This comes up on HN like quarterly, so for anyone else who is always confused when it does:
Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US.
Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.
Meaning there's a 20% chance your flour is produced this way. With the vagueness of the supply chain, it could mean 20% of people grain this way or everyone gets grain 20% this way.
And the thing is the article describes a switch from the innocuous (afaik) practice of swathing to the disturbing sounding practice of desication, ie, killing the plants you eat with chemicals before harvest. This bring up the issue of how many other disturbing practices are happening if this is legal.
Frankly my advice -- which as a human, you are incapable of heeding, being genetically programmed to obsess about food purity -- is not to worry about.
Eat a varied diet, not too much, get plenty of exercise and sleep. Pay attention to food recalls, because accidental contamination of food by things like E. coli and salmonella kill dozens of people in the US every year and god knows how many world-wide.
Worrying about everything else, the micro-contaminants that maybe-possibly-who-knows might possibly-maybe-sort-of-contribute to some sort of who-knows after years or decades of exposure, is a bad value proposition. Maybe BPA causes cancer, or whatever it was supposed to cause. Maybe eating steak does. Maybe gluten is actually poisonous, maybe soy causes estrogen problems, maybe cooked vegetables lose all their magical healthiness. Maybe cell phones and WiFi cause cancer.
You can spend weeks and months and years trying to figure out exactly what food you personally should eat, and statistically you aren't getting those weeks and months and years back in the marginal gains to healthfulness. If you have an allergic reaction to a food, avoid it, and if you don't know if you had an allergic reaction, you probably didn't, but hey, I'm not a doctor. Talk to one.
I honestly don't know if glyphosate is safe when used this way or not (since I am mostly familiar with its more conventional uses in the US and am too lazy to do a deep dive into what the existing research says and am pretty jaded about whatever the latest mass hysteria is for reasons) but frankly if it is really being used in as wide-spread a manner as articles like this claim, it can't be particularly harmful or frankly it'd be pretty obvious epidemiologically, since there's been growing use of it in this way for decades now.
Seems like the lede was buried... the "acceptable" levels of RoundUp in U.S. food has been increasing from 100 percent to 2,000 percent.
"According to the EPA, between 1993 and 2015, glyphosate MRLs increased by 100 percent to 1,000 percent in the U.S., depending on the crop."
"Current MRLs for glyphosate range from 0.2 ppm to more than 300 ppm, depending on the crop. Between 1993 and 2015, the U.S. EPA glyphosate tolerance levels have increased by a factor of 50 for corn, and 2,000 for alfalfa."
So even without desiccation, we're still "allowed" to ingest several orders of magnitude more probably-carcinogen-related herbicides which screw with our cells and gut microbiome.
Firstly, if you're ingesting alfalfa, you deserve whatever happens to you.
Secondly, you realize that regulatory agencies raise and lower the acceptable limits of chemicals as the evidence accumulates that they are or aren't particularly harmful, right? Some go down, because we find out they were way worse than we thought they were, some go up, because it turns out we were too conservative initially and they are safer at way higher levels that we previously thought. Science!
Thirdly, that article is confounding crops for human consumption with crops for animal consumption. We are way, way less worried about whether a pig is going to develop cancer later in life, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious, and we also conduct a brief autopsy on nearly every pig ever born, which as a side effect gives us pretty good data on how healthy the average pig is over time.
"A 2015 study by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found glyphosate in 30 percent of 3,200 food products. Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine." It has also been found in honey, soy sauce, oatmeal, bagels, organic eggs, potatoes, non-GMO soy coffee creamer, tampons, infant formula, and even breast milk (that's the stuff coming out of a human).
Not only is it in animal feeds, it's in processed foods. It's being passed through animals and plants. Even if you believe the claims that ingesting it won't give you cancer, it will probably screw with your gut microbiota.
The US MRLs are much higher than countries such as Japan, the EU, Canada, Australia, and Taiwan. Are our scientists just way better at sciencing, and know something these other countries' scientists don't? Or is it more probable that Monsanto has significant influence with the US's 992-billion agro industry, government, and FDA?
It's also possible that some countries have artificially low MRLs, in order to gain a competitive advantage with countries that have stricter limits on imports. But lowering MRLs means using less herbicide/pesticide, which wouldn't produce as high or reliable a yield. In order to maximize product, more herbicide/pesticide must be used more frequently (such as with desiccation), and that means you can't lower the MRLs - you can only raise them, to avoid regulatory issues from affecting your crop yields, and subsequently the profits of agro business. At the least, we know the FDA can't keep up with import testing (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297498/)
Finally, from a scientific standpoint, all of this is based on animal testing. No human testing is done, so we really don't know what long-term exposure will do to humans.
Re-read "A 2015 study by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found glyphosate in 30 percent of 3,200 food products. Similar studies have found glyphosate exceeding maximum residue limits (or MRLs) in Cheerios, beer, and wine."
The first sentence is saying a DETECTABLE amount of glyphosate is found in 30% of a huge number of food products.
The second sentence is saying excessive amounts have been found in some of these three specific food products.
Put together, it sounds like 30% of products have excessive glyphosate in them, but if you go back to the source [0], you'll find that:
"The overall compliance rate for these surveys, based on Canadian Maximum Residue Limits (MRL), was 98.7 %. No samples of fruits and vegetables, soy products, or infant foods were found to contain residues exceeding Canadian limits."
So 30% contain detectable residue, 1.3% contain residue above the Canadian MRL.
(Which, hey, room for improvement in compliance, but it's deceptive to act like 30% of food is above the MRL.)
> Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US
Or Eastern Canada. As a wheat grower in Ontario, harvest is typically in mid-July. Many months before weather becomes a factor. Really, the only crop we do sometimes desiccate in this part of the world are edible beans. A far cry from the "almost all crops" claim in the article.
Having grown up on a farm in Canada, I'm not sure that using round-up to "ripen" crops is all that common in Canada, either. Certainly, my father never did it, and I don't know of anyone who does. He typically swaths the canola, and he has taken to straight cutting the wheat in recent years.
> he has taken to straight cutting the wheat in recent years.
What changed that allowed him to start straight cutting in recent years? You'd never prefer swathing over straight cutting, so there must have been good reason to not straight cut in the past.
To be honest, I am not entirely certain. I suspect it was simply access to a straight-cut header. As far as I know it isn't and never really was a problem to let the wheat dry standing up.
EDIT: The farm has been through three generations . . . things evolve over time.
> The farm has been through three generations . . . things evolve over time.
For sure. It is just interesting to me that it would take three generations to finally get a grain table for the combine given all the pitfalls of swathing. The very first horse-drawn combine built in the 1800s had a straight-cut header for harvesting wheat, so it is not exactly new tech or a new idea.
So, that's why I wondered what changed. Finally having enough money to buy one is certainly a reasonable answer. As a farmer myself, I know all about that.
Both swathing and desiccation are primarily practices in the far north - Canada, the UK, and the Dakotas in the US.
Neither practice is necessary or common for grain production in eg the Midwest or Central Plains in the US: the growing season is long enough for wheat to ripen and dry before harvest, and so it does.
So if you're in the US, there's like an 80% chance that your flour was not produced in the way the article describes.