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.
A little pesticide is fine for cosmetic value: people buy more of the prettier fruits and veggies, great. But when you start to apply modern engineering to it, you get extremely powerful pesticides which are able to do something much more dangerous.
The most talked-about example of what I am talking about is to consider that McDonald’s has uniform french fries throughout the US. They are able to do this because the potatoes that make the french fries are genetically identical; there is exactly one McDonald’s French Fry Potato plant.
As a consequence we are freezing the evolution of part of our food supply while the pests continue to evolve to be better and better at eating those bits. The absolute precondition to do this is that human engineering clears out the pests with advanced pesticides, so that the plants don’t need evolution to stand on their own. And that is really dangerous as it pits human wits against the laws of nature for the long-term.
This is also another reason why that label of “organic” is somewhat wrong. It labels whether something happened in the production of some produce. That is very helpful, say, in response to the OP’s article about avoiding a particular pesticide for health reasons. But it doesn’t say anything about doing the historical deeds of farming where you take your best performers and plant them again for the future: and, worse, there’s a “security vulnerability” here where I can deliver a bunch of organic produce but not support evolution. I can just plant the same crop, look for signs of pests, douse only those fields with advanced pesticides, and the other fields get delivered “organic” even though their survival had only to do with random chance in how they were cultivated, not whether they were tougher in the presence of (weakened) pests.
Thanks for coming here and arguing for Integrated Farming... are there any certifications we can look for that indicate this? (I am under the understanding that anyone can call something "integrated" and it's all on the honor system.)
I have no doubts that normalization and lack of diversity are a problem. It is being observed today, for example, in the decreasing quality of tomatoes, that have lost flavour in favour of appearance.
But normalization of food production often goes in hand with normalization of feeding habits, and that is a whole different problem. For example, potato producers know that washing potatoes decreases shelf life, but they still do it because otherwise consumers wouldn't buy them.
Modern convenience has a lot to do with this, and I think that the solution lies with consumer habits as well. I am all in favour of a more conscientious approach in the consumer-side, but this should be done without resorting to simplifications and emotional responses. It will also take some time.
On the other hand, convenience is a rather early feature of our lives, so I hope adapting to new ways of producing and consuming could be at least half as quick.
In the end, I hope we will be able to use land efficiently, respecting biodiversity and allowing for a reasonable amount of natural harm, without sacrificing quality and, more importantly, food security.
As for Integrated Farming, the Wikipedia article is not as thorough as the Organic Farming article, perhaps because IF is still not a thing in the US.[1]
Integrated Farming is an extension of Integrated Pest Management, Soil management and Efficient Water Usage practices, along with other schemes. It was largely subsidized in the EU for farmers wanting to adapt their methods. From 2020 onwards, it will become the standard for EU farming practices and subsidies will stop, as far as I know.
Integrated Farming is certified by local agencies, in the same way organic farming is: checking farming logs, pesticide invoices, warehouses, equipments and such. A local agent visits my farm every year.
I'd love to see any info you have on that, because I'm not seeing anything at all. My Google Fu may be weak, but all I find is that McDonalds continues to deny using GMO potatoes.
Also, anecdotally, McDonalds french fries are far from all identical.
The lack of identicality of the fries themselves turns out to be a part of McDonald’s’ broader engineering, as a matter of fact. (You could have expected this—this is the same company whose chicken nuggets come in well-defined named shapes—but it’s not terribly well talked about.) If all the fries at McDonald’s were uniformly long they would have bad stacking properties and would give you too much in your fry cup when filled, etc., so any new potato brand that they accept, or any change to their procedures for cooking their fries, must pass a bunch of stringent tests including having a certain distribution between shorter and longer fries.
In this case there is a page on McDonalds.com which specifies the only four monocultures which they exclusively farm to make McDonalds fries.
I might be wrong, but this is how many edible crops are propagated. Apples for instance are generally clones, because the alternative is getting a new kind of apple every time.
