Farmer here: We apply glyphosate to both GMO (roundup ready) and non-GMO crops. The big difference is when: The roundup ready crops can have it applied early in the growing season. The non-GMO crops have to wait until just before harvest, when you don't care, or even prefer, that the crop dies.

What's the benefit to apply glyphosate just before harvest.

Hasn't all the growing already been done? Is it to avoid bringing in bugs with the harvest?

Weed control for future crops and/or desiccation.

Some farmers with apply roundup just before harvest in order to desiccate the plant. This makes harvesting much simpler and cheaper, as you don't have to wait for the plants to dry naturally, or deal with moisture rich plants after harvest.

Actually, they use just as much glyphosate when growing wheat (not GMO) as when growing corn (maybe 80% is GMO) in the US.

    USA
    corn
      production     333 000 000 tons
      glyphosate use  69 000 000 lb
    wheat
      production      58 000 000 tons
      glyphosate use  17 000 000 lb

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044953/ (Table 3)

Why? Are you a dicotyledon that relies on the shikimic acid pathway to synthesize folates?

The parent is probably a very complex system with too many pathways involved in their life to be confident that none of them will get involved in a side-reaction. I'm not a surface impurity on a roll of sheet metal but that doesn't mean I'll stick my hand into a steel pickling vat.

That’s just as legitimate an argument for eating nothing at all, though.

Why do you have that preference? It's my understanding that the alternatives are worse.

Organic food is worse than food wich was treated with various chemicals to kill living things?

Thats news to me.

But you probably mean "alternatives" for producing dirt cheap. Then yes, there are much worse substances around. Doesn't make it good, though.

Organic food IS food which is treated with various chemicals to kill living things. But the list of various chemicals are arbitrarily defined as "natural", putting them in the same list as other safe, natural chemicals like ricin, botulinum, strychnine, arsenic...

"Organic" is a marketing term, not a descriptor of the production process.

>"Organic" is a marketing term, not a descriptor of the production process.

I generally agree with this, but with the caveat that tomatoes are an exception as I understand it.

It's nothing to do with being GMO or pesticides used, but rather the fact that conventionally grown tomatoes are generally harvested significantly pre-ripening, and then gassed with ethylene to promote them turning red.

My understanding -- and if I'm wrong about this someone please do chime in -- is that ethylene gassing isn't acceptable for tomatoes that are labeled organic (but is for some "organic" fruits like bananas). It's possible it's all placebo, but tomatoes are the one fruit/vegetable I tend toward actually using organic as result.

No, I mean that the chemicals used in organic farming to kill living things are more harmful to humans than glyphosate is.

The (small) organic farmers I know dont use pesticides at all. And as far as I know, here in europe they would not be allowed to use anything realy toxic, when they want to have the organic label.

So things are different in the US then? Or also for europe? sources please.

> The (small) organic farmers I know dont use pesticides at all.

They aren't representative of the bulk of organic food production. Overall, organic food production is, like non-organic food production, dominated by large, industrial agriculture concerns that do use pesticides.

Here's a list of 12 chemicals approved for use in organic farming:

https://risk-monger.com/2016/04/13/the-risk-mongers-dirty-do...

That site believes organic farming is a hoax. It also also seems to be mixing up data about US regulation and UK opinion (and thus EU regulation). An intro to EU regulation for organic plant farming is https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-...

> Organic food is worse than food wich was treated with various chemicals to kill living things?

Organic food is, itself, generally food which is treated with various chemicals to kill living things. The choice of chemicals involved, and the choice of actual food crop, is limited by concerns that are chosen on bases which are not well adapted to either maximizing safety of the food or minimizing environmental impact of the food growing process.

Organic food is treated with pesticides and herbicides too. There's a limited list of allowed chemicals, some of which are much worse than glycophosphate.

To be sure we're all on the same page, there are differences in organic regulation in the US vs the EU. I don't know much about the US situation, but an outline of EU general regulations for organic plants is https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-... :

> Basic substances allowed in organic agriculture comply with two criteria: i) they are of vegetable or animal origin ii) they are considered to be "foodstuff"

That's not true, though, there are authorized exceptions, like copper. See Annex II, table 3: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=uriserv%...