use the least-intrusive methods first, and pesticides last. For example, sanitation comes first: remove last year's debris where larvae and spores have over-wintered.

Glyphosate isn't a pesticide (unless it kills host plants? maybe?)

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#138

Post by XorNot »

jayd16 wrote: post #87
victorbjorklund wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.

Then it's a discussion about magnitude and jumping to starvation is unfounded.

Price increases due to disruption of Ukrainian grain shipments from the war substantially threatened African food stability.

Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#139

Post by munk-a »

themafia wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #14

As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law. Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (i…

> a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something? > glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additive…

I think this a very unsound place to start an argument. Food production is vital and has been refined over the entirety of human existence to be stable and bountiful. I think it's extremely reasonable to critique Roundup for other reasons - but if you want to blank-slate farming and go with a no-additive solution we're bringing a lot of technology and technique into question that is helpful.

While it's more difficult to formulate on the internet through brief interactions - the correct answer here is nuanced. Somethings are beneficial to farm land productivity and also beneficial to consumers by lowering prices, increasing availability to healthy food etc - and some things are not but might be highly profitable to conglomerates. We need to pick issues like this apart carefully.

Re: Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case

#140

Post by Tuna-Fish »

yosamino wrote: post #32
quickthrowman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops. I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically m…

Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant. Essentially turning > You wouldn't download a car into > You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop. Which is obviously absurd. So while…

Using last years harvest stopped being a thing when heterosis was developed, 90 years ago.

The entire argument is stupid, only bad/hobby farmers plant their own seed.

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