I am generally pleased with the good availability of locally grown organic food where we live in the mountains of Central Arizona.
If people don't want organic food, I could generally care less except for one thing: efforts to put legal roadblocks in the way of locally grown food. For example:
A few years ago our Senator Jon Kyle, after taking large campaign contributions from Monsanto, submitted the American Food Safety bill that was prepared by Monsanto. This Bill would make home gardeners, local community gardens and small local growers jump through the same hoops as the multi billion dollar food corporations. I believe that it was generally accepted that this was an attempt to force people to buy from the large food conglomerates - at least that is my belief.
You might choose not to eat the non-organic food but you can't avoid the Atrazine [1] in the rain, which is enough to turn the male northern leopard frog tadpoles to turn into hermaphrodites.
The families of the people who work in the factory farm system are also affected.
You can see talks [2] on both these subjects in the Edible Education course from Berkeley [3], hosted by Michael Pollan and Raj Patel. I can recommend the whole series, and the ones from previous years.
> The families of the people who work in the factory farm system are also affected.
That is the exact reason I've often chosen organic for years. People used to say "Its no better for you" and I'd reply "Maybe, but its better for them, the workers"
As someone who comes from a family of small farmers, this is not really true. Organic pesticides are on-average more harmful to the people who use them than modern pesticides. Simply put, organic pesticides attack animal/fungal life indiscriminately. Including human life. Most organic pesticides will kill you at fairly low quantities. Most man-made ones won't, they are tailored to a task. And organic farmers need to use a lot more pesticides than non-organic farmers to achieve the same results, making human toxicity even more likely.
Only primary sources. Pick a few chemicals, find their LD50 from a MSDS, find their application rate. Run the numbers.
An organic fungicide: copper sulfate pentahydrate (aka CuSO4)
A non-organic fungicide: iprodione (aka Rovral)
LD50 of CuSO4: 472 mg/kg (rat) [1]
LD50 of Rovral: 2g/kg (rat) [2]
So straight up, the organic is four times more lethal to mammals. But that is just the beginning, because you have to use a lot more of the organics! How much would Farmer Joe have to use on his small, 10 acre plot? Assuming the worst, lets look at the maximum seasonal application.
rate of CuSO4: 16 pounds/acre per season [3]
rate of Rovral: 12 pints/acre per season [4]
Skipping the basic algebra, in one year Joe could apply enough organic fungicide (72.5kg) to kill 1700 people. One year of non-organic (1.3kg) would be enough to kill 7 people. (Assuming a spherical man of 90 kg.)
LD50 is one measure. For the consumer, half life and non-acute toxicity is probably a better measure to use.
The organophosphate (e.g., methyl chlorpyrifos, dimethoate, methidathion and methyl parathion) pesticides used in conventional agriculture have half lives of a little less than a week to two weeks on the surface (and a half life of years in water and soil), while pyrethrins have a half life of hours in sunlight and 2 weeks in soil.
Both organophosphates and pyrethrins have toxic effects on mammals, but one is less likely to be present on purchased produce since, at least, four half lives (97% degraded) will have passed for pyrethrins, in a single day.
In the extreme, organochlorines (e.g., aldrin, chlordane, dieldrin and dicofol [OK, DDT and such are in this class too]) were spayed on conventional crops. These have half lives measured in years (on the surface), and their residues are found, in the environment, decades after specific compound bans.
Finally, US grown rice/citrus contains arsenic (there is no safe limit established for inorganic arsenic) because of conventional pesticides containing arsenic being sprayed on cotton fields (California rice/citrus is generally safer than that grown in Southern states).
All this said, I believe (opinion) that USDA organic allowing the use of so many pesticides was a give away to big ag, so they could participate in the "organic craze" without substantially changing their production practices. Personally, I buy pesticide free vs. organic when available.
LD50 (acute toxicity) does not necessarily correlate with harmful health effects from chronic exposure. Can you cite studies that demonstrate harms from exposure at the levels used in organic farming?
