Swathing is going out of fashion, as most farmers desiccate to ripen their crops

http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-dinner

by dnetesn • 8 years ago

206 136 8 years ago

I haven't taken the need to buy organic that seriously before but this is rather terrifying.

Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.

cardamomo• 8 years ago

I agree. I had mostly preferred organics in recent years because I wanted politically to avoid Monsanto, et al. and support a more regional food system. I didn't believe that industrial-scale organics were demonstrably healthier than conventional crops. But this research and a handful of other studies that have appeared on HN recently have changed my thinking. There seems to be more and more evidence that conventionally grown crops are essentially bathed in chemicals that are at best questionable with regard to human health.

goldenkey• 8 years ago

The same thing applies to milk. Organic milk regulations disallow water and powder mixtures while conventional milk is anywhere upwards from 5% stale milk mixed with fresh milk.

What organic was originally labeled for is now just a shadow. Buying organic is just precautionary to avoid the everchanging regulations that are not made with individuals in mind..but instead, industry..

woah• 8 years ago

I wish there was a label for food that is grown without pesticides, but with artificial fertilizers.

ip265• 8 years ago

Organic food can still use pesticides. It's a curated whitelist to be sure, including things such as soap and alcohol. But it is not pesticide free.

arnoooooo2• 8 years ago

I undersand artificial fertilizers are pretty bad for soil biology. We desperately need healthy soil for CO2 absobtion (not to mention fertility).

jorblumesea• 8 years ago

There's no real regulation of the organic label, at least in the US. So buying organic just means a larger price tag for dubious quality of produce. You may be getting something totally organic or something using 60 year old pesticides. There's no way to know based on the label.

NoGravitas• 8 years ago

It's not true that there's no real regulation of the organic label in the US. Regarding the things that it actually regulates, the USDA organic label is strictly enforced. Your concern may be that people expect USDA organic to mean things that it doesn't. The relevant document is the [National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances](https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/01/25/organic-101-allow...).

SmellyGeekBoy3• 8 years ago

Anecdotal I know, but a friend in the crop spraying business told me that plenty of food sold as "certified organic" (at least here in the UK) has been dessicated with glyphosphate too.

Frondo• 8 years ago

Best anecdote I heard on the practice: a distant cousin of mine told me about the time he was driving down I-80 and saw them harvesting something off in a field, and there were two bins, one labeled "ORGANIC" and one labeled "REGULAR" and they were feeding the harvest into them both equally.

(editing for clarity: I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. I also think people make a lot of stuff up and pass it off as anecdotes because we're a very polite society for that sort of thing.)

dev_dull• 8 years ago

I knew of this practice and it always bothered me regarding flour. With fruit, for example, I can wash off any herbicide or pesticide applied to the plant during its growth. However, how do I wash glyphosate or 2,4-d off a bag of ground flour?

I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.

0xcde4c3db• 8 years ago

I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.

There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.

hammock• 8 years ago

IBS is also connected to pesticides

kristianp3• 8 years ago

The article notes that Glyphosate is a 'non-contact' herbicide, which means it doesn't kill on contact. It is absorbed into the plant. So in theory your fruit can also contain it, especially if its a Glyphosate-resistant variety.

markdown• 8 years ago

Glyphosate isn't used with fruit. He was referring to contact pesticides commonly used to kill insects that damage fruit (Eg. Malathion). You can wash contact non-systemic pesticides off easily enough.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

I have to be very careful about wheat products. If I eat the wrong stuff, I get acid reflux, and nasty acne. Some people tell me that I'm allergic to gluten. Others say yeast, because it's mainly crackers and noodles that I can eat. But not all wheat crackers are OK. The only one that I'm sure of is Stoned Wheat Thins, from Canada.

