See, I was good with the article up until it started pushing long since debunked pseudoscience claims about glyphosate. The chemical biochemistry of it is clear and, yes, there have been dozens of studies over the years, which have shown that it is actually one of the lower impact pesticides used out there. Anyone using IARC as a source (when that's not even what IARC is for or about) is betraying their own anti-science stance.
And then they bring up nonsense about organic farming. Organic farming, on average, ends up having to use more pesticides because they use non-specific "natural" ones that are less effective against targeted weeds and thus have to be re-applied more often, such as pyrethrins and spinosad. Furthermore, the use of manure instead of options like drip irrigation causes more nitrogen leaching into the water table than conventional farming methods. If all of our farms were organic farms, this issue would be way worse. Example source: https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/18/333/2014/
And that's without counting the higher land usage requirements for an equivalent amount of food production from an organic farm compared to a non-organic one. If all our farms were organic, the amount of farmland would be way higher and there's be way less wilderness areas.
All herbicides are pesticides. Pesticide is the umbrella term for herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, ect.
Agreed on BT plants. The funny thing about that one is that BT toxin is a common pesticide used in organic farming too (and all other farming) because it actually is so effective and non-toxic to vertebrates (hence why it was used to make the BT toxin producing plants in the first place). And yet the anti-GMO groups still fearmongered about the plants anyways, never seeing the hypocrisy in relation to what organic farming uses.
Monocrops themselves are pretty bad by itself. Maybe if arable land could have the wild plants/flowers grow among them, pollinators wouldn’t suffer as much. I still remember in the 80s having vast wheat and alfalfa fields dotted with wild poppies and thistles everywhere, humming with life. But somehow we have decided that those are weeds and undesirable.
I find both the article and the comment disingenuous.
Dude you know why, right? They used to spray DDT everywhere. Like drop it from planes and fog and entire town (still do outside the US). Silent Spring came out in like the early 60s and they didn’t ban DDT until the early 70s. It took a hot minute for DDT usage to ramp down and insect/bird populations to ramp up.
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