We are talking about risks to people working in the fields. Every time a farmer applies anything to a field, he will have to put on safety gear, measure out an amount, mix it with water, load it into the sprayer, drive the tractor around, and then clean up afterwards. When you are working with enough of a chemical to kill a hundred people, every single one of these steps carries the risk of an acute exposure. Dead is dead, regardless of how it happens. Don't dismiss it.
edit: From source [1]:
> Chronic toxicity: Vineyard sprayers experienced liver disease after 3 to 15 years of exposure to copper sulfate solution in Bordeaux mixture [8]. Long term effects are more likely in individuals with Wilson's disease, a condition which causes excessive absorption and storage of copper [25]. Chronic exposure to low levels of copper can lead to anemia [8]
Perhaps I generalized a bit too much (I suppose I should not have commented when I was dead tired...) However, the USDA does in fact allow non-prohibited chemicals to be used on USDA certified organic produce.
I have heard the argument that organic pesticides must be used in higher quantities, but never that they are more toxic than synthetics.
The latter statement seems nonsensical on its face. It's very difficult to believe that, given years of testing and research into both synthetic and organic pesticides, so many people are getting it so wrong as to conclude that organics are safer when they are exactly they opposite.
In fact, non-organic farming proponents aren't even making this claim to my knowledge. At most, they seem to advocate that non-organics aren't less healthy than organics.
I think they are referring to the loophole that allows farms to use organic chemicals on produce that is labeled "Organic".
In chemistry, an organic chemical is a compound that contains lots of carbon, or carbon chains. The loophole allows the use of these organic compounds as pesticides. The downside is that these are typically much more of a broad spectrum than the cutting edge pesticides. This means that unlike the new narrow-spectrum pesticides (which are often designed so they only affect the physiology of a specific order of invertebrate) the old-school organic chemical pesticides are harmful to pretty much everything it comes in contact with.
But I was replying to someone who said they live in Central Arizona. Ironic that Atrazine is produced by a Swiss company and can't even use it in their own country.
The common line is that this bill is to stymie small farmers and promote Monsanto. I don't think it was the intent of the bill at all, nor does it need to be the outcome.
Food born illness is a serious problem (~48 million people will have some form of it in the US this year). Just look at the articles on people who are fatally poisoned by things like greens and cantaloupe.
The act attempts to address this by making sure food is properly traceable back to source and cleanliness measures are taken along the way. This is most certainly in the public interest, and the intent is not to promote big agriculture but to insure process and accountability. It doesn't actually prevent you from growing and consuming food from your own garden, but when you distribute that food, the government should be able to make sure you aren't doing things like watering it with raw sewage. This is overdue in my opinion. It's just like restaurant inspection. Necessary. Small growers shouldn't be exempted from putting people at risk. They can and should grow and process food cleanly, they should keep records, and if they are unable to, they shouldn't do it.
I think it's neither a conspiracy nor a reasonable precaution.
Food borne illnesses are, in fact, a serious problem but regulations that crush the small farmer aren't the answer. Large scale farming may be incredibly efficient at producing food but they are equally efficient at propagating food borne illnesses.
Promoting small farms when possible is beneficial to society and the planet for a host of reasons, including the reduction of food borne illnesses. Nature abhors monoculture and always fights to restore ecological diversity.
>What you said is nonsensical. How would eliminating the enforcement of cleanliness standards reduce illness?
I didn't say that eliminating the enforcement of cleanliness standards would reduce illness, rather I said crushing the small farmer isn't the answer and suggested that more small farms would reduce illness.
Example (from Michael Pollan's excellent book "The Omnivore's Dilemna"): FDA regulations that require slaughterhouses to have a private restroom reserved for the FDA inspector.
For a large multinational corporation processing tons of meat per day, that is a drop in the bucket. For a small slaughterhouse processing maybe a handful of cattle/week during peak slaughtering season, that's a much more substantial cost.
And when you think about it, you realize that this bizarre rules is a statement that FDA inspectors believe farm operations are so unsanitary across the board that they refuse to use a standard farm restroom. That tells me all I need to know about the quality of USA factory farms.