I wonder if it's glyphosate, or some other pesticide.

pyk• 8 years ago

Anecdotal I know but same here - by trial and error I have also found certain wheat products OK. Name brand saltine crackers, but not generics, certain local breads, but not others. Some beers but not others too. Waiting for the day when this is all sorted out!

itronitron• 8 years ago

Caramel color is the trigger for me, you may want to isolate that as well to see if it affects you negatively. Apparently caramel color is made by burning sugar (the stuff at the bottom of the barrel) and yields various byproducts.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

I'm getting a vibe that this comes across as implausible. So I'd like to add that the skin, central nervous system, and interior layer of the gut are all fundamentally ectodermal epithelia. Both the gut and CNS arise in development through invagination and pinching off. First the gut, and later the neural tube, which becomes the spinal cord and brain. And amusingly, in deuterostomes (vertebrates and their kin), the invagination point (blastopore) becomes the anus :)

nradov2• 8 years ago

Have you actually had a bag of ground flour analyzed to measure how much glyphosate or 2,4-d it contains?

reshambabble• 8 years ago

Unfortunately you just have to avoid it. Wheat, flour and bread isn't processed well in the US. For grains and beans, soak them for 10 minutes in baking soda or 5 minutes in activated charcoal. It doesn't get rid of everything, but it's a solution.

brd3• 8 years ago

I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies and agricultural practices we've adopted. Everytime I read about modern, large scale farming I'm a little more disturbed by the norms we're establishing. Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable.

I say the US specifically because unfortunately we seem to be the origin for almost all of the modern, disturbing practices that have become ubiquitous. We've been setting the standard and hopefully we'll make a 180 and start raising the bar.

fzeroracer• 8 years ago

Unfortunately I think this will only arise if/when we have a major crisis that results in a large amount of Americans being poisoned. We're really, really bad at preventative measures instead opting for short term profit over long term stability and health.

The amount that farms end up poisoning local rivers, streams etc I thought would be enough of a wake up call but I guess I was too optimistic. Organic foods aren't the answer either sadly, since a lot of the time that's the result from unfounded fears.

brd3• 8 years ago

I'm hoping for a single solid study establishing either A) alternative farming practices that are reasonably efficient and profitable to highlight a way for smaller scale farmers to thrive. B) the negative health effects of some of these choices in our food supply that causes people to actually get up in arms about it and force some regulation with real teeth.

I can only hope you're wrong and that we don't hit a point of mass poisonings before we do anything but I can very easily see that coming to fruition.

BurningFrog• 8 years ago

One cynical/cute view is that farming subsidies will start disappearing when Iowa is no longer the first primary state.

stefs2• 8 years ago

the question is, though, whether the slow mass poisoning isn't already happening since a couple of years and the symptoms are just misattributed to other factors?

cmrdporcupine• 8 years ago

The poisoning is happening. It's just not yet happening to humans, it's happening to our rivers and streams and oceans that are receiving all the phosphorous runoff, and to the wild herbaceous plants that are caught in the drift of dicamba, glyphosate or 2-4,d.

(p.s. I live rural, have a hobby orchard/vineyard, and live next to two cash crop farms)

nradov2• 8 years ago

I don't know what you would consider a "large amount", but 32 people were recently poisoned by what authorities suspect was contaminated lettuce.

https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-11-18/index.html

mitchty• 8 years ago

I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies and agricultural practices we've adopted.

As someone that grew up on a farm, can you explain why? And also explain why the practices, aka fallow fields, are incorrect? A lot of the subidies and practices we have in place today are direct results of things like the dust bowl.

Surely there are better, healthier ways to grow food that are still economically viable.

Have you validated such assumptions? I can guarantee that large scale farming is a lot more nuanced than one can assume in an arm chair style.

Until you've seen what pests can do to a field that hasn't been treated with fertilizer or say herbicide, its really hard to understand why they get used. It is the difference between having a crop to sell, and going out of business and selling off your farm.

This black and white thinking that comes from people that haven't any experience in the chosen field is honestly more annoying. Should we improve? Sure, no farmer would disagree, but would you be ok with increasing your food costs by 5x? 10x? even more? These are the things you ultimately have to consider when you knock modern practices.

