The families of the people who work in the factory farm system are also affected.

You can see talks [2] on both these subjects in the Edible Education course from Berkeley [3], hosted by Michael Pollan and Raj Patel. I can recommend the whole series, and the ones from previous years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrazine

[2] http://vimeo.com/album/2192316/video/87586462

[3] http://vimeo.com/album/2192316

That is the exact reason I've often chosen organic for years. People used to say "Its no better for you" and I'd reply "Maybe, but its better for them, the workers"

An organic fungicide: copper sulfate pentahydrate (aka CuSO4)

A non-organic fungicide: iprodione (aka Rovral)

LD50 of CuSO4: 472 mg/kg (rat) [1]

LD50 of Rovral: 2g/kg (rat) [2]

So straight up, the organic is four times more lethal to mammals. But that is just the beginning, because you have to use a lot more of the organics! How much would Farmer Joe have to use on his small, 10 acre plot? Assuming the worst, lets look at the maximum seasonal application.

rate of CuSO4: 16 pounds/acre per season [3]

rate of Rovral: 12 pints/acre per season [4]

Skipping the basic algebra, in one year Joe could apply enough organic fungicide (72.5kg) to kill 1700 people. One year of non-organic (1.3kg) would be enough to kill 7 people. (Assuming a spherical man of 90 kg.)

[1] http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/coppersu.htm

[2] http://www.cdms.net/ldat/mpAKR005.pdf

[3] http://growabundant.com/copper/

[4] http://www.cdms.net/ldat/ldAKR006.pdf

edit: ambago, you are full of bunk. The USDA has very strict guidelines for labeling. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification

The organophosphate (e.g., methyl chlorpyrifos, dimethoate, methidathion and methyl parathion) pesticides used in conventional agriculture have half lives of a little less than a week to two weeks on the surface (and a half life of years in water and soil), while pyrethrins have a half life of hours in sunlight and 2 weeks in soil.

Both organophosphates and pyrethrins have toxic effects on mammals, but one is less likely to be present on purchased produce since, at least, four half lives (97% degraded) will have passed for pyrethrins, in a single day.

In the extreme, organochlorines (e.g., aldrin, chlordane, dieldrin and dicofol [OK, DDT and such are in this class too]) were spayed on conventional crops. These have half lives measured in years (on the surface), and their residues are found, in the environment, decades after specific compound bans.

Finally, US grown rice/citrus contains arsenic (there is no safe limit established for inorganic arsenic) because of conventional pesticides containing arsenic being sprayed on cotton fields (California rice/citrus is generally safer than that grown in Southern states).

All this said, I believe (opinion) that USDA organic allowing the use of so many pesticides was a give away to big ag, so they could participate in the "organic craze" without substantially changing their production practices. Personally, I buy pesticide free vs. organic when available.

edit: From source [1]:

> Chronic toxicity: Vineyard sprayers experienced liver disease after 3 to 15 years of exposure to copper sulfate solution in Bordeaux mixture [8]. Long term effects are more likely in individuals with Wilson's disease, a condition which causes excessive absorption and storage of copper [25]. Chronic exposure to low levels of copper can lead to anemia [8]

So yeah, its still bad for you.

USDA National Organic Program: http://goo.gl/OUCAXM USDA National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances: http://goo.gl/YXLUJ5

I have heard the argument that organic pesticides must be used in higher quantities, but never that they are more toxic than synthetics.

The latter statement seems nonsensical on its face. It's very difficult to believe that, given years of testing and research into both synthetic and organic pesticides, so many people are getting it so wrong as to conclude that organics are safer when they are exactly they opposite.

In fact, non-organic farming proponents aren't even making this claim to my knowledge. At most, they seem to advocate that non-organics aren't less healthy than organics.

In chemistry, an organic chemical is a compound that contains lots of carbon, or carbon chains. The loophole allows the use of these organic compounds as pesticides. The downside is that these are typically much more of a broad spectrum than the cutting edge pesticides. This means that unlike the new narrow-spectrum pesticides (which are often designed so they only affect the physiology of a specific order of invertebrate) the old-school organic chemical pesticides are harmful to pretty much everything it comes in contact with.

Here is some more info on the issue: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18...

And one last one that explains a bit more on organic chemicals: http://www.chemheritage.org/percy-julian/activities/2b.html

That's a very US-centric point of view. It was banned in the EU for a reason.

But I was replying to someone who said they live in Central Arizona. Ironic that Atrazine is produced by a Swiss company and can't even use it in their own country.

