I've been using strong vinegar for weed control on my property for a few years now. You do have to be careful about applying it and watch the over-spray because it is not a targeted herbicide like Roundup, it's going to kill grass and broadleaf plants alike. Sometimes I lay down a tarp to mask off the grass border, for example. But if you have a general weedy area that just needs to be knocked down, or a gravel path/driveway to keep clear, I have found it is just as effective, quick-acting, and long-lasting as the synthetic herbicides, with the side effect of smelling like salad dressing, instead of smelling like cancer.
I buy 30-45% concentrate depending on what is on sale, and dilute to around 10% for new weeds and 20% for full grown weeds. A little dish soap in there helps it wet down the leaves. For lawn weeds, once they are under control, I've been able to keep up with a 1/4 acre lawn with just manual weeding. Good tools help, I have tried a lot of weed pulling gadgets. Using a push mower means I go slow enough to spot them, and if they get too big they jam the mower so I am motivated to pull them while they are still small.
My long-departed grandmother lived her entire life in Grodno, a city in western Belarus on Nieman river. It is a lovely and fertile region with well defined seasons of the year. All kinds of things grow there, mostly temperate weather crops, potatoes, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, cabbages, apples, pears etc. Grandmother was a big believer in child labor so my summer was spent weeding every day. Her herbicide/pesticide were little children hands. I think vinegar was involved too. I think though if she could afford chemicals she would have. Ugh, if I never have to squish colorado potato beetle larvae from the potato leaf, I'll be happy.
I have an acre of forest and I spend time removing invasive species like buckthorn and wild mustard to keep the forest healthy. It can be really challenging to discriminate between native and invasive plants without a lot of experience and plant identifying apps like iNaturalist. I would love to be able to sweep my phone around and have it highlight invasive plants live. Is anyone working on something like this? The technology already works in images of a single plant, I just need to identify multiple plants in one frame, and ideally live video.
Wondering whether glyphosate-resistant plants will keep their resistance after glyphosate is no longer being used. Will that vestigial trait become a liability due to some extra energy costs, and eventually fall back out of the gene pool?
Yes - eventually. The selective pressure to acquire resistance to a widely used herbicide is enormous. The "takes tiny a bit more energy" pressure to lose a useless trait is minimal.
Weeds have a function which does run opposite to the objectives of monoculture, but I'd probably put my money on millions of years of evolution over the needs of industrial farmers. Permaculture and "food forest" methodologies are not as good for anyone's profit margin, but they are more resilient and lean on natural processes of ecological niche development instead of fighting them.
The weeds discussed in this article, Amaranthus tuberculatus and Amaranthus palmeri, are exactly the kind of plants that early human cultivators would have selected as a seed crop - fast-growing robust plants that could be continually selected for maximal seed size and minimal toxin production generation after generation (which is how crops like maize were developed). Indeed members of this genus were used by Aztecs and others for just that purpose:
As far as maintaining fields, area spraying of pesticides and herbicides will be replaced with robots wielding lasers and using AI image recognition to catch pest infestations before they take over entire fields.
Some Amaranthus species are used in India too, as foods. The grains are used to make laddus (sweet balls made by mixing the grains which sugar or jaggery) and the leaves are eaten as cooked greens with spices, masala, onions, etc. Both are quite tasty.
I wonder how soon new Amaranth species would evolve since ML models are not 100% precise and genetic mutations of a leaf shape would carry on eventually mimicking useful crops?
That's a very confident prediction for something that sounds quite unlikely to me.
How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
Laser-wielding robots are already being successfully deployed to combat weeds at scale on farms across the US.
> How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
Aside from these not currently existing, they also have far worse failure modes than robots with lasers. Introducing species for biological control methods have a long and storied history of becoming a problem as bad as or worse than the original problem.
The article does note that this may similarly cause plants to fight back. Nothing so cool as mirrored weeds, but...
> It’s not just chemicals. Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method. In a classic example from China, a weed called barnyard grass evolved over centuries to resemble rice and thus evade hand weeding.
We're pretty confidently letting AI drive 2 ton metal vehicles on the road, and letting them fly around in the sky with grenades. A farmer-bot with a laser sounds pretty tame to me.