There is no free lunch (pun intended) if you ban modern practices. There is a good chance that requiring the things you want makes large scale farming impossible, and results in more people without food at all. I'm not sure that is an overall net positive.

ip265• 8 years ago

Monocropping field corn to feed cattle has always stood out to me as a big one. Monocrops are inherently vulnerable, beef is a luxury good not a necessity, and the total input for a pound of beef is extremely high compared to most other food items. I haven't personally done the math, but I understand beef production enjoys significant subsidies at multiple steps.

Another topic, a common desire among ecologists is to incentivize more natural habitat at the margins to support native plants, insects, and birds. It's fairly simple, easy to measure the cost & implementation, and the goal would be it would ultimately be better for everyone, with healthy predator populations and so forth.

mikekchar• 8 years ago

It is the difference between having a crop to sell, and going out of business and selling off your farm.

Thinking outside of the box, I think this is the problem we should aim to fix.

saltedonion• 8 years ago

I’m no subject matter expert, but I think what brd was saying is that farm subsidies are hugely distorting to the agricultural commodities market, and that leads to inefficient capital and resource allocation, which in turn causes misalignments between overall consumer wealfare beyond monitary means and spills over to hurting the health of the general public.

How much of this is true I do not know, but based on economic theory such negative externalities are possible.

You can’t ignore at the fact that the US is much more libertarian than Canada and the EU when it comes to business regulations. And we all know what happens when governments are too business friendly and not addressing market failures or safeguarding public interest.

Ask yourself this, what percentage of your operational best practices are invented/peddled by the industry vs truly independent research?

brd3• 8 years ago

I've never worked in the industry but I've been casually studying about it for the last 10 years or so. I'm well aware of the roots of our current agriculture system stemming from the dust bowl. I've spent a good amount of time trying to understand the history of the subsidies that shaped the Ag industry.

The fact of the matter is that our modern farming practices are way too short sighted. Topsoil erosion is the easiest thing to point to to identify that something needs to change. Things like monoculture issues, herbicide issues, pollinator health, are all things we should take more seriously but nothing is as concrete as the argument that we need to maintain our soil better.

Small scale forest farming practices have shown that there's alternative methods to produce high yields off the same land with better practices. There's a multitude of simple techniques like hugelkultur that seem like amazingly efficient ways to improve yields. Salatin's work has highlighted some potential ways to incorporate more biodiversity on the farm to maintain a healthier long term ecosystem. There's been meaningful traction with hydroponic and vertical farming practices.

I'm certainly no expert in what the actual solution is but whatever we're doing now is unsustainable. Much of it originates from the abused and malformed subsidies that over-emphasize food security over health or environmental issues. High Fructose corn syrup and ethanol being perfect examples of the stupidity of our current strategy around agricultural subsidies.

The government already pumps a tremendous amount of money into the agriculture industry. We should just do it more deliberately and thoughtfully.

Sure, prices or taxes will likely go up. By how much is the real debate but ultimately I'd say whatever the change is it's probably going to be worth it. Modern farming practices is right up there with climate change as an existential threat that we should not neglect and saddle future generations with.

dylan604• 8 years ago

Until you've seen what pests can do to a field that hasn't been treated with fertilizer or say herbicide, its really hard to understand why they get used. It is the difference between having a crop to sell, and going out of business and selling off your farm.

In my meager attempts at a backyard garden, I have lost entire "crops" of vegetables due to insects. From the slugs eating the young/new growth, grasshoppers eating the leafy plants, birds/insects eating the fruit, and just neighborhood stray cats using the loose soil as litter box digging up the plants. Then there's the squirrels and possums or raccoons that come along digging up plants looking for food. I just want to nuke the whole place from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

With all of that, it's just a hobby to "keep me off the streets", but damn those pesky pests. I have often said that I'm really lucky/thankful that my livelihood does not depend on me being able to successfully grow food. Oh, and before you get to the stage of pests, it has to rain just the right amount. Not enough, and nothing grows. Too much, and everything drowns and rots. None of these things are in the farmer's control.

fidrelity• 8 years ago

I completely agree that the reality is far more nuanced.

