The sustainability case for “industrial agriculture”

Small-scale food system enlarges human footprint

 

It has come to my attention that the fast food chain Chipotle has announced that it will no longer serve food grown with genetically modified organisms. Apparently, this occurred last month, but somehow I missed it on Twitter. Between the debut of Caitlyn Jenner, the latest royal baby, and the FIFA corruption scandal, I guess it just slipped through my stream.

I’m kidding, of course. If you follow food politics on social media or pretty much anywhere else, I dare say it would be impossible not to know that Chipotle has decided to phase out GMOs. In this way, what you think about GMOs has become a proxy for what you think about food and agriculture more broadly. GMO opponents are actually quite clear about this. What they are really after, many will tell you, is the “food system” itself –– globalization, Monsanto, corporate agriculture, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, monoculture, and the rest.

GMO advocates have been less clear about this. Outside the corridors of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, there hasn’t been a lot of stomach for defending industrial agriculture. As I will argue to you today, this is a problem. For at the bottom of contemporary debates about food and agriculture lay a series of fundamental misconceptions about agriculture that have become an obstacle to improving our food system.

Agriculture involves harvesting some portion of the earth’s primary productivity, the processes though which energy is converted into organic material via photosynthesis in order to sustain us. Early human populations began to find ways to do this more efficiently and at greater scales long before the invention of agriculture, mostly by burning forests to create open meadows and grasslands that were better for hunting and supported larger mammal populations and hence more protein on each hectare of land.

The subsequent development of agriculture represented not a break, but rather an intensification of this process. Gradually, humans began to domesticate the grasses and mammals that pre-agricultural hunting and foraging were already selecting. With domestication, these processes simply accelerated. Humans systematically raised yields and intensified agricultural systems by selecting seeds and irrigating, developing ploughs to turn the soil, and domesticating livestock to work and fertilize the land. As a result, agricultural yields rose dramatically over centuries and millennia.

Broadly speaking, the long-term intensification of agriculture was driven by two heavily intertwined processes: first, increasing inputs of labor, capital, and resources to increase the productivity of the land; and second, improving routines and technologies to direct that productivity toward outputs that humans desire –– in other words, excluding unwanted plants, animals, and insects from the sites of agricultural production.

This is not ancient history. These trends and processes continue today. On a planet of seven-going-on-nine billion people, agricultural systems that do not both increase the productivity of land under cultivation and capture as much of that productivity for human consumption as possible will be neither practical nor sustainable. As such, arguments about agriculture and food that ignore these two imperatives are at best incoherent and at worst pernicious.

Let me use two contemporary controversies to illustrate this: the butterfly and the bee.

Monarch butterfly populations have declined significantly in recent years and many people have pointed the finger at two culprits, GMO corn and the herbicide glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup. The former association is simply specious, but the latter is not. There is a correlation between glyphosate use and butterfly decline. But it’s not that glyphosate is killing the butterfly. It is an herbicide that targets plants, not insects. Rather, glyphosate is killing milkweed, a weed in which monarchs lay their eggs. While the decline of monarch butterflies is an unintended consequence of glyphosate use, the elimination of milkweed is not. It is one of the weeds that the herbicide is supposed to get rid of.

The trade-off here is straightforward and zero sum. You can either have more milkweed in cornfields or higher yields, but you can’t have both. If you choose more milkweed, then you are choosing lower yields, and, all else being equal, that means putting more land under cultivation to achieve the same level of agricultural output. With that comes attendant losses of habitat and biodiversity elsewhere.

Ultimately, the only way to have more monarch butterflies without reducing agricultural output or saving monarchs at the expense of other species is to create more monarch habitat outside of cornfields. This is an effort that a lot of people more concerned about monarch preservation as opposed to scoring ideological points about the food system have begun to focus on.