Food born illness is a serious problem (~48 million people will have some form of it in the US this year). Just look at the articles on people who are fatally poisoned by things like greens and cantaloupe.

The act attempts to address this by making sure food is properly traceable back to source and cleanliness measures are taken along the way. This is most certainly in the public interest, and the intent is not to promote big agriculture but to insure process and accountability. It doesn't actually prevent you from growing and consuming food from your own garden, but when you distribute that food, the government should be able to make sure you aren't doing things like watering it with raw sewage. This is overdue in my opinion. It's just like restaurant inspection. Necessary. Small growers shouldn't be exempted from putting people at risk. They can and should grow and process food cleanly, they should keep records, and if they are unable to, they shouldn't do it.

http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/ucm237934.ht...

TLDR; not a conspiracy but a reasonable and overdue precaution.

Food borne illnesses are, in fact, a serious problem but regulations that crush the small farmer aren't the answer. Large scale farming may be incredibly efficient at producing food but they are equally efficient at propagating food borne illnesses.

Promoting small farms when possible is beneficial to society and the planet for a host of reasons, including the reduction of food borne illnesses. Nature abhors monoculture and always fights to restore ecological diversity.

I didn't say that eliminating the enforcement of cleanliness standards would reduce illness, rather I said crushing the small farmer isn't the answer and suggested that more small farms would reduce illness.

Example (from Michael Pollan's excellent book "The Omnivore's Dilemna"): FDA regulations that require slaughterhouses to have a private restroom reserved for the FDA inspector.

For a large multinational corporation processing tons of meat per day, that is a drop in the bucket. For a small slaughterhouse processing maybe a handful of cattle/week during peak slaughtering season, that's a much more substantial cost.

People like Michael Pollan are ideologues (a good writer...I have read "Botany of Desire") but you have to take some of their views, particularly on science, with a grain of salt. Something like Micheal Moore. Not that he isn't often right but...... then there is reality.

And (to reply to a parent) I don't understand how insisting on and legislating sanitary food production, record keeping and food tracking has anything to do with mono culture and isn't a reasonable precaution.

Considering that slaughterhouses process the entire animal, and thus have to deal with whatever happens to be on the hooves or skin, or inside the viscera, it may be that a separate restroom is actually a method of reducing the risk of cross-contamination.

http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/Inspections/ucm381526.htm#foods

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/CFR-2001-title21-vol2/CFR-2...

http://www.ncagr.gov/meatpoultry/pdf/Facility%20Guidelines.p...

At any rate, this blog post provides the quote in question, from page 229 of "Omnivore's Dilemma" though it turns out it's the USDA, not the FDA that is mentioned.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...

Here's the quote: "The problem with current food-safety regulations, in [small farmer Joel Salatin’s view], is that they are one-size-fits-all rules designed to regulate giant slaughterhouses that are mindlessly applied to small farmers in such a way that “before I can sell my neighbor a T-bone steak I’ve got to wrap it up in a million dollars’ worth of quintuple-permitted processing plant.” For example, federal rules stipulate that every processing facility have a bathroom for the exclusive use of the USDA inspector. Such regulations favor the biggest industrial meatpackers, who can spread the costs of compliance over the millions of animals they process every year, at the expense of artisanal enterprises like Polyface [Salatin’s farm]."

Perhaps highly opinionated, but ideologue? How much science is he getting wrong, and how much of that is because he actively denies it?

It's like advocating that food trucks shouldn't be subject to health inspections and then saying we would all be healthier eating from this food trucks instead of restaurants.

The idea is that industrial agriculture is far more likely to produce illness. So industrial agriculture + regulations can have a higher likelihood of producing illness than small agriculture without regulation.

And since regulations stifle small farms, lower regulations on small farms can decrease the incidence of food borne illness by decreasing the percentage of food that comes from industrial agriculture.

You make good points on food safety, definitely important, but I personally feel more secure buying food from the same local farmers every week or so at our local farmers markets than food that is grown on huge farms and shipped from long distances.

I have the same opinion about meat. I would rather buy locally grown free range chicken from small local farms than chicken grown in small cages living in their own poop.

All that said, we are supposed to be a free country, so I feel like it is important to maintain the rights of both people like you who prefer food from large grocery stores, and also people like me who like my food raised by very nearby local small farmers. Really, why shouldn't we both get what we want?