Have you questioned your assumptions yourself that food cost has to go up using alternative approaches? There is research out there painting a different picture[1].

[1] https://rodaleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/RI-FST-Brochu...

dirkgently• 8 years ago

As someone that grew up on a farm, can you explain why?

One reason is sheer hypocrisy of the country to force developing or under-developed countries to stop subsidizing _their own_ farming.

randomdata8• 8 years ago

I cannot wait for the day that the US seriously revisits the farming subsidies

Like the 2014 Farm Bill? I farm outside of the US, but from an outsider’s perspective that seemed like a huge change.

AngryData• 8 years ago

I think subsidies are a good thing, however our current application of them is definitely backwards. Corn is one of the worst crops to subsidize, the whole reason we grow corn is because how absolutely robust and resilient it is as staple crop. However the trade off for being such a strong crop is poor input-output efficiency. I think subsidies need to be applied to more vulnerable crops, some should go to staple crops other than corn, but I think the larger portion of it should go to fruit and vegetable production. I would also like to see some of it given to more sustainable farming practices, with an emphasis in reducing artificial irrigation, reducing artificial fertilizer usage, and maintaining or increasing topsoil depth and soil health, although I have no idea how to properly implement those practice.

bluGill4• 8 years ago

When you grow a crop that takes nutrients out of the soil they must be replaced. When you eat the crop in the same location (substance farming) there isn't a problem as your excrement is fertilizer.

When you live in the city that doesn't happen - nobody transports sewage back to the fields. It isn't necessarily a good idea to try: the energy to transport sewage back to the fields needs to come from somewhere; sewage needs to not have harmful chemicals/heavy metals from other processes mixed in.

thecopy• 8 years ago

I have read somewhere, and i agree with the argument, that the subsidies given to farming in the US is partly in place in order to secure food in case of imported foods not being an option due to sanctions, war or any other reason.

So as long as the farms in the US fulfills this criteria there is no urgent reason for the government to restructure the subsidy criteria, incentives and payouts.

hyperbovine• 8 years ago

That will never happen unless people start voting with their feet. Look into CSAs in your area. The guy that runs mine is fanatical about using traditional practices—“just compost and hard work”. It’s incredibly satisfying.

stefs2• 8 years ago

a couple of weeks ago i heard that people who move to the us lose ~30% of their gut bacteria diversity - here's one paper https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(1831382-5.pdf . most sources claiming a monotonic diet lacking in fibre. could the influence of glyphosat also play a role in this?

bsaul• 8 years ago

Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster. From meal habits, to crop to cattle, to sugar, and obesity. This society is in self destruction mode, and the only good side of it is that as a consequence your pharmaceutical industry is a huge economy that’s discovering new drugs that benefits to the rest of the world.

I wouldn’t expect this to be a sustainable model for too long though.

lurquer• 8 years ago

Everything related to food in the US is just a total disaster.

The US has the most plentiful and cheapest foods. It supplies its own population with food so cheap the prices have to be supported. And, even with that, there is enormous surplus. And, on top of that, the US is by far the worlds largest exporter of food. As well as the world's largest supplier of free food for relief purposes.

In light of that, your comment seems odd.

tyu10004• 8 years ago

The U.S. feeds not only itself but a huge chunk of the world. Agricultural innovations primarily coming from the United States (but also Canada and other industrialized countries) throughout this century and last saved the planet from the Malthusian famines that were widely predicted in the 1970s due to expanding human populations.

No doubt there can be lots of improvements in all agricultural sectors around the globe but having too much food is much better than having too little.

pfarnsworth• 8 years ago

I think I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to navigate what is actually healthy to eat, and more importantly, what is healthy for my children to eat.

