Chlorpyrifos: Pesticide tied to brain damage in children

https://usrtk.org/pesticides/chlorpyrifos/

by stareatgoats • 2 years ago

234 134 2 years ago

blackhaz3• 2 years ago

It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?

Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself?

Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum?

Good morning, all!

crq-yml• 2 years ago

Whenever a politician says "we don't want to inhibit innovation", always call them out for being for sale to whoever lobbies them.

MattGaiser• 2 years ago

When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?

Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.

jenadine• 2 years ago

Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things?

Back to when 75% of the population worked in the fields many of them as slaves? Surely you don't want that back.

Filligree• 2 years ago

He did say “we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes”.

burnished• 2 years ago

Yes

'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two

Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm.

Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is.

..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say

lijok• 2 years ago

It depends on what you see the objective of the human species to be

DinaCoder99• 2 years ago

Easy! Maximization of index funds.

oven9342• 2 years ago

The objective of the human species is the annihilation of any kind of life on the planet in the seek of profit. pesticides and insecticides play a crucial role in this task, together with PFAS, co2 and EMR in the form of light pollution, for example

lukas0992• 2 years ago

Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)

blackhaz3• 2 years ago

No, I advance a half-baked argument, don't take it as a maxim. All I am saying is that some developments in agriculture that may seem as advances today may not seem so if we take a longer time scale into consideration.

IggleSniggle2• 2 years ago

Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity.

I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas.

Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."

skhunted• 2 years ago

There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating.

This is precisely what people mean by saying what we are doing is unnatural.

But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural."

But most people believe this is the right word to use. I don’t think they will change their minds.

thuuuomas• 2 years ago

Regardless of what’s “natural”, widespread contamination from industry should reduce or remove the limits to industry’s liability. Externalities are real & must be accounted for.

WhitneyLand2• 2 years ago

By this logic humans could nuke the entire planet and that would still be “part of nature”.

I think it tends to be easier for people on HN to get caught in this kind of “but it’s technically true” fallacy. We’re trained to constantly look for patterns and generalize the crap out of things so it’s a natural inclination.

lo_zamoyski• 2 years ago

I would go further: we shouldn't use the word "nature" in this sense at all. Because what is nature? The woolly meaning you are using, which I presume is the common one we hear in this context, is at best so utterly banal, that it looses all meaning. At worst, it is incoherent. What is "natural" vs. "unnatural" according to such a definition? Is nature all that wasn't produced by human beings? Since everything human beings produce is produced from preexisting things (a process ancient philosophers might call "mutation" -- mutatio and poiesis), does that mean all such things are unnatural? Is rainwater natural, but water synthesized from hydrogen and oxygen unnatural? Is corn unnatural, given it is the result of selective breeding carried out by human beings? Is a blueberry natural, but a blueberry danish unnatural? Are human tears unnatural?

And this contemporary use of the word isn't really in accord with the traditional meaning, if we can say that, certainly not the traditional philosophical view. Nature concerns the nature of the thing. Thus, the nature of water is to be wet and transparent in its liquid state, but equally, the nature of certain plastics is to be flexible within certain conditions. And we can extend this to organisms: the nature of human beings is to be rational; the nature of lions is to hunt prey and consume their flesh; the nature of synthetic water is identical to the nature of water found in a puddle; the nature of corn is to grow to produce the fruit that we happen to eat.

Now, in a traditional philosophical context, we may speak of creation, that is, all that is, metaphysically speaking, contingent, that which did not need to exist, or that which cannot account for its own existence, not just in time, but here and now. This draws the distinction between creation and creator, that is to say, that cause which causes things to be and which itself is not a thing, not contingent, and does not require a cause, as it is that cause. But this has nothing to do with distinguishing between things we already find in the world, and things made by human beings, like pesticides or artifacts or synthetic objects. Everything that is is creation in this sense, man-made or otherwise.

Also according to this traditional metaphysical view is how human beings differ from other embodied living things, and that is the capacity to reason and the capacity to choose (either in accord or against reason, effectively). And these faculties of intellect and will, dependent as they are on the physical to function, but inexplicable as physical phenomenon as such, mean human beings are a unity of the physical and immaterial. It is not my intent to prove this claim here (it has to do with the act of abstraction and matter as the principle of individuation, if you're interested; you might find this video of use [0]). The point is to show a sound basis for making certain distinctions, none of which conform to the woolly, contemporary notion of "nature".