How do you know that locally grown food is organic unless someone checks? Local grown and sold food doesn't necessarily mean "organic" it just means locally grown. Pesticides and chemicals are available for local growers too.

Unless you grow it or personally know where, who and how they grow the food you will not know what are you getting.

A lot of "farmers" I know (not in this country but in a country with a non-functioning FDA or USDA) have 2 lots. One lot to grow the food to sell and one to grow for themselves. The pesticide the shit out of one they sell. Nobody checks. Still looks good and pretty and people buy it and sellers make money.

As a farmer myself, I find something intriguing in your comment. I take away visions of someone using way more chemical than necessary when reading this, but that stuff is expensive. There is no reason to use more. It's always considered a blessing when you don't have to use any, even if we assume the environmental/health impact is zero. Judicious use of pesticides can improve plant health and increase yields, but that happens in every country.

I guess I'm curious about what you are trying to say? A those "farmers" you referred to really that reckless with their incomes (never mind anything else that goes along with it) in a business that has incredibly slim margins?

My gramps had a vinyard and an orchard. Pesticides are a bitch to use. Windy the next day? A bit of rain? Dew too strong? Well screw you buddy, you get to re-do everything because it's as if you didn't spray at all. Ha ha.

And those stupid grapes wouldn't even grow without pesticides. They're so bloody fragile and finnicky. Sometimes the whole thing would go belly-up because gramps would miss the spraying window by a few days (due to weather).

Seriously, anyone who is passionately against pesticides has never tried to make money off of food production. And anyone who's worried about pesticides having residual effects on them (and doesn't get in direct contact with the stuff) has never tried to make pesticides stay on those god damned plants long enough to work.

Well, if we're going to be fair about it, the fact that it washes off the surface of plants so easily doesn't mean it's just gone and not causing residual effects elsewhere.

True, but I have better things to worry about than this health food craze americans seem to be going through. I've been living here for several months and I honestly think most people here are insane. So much worrying about everything! Live a little, sheesh.[1]

Maybe SF is especially bad.

In my country we have a saying: "You keep the nice apples for yourself, you sell the rotten ones to city slickers as organic."

[1] my main gripe with the organic anti-chemical food craze is that we simply don't have enough arable land to feed everyone if we stop using GMO's and pesticides and all that stuff. We were actually supposed to all have been starving by some 20 years ago, but then we invented cool things. But I guess we can always get rid of all the rainforests to compensate and we're all gonna be so super healthy and chemical free. Hoofuckingray.

I think the same people who prefer organic food might also be wise enough not to eat three large servings of beef every day, which is what is killing the rain forests right now. And how many % of good food are being thrown away nowadays? Something like 30%? Simply because supermarkets want to have everything on the shelves all the time, and people buy without planning. There is still a lot of room for experimentation before we starve.

The vision is spraying with the deadliest and sometimes illegal pesticides (DDT and other things).

The "shit of out" is comparing to "0 pesticides". That means plucking bugs by hand in the evening from potatoes, weeding by hand, watering by hand.

> Judicious use of pesticides can improve plant health and increase yields, but that happens in every country.

Nobody is arguing with that, but given that these particular people I know (friend of relatives and so on) don't have time or language skills to read scientific literature what "judicious" amounts are.

> A those "farmers" you referred to really that reckless with their incomes

That is usually seasonal they have other business. They are not reckless they are just capitalists. They are maximizing the profit. The vegetables that look bigger, shiner and of which they can have a greater yield will maximize their profit.

My mom has a small garden (and I helped her around when I was little), it takes a LOT of time to pluck all insects from just potatoes. That is time just for that can easily be 4-6 hours. Also plucking in the evenings is like reading a book on dark side of Mars, in a barrel. You can't spot the fuckers in low light, you need best light available so only morning and in the afternoon will do.

What this comes to is this, if you use 0 pesticide that means you have to pay workers to do so which means lower efficiency and higher prices. Price for organics should (under given circumstances) be between 4-10 times more expensive.

I'm curious to know which pesticides fit this description.

This page lists many "less toxic" insecticides - http://www.clemson.edu/extension/hgic/pests/pesticide/hgic27....

The replies in this thread from people claiming to be farmers are odd -- what crop? It seems pretty important. It sounds like it's hard to grow certain wine grapes some places, ok, but why do we have lists of the 'best' and 'worst' fruits/veggies to buy organic? They have less pest problems to begin with is my assumption, but I'm not really a farmer [beyond 10'x10' of herbs and veggies in the backyard].

insecticides: Bacillus thuringiensis Cry proteins (used both in organic agriculture and in Monsanto's Bt lines), RNAi

Concentrated urine as well.