It has a guidance system that is connected to a wheel that is friction attached to the steering wheel and turns it on an old tractor. A newer system with an old tractor - https://youtu.be/t0uIYjOds_o
Newer tractors have this built in. The modern tractor cab is a mini data center. https://youtu.be/ZhOvchjeqgM (and you can see that he's not touching the wheel most of the time)
> Monsanto claimed it was “highly unlikely” that glyphosate-resistant weeds would become a problem. There were, of course, those who correctly predicted that such a thing was inevitable
I've started noticing that this happens all the time, across all fields. Experts disagree, the expert with the most positive outlook is the one whose opinion wins out, and we find ourselves in trouble years/decades later.
I've adopted a "treat every expert as a lawyer" mindset now that has helped illuminate some of this for me. I prefer to listen to podcasts where people in the field talk to each other, rather than someone presenting the information to the layperson. There's a lot of jargon but you can very easily get a sense of (1) what issues does everyone agree on (2) what issues are they bickering on, and what their reasons are
The emergence of resistance to glyphosate was a given. Monsanto itself sells glyphosate-resistant plants, so we know exactly how it can evolve.
The resistant gene was isolated from an Agrobacterium strain. And these bacteria have been doing gene editing in plants for hundreds of millions of years, completely naturally. So it was just a matter of time until weeds gained the resistant genes from it. Or evolved them via a different mechanism.
Still, glyphosate bought us at least six decades of relatively weed-free agriculture for staple crops. Resistance is still not universal, so glyphosate will continue working for a while, helping to lower the price of food.
Do you mean DEKALB, a subsidiary of Bayer Crop Science? Monsanto doesn't sell anything. They closed up shop years ago and sold the assets to Bayer and BASF.
Devil's advocate: I've asked a couple of farmers about this. The conventional wisdom is that glyphosate reduced the carbon footprint of farming.
My own feeling is that reducing the amount of farming would also reduce the carbon footprint of farming. I love meat as much as the next person, but widespread meat consumption is not particularly ecological.
Despite the very large recent decreases in the price of lab-grown meat (I have just seen an announce about a company that claims that they "can now produce 100 percent cultivated chicken (85 percent muscle and 15 percent fat) at $11.79 per pound on a large scale"), it is not yet proven that lab-grown meat can be produced at a lower price and by consuming less resources than traditional meat.
On the other hand, it is pretty certain that it is possible to produce high-quality animal proteins, like whey protein or egg white protein, in a sustainable way and at a lower cost, by cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which can be fed with cheap carbohydrates from cereals and with minerals, unlike the animal cells which require a very complex food.
The company that has achieved the low price quoted above has done this by replacing the animal food that was given previously by everybody to the cultivated cells (e.g. serum and albumin) with some mixture of substances extracted from various vegetables.
It is unlikely that it will be ever possible for the food given to cell cultures to be cheaper than the food given to real chicken. The only chance for lab-grown meat to become cheaper than real chicken meat is given by the fact that only the edible part of a chicken is grown, i.e. the equivalent of a breast or thigh, instead of growing the entire chicken body with many parts that have a low value.
While fungal cultures would be much more efficient than any lab-grown meat, they could provide only protein powder, which could enrich in proteins any vegetable food, but from which it would not be easy to make something resembling a steak.
Could you pinpoint what exactly is not sustainable about eating meet though? In the UK (where I live) we eat meet produced mostly within the country, the livestock here are generally mostly fed a grass diet. Yes we should eat meet in moderation like anything, yes chopping down rainforests and building feeding lots is obvs horrific. But otherwise, the cattle eat the grass, they turn that into meet and farts, which fairly quickly come full circle back into the ground. No fossil fuels here. Hard to think of something more sustainable to me.
They emit methane as a by product of eating the grass, it's like chucking the grass up in the air and having to wait approx 20 years for it to fully come back down to be eaten again, it's still circular, it's still fully sustainable. Digging up fossil oils from deep ground and shuving it into the atmosphere and never ever putting it back deep into the ground is the elephant in the room here.
Lab grown meat is an economical dead end. Way too many large scale meat eaters in the US think it's fucking identity politics somehow, and will willingly pay more for "real" meat even if lab grown meat could magically become cheaper, which it has shown no ability to so far.