What we might say is that the pesticide in question, because of its nature, is harmful to human beings, because of our nature.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6GmCyKylTw

dauertewigkeit• 2 years ago

Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction.

Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.

WhitneyLand2• 2 years ago

Aren’t many insect larvae are not bad for you containing proteins, fats, and other beneficial nutrients?

So as long as the potato isn’t rotted you wouldn’t even have to remove it.

Biggest risk might be, ironically, if the insect contained pesticides.

owenpalmer• 2 years ago

Aigen is a robotics company working on scalable, clean, farming.

https://www.aigen.io/

Lutger4• 2 years ago

It is actually possible to produce healthier food from healthy plants in good soils, getting good yields with reduced costs. A plant that is healthy has a functioning immune system and is capable of warding of most, if not all pests (except for mammals and birds). You can only do this without pesticides, because the pesticides and fungicides are (mostly) what creates bad soils. And contrary to what a lot of people assume, this can be scaled as well.

Why is not everybody doing this at scale? Mostly I think because it requires advanced, state of the art knowledge and goes against current practice in some ways. We are only just finding out how plants actually take up nutrition (which is wild to me), and barely have uncovered the life in the soil. A lot of farmers are old, and their teachers espoused the view that soil life is literally irrelevant to farming and everything comes down to soluble fertilizers + pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Crudely simplified it is the agricultural equivalent of putting someone on an intensive care bed, feeding them liquid food with a tube and killing every germ with antibiotics. It works and is not too hard, but the results aren't that good actually. Now try becoming a healthy person overcoming illness in the wild, its a bit more complex than feeding through a tube and taking antibiotics.

Creating healthy food in a healthy way requires much more knowledge and sometimes (not always) a bit more labor, and a lot of it is going against what people know. Agriculture doesn't like to take risks. A lot of money depends on things staying as they are. A couple of big failures and you are out. Its not as easily disrupted as software.

Take a look at the work of John Kempf if you want to find out more: https://advancingecoag.com/

rpbiwer2• 2 years ago

I feel like in part it's an education issue. I don't have the slightest clue - was never taught - what is ok to eat and what is risky. I rely entirely on gut feelings and Google.

ThrowawayTestr2• 2 years ago

Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry

That chemistry, like fertilizers, is why we can feed 8 billion people.

jajko3• 2 years ago

Yeah, with various poisons that will mess up some and kill others, and who knows what are long term consequences on genome. Not that great of an achievement if you ask me, since we know better, but its not as price efficient.

VoodooJuJu• 2 years ago

You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry.

They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo.

It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.

metabagel• 2 years ago

You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry.

You're painting with far too broad of a brush. I personally see a lot of push back on HN against those "philosophies".

wizzwizz4• 2 years ago

It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects

Genetically-modified foods are fine: the main problem is when GM plants are wind-pollinated. And even that's largely due to patent law[0]: the harms of wind-pollination from monoculture is there regardless of where the genes come from.

Genetic modifications to insects are only to wipe out populations, as far as I can tell – it doesn't hugely matter what the long-term side-effects are, in that case, because there won't be any organisms around to experience them. There was a lot of research done into the effects of anti-mosquito gene drives before the (very recent) releases into the wild, because we have learned from the Four Pests campaign.

[0] https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute

google2341233• 2 years ago

It's dumb to conflate an action done in war and what a tyrannical madman did to science based GMOs.

manoDev• 2 years ago

The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all.

There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks.

Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.

scotty792• 2 years ago

When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?

It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new.

Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly?

How long did it take for aerospace industry?

dappermanneke• 2 years ago

USRTK is by no means an impartial source to grab scientific summaries from

Attummm• 2 years ago

Could you elaborate why that would be the case?

piva00• 2 years ago

I got curious and went checking a bit deeper USRTK, haven't found much to discredit their reporting.

Don't think we will get a well thought out argument given the user's comment history, a bit of a loony with a taste for hot takes with weird hyperbole.

notthemessiah• 2 years ago

As far as I can tell, there seems to effort to discredit USRTK citing how some major prior donors to USRTK (such as Organic Consumers Association) have become antivax organizations pushing conspiracy theories, but it seems the most this has resulted in is USRTK investigating lab leak theories of Covid-19's origin and a few events in collaboration with the antivax funders. All and all, it seems like some cause for scrutiny, but not anything close to discrediting the organization.