Like monarch butterflies, honeybees have also become a cause célèbre in the ongoing food debates. In recent years, beekeepers have been losing significantly higher percentages of their bees and hives to various ailments, with many advocates pointing the finger at a particular class of insecticide know as neonicotinoids. In the name of honeybees, the European Union has banned neonicotinoids, and the US Environmental Protection Agency, under pressure from environmental groups, is considering following suit.

In reality, there is scant evidence that these pesticides are a major contributor to bee deaths. The studies that do purport to show a direct link have been poorly designed and widely rejected by entomologists. And while Europe, which has banned neonicotinoids, continues to experience heavy bee losses, Australia, which hasn’t banned them, has not.

Notwithstanding the cause of rising bee mortality, perhaps what is most interesting is that, despite rising losses, bee populations have not declined at all. The vast majority of bees live neither in the wild nor in backyard hives but are kept by industrial beekeepers, many of whom keep tens of thousands of hives that they ship around the country on semi-trucks to provide pollination services year-round.

Die-offs have always been a fact of life for beekeepers and are likely to remain so. But bee populations have remained stable because we have become expert at breeding queens and splitting hives. With or without neonicotinoids, that basic system of pollinating crops will almost certainly continue, as relying upon wild pollination and small-scale beekeeping could not possibly meet the pollination demands of American agriculture.

As I noted at the beginning, at bottom of both these controversies are fundamental misunderstandings of what agriculture is. Commercial honeybees are hardly more natural these days than the pesticides that activists claim are killing them, and every bit as much an agricultural technology. Monarch butterflies are increasingly unable to thrive in cornfields because we dedicate that land to the production of corn, not butterflies. Both cases are not novel expressions of an industrial food system gone haywire but rather reflect what the food system is, and has always been. Both domesticated honeybees and herbicides are used to increase the productivity of the land and to monopolize the outputs for human purposes.

Failure to understanding these basic dynamics too often results in advocacy and policy that is simply misguided. In the name of maintaining bee populations that are not at any particular risk from neonicotinoids, the EU and now the EPA are proposing banning the pesticides, which in all likelihood will be replaced by organophosphate pesticides that are vastly more toxic to wildlife of all kinds. Making it harder to keep milkweed out of cornfields and hence maintain higher yields will almost certainly result in putting more land under cultivation somewhere else, with impacts for habitat and biodiversity that might be significantly worse.

Debates about specific agricultural technologies and environmental impacts often lose sight of the forest through the trees in terms of the relationship between food production and the environment. Low-productivity food systems have devastating impacts on the environment. As much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred prior to the Industrial Revolution, almost entirely due to two related uses, clearing land for agriculture and using wood for energy. Indeed, many places that we now think of as vast wilderness were once farmed. Even the Amazon basin, long thought to have been a primeval Eden turns out to have been the site of extensive agriculture prior to the decimation of the pre-Columbian population due to conquest and disease. Today, forests have come back in New England and many other parts of the world not due to disease, privation, or genocide but rather because agricultural productivity has risen so dramatically that many marginal agricultural lands have been abandoned.

Meanwhile, everywhere that people depend upon bushmeat for protein, forests and other habitat continue to be defaunated. Moreover, low-intensity pasturing of livestock represents the largest single human land use, larger even than cropland. When leading public intellectuals and chefs like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters decry feedlot meat and rhapsodize about the culinary and environmental benefits of grass-fed beef, what they are really proposing is a vast expansion of human impacts on the land.

Even with much lower levels of per-capita beef consumption, there is no way that American beef consumption, much less global consumption, could be met with pastured beef without dedicating much more land to pasture. Even accounting for the immense amount of grain needed to feed cattle, feedlot beef is more land efficient than grass-fed.

In short, were such a thing even possible, attempting to feed a world of seven-going-on-nine billion people with a pre industrial food system would almost certainly result in a massive expansion of human impacts through accelerated conversion of forests, grasslands, and other habitat to cropland and pasture.