I'm not sure that is the reason they won't use the restrooms nor that we are actually hearing the specifics of the rule nor the reason for it or if it is anything more than internet rumor (wouldn't be surprised).
People like Michael Pollan are ideologues (a good writer...I have read "Botany of Desire") but you have to take some of their views, particularly on science, with a grain of salt. Something like Micheal Moore. Not that he isn't often right but...... then there is reality.
And (to reply to a parent) I don't understand how insisting on and legislating sanitary food production, record keeping and food tracking has anything to do with mono culture and isn't a reasonable precaution.
I could not find language supporting a "private restroom"
requirement after about 30 minutes of Googling, but it appears that
FDA meat processing regs may require full-time on-site inspectors.
Considering that slaughterhouses process the entire animal, and thus
have to deal with whatever happens to be on the hooves or skin, or
inside the viscera, it may be that a separate restroom is actually
a method of reducing the risk of cross-contamination.
Ha! I just made the same search and my comment was the top google result.
At any rate, this blog post provides the quote in question, from page 229 of "Omnivore's Dilemma" though it turns out it's the USDA, not the FDA that is mentioned.
Here's the quote:
"The problem with current food-safety regulations, in [small farmer Joel Salatin’s view], is that they are one-size-fits-all rules designed to regulate giant slaughterhouses that are mindlessly applied to small farmers in such a way that “before I can sell my neighbor a T-bone steak I’ve got to wrap it up in a million dollars’ worth of quintuple-permitted processing plant.” For example, federal rules stipulate that every processing facility have a bathroom for the exclusive use of the USDA inspector. Such regulations favor the biggest industrial meatpackers, who can spread the costs of compliance over the millions of animals they process every year, at the expense of artisanal enterprises like Polyface [Salatin’s farm]."
What you said is nonsensical. How would eliminating the enforcement of cleanliness standards reduce illness?
It's like advocating that food trucks shouldn't be subject to health inspections and then saying we would all be healthier eating from this food trucks instead of restaurants.
>What you said is nonsensical. How would eliminating the enforcement of cleanliness standards reduce illness?
The idea is that industrial agriculture is far more likely to produce illness. So industrial agriculture + regulations can have a higher likelihood of producing illness than small agriculture without regulation.
And since regulations stifle small farms, lower regulations on small farms can decrease the incidence of food borne illness by decreasing the percentage of food that comes from industrial agriculture.
I don't view the Bill as a "conspiracy," just a large corporation trying to increase profits.
You make good points on food safety, definitely important, but I personally feel more secure buying food from the same local farmers every week or so at our local farmers markets than food that is grown on huge farms and shipped from long distances.
I have the same opinion about meat. I would rather buy locally grown free range chicken from small local farms than chicken grown in small cages living in their own poop.
All that said, we are supposed to be a free country, so I feel like it is important to maintain the rights of both people like you who prefer food from large grocery stores, and also people like me who like my food raised by very nearby local small farmers. Really, why shouldn't we both get what we want?
> If people don't want organic food, I could generally care less except for one thing: efforts to put legal roadblocks in the way of locally grown food.
How do you know that locally grown food is organic unless someone checks? Local grown and sold food doesn't necessarily mean "organic" it just means locally grown. Pesticides and chemicals are available for local growers too.
Unless you grow it or personally know where, who and how they grow the food you will not know what are you getting.
A lot of "farmers" I know (not in this country but in a country with a non-functioning FDA or USDA) have 2 lots. One lot to grow the food to sell and one to grow for themselves. The pesticide the shit out of one they sell. Nobody checks. Still looks good and pretty and people buy it and sellers make money.
As a farmer myself, I find something intriguing in your comment. I take away visions of someone using way more chemical than necessary when reading this, but that stuff is expensive. There is no reason to use more. It's always considered a blessing when you don't have to use any, even if we assume the environmental/health impact is zero. Judicious use of pesticides can improve plant health and increase yields, but that happens in every country.
I guess I'm curious about what you are trying to say? A those "farmers" you referred to really that reckless with their incomes (never mind anything else that goes along with it) in a business that has incredibly slim margins?