Is there a single, trustworthy authority that can tell me which brands are safe, knowing full well designations like "USDA Organic" are being gamed by companies?

rossdavidh• 8 years ago

Short answer: no. Longer answer: buy from farmer's markets, preferably places where you have seen the farm or met the farmer. You can't inspect everything they do, but you can ask yourself, "does this seem like the kind of person who is trying to do things right?" But, also, refer to the short answer, above.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

Thanks. Shorter, and more to the point, than my answer :)

mirimir5• 8 years ago

I'm not aware of any such authority. And maybe worse, I doubt that there could be, at the national level. It's not just that designations like "USDA Organic" are gamed. Stuff is just too complicated, and there's inadequate data.

Over the past century, the chemical industry has commercialized numerous novel compounds, maybe 10^5 to 10^6 or more. Although there's been some toxicity testing, of course, we are basically living in the only large-scale, long-term test.

Anyway, to be safest, your best bet is growing your own food, or buying from trusted local producers. And yes, I realize how impractical that is for most people. But no matter where your food comes from, it's arguably safest to eat as low on the food chain as possible.

strainer2• 8 years ago

The Organic "designation" has to be adequately enforced for international trading purposes, as well as your own consumer confidence. How did you come to the belief that it is being significantly gamed? Besides rumor and anecdote, have you seen any evidence or quality journalistic reports on the gaming of organic certification?

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

At least one part of TFA plays rather fast and loose with the numbers...

“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.

30,000 acres is 47 square miles, not 6,000 square miles.

notatoad• 8 years ago

And there are definitely no 6000 square mile farms in saskatchewan.

SmellyGeekBoy3• 8 years ago

Or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

benj111• 8 years ago

Yeah, check the references also. First off links to news sites, not studies, then the links just point to the front page.

We have this statement in the article: "Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine.4,5"

This one: 5. Copley, C. German beer purity in question after environment group finds weed-killer traces. Reuters (2016)

Googling that gets to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-beer/german-beer-...

That article doesn't give a limit for weedkiller in beer, but does for water.

Now I'm no expert, but I would expect primary ingredients such as water to have lower safe limits, because they're expected, A. To be consumed in higher quantities and B. Combined with other primary ingredients with the potential the potential to end up at a higher overall chemical level, as seemed to have happen here.

_Codemonkeyism4• 8 years ago

I do think the 6000 sq miles farm does not refer to the 30,000 acres farm, there is a sentence or some bridge logic missing.

Otherwise it would not go on with

"A farm that big would have different soil types [...] It would be hard [...]"

but use "has" and "is" instead of "would have".

Jill_the_Pill2• 8 years ago

He's a Canadian bluffing American units. I'm not sure we'd do much better with hectares and kilometers!

TremendousJudge• 8 years ago

Yes, you can, because it's just dividing by 10. If a piece of land is 30000 hectares then it is 300 square kilometers.

MegaDeKay• 8 years ago

These 30,000 acres are are not continuous. You don't have one farmer that owns 30,000 acres in one big block. There are a bunch of other farms owned by different people within an area, there might be some small towns in there, etc. Really big farms are more like distributed operations over large areas, with crews of guys, contract harvesting, etc.

tyu10004• 8 years ago

An interesting topic but there were some really silly speculations that ruined a lot of the piece. Big farms can't combine in stages because they have more diverse terrain? Multiple combines harvesting together are a picture from a horrible dystopia?

I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done.

If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.

Johnny555• 8 years ago

The same is true of most businesses, for example, big retailers are more efficient than many smaller retailers. Though I don't think I'd want to live in a world where I can only shop at Amazon or Walmart any more than I'd want to live in a world where only a few corporate farms produce all food.

Efficiency isn't always what's best for the market, and doesn't mean lower prices for consumers.

chrispeel• 8 years ago

Swathing is definitely still used for alfalfa and grass hay. It may be called "mowing" or just "cutting hay"; it's definitely not chemical desiccation.

omegaworks2• 8 years ago

Cattle are fed low dose antibiotics in feedlots—not to stave off disease, but because it makes them gain weight more easily than an antibiotic-free cow. It changes their gut microbes so that they grow fat on less food.

