The author of the piece seems to have some conflict of interest WRT organic farming. Here's a two year old LinkedIn post[1] where she claims to have been a keynote speaker at the Croplife America Annual Meeting.
Headline on the Croplife America website[2] is: "We Represent America's Pesticide Industry".
The point of this article is that "organic" farming uses organic pesticides. And more of them are required than when using synthetic pesticides. But I suppose it is the wrong pesticides for the industry lobby (except for copper sulfate?) and that's why they'd have someone write up this article. Not because of the true statements about the synthetic pesticides being safer (lower LD50, lower mass needing to be applied, etc).
Both "sides" that are involved (organic pesticides vs non-organic pesticides) here are arguing for pesticide use in practice.
It's written in bad faith in my opinion and also factually wrong in multiple places.
Nicotine sulfate which the srticle explicitly discusses as one of the "natural" substances, used in organic farming (i assune the context is US specifix here) is
a) not the natural occuring nicotine of e.g. tobacco plants and b) stictly prohibihed for all types of agriculture, organic or notchemically modified nix.
And the use of the LD50 toxicity as sole metric is laughable: caring about not being exposed to carcinogenic substances, would not even make sense, when everythink that is harmful would also be accordingly toxic in the sense of an LD50 dose.
You can also argue the opposite, that due to her working with a particular interest in proving the organic industry wrong, she is finding factual information about it. As usual, information should be dismissed or confirmed with more information, not with fallacies
The principle of charity suggests we should assume good intentions about others and their ideas, and give them the benefit of the doubt before criticising them.
Does no one think this is a little strange and suspicious? This blog post from 2024 is citing another blog post that cites a survey with a sample of 813 people in the UK, but without an actual link to the survey. And while dancing around with other things is of course a pro glyphosate argument.
I think there is a difference between avoiding all pesticides, and say avoiding glyphosate, which is why I prefer the buy the organically grown version or some vegetables. If anyone wants to chow down on glyphosate, knock yourself out, but so what if other people are paying a little more to not. That's their prerogative. Everyone can have what they want. What is this blog even arguing?
Exactly. Also, it doesn't even mention the fact that when a crop becomes dis-organic (or unorganic), it's no longer food since the taste and texture changes somewhat. The change of taste is a good indicator that you're eating poison. Or at least, it has no health benefits. Organic crops may have pesticides too, but at least they are still health-giving food that may counter some of the effects of pesticides. With inorganic, you are hurt twice: the chemicals and then the food itself offers no benefits.
The USDA only permits very specific and highly restricted pest control substances to be used under the "organic" label [1]. So yes, they may still use pesticides, but they are miles away from the usual pesticides used in conventional farming. That stuff will literally kill you if you aren't careful [2]. Beware that there is a lot of misinformation out there targeting anything that dares to go against the conventional farming industry. Of course not all eco hippie alternatives are great, but the usual stuff out there is without question outright terrible in many cases.
Many of the "organic approved" substances are also incredibly dangerous. Rotenone is a naturally derived neuro-toxin linked to Parkinson's. Pyrethrin is poison. Then you have a bunch of chlorine and ammonia based elements - maybe not as dangerous in their pure industrial concentrations as paraquat would be but certainly not safe.
(Paraquat is also very unique because it neutralizes itself in contact with soil so it's actually a lot safer in a lot of situations).
Rotenone is not allowed in USDA Organic produce. [1]
Pyrethrin in USDA Organic produce is required to be natural, not synthetic, so don't confuse the two. Also, even natural pyrethrin is a last resort Organic pesticide.
This is untrue. For example, Copper Sulfate is a moderately toxic substance used in organic farming and is highly corrosive. It is approximately 5 to 10 times more toxic than Glyphosate (LD50 of ~300 to 790 mg/kg for Copper Sulfate vs. >4,320 mg/kg for Glyphosate.)
These two substances are used at entirely different times, for entirely different purposes, in entirely different manners, with different levels of persistence in both the environment and the final product.
Indeed. Copper sulfate is persistent (it's copper!) and is often used not long before harvest.