The people like me, willing to eat lab grown meat, already are willing to pay more for more carefully grown meat and just eat less meat in general. We are the minority.
The fake meat industry is currently failing. Probably because their products were hyper processed trash that was usually less palatable than a comparable meat replacement, not healthier in general, and somehow STILL more expensive than real meat.
The EPA says that glyphosate isn't carcinogenic in humans. The WHO says that it is.
The EPA says it's not an endocrine disruptor. Numerous studies and experts suggest that it is, although I can't find any major government or NGO that agrees.
I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
EDIT: I'm not religious about this, presumably all the restaurant food I eat is grown with glyphosate. But my local grocery store only has organic produce, I usually buy that since it's convenient and the cost difference is not a big deal.
> A cancer hazard is an agent that is capable of causing cancer, whereas a cancer risk is an estimate of the probability that cancer will occur given some level of exposure to a cancer hazard. The Monographs assess the strength of evidence that an agent is a cancer hazard. The distinction between hazard and risk is fundamental.
> The identification of a cancer hazard should trigger some action to protect
public health, either directly as a result of the hazard identification or through the conduct of a risk assessment.
The key thing to recognize here is they are making preliminary assessments of existing lines of research, looking for studies into whether an agent has been associated with cancer in humans, animals, or mechanistically, and characterizing the strength of such evidence, as to whether or not something can cause cancer.
The purpose of doing this is so that other standards bodies can assess the actual dose/response relationship and your probability of getting cancer from levels of exposure. Glyphosate in in group 2A, along with things like being a barber, night shift work, hot beverages, red meat. Lots of things the EPA does not ban.
Why? Because as the organization itself says, hazard does not mean risk. The fact that studies show a robust association between one thing and some increase in cancer incidence, at any dose, does not mean the level of exposure any regular person experiences raises their probability of getting cancer by any meaningful amount we should care about or regulate.
The problem here is you're almost certainly not actually reading the publications of either IARC or the EPA, which are not in conflict with each other. You're reading science journalism, which almost universally presents this in the most misleading, fear-mongering fashion possible to attract eyeballs.
The IARC monograph restricts its inquiry to carcinogenicity whereas I am more worried about glyphosate's potential to impair my gut microbiome, i.e., decrease the total number of microbes or decrease the ratio of beneficial microbes to harmful ones.
Basically they conclude that the chemical has the potential to increase cancer incidence in some dose. But they are not making any statement about whether glyphosate as used in agriculture increases cancer risk?
> I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
Yeah, and I tuned my car to emit extra black smoke for better motor vibration. It now ROARS and consumes more gas, helping to stimulate the economy!
It's like I can cite the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation to say that we should ban electric cars, because they are polluting the air with brake dust.
Did you read that link? Group 2 is pretty poorly explained to laypeople, Aloe Vera is listed as "Possibly carcinogenic", 2B.
High concentration and quantity and long term exposure to glyphosate is probably bad for the farmers spraying, but their listing of glyphosate is completely irrelevant for the consumer buying a crop that was sprayed with it. They never once mention any danger to consumers in that entire article.
Even in that limited case (occupational hazard), the data is mixed, and the IARC says that the US AHS study of 50k pesticide applicators did not find a correlation between cancer and glyphosate. They say that doesn't overrule the other findings.
They are being hyperconservative for the safety of workers. That literally doesn't apply to you, the consumer.
Monsanto didn't win because they had the most positive outlook, they won because they had a dominate business position, the most lobbying, etc. Jonathan Gressel & Stanley Culpepper, who the article mentions as folks who disagreed with Monsanto on this, have no such power to dictate things to farmers or congress.
>Monsanto won because they have a superior product, that makes it easier for farmers to grow crops.
Cheaper too and leads to better no-till practices. Despite all the anti-GMO FUD around it, it's just a superior way to farm by basically any metric you look at.
There has not been a single plant/weed agricultural expert in the field in the last 20+ years who has said our overuse of herbicides is not a bad thing and will result in ever more resistant weeds.
I think the confusion is always the same, laymen listening to industry or company spokesmen who have a profit motives, the scientist have no such confusion.