Dr. Kathleen Jamieson [professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a recent article on conspiracists’ exploitation of uncertainty in COVID-19 science] argued USRTK’s work deserved scrutiny because of its funding and affiliations. But she also noted that the organization’s published research stopped short of open conspiracy theorizing on the virus’ origins.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-right-to-know-fave-mainstre...

josefresco2• 2 years ago

This is the study they cite: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1203396109

Is there something specific you'd like to point out?

djakaitis• 2 years ago

Is this something easily avoided by eating more organic foods? Or is the prevalence of this make it unavoidable?

weweersdfsd• 2 years ago

Wikipedia claims that "Some states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Oregon, have banned chlorpyrifos on food grown and sold in their jurisdictions. Those bans remain in effect." It's also 100% banned in foods sold in EU area.

So, not that hard to avoid depending on where you live. Apparently corn, soybeans, wheat, fruit trees are some of the most common crops it's used on.

athrun• 2 years ago

Apparently it’s still allowed in Australia for agricultural uses. That might change this year.

https://www.apvma.gov.au/resources/chemicals-news/chlorpyrif...

lukas0992• 2 years ago

If it’s banned in all those places, does that have a knock-on effect of limiting its profitability thereby causing the market to produce less of it to sell elsewhere?

osivertsson2• 2 years ago

Do you got a source that chlorpyrifos is banned in foods sold in EU?

A quick search seems to indicate that imported food can still have been grown with chlorpyrifos: https://www.eurofins.de/food-analysis/food-news/food-testing...

Since we import a fair bit of vegetables and fruit during winter, we may still consume it here in the EU area.

Also, Ascenza Agro and Industries Afrasa that sell chlorpyrifos based products recently tried to overturn this ban, but luckily were not able to: https://www.env-health.org/victory-for-health-european-gener...

cmrdporcupine• 2 years ago

Looks like banned here in Canada, too. But only since December 2022.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications...

droopyEyelids2• 2 years ago

Corn: It was often used to protect against rootworms and other pests.

Soybeans: For controlling various insects such as aphids and beetles.

Fruit trees: Including apples, oranges, and stone fruits to manage pests like codling moth and citrus thrips.

Vegetables: Such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and other leafy vegetables to combat caterpillars and other insect larvae.

Almonds and nuts: To protect against a range of insect pests. Cotton: Used for bollworms, aphids, and other pests affecting cotton crops.

i_am_proteus• 2 years ago

It is not permitted for use on organic crops. One will certainly ingest less of this chemical by submitting to an all-organic diet.

ThrowawayTestr2• 2 years ago

Just wash your produce

rsynnott• 2 years ago

The EU has proposed that it be added to the Stockholm Convention ban list, which would lead to it being banned almost everywhere on earth.

epgui• 2 years ago

This specific pesticide might not be used on organic crops, but plenty of other even-less-well-safety-tested "organic pesticides" may be used instead on organic crops.

The word "organic" is largely a marketing gimmick.

/biochemist,fwiw

josefresco2• 2 years ago

While organic might currently be a "marketing gimmick" purchasing organic is an important signal to the market that consumers consider it important. I'll gladly be a first adopter if it helps move the industry and regulations in the right direction.

hammock• 2 years ago

Such as?

Lutger4• 2 years ago

That is only partially true, and mostly hyperbolic.

biorach• 2 years ago

I can't speak for the US, but in the EU this is not true

itomato• 2 years ago

Yes, as well as glyphosate and products and chemicals not in The National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...

drtgh2• 2 years ago

It is forbidden to use Chlorpyrifos in the EU, but in Morocco it's used. Recently, imports of olives contaminated with high levels of this chemical have been detected, but they have entered into the EU.

Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU.

The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included.

Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess.

Is aware the EU about this?

jiwidi• 2 years ago

EU is aware, but are too afraid to enforce it that way. See all the protest from farmers in the last months, one of their main demands is that imported foods are also subject to same rules they are.

yard2010• 2 years ago

Awareness !== Competency

bone_frequency• 2 years ago

What kind of leverage does Morocco have to get away with this?

pgeorgi• 2 years ago

People like to buy cheap stuff. And if that fails, there's always Ceuta and Melilla.

