21–30 of 135 posts
Pesticides inc. *cides in agriculture along with antibiotics in poultry, which helped address world hunger is becoming bane of humanity.
When there are chances of superbug arising from antibiotics abuse such as colistin from India becoming a pandemic, why treat these issues as local to the country?
Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat. This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible tha…
"Human epidemiological [23, 29, 30, 31] and domesticated animal studies [32, 33] suggest associations between exposures to GBHs and adverse health outcomes. For example, congenital malformations have been reported in young pigs fed GBH residues-contaminated soybeans [32]. This suggests that GBHs may be at least a contributing factor to similar birth defects observed in human populations living in and near farming regions with substantial land area planted to GBH-tolerant GE crop cultivars [23, 34]."
Footnote 23, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/tx1001749, that detail the teratogenic effect is something I will be reading later, but was the most disturbing. Footnote 24, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/tx1001749, should be eye opening to many people here based on (unfounded) isoflavone estrogen mimic fears of soy/tofu: "We also checked androgen to estrogen conversion by aromatase activity and mRNA. All parameters were disrupted at sub-agricultural doses with all formulations within 24 h."
And with respect to your edit, it looks like the author touched on fungicides in his prior editorial: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-03/big-ag...
> ...10,000 further cases are pending, worrying Bayer investors as well as farmers who rely on the product as a cheap, effective herbicide. > Cancer may only be part of the story. Studies over the past decade suggest that glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — pollutes water sources, hangs around in soil far longer than previously suspected, and routinely taints human food supplies. I mean... yeah. I'm not f…
Buying organic is not safer, though, because one can still use herbicides in organic farming, as long as they aren't synthetic. Sometimes the safer organic option won't be as safe as the synthetic one.
Some herbicides are dangerous, and if safer solutions were available farmers would use them - if only their crops would survive that substance. That is one of the points of glyphosate-resistant varieties.
Be it as it may, the danger will always be greater for farmers than consumers. Integrated Farming accounts for this as well, and the list of available pest management substances is constantly being updated. I don't know how well IF works in the US, but in the EU (Portugal) at least I get updates every now an then.
I still use glyphosate and will keep using it for weed control. In an olive field, I use a shredder for most of the field, and leave herbicides for plantation lines only. This means that only about 30% of the total area is actually sprayed with herbicides in some orchards.
I'd reserve the ban on allegedly dangerous substances for personal use. And I would start with home spray insecticides.
It's entirely possible the occurrence wasn't elevated relative to populations she didn't work with or I didn't hear about... but I've long suspected that there's a story hiding in plain sight that's bigger than even the recent cancer-related damages. Especially given that many of the workers are Mixtec and so are incredibly isolated from society-at-large (many would pretend to understand Spanish and didn't realize they could request Mixtec-speaking translators).
Does anyone have the insight as to why Bayer purchased Monsanto? This to me is one of the biggest corporate acquisition mistakes in history. To make things worse Bayer even retired the name Monsanto making Bayer the defendant in all these cases.
Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat. This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible tha…
Like I said in another comment in this thread, organic farming still uses pesticides, just not the synthetic ones.
In my opinion as a farmer, the foundational principle of Organic Farming is not a path towards better farming practices, but one that divides what is supposedly natural and organic, and what is artificial and synthetic.
This has more to do with a romantic ideal of purity regarding agriculture and food production than guiding farming with principles of science-based agronomy or efficacy/efficiency decision making.
I'm sympathetic to concerns about our food chain but to the folks hoping for the downfall of Monsanto/Bayer: You are hereby invited over to pull weeds in 100 degree weather. I'll supply the beer.
I am really looking forward to the day we can replace chemical herbicides with weed-hunting robots. It seems such a huge market opportunity... little, inexpensive bots that can roam a field, picking out weeds the moment they appear as seedlings, never touching the crop itself, not putting anything in the soil. When I was a kid growing up in central Illinois in the 1970s, before Roundup, "walking beans" was a common s…
Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat. This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible tha…
I wouldn't decide for organic because of that. Like I said in another comment in this thread, organic farming still uses pesticides, just not the synthetic ones. In my opinion as a farmer, the foundational principle of Organic Farming is not a path towards better farming practices, but one that divides what is supposedly natural and organic, and what is artificial and synthetic. This has more to do with a romantic id…
If there were a standard out there that instead embraced a systems-thinking view on safe practices - both chemical use and general land management, emphasizing safety for the long term health of the ecosystem, the farm economy, and the humans consuming the product - I would embrace that standard instead. Even if it were (as it might be) initially quite expensive.
Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/ I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat. This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible tha…
I wouldn't decide for organic because of that. Like I said in another comment in this thread, organic farming still uses pesticides, just not the synthetic ones. In my opinion as a farmer, the foundational principle of Organic Farming is not a path towards better farming practices, but one that divides what is supposedly natural and organic, and what is artificial and synthetic. This has more to do with a romantic id…