> First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted -- soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project."
> Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, "the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant" to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for Monsanto's efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds.
Of course it's easier for it to happen in nature than for them to do it in a lab. The way nature does this is that when you kill untold numbers of the ones that aren't resistant, you're left with the ones that are. If you used that method with our actual crops, you would nearly wipe out the crops and cause massive food crises.
But not productively. In monoculture agriculture, all but a single planted crop is a weed by definition, and we have no way of making use of it at scale. Sure, you can eat dandelion greens from your yard, but that does not scale.
There are a lot of benefits to quality, nutrition, environment, and community to growing food at smaller scale, but it is certainly more expensive.
You don't need to grow anything. You can just eat the plants. Just be careful in how you decide what plants to eat.
My cats eat plants that somehow seem to grow out of concrete. I have no idea how a plant can even grow out of concrete at all, but it totally works.
It probably has some minerals in it. Is it very nutritious? Probably not.
You can also just eat stinging nettle. Make soup out of it. Free meal. One of the most nutritious plants that is available in almost all western countries, and probably grows outside of western countries too.
It's... I dunno why people don't trust nature or the wisdom in their bodies anymore.
Another example. Eat an apple. You're fine.
Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat that paste, you will die.
Yet we eat apples all day. We trust apples. If something looks, feels and smells edible? Probably fine. Maybe ask a few locals like some birds, cats and dogs because they know nature a little bit better than you do probably.
If you eat in the same way that Werner Herzog makes films, you'll be invincible.
There is no such thing as "herbicides"
they are semi targeted biocides and are not maintaing there effectivness or targeted enough to prevent unacceptable
"collateral" damage.
Biology supports this as there are very few parallels to be found in nature for this kind of defence/offencive use of
chemicals in multi cellular life.Which is a great big hint as to the true cost benifit equation over, reproductive time
scales
Many single celled life does of course use
chemical deffensive/offensive products, yeast and various algae capable of powerfull effects on many life forms.
Then there are venoms,but those are mechanicaly targeted.
Nature evrn invented the "tazzer" as a weapon/deffence,in electric eals.
Ignoring the vast and tested data set that is present in nature is dumb.
I've been using strong vinegar for weed control on my property for a few years now. You do have to be careful about applying it and watch the over-spray because it is not a targeted herbicide like Roundup, it's going to kill grass and broadleaf plants alike. Sometimes I lay down a tarp to mask off the grass border, for example. But if you have a general weedy area that just needs to be knocked down, or a gravel path/driveway to keep clear, I have found it is just as effective, quick-acting, and long-lasting as the synthetic herbicides, with the side effect of smelling like salad dressing, instead of smelling like cancer.
I buy 30-45% concentrate depending on what is on sale, and dilute to around 10% for new weeds and 20% for full grown weeds. A little dish soap in there helps it wet down the leaves. For lawn weeds, once they are under control, I've been able to keep up with a 1/4 acre lawn with just manual weeding. Good tools help, I have tried a lot of weed pulling gadgets. Using a push mower means I go slow enough to spot them, and if they get too big they jam the mower so I am motivated to pull them while they are still small.
The other option is boiling water, I've used it and it's very effective.
Another vote for this, especially on pathways and between bricks etc.
Curious person here with a warning: don’t smell 30% vinegar. You are missing nothing gods by skipping this. I promise.
I hope you know that this’ll make more people want to smell it, not less. ;)
At least I’m curious now..
An olfactory Streisand Effect!
I've used the same, and it seems just as, if not more, effective than the roundup available from the garden centre.
The only problem is that vinegar destroys spray machines. Even though I rinse through after every use.
My long-departed grandmother lived her entire life in Grodno, a city in western Belarus on Nieman river. It is a lovely and fertile region with well defined seasons of the year. All kinds of things grow there, mostly temperate weather crops, potatoes, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, cabbages, apples, pears etc. Grandmother was a big believer in child labor so my summer was spent weeding every day. Her herbicide/pesticide were little children hands. I think vinegar was involved too. I think though if she could afford chemicals she would have. Ugh, if I never have to squish colorado potato beetle larvae from the potato leaf, I'll be happy.