Granted I haven't been to Mcdonalds in a while, but from what I remember this is 100% not the case. You get fries of all different sizes.
All of the bananas you eat are also genetically identical, since all banana trees grown for U.S. markets are clippings from the same original cavendish tree. Bananas is a real concern though for U.S. markets and there is currently a blight spreading, but the good news is there are hundreds of types of bananas, most of them more flavorful. The hard part is shipping them to the U.S. without bruising.
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.
And everything you do in Organic Farming can be done in Integrated Farming - you only resort to chemical solutions if there are no other options left. And even then, only if you've gone beyond a certain point beyond which the damage will out-cost the benefits of the spraying.
edit: as others have pointed out, some chemicals are allowed. However the points remains, environmentally friendly means to control weeds is often not allowed in organic.
In some rare cases, synthetic mineral solutions are allowed, like copper sulfate.
Organic doesn't mean nothing is applied. It's just a different category of product that is approved.
I mostly notice wrt soy fed chicken eggs and dairy myself, but can definitely tell the difference. Butter, and meat not as much beyond flavor.
The precautionary principle lies within Integrated Farming, because it is highly adaptable.
There are harmful insecticides being used in organic farming, and the avoidance of synthetic fungicides allows for higher levels of some dangerous fungal toxins in food.
If a fungus-resistant GMO variety were available, organic farmers could then avoid the use of fungicides altogether. But GMOS are completely of of question in OF. Why? Because it is artificial, and that's the end of it.
Quoting from criticism of that paper in [1]. Seems to a rather apt description.
You argument is precisely the kind of one that would be deployed to argue against the health risks of tetraethyl lead, asbestos, or CFCs.
It's possible it's not related, but it probably is. You are right, though "damning" and "urgent" are subjective, and depend on how much you care about preventable cancers and birth defects.
From that samsel paper, figure 3 is the most damning to me as it's closer to my field so I know more about it. The reason why thyroid cancer incidence is rising is mostly that ultrasound is increasingly used for diagnosis which gives you power to detect smaller tumors that you'd otherwise miss and not diagnose as thyroid cancer.
The authors know that this paper is crap, that's why they published it in a predatory journal. There are lots of x that are rising at the same time as y and it's very easy to ignore context and make a correlation. Depression is rising while smoking is falling; you want a cigarette?
Read this damning critic on samsel and seneff: https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/pmc/ar...
"Dr. Seneff has already predicted that by the year 2025, half of the children will be afflicted with autism from glyphosate poisoning." Half of all kids in 2025 will be autistic, right from the horse's mouth, does that seem reasonable to you?
It cites a number of studies. In particular, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/tx1001749 ("Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signaling") and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X0... ("Glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic and endocrine disruptors in human cell lines")
I don't even know what you're talking about with Samsel and Seneff. And I can't view your link.
From the Chemical Research in Toxicology article: "A reporter gene assay revealed that GBH treatment increased endogenous retinoic acid (RA) activity in Xenopus embryos and cotreatment with a RA antagonist rescued the teratogenic effects of the GBH. Therefore, we conclude that the phenotypes produced by GBH are mainly a consequence of the increase of endogenous retinoid activity. This is consistent with the decrease of Sonic hedgehog (Shh) signaling from the embryonic dorsal midline, with the inhibition of otx2 expression and with the disruption of cephalic neural crest development."
From the Toxicology article: "First, we observed a human cell endocrine disruption from 0.5 ppm on the androgen receptor in MDA-MB453-kb2 cells for the most active formulation (R400), then from 2 ppm the transcriptional activities on both estrogen receptors were also inhibited on HepG2. Aromatase transcription and activity were disrupted from 10 ppm. Cytotoxic effects started at 10 ppm with Alamar Blue assay (the most sensitive), and DNA damages at 5 ppm."
Not to mention if I give someone a glass of water it will do nothing. If I force feed them a 1000x the dose, like many of these studies, they would die. A far worse outcome than what happened to these mice and fish.