Curious if we're externalizing the costs of producing desiccant-free food into our healthcare system. CDC says obesity will cost us $147 billion this year[1]. Does glyphosate save the agriculture industry that much? Has the link even been examined?

1. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html

briandear3• 8 years ago

Obesity is generally caused by eating too many calories. The real cause of being fat is too many calories and not enough movement. The fault is at the fork, not the farm.

omegaworks2• 8 years ago

they grow fat on less food.

Seems to indicate that the effects of these chemicals change the way the animal physiologically responds to an intake of a given number of calories.

When we're talking a problem that impacts us on a societal level, we need to look at all potential influencing factors. Limiting that analysis to the "calories-in, calories-out" hypothesis hasn't gotten us any closer to a solution.

swift5322• 8 years ago

While that is true, it is also true that it's much easier to remain on a sustainable amount of calories if you're eating better, more filling food that's not just empty calories.

saalweachter6• 8 years ago

This comes up on HN like quarterly, so for anyone else who is always confused when it does:

Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US.

Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does.

So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.

Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way.

And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.

saalweachter6• 8 years ago

Frankly my advice -- which as a human, you are incapable of heeding, being genetically programmed to obsess about food purity -- is not to worry about.

Eat a varied diet, not too much, get plenty of exercise and sleep. Pay attention to food recalls, because accidental contamination of food by things like E. coli and salmonella kill dozens of people in the US every year and god knows how many world-wide.

Worrying about everything else, the micro-contaminants that maybe-possibly-who-knows might possibly-maybe-sort-of-contribute to some sort of who-knows after years or decades of exposure, is a bad value proposition. Maybe BPA causes cancer, or whatever it was supposed to cause. Maybe eating steak does. Maybe gluten is actually poisonous, maybe soy causes estrogen problems, maybe cooked vegetables lose all their magical healthiness. Maybe cell phones and WiFi cause cancer.

You can spend weeks and months and years trying to figure out exactly what food you personally should eat, and statistically you aren't getting those weeks and months and years back in the marginal gains to healthfulness. If you have an allergic reaction to a food, avoid it, and if you don't know if you had an allergic reaction, you probably didn't, but hey, I'm not a doctor. Talk to one.

I honestly don't know if glyphosate is safe when used this way or not (since I am mostly familiar with its more conventional uses in the US and am too lazy to do a deep dive into what the existing research says and am pretty jaded about whatever the latest mass hysteria is for reasons) but frankly if it is really being used in as wide-spread a manner as articles like this claim, it can't be particularly harmful or frankly it'd be pretty obvious epidemiologically, since there's been growing use of it in this way for decades now.

randomdata8• 8 years ago

Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US

Or Eastern Canada. As a wheat grower in Ontario, harvest is typically in mid-July. Many months before weather becomes a factor. Really, the only crop we do sometimes desiccate in this part of the world are edible beans. A far cry from the "almost all crops" claim in the article.

peterwwillis2• 8 years ago

Seems like the lede was buried... the "acceptable" levels of RoundUp in U.S. food has been increasing from 100 percent to 2,000 percent.

"According to the EPA, between 1993 and 2015, glyphosate MRLs increased by 100 percent to 1,000 percent in the U.S., depending on the crop."

"Current MRLs for glyphosate range from 0.2 ppm to more than 300 ppm, depending on the crop. Between 1993 and 2015, the U.S. EPA glyphosate tolerance levels have increased by a factor of 50 for corn, and 2,000 for alfalfa."

So even without desiccation, we're still "allowed" to ingest several orders of magnitude more probably-carcinogen-related herbicides which screw with our cells and gut microbiome.

nicky02• 8 years ago

100 percent to 2000 percent of what?

saalweachter6• 8 years ago

Firstly, if you're ingesting alfalfa, you deserve whatever happens to you.

Secondly, you realize that regulatory agencies raise and lower the acceptable limits of chemicals as the evidence accumulates that they are or aren't particularly harmful, right? Some go down, because we find out they were way worse than we thought they were, some go up, because it turns out we were too conservative initially and they are safer at way higher levels that we previously thought. Science!