I have an acre of forest and I spend time removing invasive species like buckthorn and wild mustard to keep the forest healthy. It can be really challenging to discriminate between native and invasive plants without a lot of experience and plant identifying apps like iNaturalist. I would love to be able to sweep my phone around and have it highlight invasive plants live. Is anyone working on something like this? The technology already works in images of a single plant, I just need to identify multiple plants in one frame, and ideally live video.
What a brilliant idea!
To Xcode i go!
And I now have an excuse for a new M4 Mac mini.
You’re a genius Navark!
Wondering whether glyphosate-resistant plants will keep their resistance after glyphosate is no longer being used. Will that vestigial trait become a liability due to some extra energy costs, and eventually fall back out of the gene pool?
Yes - eventually. The selective pressure to acquire resistance to a widely used herbicide is enormous. The "takes tiny a bit more energy" pressure to lose a useless trait is minimal.
Weeds have a function which does run opposite to the objectives of monoculture, but I'd probably put my money on millions of years of evolution over the needs of industrial farmers. Permaculture and "food forest" methodologies are not as good for anyone's profit margin, but they are more resilient and lean on natural processes of ecological niche development instead of fighting them.
The weeds discussed in this article, Amaranthus tuberculatus and Amaranthus palmeri, are exactly the kind of plants that early human cultivators would have selected as a seed crop - fast-growing robust plants that could be continually selected for maximal seed size and minimal toxin production generation after generation (which is how crops like maize were developed). Indeed members of this genus were used by Aztecs and others for just that purpose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_grain
As far as maintaining fields, area spraying of pesticides and herbicides will be replaced with robots wielding lasers and using AI image recognition to catch pest infestations before they take over entire fields.
Some Amaranthus species are used in India too, as foods. The grains are used to make laddus (sweet balls made by mixing the grains which sugar or jaggery) and the leaves are eaten as cooked greens with spices, masala, onions, etc. Both are quite tasty.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rajgira
I wonder how soon new Amaranth species would evolve since ML models are not 100% precise and genetic mutations of a leaf shape would carry on eventually mimicking useful crops?
It already happens with human vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
> will be replaced with robots wielding lasers
That's a very confident prediction for something that sounds quite unlikely to me.
How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
Laser-wielding robots are already being successfully deployed to combat weeds at scale on farms across the US.
> How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
Aside from these not currently existing, they also have far worse failure modes than robots with lasers. Introducing species for biological control methods have a long and storied history of becoming a problem as bad as or worse than the original problem.
The article does note that this may similarly cause plants to fight back. Nothing so cool as mirrored weeds, but...
> It’s not just chemicals. Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method. In a classic example from China, a weed called barnyard grass evolved over centuries to resemble rice and thus evade hand weeding.
Read the article you are commenting on, these alternatives are mentioned.
Laser wielding AI robots already exist, and are being used commercially.
If you'd like to see a successful one at scale: https://carbonrobotics.com/
https://carbonrobotics.com/autonomous-weeder
https://carbonrobotics.com/laserweeder
Weed lasers in Idaho - https://youtu.be/lWTDwj1y9Xg
We're pretty confidently letting AI drive 2 ton metal vehicles on the road, and letting them fly around in the sky with grenades. A farmer-bot with a laser sounds pretty tame to me.
12 years ago: Our Tractor Literally Drives Itself! (GPS Auto Steering Technology) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStRc1fCj38
It has a guidance system that is connected to a wheel that is friction attached to the steering wheel and turns it on an old tractor. A newer system with an old tractor - https://youtu.be/t0uIYjOds_o
Newer tractors have this built in. The modern tractor cab is a mini data center. https://youtu.be/ZhOvchjeqgM (and you can see that he's not touching the wheel most of the time)
https://archive.ph/Euc4P
Wonder if Laundando and associates lurk HN. Surely they are comments about carbon robotics.
> Monsanto claimed it was “highly unlikely” that glyphosate-resistant weeds would become a problem. There were, of course, those who correctly predicted that such a thing was inevitable
I've started noticing that this happens all the time, across all fields. Experts disagree, the expert with the most positive outlook is the one whose opinion wins out, and we find ourselves in trouble years/decades later.