It is perhaps no surprise that these kinds of errors would take hold in a society in which so few of us actually work in the agricultural sector. The archetypal farm in the public imagination is roughly the farm that existed around the turn of the last century, when most people in the United States left farming.

At that time, roughly half of the U.S. population worked in agriculture. A century earlier, that number was closer to 90 percent. Without modern agriculture you cannot have modern life. There are literally no examples where societies have achieved modern living standards –– universal education, healthcare, electrification, and so on –– without moving most of the population off the land and out of agriculture. Without modern agriculture, most of us could not live in cities, go to college, or have professional careers. A world in which celebrity chefs can open farm-to-table restaurants and cultural creatives can patronize them is, ironically, only possible after industrial agriculture has liberated most of us from farming.

To be clear, modern agriculture is characterized by no shortage of charnel horrors –– labor exploitation, factory farms, and poisoned land. I make these observations about the nature of agriculture and the modern food system not to absolve industrial agriculture of its problems, but rather to offer some more useful parameters for thinking about what we should want from our food system. In that spirit, let me suggest a few basic principles.

First, and most importantly, the food system globally needs to grow enough food to meet the basic nutritional needs of somewhere in the vicinity of nine billion people by the middle of this century. While the discussion in recent years about food and nutrition in the United States has been heavily focused on obesity, the reality is that much of the world still needs to consume more calories, not less. Nearly a billion people globally still struggle to meet their basic, daily caloric needs. Several billions more are just beginning to consume modest levels of dietary protein and fat. Suffice to say that the daily ration of farm-fresh vegetables that for so many of us symbolizes a healthful diet is still beyond the means of most people on the planet.

Second, the food system needs to liberate most of the global population from work on the farm and all of it from subsistence agriculture. When people leave the land and move to the city, life expectancy, education, and incomes rise. Fertility rates decline as women can find work outside of the home and children can go to school rather than working in the fields. Manufacturing and industrialization bring greater societal wealth, infrastructure, and higher wages. By virtually every quantifiable economic, health, education, and environmental metric, life improves when people move to the city, even as it brings new challenges.

Third, we need to accelerate the long-term processes of growing more food on less land. Meeting rising food demand for a global population that will continue to grow for at least the next several decades, without converting virtually all of our remaining forests and grasslands to agriculture, will require that we grow food ever-more efficiently. Making more room for nature will, perhaps counterintuitively, require that we use the land on which we produce food more exclusively for production. A world with more forests, grasslands and wetlands, and more biodiversity within them, will require less biodiversity in our fields.

Finally, raising yields while reducing environmental impacts will require that we farm with ever-greater precision. Raising yields through greater application of technology has often meant more pesticides, fertilizer, and water. But as technology has improved, these trends have begun to reverse. Measured in relationship to agricultural output, nitrogen and water use on US farms has peaked and is now declining. The same is true in other advanced developed economies. Better seeds, irrigation systems, and application practices are allowing for much more precise delivery of inputs when and where plants need them and where they don’t. All of those trends will need to be accelerated.

Now, like many people, I am also not immune to the charms of farmer’s markets, locally raised grass-fed beef, wild salmon, and all things artisanal. An ecologically vibrant planet in which nine or ten billion people consume healthy diets can also be one in which there is plenty of room for small-scale artisan agriculture and animal husbandry and in which some of us, having been liberated from the land for our sustenance, return to it out of choice. But I think it important that we neither confuse a particular kind of privilege with virtue, nor that we delude ourselves into thinking that these forms of production will be the primary food system that feeds the planet.

I also wonder whether this kind of luxury and artisanship need be so closely tied to our contemporary nostalgia for simplicity and natural foods. By many accounts, the finest beef in the world is raised in Japan, a land-scarce country where kobe beef is raised on beer mash, bathed in sake, massaged daily, and highly confined to prevent the meat from becoming tough. It is not so far from here to laboratory meat, which perhaps someday we might engineer to have similar characteristics. The harvesting of fine caviar has decimated wild sturgeon populations in the Caspian Sea and elsewhere. But thanks to aquaculture technologies developed here at UC Davis, virtually all sturgeon caviar consumed in the United States and Europe is now farmed right here in the Sacramento Delta, and is by all accounts every bit the equal of Russian caviar, if not superior.