Thirdly, that article is confounding crops for human consumption with crops for animal consumption. We are way, way less worried about whether a pig is going to develop cancer later in life, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious, and we also conduct a brief autopsy on nearly every pig ever born, which as a side effect gives us pretty good data on how healthy the average pig is over time.

gadders2• 8 years ago

Happens a lot with rape seed (Canola) in the UK as well.

https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/three-options-for-osr-desiccati...

(Interesting to hear the UK described as the Far North as well :-) )

NLips• 8 years ago

A favourite fact of mine: Every point in the UK is more northerly than every point in the contiguous USA (i.e. excluding Alaska).

Take that and think about winter in Minnesota vs winter in England. The sea and the Gulf Stream provide a lot of warmth in winter!

goodcanadian2• 8 years ago

Having grown up on a farm in Canada, I'm not sure that using round-up to "ripen" crops is all that common in Canada, either. Certainly, my father never did it, and I don't know of anyone who does. He typically swaths the canola, and he has taken to straight cutting the wheat in recent years.

EDIT: anecdata, I know.

randomdata8• 8 years ago

he has taken to straight cutting the wheat in recent years.

What changed that allowed him to start straight cutting in recent years? You'd never prefer swathing over straight cutting, so there must have been good reason to not straight cut in the past.

jelliclesfarm2• 8 years ago

Farming is an incredibly inefficient way to keep people alive. The way we have been feeding ourselves must stop. 1. Taking some Ag indoors would help 2. Making synthetic and customized ‘food’ would also make sense. We eat too much and not right. 3. Enormous wastage in the industry. We treat Ag like industry and supply chain is very leaky. 4. It’s imbecility to dig up fossil fuel and release it to create food and use it as fodder to eat more. We are just a fart’s way to create another fart. 5. We need to think of food as fuel and food as pleasure. Let’s farm to create food for pleasure. In a sci-fi world, we should be able to synthesize our own nutritional requirements...but realistically it’s possible to customise individual food needs at diff life stages and consume synthetic food. 6. If I were to imagine a world where this is possible..one could go to a health center once a month and assess nutritional/calorific needs based on health requirements. A monthly supply of food-meds should sustain us. ‘Food’ as we know it now would be for hedonistic purposes. Why shouldn’t this be possible in our lifetimes? I am appalled and horrified and disgusted by what we are doing to this planet in the name of farming. One can’t say one word against large scale farming without being shamed and called anti-science...and then being accused of not knowing the reality of ‘feeding the billions’. Farming has NOT made our lives and our planet better. I am hoping robotics and AI and automation would perhaps make things better by nudging us towards a diff way to farm. Not sure if it will happen in my lifetime. I just think of sci fi story plots instead.

jacobush2• 8 years ago

I don't like that future of yours.

Robotic farming where traverse the fields and selectively nips the weed and kills the unwanted bugs, could probably be done with no chemicals at all. Fertilized could probably also be added very selectively this way.

jelliclesfarm2• 8 years ago

What about land availability and water? And labour? Farms are just open air food factories. They are not ‘natural’..they have to be erased of habitat and soil structure to start anew every year. It’s actually horrifying and appalling. I am not a generational farmer and I don’t harbor any romantic notions about farming anymore after 6+ years. We have to change farming. It’s brutal treatment of nature.

arnoooooo2• 8 years ago

What is being done to soil biology, even in organic farming, is a disaster.

I don't know the impact this specific technique has on soil life, but I'd wager it can't help.

If we want to keep the soil fertile, and restore CO2 absorbtion to the soil, we need healthy soil !

upofadown• 8 years ago

The article took a long time to get to the point. The idea is that desiccation, if done badly can result in more glyphosate ending up in the grain. There is an idea floating around that glyphosate can affect gut bacteria in humans. No one has tested that so it might be a good idea to do some research.

Swathing is going out of fashion, as most farmers desiccate to ripen their crops

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