But if glyphosate is this poisonous why don't rats get sick when we give it to them?
> You argument is precisely the kind of one that would be deployed to argue against the health risks of tetraethyl lead, asbestos, or CFCs.
Except there are specific clinical links between lead/asbestos and particular, well identified conditions. On the other hand, your argument is the same used by the anti-vax and "alternative science" crowd since time immortal.
> It's possible it's not related, but it probably is. You are right, though "damning" and "urgent" are subjective, and depend on how much you care about preventable cancers and birth defects.
It must also depend on your definition of "probably"; typically, people use the word to mean "very likely" or "more likely than not", but I see you've developed your own definition here.
Of course GMO Wheat, Soy, Corn and the increased intake in Fructose in general along with refined seed oils are probably all at least in part to blame about the general state of health in the world.
Now that we've generally solved the issues of famine, we need to work on healthier foods... of course corporations aren't aligned with such concerns.
> This week, in a process that is largely invisible to consumers but that has become a semi-annual ritual of controversy within the world of organic politics, a committee called the National Organic Standards Board is selecting those synthetic substances that organic farmers and processors may use.
> ...For while many would prefer to exclude the use of any synthetic chemicals, there are some substances - including herbicides, fungicides, emulsifiers and other additives - that some organic farmers say they cannot do without.
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/sure-...
I haven't read it entirely so I cannot vouch for its quality, but you might be interested in the following paper which does a critique of their work: [2]
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=Glyphosate%2C%20pat...
[2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Glyphosate%2C-neurolog...
>In 2011, Seneff began publishing articles on topics related to biology and medicine, an area in which she has no relevant qualifications or expertise, in low-impact, open access journals,
>Seneff's claim that glyphosate is a major cause of autism and that, "At today's rates, by 2025, half the kids born will be diagnosed with autism," has also been criticized...contrary to Seneff's claims, many scientific reviews have found that the rise in autism rates over the past 20 years is due to changes in diagnostic practices
>Clinical neurologist and skeptic Steven Novella criticized Seneff's Entropy publication for making "correlation is causation" assumptions using broad statistical extrapolations from limited data,
>In 2014–2016 Seneff was proposed as an expert witness for litigators seeking damages from Pfizer associated with their cholesterol drug Lipitor,[15] but the court dismissed the claim largely because Seneff lacked expert status
I love the last one; she's actually a court-certified quack.
Speaking of fishy, the fish study was a small study where fish were literally swimming in roundup(not just glyphosate) at much higher concentrations than anything humans have contact with. Which tells us it's probably a bad idea to drink a glass of round up.
Here is a critique by an actual researcher in the field. http://www.ultimateglutenfree.com/2014/02/does-glyphosate-ca...
"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...
Extra points for also bringing up gut bacteria which also typically generates controversy, last HN article on the microbiome commenters were calling it peak gut bacteria. Whereas it’s also a science in its infancy.
I understand that science is hard, and I think it's great that people read primary research, but your attempts to do so should be balanced (i.e. don't just read things that support your argument!) and you should seek expert interpretations when possible to consider counterarguments.
It's good to take a step back and understand the kind of evidence that a given manuscript may employ. Ideally you have high-quality data from experimental intervention, appropriately quantified with statistics. This generally comes from tried-and-true experimental methods, and will produce results that speak for themselves without 'squinting' at it with stats. For smaller effect sizes, or else when sampling is limited, you may need to rely on more questionable statistics, but as part of a suite of complementary methods, this data can be very useful as well.
Next would be observational data. Observational data must deal with confounding factors as no controlled experimental intervention is made, and can only demonstrate correlation, not causation. Sometimes this data is all that is reasonably available (for practical or ethical concerns), but extreme care must be used with observational data. It becomes very easy to support a desired conclusion by careful selection of data. Serious work with observational data will go to extreme lengths to consider potentially confounding factors and explore them in great detail.