Today, some of the finest and most cutting-edge restaurants in the world have begun to serve dishes featuring ants, grasshoppers, and other insects, a vastly more efficient source of protein than most that grace our plates today, and one well suited to high-yield, low-input production. I think it is possible that a prosperous, ecologically vibrant future, characterized by large-scale, high-productivity and high-technology agriculture, might also be one filled with epicurean delights.

This article originally was originally delivered as a speech at the first annual Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy Symposium on June 3, 2015. Originally posted on The Breakthrough Institute website, and reprinted with permission of the author.

Ted Nordhaus, an author, researcher, and political strategist, is a founder and chairman of The Breakthrough Institute, a political think tank based in Oakland, California, that works at the nexus of climate, energy, and economic policy. With co-author Michael Shellenberger, he published the seminal essay “The Death of Environmentalism” in 2004 and the controversial and critically acclaimed Break Through, Why We Can’t Leave Saving The Planet To Environmentalists in 2007. Time magazine named Ted a Hero of the Environment in 2008, and dubbed his work “prescient.”

 

54 thoughts on “The sustainability case for “industrial agriculture””

  1. Honeybees, bumblebees and monarch butterflies are still abundant on the GMO farmlands of the upper Midwest. How can this be? The GMO crops are bordered by hundreds of thousands of miles worth of rural gravel farm road ditches and that’s where the Honeybees, bumblebees and monarch butterflies are still abundant – see video below. I will obtain much more professional quality video shot on a tripod again this coming August: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTJZFJ1egGQ

    Reply
    • Paul, this video shows it how it is. Excellent. Thank you for posting this. I think it would be helpful if ag extension agents all over the farming parts of the U.S. would make these kinds of videos. Nice work!

      Reply
  2. Is the milkweed reduction specific to glyphosate? I would guess that the correlation is just because glyphosate is such a successful herbicide — _any_ herbicide used to create yield-efficient crop monocultures sans milkweed would have the same effect, right?

    I just mention it because people tend to jump on any mention of glyphosate, shouting about poison and Monsanto. G is off-patent, of course, and Monsanto isn’t even the largest manufacturer, but why let fact get in the way? (In fact, despite that being the case, Monsanto has substantially invested in the project to establish a milkweed corridor across North America to boost Monarch populations.)

    Reply
    • Farmers have been controlling milkweed since fields were first tilled. Common milkweed (the kind monarchs like) is a perennial weed that spreads by seed and by underground rhizomes.

      Back when we were using deep horizontal tillage (moldboard plow days), that along with some chemical control was effective. As we shifted from deep tillage to more environmentally-sound vertical tillage methods (and shallower horizontal tillage) in the 1970s, milkweed became more difficult to control because we weren’t busting up and turning over the milkweed roots with the soil, so more chemical control was needed. Mostly 2,4-D & Banvel spot applied after the milkweed would bud, or glyphosate in a pipe wick (wiper application over the top of the crop).

      Herbicide tolerant crops have made it easier to control milkweed in fields because it changes the application timing and helps knock out the milkweed at a more vulnerable stage. I would argue that there’s no place in a farm field for milkweed, just like there’s no room for any other weed, because weeds reduce yields by competing for nutrients, water and sunlight. But there are plenty of other places where it’s just fine – shelter belts, highway rights-of-way, parks, peoples’ backyards, etc.