He means "They use pesticides responsibly but I am passionate about hating pesticides"
My gramps had a vinyard and an orchard. Pesticides are a bitch to use. Windy the next day? A bit of rain? Dew too strong? Well screw you buddy, you get to re-do everything because it's as if you didn't spray at all. Ha ha.
And those stupid grapes wouldn't even grow without pesticides. They're so bloody fragile and finnicky. Sometimes the whole thing would go belly-up because gramps would miss the spraying window by a few days (due to weather).
Seriously, anyone who is passionately against pesticides has never tried to make money off of food production. And anyone who's worried about pesticides having residual effects on them (and doesn't get in direct contact with the stuff) has never tried to make pesticides stay on those god damned plants long enough to work.
> anyone who's worried about pesticides having residual effects on them (and doesn't get in direct contact with the stuff) has never tried to make pesticides stay on those god damned plants long enough to work.
Well, if we're going to be fair about it, the fact that it washes off the surface of plants so easily doesn't mean it's just gone and not causing residual effects elsewhere.
> doesn't mean it's just gone and not causing residual effects elsewhere
True, but I have better things to worry about than this health food craze americans seem to be going through. I've been living here for several months and I honestly think most people here are insane. So much worrying about everything! Live a little, sheesh.[1]
Maybe SF is especially bad.
In my country we have a saying: "You keep the nice apples for yourself, you sell the rotten ones to city slickers as organic."
[1] my main gripe with the organic anti-chemical food craze is that we simply don't have enough arable land to feed everyone if we stop using GMO's and pesticides and all that stuff. We were actually supposed to all have been starving by some 20 years ago, but then we invented cool things. But I guess we can always get rid of all the rainforests to compensate and we're all gonna be so super healthy and chemical free. Hoofuckingray.
> my main gripe with the organic anti-chemical food craze is that we simply don't have enough arable land to feed everyone
I think the same people who prefer organic food might also be wise enough not to eat three large servings of beef every day, which is what is killing the rain forests right now. And how many % of good food are being thrown away nowadays? Something like 30%? Simply because supermarkets want to have everything on the shelves all the time, and people buy without planning. There is still a lot of room for experimentation before we starve.
At least here in the UK - and I believe the US is the same - our major supermarkets won't buy fruit that isn't visually flawless, even when it doesn't affect the flavor. They charge the farmers for disposing of it too. So a lot of effort - and spraying - goes into keeping as much of the fruit flawless-looking as possible.
> I take away visions of someone using way more chemical than necessary when reading this
The vision is spraying with the deadliest and sometimes illegal pesticides (DDT and other things).
The "shit of out" is comparing to "0 pesticides". That means plucking bugs by hand in the evening from potatoes, weeding by hand, watering by hand.
> Judicious use of pesticides can improve plant health and increase yields, but that happens in every country.
Nobody is arguing with that, but given that these particular people I know (friend of relatives and so on) don't have time or language skills to read scientific literature what "judicious" amounts are.
> A those "farmers" you referred to really that reckless with their incomes
That is usually seasonal they have other business. They are not reckless they are just capitalists. They are maximizing the profit. The vegetables that look bigger, shiner and of which they can have a greater yield will maximize their profit.
My mom has a small garden (and I helped her around when I was little), it takes a LOT of time to pluck all insects from just potatoes. That is time just for that can easily be 4-6 hours. Also plucking in the evenings is like reading a book on dark side of Mars, in a barrel.
You can't spot the fuckers in low light, you need best light available so only morning and in the afternoon will do.
What this comes to is this, if you use 0 pesticide that means you have to pay workers to do so which means lower efficiency and higher prices. Price for organics should (under given circumstances) be between 4-10 times more expensive.
Also, before chemical fertilizer there were several wars fought over bird extrement. Unfortunately the anti-synthetics fads are putting pressure on this resource again
People in this thread seem to be under the misapprehension that organic farming doesn't use pesticides or 'chemicals'. Everything is a chemical, and organic farming in particular uses some nasty ones (rotenone, copper sulfate, pyrethrins). Pesticides are not automatically bad - in fact some of them are almost unbelievably benign to humans and/or to the environment.