RamblingCTO3• 2 years ago

Source on "Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess."?

The legislation is pretty clear imho. Raw food needs to be labelled when it comes to the origin. Even processed food needs to state the origin of their main ingredient.

Good point on moroccan stuff, will try to avoid it in the future.

wouldbecouldbe• 2 years ago

Origin fraud happens all the time.

For instance to circumvent the embargo of fruit trees in Russia, Dutch farmers use Belarus to relabel the origin their products and continue selling. This was before the war, but probably still going on.

Olive Oil is also a fun one: "Operation Golden Oil (2008, Italy): In March 2008, 400 Italian police officers conducted “Operation Golden Oil,” arresting 23 people and confiscating 85 farms after uncovering a large-scale scheme to relabel oils from other Mediterranean nations as Italian ."

https://ilcircolo.eu/unveiling-the-truth-combating-olive-oil...

LtdJorge2• 2 years ago

It is crazy that we (Spain) are importing olives from Morocco into the EU when we are the largest producer of olives in the world, more than doubling the second.

gedy• 2 years ago

I live in the former "[fruit] Capital of the World" and surrounded by trees, and the local stores sell [fruit] from Mexico and Chile.

sp332• 2 years ago

In New Zealand, they made a law that the largest kiwis could not be exported. Otherwise they would all be sold to other countries for more money.

Aloisius• 2 years ago

The drought has hit Spain's olive orchards quite hard and people are desperate for olive oil.

jwells89• 2 years ago

Similarly it was always surprising to find garlic in San Francisco and Oakland grocery stores that didn’t come from just down the road in Gilroy, the “Garlic Capital of the World”[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy,_California

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus

Hepatitis A contamination of frozen fruits happens from time to time all around the world, but I thought it was usually linked to the picking process and processing plants. Not that irrigation can’t be blamed, but some single digit hours of sunlight exposure should inactivate viruses (even the non-enveloped kind).

amluto• 2 years ago

Why is Hepatitis A vaccination coverage so spotty in Europe (according to the WHO vaccination data)? The US has given it as part of the standard pediatric vaccination schedule for decades.

fransje264• 2 years ago

Is aware the EU about this?

Yes, of course the EU is aware of this. Health and Food regulations apply to the products grown inside the EU. There may be partial import restrictions on GMO products and hormone-boosted meat, but other food products are generally allowed in.

This is even more true with organic products, that are subjected to stringent norms and checks in the EU, but absolutely no checks when coming from outside the EU.

So when buying organic bananas, from say, Africa, the probability of them actually not being organic is close to 1. Organic olive oil from Turkey? Well, let's say you can be happy if it is olive oil at all. Honey from China? Hmm.. Well.. Let's say that with 150'000 tons exported a year, their counterfeiting labs are better funded and equipped than the fraud-detection labs on the EU side.

So, if you want a quality product with a relative certainty you're not being defrauded (or worse, poisoned), you buy European. Anything else? You're on your own.

which is expected to "un-label" the source of products

That is not legal. But, of course, fraud exists everywhere, unfortunately.

Al-Khwarizmi4• 2 years ago

The problem is that it's not always that easy to buy European.

At least in Spain, it's common to see strawberries with unmarked origin or, even worse, "Origin: Spain" but it happens to be a Spanish company that brings them from Morocco and only does the packaging.

(BTW, not sure if each of these things is legal or not. But the fact is that they happen. I would be happy with actually enforced laws that mandated specifying the actual origin of everything).

myth_drannon2• 2 years ago

In Canada, most of the clementines are from Morocco!

pvaldes2• 2 years ago

Mediterranean product came from Mediterranean!. Having clementines cultured on Canada would be less probable.

All this news are linked directly, with the current farmers protests. Farmers that are being manipulated very obviously by political agents on parties that in turn are puppets supported (and probably directed) by "outer group" in a divide-and-conquer mode, with their own agendas to promote".

So French farmers were incited to destroy Spanish fruits, and then Spanish farmers where wipped up against Morocco farmers; and then angry Polish farmers started to destroy Ukrainian grain exports (a incredibly stupid move for Poland interests). All at the same time, veery curious.