I've adopted a "treat every expert as a lawyer" mindset now that has helped illuminate some of this for me. I prefer to listen to podcasts where people in the field talk to each other, rather than someone presenting the information to the layperson. There's a lot of jargon but you can very easily get a sense of (1) what issues does everyone agree on (2) what issues are they bickering on, and what their reasons are
The emergence of resistance to glyphosate was a given. Monsanto itself sells glyphosate-resistant plants, so we know exactly how it can evolve.
The resistant gene was isolated from an Agrobacterium strain. And these bacteria have been doing gene editing in plants for hundreds of millions of years, completely naturally. So it was just a matter of time until weeds gained the resistant genes from it. Or evolved them via a different mechanism.
Still, glyphosate bought us at least six decades of relatively weed-free agriculture for staple crops. Resistance is still not universal, so glyphosate will continue working for a while, helping to lower the price of food.
> Monsanto itself sells glyphosate-resistant plants
Do you mean DEKALB, a subsidiary of Bayer Crop Science? Monsanto doesn't sell anything. They closed up shop years ago and sold the assets to Bayer and BASF.
>glyphosate will continue working for a while, helping to lower the price of food.
And I'll continue to choose the version grown without glyphosate even though the price is higher.
Devil's advocate: I've asked a couple of farmers about this. The conventional wisdom is that glyphosate reduced the carbon footprint of farming.
My own feeling is that reducing the amount of farming would also reduce the carbon footprint of farming. I love meat as much as the next person, but widespread meat consumption is not particularly ecological.
I love meat as much as the next person, but widespread meat consumption is not particularly ecological.
Lab-grown meat is probably the quickest route forward that maintains normalcy whilst solving the sustainability issues.
Despite the very large recent decreases in the price of lab-grown meat (I have just seen an announce about a company that claims that they "can now produce 100 percent cultivated chicken (85 percent muscle and 15 percent fat) at $11.79 per pound on a large scale"), it is not yet proven that lab-grown meat can be produced at a lower price and by consuming less resources than traditional meat.
On the other hand, it is pretty certain that it is possible to produce high-quality animal proteins, like whey protein or egg white protein, in a sustainable way and at a lower cost, by cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which can be fed with cheap carbohydrates from cereals and with minerals, unlike the animal cells which require a very complex food.
The company that has achieved the low price quoted above has done this by replacing the animal food that was given previously by everybody to the cultivated cells (e.g. serum and albumin) with some mixture of substances extracted from various vegetables.
It is unlikely that it will be ever possible for the food given to cell cultures to be cheaper than the food given to real chicken. The only chance for lab-grown meat to become cheaper than real chicken meat is given by the fact that only the edible part of a chicken is grown, i.e. the equivalent of a breast or thigh, instead of growing the entire chicken body with many parts that have a low value.
While fungal cultures would be much more efficient than any lab-grown meat, they could provide only protein powder, which could enrich in proteins any vegetable food, but from which it would not be easy to make something resembling a steak.
Could you pinpoint what exactly is not sustainable about eating meet though? In the UK (where I live) we eat meet produced mostly within the country, the livestock here are generally mostly fed a grass diet. Yes we should eat meet in moderation like anything, yes chopping down rainforests and building feeding lots is obvs horrific. But otherwise, the cattle eat the grass, they turn that into meet and farts, which fairly quickly come full circle back into the ground. No fossil fuels here. Hard to think of something more sustainable to me.
What feeds the grass? Chances are it partly is imported fertilizer (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/imports-of-ferti...), and that the nitrogen in the fertilizer is partly washed out into the environment (https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/government-watchdog-fai...)
Also, chances are the livestock partly is fed from imported food, for example in winter.
The farts (and burps) are a major greenhouse gas component. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/war-cow-farts-is-stink...
They emit methane as a by product of eating the grass, it's like chucking the grass up in the air and having to wait approx 20 years for it to fully come back down to be eaten again, it's still circular, it's still fully sustainable. Digging up fossil oils from deep ground and shuving it into the atmosphere and never ever putting it back deep into the ground is the elephant in the room here.
What is the delta in production between cows eating the grass and the same grass decomposing without the cows?
Indeed, our current dietary "normalcy" is an engineered phenomenon to begin with, and a new one can be engineered just as well.