      Reply
        • You’re welcome. I think you’ll find that anyone that farms is more than willing to share their perspectives and experiences. People like Hyperzombie, Mary M., Randall, etc. There are also two outstanding ag blogs, one written by Dr. Andrew Kniss and one written Dr. Steve Savage,

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      • I think you raise a point that needs to be studied. What is the baseline for milkweed range and density in a cultivated environment. I also wonder if early adoption of conservation tillage practices didn’t lead to an increase in milkweed for a time over that baseline and now better methods of controlling milkweed have put us below that baseline.
        I don’t know that it is fair, or is necessarily the means to restore monarch populations, to placing all the responsibility for their decline on farming and herbicides. What is at issue is the availability of milkweed, not the method by which it was eliminated. If I hire migrant workers to eliminate weeds by hand, if I use tillage or another chemical, if I build a new subdivision on a place that once supported milkweed populations, if I mow road ditches at the wrong time, I’ve reduced the population of critical plants available to sustain the monarch population. It is not that I eliminate habitat for monarchs if I spray roundup on a milkweed plant, but if I use a hoe to kill that same plant, the monarch is just fine.

        Reply
        • Good points.

          Here’s another scenario to consider: A natural pathogen develops that threatens to wipe out milkweed. What is mankind’s responsibility to fight nature in this case?

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          • There is a “Rights of Nature” woo woo movement who would fight your efforts to repel such a pathogen! Weird, eh?

          • I think it’s a legit question.

            Insect pests that affect agricultural crops? Sure, it’s worth spending public money to protect the public interest.

            Insect pests that transmit viruses that affect agricultural crops? Same deal.

            But what does mankind owe the monarch butterfly?

            Center for Food Safety is using the monarch as a cudgel to attempt to ban biotech crops.

            Do you think the Kimbrells who are behind CFS would pony up to save the monarch in my scenario? I don’t.

        • Good question, but Atrazine has never been useful for milkweed control. Or any other perennial broadleaf weed for the most part. Milkweed is a perennial, and control of any perennial is tough. Milkweed is tougher than many perennials to control because it reproduces by seed and underground by buds that grow off the roots.

          That’s one of the reasons that glyphosate became popular in the 1970s. Not only was it a better/safer burndown herbicide than gramoxone (paraquat), but glyphosate was useful in a wiper application, i.e. applying it over the top of the crop with a pipe wick.

          Nowadays, we would never let weeds get taller than the crop, because of the yield decrease. But back in the ’70s, glyphosate in a pipe wick was a whole lot better than walking soybeans or being on a bean rider.

          Reply
    • Andy, Off topic, but as a physicist, what do you think of Dr Mae-Wan Ho’s physics? The commenter said that here physics are bang on even though her ideas are a bit nutty… Just curious.. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

      Reply
      • Where were those comments made? I don’t see any other mention of her on this page / comments, and can’t actually find a lot of good information online. But maybe that’s because the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS!) web pages look like such typical quacktivist fare that I automatically discount them…

        Without having looked deeper, but knowing a reasonable bit about the untenability of macroscopic “memory of water” explanations for homeopathy (one of her special interests according to Wikipedia and ISIS) gives a pretty strong indication that this isn’t someone concerned with physical plausibility. David Colquhoun, who is very good on this sort of thing, has a critical (but old) article on his excellent website, followed by some newer comments that are also worth reading: http://www.dcscience.net/2006/07/19/institute-of-science-in-society/comment-page-1/ I don’t know what (GMO-related?) physics theories you had in mind — if you let me know then I’ll take a look.

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        • Is this the Ho article you were thinking of?
          http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/11/4748
          (in Entropy, of course — first warning bell)

          I found this via a link given in the last comment on the dcscience page I linked to above. That link claimed a connection to the pseudo-physics article http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166 (see http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/07/montagnier-dna-electromagnetic-wave-claim for a reasonable take on it, and as a particle physicist I am very sceptical of the implication that using quantum field theory to calculate molecular correlations in water means that the predictions are remotely robust.) But I don’t see any reference to this article in the Ho article’s references, so I’m not sure what that claim of connection was based on.