Good if they solve part of the problems, but this path is a double-edged sword. We like it or not, we live in a globalized world. "Qatar announce that will not export diesel for Spanish tractors anymore", and the Morocco strawberries will became a "clean as snow" new superfood overnight. Trust me.

londons_explore• 2 years ago

Morocco just doesn't seem to place the same importance in food cleanliness as the rest of the world. For example, they display, store and sell food directly touching the floor.

Buy a kilo of flour from a seller in Morocco, and he probably was storing that flour on the street. Directly on the street - not on a plastic bag or anything. He'll literally shovel the flour from his pile on the street into your bag.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

Are kids vaccinated for hep A and B now? Not that it’s an excuse to let pathogens into food.

Madmallard• 2 years ago

If you didn't think we were in the end-stages of population growth and decline, just know that in your standard organic chemistry textbook given to students in university, it says that there are over 500,000 unregulated chemicals in industrial use. Exponential growth and technology with an evolutionary preference toward short-sighted and near-future decision making are going to cull the human race down by a large % as peoples systems are not evolved to tolerate the extensive environmental changes. The largest culprits are changes to food chemistry (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over health), air pollution (prioritizing transportation and other means to maintain and grow economically), chemical exposures in the environment (multifactorial), and internet technology (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over social health and function) [in my opinion]. People will get weaker, sicker, and dumber. Chronic diseases will start sooner, fertility will decrease, and population growth will reverse. The humans to survive out the other side will be children of health-conscious wealthy and those that live in less toxic environments globally.

It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. I think these issues are honestly far more serious than global warming. They are causing serious problems RIGHT NOW everywhere. I think within the next 20 years even we're going to see many consequences related to these issues. I'd like to believe we can bioscience our way through this mess but I really think that won't be the case.

Fundamentally, I think proactive decision making takes a lot of time, energy, and work both on the individual and collective scales. I think it almost boils down to a physics problem where that just ends up being overtaken by the negative trend caused by exponential growth + the environmental equivalent of technical debt.

RamblingCTO3• 2 years ago

It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it.

You can't solve the big thing, but there's some control over lifestyle imho.

Otherwise, I concur.

svnt• 2 years ago

Bayer has enough money to build a few biospheres and trial their inventions there, but it is expensive and hard and so they won’t unless we make them.

barbazoo2• 2 years ago

It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it.

If we ate locally grown food and prioritized food that's not heavily processed, that would probably help. Throw in a plant based diet and your gut will probably be pretty happy overall.

myth_drannon2• 2 years ago

My dream is a mobile device/app that can analyze chemicals in fruits/vegetables, but we are too far from the StarTrek world.

I tried to build a vision system to at least identify wax on apples, but even that is too hard. There was an Israeli startup couple of years ago that built some device but it looks like it was a flop.

akyuu• 2 years ago

Not exactly what you describe, but there's Yuka for processed products (food and cosmetics). You scan a barcode and it gives you a score based on the product composition, it's quite helpful: https://yuka.io/en/

sharpshadow2• 2 years ago

It’s convenient and lucrative to use toxic patented pesticides and herbicides but there are definitely working alternatives which one could even mix themselves. Obviously the industry has no interest in cheap and available solutions. For a small example I questioned myself if DMSO a organic solvent would be useful to transport active ingredients into the plant and quickly found that just DMSO has a desired effect on plants, roots and seedlings.[1] Following the study adding H2O2 to DMSO should even increase the effect. Furthermore other ingredients can be added which impact the biochemistry of the plant.

The point which I want to make is that many effective chemicals have been discovered long ago but are not in the interest of the industry because the patents expired already.

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-015-0899-6

scotty792• 2 years ago

Time for open source pesticides catalogue?

sharpshadow2• 2 years ago

That would be great. For people not for profit.

aszantu7• 2 years ago

Just dived in and found this one, highly interesting. EU tracker for contaminated imports

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/search

s1gnp0st2• 2 years ago

This is very cool, but why doesn't it list the names of companies involved? (or did I miss it?)

aszantu7• 2 years ago

haven't checked, but I bet you could ask for a list or the documents to the cases

tomcar2882• 2 years ago

and these are just the chemicals you hear about. what about all the nonsense that never even makes the front pages?

I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US.

personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

Any time I see “pyr” in a pesticide name I worry that it is being used on foods marked organic (since pyrethrins get a pass in some cases)

The chemical is not allowed on organic crops.

Phew.

Chlorpyrifos: Pesticide tied to brain damage in children

Related Stories