This is not a serious paper. It's not good science, and there are litany of reasons.
This paper amounts of a sort of 'gish gallop' of specious correlations that pin glyphosate as the ultimate evil and cause of an absurd variety of maladies. Celiac disease, intestinal infection, sulfate metabolism, retinoic acid, reproductive issues, Cobalamin deficiency, anemia, Molybdenum deficiency, thyroid cancer and selenium, kidney disease, general cancer, and various nutritional deficiencies. It's an astounding list. More astounding, in other work, the first author has included asthma, autism, diabetes, COPD, and more!
A priori, you should consider whether this is plausible when it's such a well-studied molecule. How could so many studies, carefully conducted with standard methods in epidemiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, etc. have missed this litany of issues?
What kind of data is backing this up? The paper presents a few graphs where incidents of certain diseases are compared to the mass of glyhposate applied. One immediately wonders how this relationship plays out: are more acres being treated with glyphoste, is the application per acre increasing, what is the number of people exposed, what are the doses of exposure, are there geographic relationships between exposure and incidence, are there new diagnostic tools or detection of the disease, etc. etc.? These are the standard sorts of questions you expect to be addressed from observational studies, yet they have no discussion here. This is telling.
Furthermore, the proposed mechanisms are little more than idle speculation. This is basic biochemistry and molecular biology, tractable issues that can be investigated experimentally. So why is this discussed? This is the sort of thing that might get a paragraph or two in a review article talking about future work. Generally this is only done when the review author knows that a colleague is performing this work or seeking funding for it.
It's difficult to communicate how 'off' this kind of speculation is. Biology is full of specious hypotheses. It's so easy to be wrong, but to sound very right and reasonable while you're doing it. You quickly develop a deep distaste for speculation outside of some animated conversations you might have with colleagues in the lab or at conferences. It has no place in the literature. It is a violation of norms that is deeply revealing.
So what about these authors? Are these molecular biologists? Biochemists? Epidemiologists? Physicians? No.
Anthony Samsel is an 'independent researcher' that publishes on occular medicine. He does stuff like go on "Moms across America" and says that glyphosate and GMOs are responsible for the Autism 'epidemic'. https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/tags/anthony_samsel Seriously, this asshole is an autism scaremonger, and somehow he's getting upvoted of fucking hacker news.
Stephanie Seneff is a (staff, i.e. not a PI. her husband is a PI, tho) computer scientist at MIT that works with speech, natural language, human-computer interface, that sort of thing. She's earned herself a Wikipedia entry that discusses her habits of publishing controversial (i.e. shitty) work in low-impact journals and generally gets involved in all kinds of shit she has no professional experience in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Seneff
You almost couldn't pick a more ridiculous pair to embody 'bad science'.
The paper you linked is pure bullshit my friend.
It's clear as day for all to see with a moment's reflection. I think you may consider your own epistemology and critical faculties to see whether they are serving you.
You got got.
"Plausible" is everywhere. There's good reason why it has not currency in science. Evidence is what has currency, and that's tricky enough to begin with.
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 that many people with trouble with wheat would be fine if they were able to avoid pesticides and repair their gut bacteria and general gut health.
The other thing I learned alongside reading that paper (or maybe it was mentioned in it, I forget), was that they use glyphosate not just to kill weeds, but as a dessicant applied directly to wheat to aid in the harvest, and a "ripening agent" applied directly to sugar cane.
Finally, although the risks are not well understood, it has been demonstrated that glyphosate does appear in detectable amounts in human excretions (urine and milk), which goes against some of the claims that were made in approving its safety (they claimed it does not bioaccumulate).
Sorry I don't have sources handy for the rest of this stuff, but it's enough to perhaps encourage others to run some searches too.
Edit: a final concern is not to humans but to soil biology. This new and growing field has been finding that there are symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi in the soil and that pesticides may disrupt this, dramatically reducing effective soil quality and the nutritional content of the plants grown there.