          Looking in the Ho article, it’s just a big screed of 25 pages of text — no tables, no data histograms, no statistics, just one ISIS bulls*** slide as a figure, and a “box” uncritically reporting what looks like every informal “GMO adverse incident” she could find. Warning bell #2: looks like the usual activist fare with more emphasis on rumour than data.

          Near the end of the introduction: “Samsel and Seneff have exposed…” Samsel and Seneff have never exposed anything, as anyone remotely competent in basic statistical reasoning would be well aware. Warning bell #3.

          Happy citations of every dodgy study you can think of, from Seralini to Seneff and co, to Pusztai. Warning bell #4!

          I didn’t see any physics in here, but will admit that I couldn’t bear to read it closely enough to find small references. The text looks like an attempt to exercise every possible rhetorical avenue to cast doubt on the mechanisms of GM engineering (which demonstrably does work…) without actually providing any evidence against it. I can’t critique it from a physics perspective, but in general scientific quality it looks pretty sloppy, shallow stuff — about par for the course for Entropy.

          Reply
  3. SaveOurMonarchs.org offers free milkweed seeds to anyone requesting them. SaveOurMonarchs is a Minnesota 501c3 charity.

    You can see who we are at SaveOurMonarchs.org, or at Facebook.com/SaveOurMonarchs.

    The Milkweed Seeds are perennials known as Asclepias incarnata, which proliferate across the US.

    They are needed by all Monarch caterpillars for their survival.

    They make a beautiful wildflower garden, and require no maintenance.

    SaveOurMonarchs provides over 100,000 Milkweed Seed Packets per MONTH, to all that request them. Our hopes are to provide over 1 Million this year.

    Just send your request for seeds to SaveOurMonarchs.org and you will receive the free Milkweed Seed Packets immediately.

    Remember, No Milkweed, No Monarchs.

    Ward Johnson

    SaveOurMonarchs Foundation, a Minnesota 501c3 charity

    952-829-0600

    Reply
    • “The Milkweed Seeds are perennials known as Asclepias incarnata, which proliferate across the US.”

      You’re marketing swamp milkweed.

      Which is great if you live in a swampy area. But most people don’t.

      You should be schlepping Asclepias syriaca, “common milkweed”, which is what monarchs prefer and is the most common species in the Midwest.

      You need to post back and explain yourself and your justification for pushing swamp milkweed. Like a written opinion from an Entomologist or Biologist from U of M.

      Reply
  4. Humm, like we need more food by expanding industrialization. Let’s see, we have 80% of the US population as either overweight or obese. Nearly 30% of the US population is considered OBESE. On top of that, Americans annually throw away 40% of ALL food produced.

    Folks, look around you. It’s disgusting that so many people are FAT and completely unhealthy from industrialized cheap food. Browse through any restaurant and look at the sizes of the portions and the people. Browse through grocery stores where the pure garbage fills the stroller and where the notion of LOTS of cheap food is appeasing and is the NORMAL thing to do.

    Why does someone needs to consume a 12-16oz steak with a bacon loaded potato and washed down with a GMO loaded beer or with a HFCS laden soda is beyond mentally insane especially when they are already massively overweight. You wonder why the health care system is so expensive. It’s not the health care system that is broken, it’s the PEOPLE. We have normalized being FAT and if you’re FAT we have normalized it further by accepting it as “it’s not my fault”. So totally sad that we have such a corrupt food system. So yes, small scale farms can produce enough food for everyone if we stop the insane obsession of eating until you balloon to 5 times your healthy weight.

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    • Your personal feelings of bigotry against overweight people are off topic. The subject here is feeding 8 billion people regardless of their body weight.

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    • Overweight people typically consume only a few hundred calories above their needs. Even if we had a magical being capable of eliminating obesity, that’ll only buy you back a few percent of humanity’s caloric needs.