Lab grown meat is an economical dead end. Way too many large scale meat eaters in the US think it's fucking identity politics somehow, and will willingly pay more for "real" meat even if lab grown meat could magically become cheaper, which it has shown no ability to so far.
The people like me, willing to eat lab grown meat, already are willing to pay more for more carefully grown meat and just eat less meat in general. We are the minority.
The fake meat industry is currently failing. Probably because their products were hyper processed trash that was usually less palatable than a comparable meat replacement, not healthier in general, and somehow STILL more expensive than real meat.
Why? Because it has better vibes?
The EPA says that glyphosate isn't carcinogenic in humans. The WHO says that it is.
The EPA says it's not an endocrine disruptor. Numerous studies and experts suggest that it is, although I can't find any major government or NGO that agrees.
I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
EDIT: I'm not religious about this, presumably all the restaurant food I eat is grown with glyphosate. But my local grocery store only has organic produce, I usually buy that since it's convenient and the cost difference is not a big deal.
You're presumably thinking of the IARC monograph. You can read how the classifications work in their own preamble: https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/P...
Specifically,
> A cancer hazard is an agent that is capable of causing cancer, whereas a cancer risk is an estimate of the probability that cancer will occur given some level of exposure to a cancer hazard. The Monographs assess the strength of evidence that an agent is a cancer hazard. The distinction between hazard and risk is fundamental.
> The identification of a cancer hazard should trigger some action to protect public health, either directly as a result of the hazard identification or through the conduct of a risk assessment.
The key thing to recognize here is they are making preliminary assessments of existing lines of research, looking for studies into whether an agent has been associated with cancer in humans, animals, or mechanistically, and characterizing the strength of such evidence, as to whether or not something can cause cancer.
The purpose of doing this is so that other standards bodies can assess the actual dose/response relationship and your probability of getting cancer from levels of exposure. Glyphosate in in group 2A, along with things like being a barber, night shift work, hot beverages, red meat. Lots of things the EPA does not ban.
Why? Because as the organization itself says, hazard does not mean risk. The fact that studies show a robust association between one thing and some increase in cancer incidence, at any dose, does not mean the level of exposure any regular person experiences raises their probability of getting cancer by any meaningful amount we should care about or regulate.
The problem here is you're almost certainly not actually reading the publications of either IARC or the EPA, which are not in conflict with each other. You're reading science journalism, which almost universally presents this in the most misleading, fear-mongering fashion possible to attract eyeballs.
The IARC monograph restricts its inquiry to carcinogenicity whereas I am more worried about glyphosate's potential to impair my gut microbiome, i.e., decrease the total number of microbes or decrease the ratio of beneficial microbes to harmful ones.
Thanks, this is helpful context.
Basically they conclude that the chemical has the potential to increase cancer incidence in some dose. But they are not making any statement about whether glyphosate as used in agriculture increases cancer risk?
> The WHO says that it is.
No, it doesn't.
> I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
Yeah, and I tuned my car to emit extra black smoke for better motor vibration. It now ROARS and consumes more gas, helping to stimulate the economy!
"IARC classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans".
The International Agency for Research on Cancer is part of the WHO.
https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-new...
What am I missing?
> "IARC classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans".
This category includes: carpentry, bracken ferns, aloe vera extract and traditional Asian pickled vegetables, magnetic fields, radio, coffee.
I'm not kidding, go see yourself: https://monographs.iarc.who.int/list-of-classifications (group 2B).
This agency has zero credibility now. No serious agency (EPA, EFSA, etc.) classifies it as dangerous: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2023-07/glyph...
It's like I can cite the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation to say that we should ban electric cars, because they are polluting the air with brake dust.
Coffee seems to now be group 3, but your point stands. 2B is meaningless as a consumer guidance.
Did you read that link? Group 2 is pretty poorly explained to laypeople, Aloe Vera is listed as "Possibly carcinogenic", 2B.
High concentration and quantity and long term exposure to glyphosate is probably bad for the farmers spraying, but their listing of glyphosate is completely irrelevant for the consumer buying a crop that was sprayed with it. They never once mention any danger to consumers in that entire article.