In WA some apple orchards are sprayed with kaolin (a fine white clay). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaolin_spray. Diatomaceous earth is also used on some crops. Both of these are like... mechanical insecticides.
The replies in this thread from people claiming to be farmers are odd -- what crop? It seems pretty important. It sounds like it's hard to grow certain wine grapes some places, ok, but why do we have lists of the 'best' and 'worst' fruits/veggies to buy organic? They have less pest problems to begin with is my assumption, but I'm not really a farmer [beyond 10'x10' of herbs and veggies in the backyard].
herbicides: pelargonic acid (Scythe) and acetic acid are famous examples, but glyphosate (Roundup) and imazaquin (Image) have higher LD50s than table salt.
insecticides: Bacillus thuringiensis Cry proteins (used both in organic agriculture and in Monsanto's Bt lines), RNAi
no, I didn't say it did. But there's also no convincing evidence that either of the synthetics I mentioned does cause negative long-term effects (let alone serious ones).
However, the statement in question was explicitly regarding pesticides, not herbicides. And, implicitly, the context is those pesticides which are in use at scale on non-organic crops.
Nicotine would classify as insecticide that, while perhaps not completely benign, is considered to have minimal impact on human health (smoking it notwithstanding). A synthetically derived form of nicotine is the primary insecticide in use these days, although it's incredible success with the insect population is starting to give us second thoughts about using it.
Yes. But going back to my original question, it was in response to the statement that there are "almost unbelievably benign" pesticides with regard to human and environmental impact.
So, while there was also an implication that we're talking about pesticides that might see practical use, I'm really not even holding out that requirement. I'm just inquiring into the names of those pesticides that are benign to both humans and the environment.
For more information about 'particle films' (like kaolin spray) see this document. There are numerous compounds mentioned and very interesting references too. These techniques also can be mixed with conventional pesticides and achieve the same efficacy as pure pesticide.
"At the present time, a commercial particle film material, Surround crop protectant, is being used in about 90% of the Pacific Northwest pear market for the early season control of pear psylla and approximately 20% of the Washington State apple market to reduce sunburn damage."
Um no. It is taking about this one specific usage which is exclusive. Other usages are inclusive, but some usages refer only to artificial concoctions. (Like when people use the word "animal" to refer to non-human animals).
Is routine use of pesticides on 'organic' farms an american thing? I'm not familiar with the US organic standards / regulations.
In the UK, the Soil Association (organic standards body) claims [1] that pesticides are used "Very rarely" on organic farms. So it strikes me as quite odd that there's all this discussion about organic pesticides as if their use is on par (or even greater than) non-organic pesticide use.
Could you explain what you mean by home gardeners and how you think this proposed bill would have affected them? I don't think the average Senator is foolish enough to try to ban (or substantially regulate) backyard gardening.
My senator, Jon Kyle, has a history of supported nutty bills, BTW.
When George W. Bush was president, he proposed a bill that would create a small national committee that would have the power to have any university professor fired because of their political views. Being a senator does not guarantee rational behavior :-) when I wrote to my Senator about this Bill, his response was very unsatisfactory in my opinion, but now that a democrat is president, I doubt he would like an Obama appointed committee to have the same powers!
Not the op but I think I can explain. In rural areas a home gardner may have more an acre garden and a high tunnel (green house) and produce more then they can use or eat so lots of people will donate/share/sell for extra money a few things.
Where I live in Montana they can sell at the farmers market or roadside stands without jumping through too many hoops but for whatever reason they need to package things to sell it in stores (a store owner explained that otherwise too much liability falls on the store but i'm not sure that is it).
So I can go to a small locally owned store and buy a one pound bag of spinach grown just down the road and put in the bag by the farmer but I can't say, pick out a few local apples (or squash or bulk salad mix) unless I actually drive up the road to the orchard/farm or go to the once a week farmers market.
Yes, I'm aware that small growers often want to sell produce. But "small local growers" were explicitly mentioned, hence the question.