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  5. Lack of stewardship in pesticide usage is no more excuse for Industrial agriculture. Growing awareness by public on health risk associated with pesticides and finding that most commercial GMOs are linked to Glyphosate usage will make only existing conditions worse for industrial agriculture.

    Reply
    • That should make you redouble your efforts to support the development of better pesticides and GE seed because organic is a myth and it definitely won’t cut it for 8 billion.

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        • Samsel, just like Huber, oooh I have proof of these horrible things but I am not allowed to show anyone.
          I have a unicorn in my pocket, but I can’t show it to you, you just have to take my word for it.

          Reply
        • Nonsense. Seneff published her Gish Gallop in a pay-to-play journal. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can get anything they want printed in that rag.

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          • Try reading the EPA registration and re-registration files for glyphosate, genius.

          • Yep, when mutton-heads like you can’t keep up, you play the troll/shill card. And that means you’re conceding, because you’ve got no argument.

            I can’t help it that you feel compelled to comment on a subject you clearly know nothing about, though. That’s something only you can fix.

            Try learning the difference between annual and quarterly earnings for a start. After you study the EPA files and BFR report on glyphosate, that is.

          • That is not what you were saying. The article in your link states that Monsanto stock has been consistently up for the last 12 months. Monsanto is maneuvering to buy another huge company now, not the actions of a company in trouble.

            And in any case Monsanto represents only 1/3 of the GMO industry. China’s sales of glyphosate are the world’s largest and climbing. If Monsanto totally folded and ceased all business activity the other companies in its industry would immediately step in to fill the gap. Farmers line up eagerly to buy patented seed and that will never change.

        • As I challenged the jaypee entity above, support efforts to find an even less toxic pesticide than glyphosate. It will happen eventually as agricultural science is still in its infancy, historically speaking.

          Since the concentrations used for farming are between citric acid and baking soda on the toxicity scale, calling it poison is a real stretch unless you are also on the bandwagon to ban baking soda in our baked goods.

          Reply
          • No strawman here, just facts. Glyphosate DOES NOT bioaccumulate. And it is toxic to weeds, not humans.

            Therefore I did not know what is not true.

            The facts about how it metabolizes and passes through human bodies can be found right here at ground zero for GE literacy. Therefore this entire site, minus troglodyte comments, is my citation.

          • What are you doing here if you do not even know who the editor is? It is plastered all over the site.
            Your activist flunkies don’t want to see reality being addressed head on by Jon Entine doing what they desire the public to think nobody would do.

          • Do you have any clue to how purile and shallow you are presenting your mind to be?
            We all eat glyphosate farmed foods. No harm proven, ever. It is applied at a rate of 8 dry ounces per acre. It is profoundly diluted and I would not hesitate for a second to drink a full quart of the diluent. So what. Grow up and present a cogent non-biased argument here or flake off.

      • I guess when you learn how to plant seed using more than a sharp stick, you’re industrial.

        So there, Mr. Industrial Farmer!

        Reply
  6. Yet another biased activist citation. Not worth the electrons required to post it.

    It is extremely childish to adamantly insist on a ‘video’ of someone disproving a myth that is widely known to be false by the entire scientific community, minus a few quacks. You are a sucker for activist memes and youtube is the domain of amateur quacks and crackpots.

    Reply
  7. Glyphosate doesn’t bioaccumulate. It is a salt. Any absorbed into the bloodstream is extracted by the kidneys and excreted in urine, the remainder passes through the colon and out in your stool. That is how salts work in the body.

    Reply
    • Cletus’ underlings Debbie Owen and Sally Blackmore also both disagree that it is how it works. They also believe that ridiculous youtube video phone interview with Samsel that he has these “secret” Monsanto testing documents from glyphosate trials.

      Reply
  8. It wasn’t a glass of glyphosate, it was a glass of roundup. Roundup contains surfactants and is not intended for consumption for that reason. But hey, go drink a glass of water mixed 50/50 with dish soap and let me know how that works out for you.

    Reply

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