Even in that limited case (occupational hazard), the data is mixed, and the IARC says that the US AHS study of 50k pesticide applicators did not find a correlation between cancer and glyphosate. They say that doesn't overrule the other findings.
They are being hyperconservative for the safety of workers. That literally doesn't apply to you, the consumer.
Glyphosate is mostly used for animal feed crops like field corn, soybeans, and alfalfa that have genetically modified seeds that resist glyphosate.
Looks like it’s used for some fruits and vegetables too, but it’s mostly for the ones I listed above.
Monsanto didn't win because they had the most positive outlook, they won because they had a dominate business position, the most lobbying, etc. Jonathan Gressel & Stanley Culpepper, who the article mentions as folks who disagreed with Monsanto on this, have no such power to dictate things to farmers or congress.
Monsanto won because they have a superior product, that makes it easier for farmers to grow crops.
That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
>Monsanto won because they have a superior product, that makes it easier for farmers to grow crops.
Cheaper too and leads to better no-till practices. Despite all the anti-GMO FUD around it, it's just a superior way to farm by basically any metric you look at.
There has not been a single plant/weed agricultural expert in the field in the last 20+ years who has said our overuse of herbicides is not a bad thing and will result in ever more resistant weeds.
I think the confusion is always the same, laymen listening to industry or company spokesmen who have a profit motives, the scientist have no such confusion.
> First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted -- soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project."
> Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, "the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant" to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for Monsanto's efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/03/11/148290731/wh...
Of course it's easier for it to happen in nature than for them to do it in a lab. The way nature does this is that when you kill untold numbers of the ones that aren't resistant, you're left with the ones that are. If you used that method with our actual crops, you would nearly wipe out the crops and cause massive food crises.
Weeds are just plants
You can eat weeds, and they turn back into plants or crops.
It's just some word trickery.
But not productively. In monoculture agriculture, all but a single planted crop is a weed by definition, and we have no way of making use of it at scale. Sure, you can eat dandelion greens from your yard, but that does not scale.
There are a lot of benefits to quality, nutrition, environment, and community to growing food at smaller scale, but it is certainly more expensive.
You don't need to grow anything. You can just eat the plants. Just be careful in how you decide what plants to eat.
My cats eat plants that somehow seem to grow out of concrete. I have no idea how a plant can even grow out of concrete at all, but it totally works.
It probably has some minerals in it. Is it very nutritious? Probably not.
You can also just eat stinging nettle. Make soup out of it. Free meal. One of the most nutritious plants that is available in almost all western countries, and probably grows outside of western countries too.
It's... I dunno why people don't trust nature or the wisdom in their bodies anymore.
Another example. Eat an apple. You're fine.
Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat that paste, you will die.
Yet we eat apples all day. We trust apples. If something looks, feels and smells edible? Probably fine. Maybe ask a few locals like some birds, cats and dogs because they know nature a little bit better than you do probably.
If you eat in the same way that Werner Herzog makes films, you'll be invincible.
>Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat them, you will die.
Only if you eat a couple pounds of the seeds. I eat one apple's worth of seeds every time I eat an apple, it's fine.
Profit motives... the very sickening sickness of The System.
Why?
This is just a link to the actual article here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-cl...
Thanks! We've switched to that from https://longreads.com/2024/11/07/the-weeds-are-winning/ above.
Can we just link directly to the story rather than through longreads? https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-cl...
There is no such thing as "herbicides" they are semi targeted biocides and are not maintaing there effectivness or targeted enough to prevent unacceptable "collateral" damage. Biology supports this as there are very few parallels to be found in nature for this kind of defence/offencive use of chemicals in multi cellular life.Which is a great big hint as to the true cost benifit equation over, reproductive time scales Many single celled life does of course use chemical deffensive/offensive products, yeast and various algae capable of powerfull effects on many life forms. Then there are venoms,but those are mechanicaly targeted. Nature evrn invented the "tazzer" as a weapon/deffence,in electric eals. Ignoring the vast and tested data set that is present in nature is dumb.
People would take you more seriously here if you made fewer spelling and grammatical mistakes.
It’s extremely arrogant actually to post that incoherence and put the work on to us to make sense of.
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