"Some home gardeners end up being small local growers" is sort of an answer, but why mention them both if you are only talking about the situation where "home gardener" is (at least becoming) a stretch?
I think we're having a rural/city dweller divide. I wouldn't consider anyone even a small grower unless they make their main living doing it but lots of people sell a few things to make ends meet.
I was mostly curious if mark_l_watson meant to include people growing for their own table or not. The expected impact on people growing to sell small amounts is also interesting. Figuring out what we each would have called the various possible delineations prior to the discussion is not very interesting.
(I would think the big impacts would be things like requiring people to disclose that they were reselling something, which I see as a positive for the buyer, without being particularly onerous)
> American Food Safety bill that was prepared by Monsanto
Was it just Monsanto? They are a relatively small business of the businesses that deal in agriculture. I'd be surprised if the bigger companies would let them have free reign over the decision making process like that (though I'm sure they're happy to have Monsanto as the fall guy, so to speak). The only reference to the bill, with respect to who wrote it, that I could find said it was prepared by multiple corporations.
Is there really bigger companies than Monsanto doing the same thing? If so, and the power/bullying that Monsanto has proven it holds, we need to be really scared. Because the financial needs to defeat Monsanto can bleed even a State dry, so if they are just a front of whats to come, how could we win? I would love to hear more on these other companies and organizations.
Monsanto is now a relatively focused company that mostly sells seeds: Many GMOs, some bred traditionally. They also now sell some services related to optimizing seed selection for a particular field. If you read their PR(which you might believe or not), there is much focus on minimizing pesticide application, and instead make the plants themselves more resistant to pests. So instead of spraying your field with a liquid full of Bacillus Thuringiensis, they'd rather have the farmer grow plants with leaves that produce the same toxins than BT does.
The market cap is just 63B. In comparison, a Walmart is 240+. The main reason they are smaller than their competitors is that they separated their biotech arm from their chemical company roots, while most of their competitors are still mainly chemical companies: BASF and DuPont. If we just compared their seed-producing operations though, Monsanto is probably larger, but it's not as if I've checked the numbers.
The thing about political influence is that it's not really about size, but about being in a position so that you do not have clear opponents. Farmers as a whole do not dislike Monsanto, or they'd not buy their seeds. They tend to lower crop prices, so it's not as if the next level in the food production chain has a problem with them either. So, as far as getting laws that are helpful to them, their one opponent is certain kinds of environmentalists. It's how lobbying works: It's easier to get a few people to spend a lot of an effort than to get a whole lot of people to do very little.
What do you mean by same thing? Monsanto has hands in many things, including software development. If you mean GMOs, which they have have become infamous for, then absolutely. Bayer, for instance, is significantly larger.
I'm not sure they are exactly hidden. I'd consider them household names. BASF and Bayer are larger, Dow and DuPont are roughly the same same size as Monsanto, and Sysgenta is slightly smaller. In hindsight, it would have probably been better to say that Monsanto is a medium sized business, relatively speaking, in that agriculture space.
You might not be aware that the idom "I could care less" is in common usage, espechally in American english, and has the same meaning as "I could not care less".
Interesting. Certainly not in my country at least (and possibly most places English is spoken outside the US), it's a mistake that you will be pulled up for and possibly will harm your argument by making you look uneducated, since it's such a simple statement to parse.
Yes, either phrase is usually understood by American readers. However, "I could care less" has a literal meaning opposite from its idiomatic meaning and is likely more troublesome for non-native or non-American readers.
Also, when many people read "I could care less", they assume the writer has a deficiency in their education and/or attention to detail. Seldom is it advantageous to write "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less".
If people don't want organic food, I could generally care less except for one thing: efforts to put legal roadblocks in the way of locally grown food. For example:
A few years ago our Senator Jon Kyle, after taking large campaign contributions from Monsanto, submitted the American Food Safety bill that was prepared by Monsanto. This Bill would make home gardeners, local community gardens and small local growers jump through the same hoops as the multi billion dollar food corporations. I believe that it was generally accepted that this was an attempt to force people to buy from the large food conglomerates - at least that is my belief.