However, the statement in question was explicitly regarding pesticides, not herbicides. And, implicitly, the context is those pesticides which are in use at scale on non-organic crops.

So, while there was also an implication that we're talking about pesticides that might see practical use, I'm really not even holding out that requirement. I'm just inquiring into the names of those pesticides that are benign to both humans and the environment.

For more information about 'particle films' (like kaolin spray) see this document. There are numerous compounds mentioned and very interesting references too. These techniques also can be mixed with conventional pesticides and achieve the same efficacy as pure pesticide.

Particle Films: A New Technology for Agriculture - http://blog.meyvelitepe.org/images/Book_Chapter_Particle_Fil...

"At the present time, a commercial particle film material, Surround crop protectant, is being used in about 90% of the Pacific Northwest pear market for the early season control of pear psylla and approximately 20% of the Washington State apple market to reduce sunburn damage."

It is as though words in human language can have multiple meanings.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chemical

> 1. any substance used in or resulting from a reaction involving changes to atoms or molecules, especially one derived artificially for practical use

In the UK, the Soil Association (organic standards body) claims [1] that pesticides are used "Very rarely" on organic farms. So it strikes me as quite odd that there's all this discussion about organic pesticides as if their use is on par (or even greater than) non-organic pesticide use.

[1] http://www.soilassociation.org/frequentlyaskedquestions/your...

Everything is a chemical? [0] How about outer space, warmth, love, freedom, sunshine, and rainbows?

[0] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3324

Similar legislation was enacted btw:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDA_Food_Safety_Modernization_A...

But it had some provisions excluding smaller operations from federal oversight.

My senator, Jon Kyle, has a history of supported nutty bills, BTW.

When George W. Bush was president, he proposed a bill that would create a small national committee that would have the power to have any university professor fired because of their political views. Being a senator does not guarantee rational behavior :-) when I wrote to my Senator about this Bill, his response was very unsatisfactory in my opinion, but now that a democrat is president, I doubt he would like an Obama appointed committee to have the same powers!

It'd also like more information about the university professors, I either didn't notice at the time or completely forgot about it.

Where I live in Montana they can sell at the farmers market or roadside stands without jumping through too many hoops but for whatever reason they need to package things to sell it in stores (a store owner explained that otherwise too much liability falls on the store but i'm not sure that is it).

So I can go to a small locally owned store and buy a one pound bag of spinach grown just down the road and put in the bag by the farmer but I can't say, pick out a few local apples (or squash or bulk salad mix) unless I actually drive up the road to the orchard/farm or go to the once a week farmers market.

"Some home gardeners end up being small local growers" is sort of an answer, but why mention them both if you are only talking about the situation where "home gardener" is (at least becoming) a stretch?

I was mostly curious if mark_l_watson meant to include people growing for their own table or not. The expected impact on people growing to sell small amounts is also interesting. Figuring out what we each would have called the various possible delineations prior to the discussion is not very interesting.

(I would think the big impacts would be things like requiring people to disclose that they were reselling something, which I see as a positive for the buyer, without being particularly onerous)

Was it just Monsanto? They are a relatively small business of the businesses that deal in agriculture. I'd be surprised if the bigger companies would let them have free reign over the decision making process like that (though I'm sure they're happy to have Monsanto as the fall guy, so to speak). The only reference to the bill, with respect to who wrote it, that I could find said it was prepared by multiple corporations.

The market cap is just 63B. In comparison, a Walmart is 240+. The main reason they are smaller than their competitors is that they separated their biotech arm from their chemical company roots, while most of their competitors are still mainly chemical companies: BASF and DuPont. If we just compared their seed-producing operations though, Monsanto is probably larger, but it's not as if I've checked the numbers.

The thing about political influence is that it's not really about size, but about being in a position so that you do not have clear opponents. Farmers as a whole do not dislike Monsanto, or they'd not buy their seeds. They tend to lower crop prices, so it's not as if the next level in the food production chain has a problem with them either. So, as far as getting laws that are helpful to them, their one opponent is certain kinds of environmentalists. It's how lobbying works: It's easier to get a few people to spend a lot of an effort than to get a whole lot of people to do very little.

I concur, who are these hidden giants?

Also, when many people read "I could care less", they assume the writer has a deficiency in their education and/or attention to detail. Seldom is it advantageous to write "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less".