Did you know that they now use glyphosate to kill crops faster at the end of the harvest[1]. Its as widespread industry practice. Specifically for oats, instead of just waiting for them to die / dry out (or whatever they used to do), they now purposely spray glyphosate on them right before harvest, simply to save some money.

This isn't done early in the season, where rain or whatever can wash the crops off. Spray and Harvest.

I understand herbicides when the alternative is manually picking weeds (aka greatly increasing the cost), but to me this just screams over-use. Someone did a basic cost analysis, probably realized its 10% cheaper to use the herbicide, and done.

1. https://www.asyousow.org/blog/2020/6/23/kelloggs-glyphosate-...

And that stuff saturates the soil. This is especially problematic for legumes, as they soak it all up. It is not uncommon for cotton and legumes to be alternating crops.

By environmentally friendly, I assume you're speaking of CO2 emissions? Because there are other environmental impacts that makes glyphosate worse than tillage, such as the degradation of soil life.

There are other alternatives to tillage, but they generally require more manual labor and large farms want as little of that as possible.

You should look into conservation agriculture. It's less oil, less labor, less fertilizer, less pesticides than organic agriculture (and better soils). Only downside, lot of mice.

The conservation agriculture I'm familiar with uses less fuel, less labour, less fertilizer, less tillage but more pesticide than either conventional or organic agriculture. Another name for this type of agriculture is zero-till.

I was mostly thinking about soil loss. Tillage results in a massive loss of topsoil through erosion.

Tillage is also devastating for animal life in the soil.

This is the issue, what will replace Glyphosate? I think it peak naivete to argue it will be replaced by soap and vinegar.