Glyphosate in Chicken Feed- Should I be concerned or not?

[Sally PB]

A friend of mine is often called as an expert witness in court.

One time, he told his daughter to finish her breakfast.

"Objection!" she said.
"Overruled!" he answered.
"Exception!"
"Noted!"

And then he laughed, and let the last couple of bites go uneaten.

 

[Shadrach]

This field where I have my vegetable and herb plot is organic. It should have been certified as such years ago. Looks great doesn't it. Stick the first picture on an onion advertisment and the company should sell truck loads.

I let the chickens on it most days. They comb the grass edges and pick of many of the paraistes that breed there. Dig over a patch and one wonders what one is missing when watching the chickens scoure the ground and eat all sorts of tiny bugs. In the winter when I dig the plot over I don't have to break up the clods most of the time. the chicks break them up for me. Lovely eh? The organic enthusiasts dream.

But, it isn't what it seems. When I started this plot I took around 30 barrow loads of building rubble out of it. There was about six inches of soil covering the rubble. I've more than doubled that six inches now with compost and chicken shit, all from the field.
In the distance behind the rooster is an orchard. The grass is tall and corn wavy. Lots of wildflowers hiding in the shade of the grass. Most of the trees look healthy apart from needing some informed pruning.
A couple of metres away partially buried under what was once an edible hedge (usually berry bearing bushes and brambles) is a landfill tip that didn't even get covered with soil.
The water we use on the field comes from the local mains water supply. It's got all the stuff in it, plastics, metals, chemicals as have many of the brands of bottled spring drinking water people buy.

I visited another local organic farming cooperative style field a while ago. They buy in peat free organic compost. Have the chickens locked up 24/7. They've only recently started putting the chicken shit in the compost! The only major plus point I could find was it was a lot tidier than the field I grow on. I watched one guy go around the edges of a plot around six yards by three yards with a petrol strimmer.

While a push to encourage organic farming si undoubtably a good thing, it's a bit late. In the UK organic standard isn't hard to achieve. You don't get risk free food for your money that's for certain.

If we could all stop buying the highly processed foods that would certainly help because the profit would drop out of the product. I know a few new affluent diet fadists who buy organic label vegetables (for some reason organic fruit hasn't hit the supermarket shelves in the UK yet) and then pick up a boxfull of ultra processed meat altenatives with an analysis table taking up half the packet; stuff in those products I don't even know existed.

While the potential poisons in our food are a concern, the horse has bolted on that issue. We can encourage the use of less but the things that need more immediate attention are issues like the nitrates and insectecides being poured into the water from chicken factories, the illegal dumping of sewage in our water courses, our eating preferences filled by imports, etc, etc.

 

[saysfaa]

One of the problems of inhaling/eating /drinking a mix of too much pesticides /herbicides is that people get Parkinsons disease many years later.

Any pesticide? or paraquat.

My cousin has had Parkinsons for many years now. It is possibly from paraquat; he has known extensive exposure many years ago. I see him regularly and it is terrible. I don't want higher risks of that.

But I also don't want every pesticide banned because one or two (rotenone also has a link to Parkinsons - it is off the market except one narrow application) caused 2.5 times the incidence of Parkinsons in people who applied it for a living compared to the general population.

Or even any other pesticide.

I agree some substances should be banned. But the reason matters. They should be banned because of the effects they have.

And the cost should also be considered...

[edit, sorry I messed up the quoting format. I'll fix it if I can figure out how before the edit function times out... between pitting cherries and such]
Have you ever tried to garden without pesticides and herbicides? Maybe it's because we live in a southern, bug infested state... but I found it rather eye opening.

I tried it too. I also found it rather eye opening.

...Humans grew food just find before they started spraying this poison on everything

Did they? I seem to remember quite a few references to famines.

Also, we don't live in the same world. The problems I have with trying to garden organically are all related to invasive species. There are no natural controls around here - that is why they are invasive. Importing natural controls for such problems has been tried several times with disasterous unintended consequences.

.. The soil with a yearly dose of poison becomes a desert...

I've seen a whole lot of cropland that gets yearly does of several herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. They are not deserts.

Here is a picture taken in the latest one I went to - yesterday. A cherry orchard, I took the picture because of the cool moth that landed on my pail. I noticed at least a dozen species of plants growing among the trees and I wasn't paying attention to that. Oh, and it is pollinated by bees.

If farmers stop using poisons their infertile land becomes healthy again within a few years.

My garden hasn't. The invasives continue to get worse.

there is enough land to feed the world.

This part of that sentence, I agree with. Even doing it organically. And even with as many people as we currently have. If enough people are willing to work in the fields, orchards, pastures, ect for extended parts of the year to do the work by hand that machines can't do without the chemicals. Pick spotted asparagus beetles off the asparagus plants from late June until into Septemver for example. It only took me three or four hours per day to keep 25 plants clear enough of them to have leaves on half of each plant. Or tie bags around each peach as it grows.

Of course, if people spend the time in the fields, ect, then they won't be working at their current jobs as much so expect a lower standard of living as most people consider it. I don't have much problem with living like my grandparents did (one set of new clothes per year, walk three miles for groceries, ...) but I think most people would.

Edit to add: lower cost of living would include things like being willing to accept smut in grains, to cut the earworms off the ends of the sweet corn...

 

[Sally PB]

There was a saying at the shop I worked at:

Good, cheap, fast. Pick two.

We want it all. We want it cheap. We want it now.

Pick two.

 

[Shadrach]

What kind of honesty are we talking about here, within the law or integrity?
My sister was a lawyer; if she thought disingenuousness might help her client or her cause she would lie her back teeth out.
I knew a lot of the people she did her law degree with. They were pretty much the same. Those that had integrity that I knew left the profession.
It's a job. There is money involved not to mention prestige. It's performance related; don't make your firm money and you don't last long. You make money by winning the case.

 

[SourRoses]

Humans grew food just find before they started spraying this poison on everything

Pardon?

Have you heard of the word "famine"?
It's not a word in frequent use these days.
But it describes a danger the world faced over and over again, killing millions of people in the ages before modern agriculture.

Here's a test, for anyone that's game. We could say that any given area might be capable of supporting 3 different crops. (excluding deserts and frozen tundra)
So pick 3 of the most common things farmers grow in your area. Anything you get from those crops you can eat fresh, or can / freeze / dehydrate for later. But you don't buy any of those 3 items from the store for the year. So if one crop fails, you don't get any that year.
If you just want to do it as a mental exercise, that's fine. Think about our forebearers being completely dependent on those 3 crops. Failure = Starvation.

 

[SourRoses]

Did they? I seem to remember quite a few references to famines.

Hey! I must have missed this reading your post the first time, lol.

So one promising area is biological control. There are more products coming out based on microbial processes that work against some pests. I want to try the one for tomato hornworm, which are horridly rampant here. But it's pricey.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

tomato hornworm,

Oh my goodness, even I had some this year! Scared the heck out of me when my eyes finally picked those fat buggers out on my bare stems

 

[2ndTink]

Oh my goodness, even I had some this year! Scared the heck out of me when my eyes finally picked those fat buggers out on my bare stems

Try reaching in to grab a tomato and grabbing one of those instead my neighbor heard me scream a few years ago he thought it was funny anyway

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Try reaching in to grab a tomato and grabbing one of those instead my neighbor heard me scream a few years ago he thought it was funny anyway

My chickens were far more thrilled than I was at their attempted invasion. Too bad they were wild, my dragon would have loved them too