Meanwhile, glyphosate is used early before planting to kill off the weeds and so it's naturally degraded (to harmless CO2 and water) by the harvest time.
You're conflating two different categories of product and their targets.
Copper is a fungicide, which is a category of product that both chemical ("conventional") and organic farmers often need to use for certain types of crops in certain types of climates, including pretty much any fruit. There are chemical fungicides which are more targeted and thus can be "greener" in some ways than copper, but there's also a lot more which are substantially worse.
Whereas RoundUp/glyphosate is an herbicide, which is a category of product that chemical farmers use extensively but organic farmers use rarely to not at all, relying instead on cultural and mechanical means. And what organic herbicides are used rely on contact rather than systemic action.
Funnily enough, both are pretty terrible when used near bodies of water. But chemical agriculture requires a much greater volume begetting much greater runoff.
LD50 is a very poor measurement for this kind of stuff though, there are plenty of stuff that can severely harm you on the long term at relatively low doses but will never realistically kill you in the short term no matter how high the dose (asbestos fibers for instance). Many carcinogenic or reprotoxic stuff are like that.
The problem is that there's a part that's true (the “organic” label is based in part on “appeal to nature”, allowing certain stuff on the basis that it is natural, which truly isn't a great way of drawing the limit).
So of course, the (often paid) promoters of “YOLO agriculture” will use that as an argument, putting under the rug that the industry they defend is doing bullshit with people's health and the environment.
There ought to be a middle ground, but unfortunately we live in a permanent culture war so there cannot be reasonable discussion about anything, really.
The claim in the article is that there's nothing intrinsically safer about the "organic" pesticides. And that just because "organic" labeled pesticides can be found as is in nature doesn't mean they are safer. Many of the "organic" pesticides, copper sulfate, rotenone, and nicicotine sulfate actually require more per unit area farmed while at the same time having a lower LD50 than the other non-organic pesticides.
What do you find is nonsense about this? Did you not read the article and think it was about "pesticides" vs "no pesticides"? It is actually about how the organic label often results in farmers using more pesticides.
Except those "organic pesticide" are largely NOT used in modern organic farming, and when they are, they're used at a much lower level than "conventional pesticides"
"Organic means better" is the embarrassing and misleading talking point here though, not being against having toxic chemicals in our food sold as "organic". I don't want added copper compounds and residue in my food, and copper sulfate used in organic farming empirically does that.
Apart from that I buy organic because it's also better for the environment. Among other things also due to lower nitrate levels in the groundwater. Which is consistently above the maximum allowed concentration in Germany for years.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/nitrate-in-...
Every few years, I hear something like this. And every time, I wonder who is going to believe them, because almost without exception when I purchase organic produce it tastes noticeably better.
Perhaps one could argue "well, that's not because it's certified organic, it's because it's a smaller farm that uses these other crop-growing techniques blah blah blah". OK. Irrelevant. The point is, when I buy conventional produce, and then I buy organic produce, the organic stuff is clearly higher quality. Even better? Go to a farmers market and buy directly from the source.
What about food produced in Europe? We have an Italian restaurant in my Tennessee town that imports all of its ingredients from Italy.
I know several people who are otherwise gluten-intolerant but can eat anything there with no trouble.
All of the food issues we're suffering from in the US -- celiac's disease, food allergies, gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance -- are relatively rare in Europe.
I use a lot of italian imports from my cooking, but it's less to do with the organic nature and more to do with a combination of terroir + refined techniques + heritage breeds of crops.
I tend to suspect that the "gluten-intolerant but can eat noodles in Europe" is a bit bunk. These days the top source of Durum wheat used in luxury European products is ... North Dakota and Canada.
I suspect the root of the issue is that the European lifestyle in general is so much healthier (less processed food, smaller portions, more walking) combined with the excitement of travel gives people a overall boost in their constitution.
Anecdotally, we have no history of food allergies in the family but my daughter has severe sesame allergy, milk, egg and nuts allergy. We are from South America but live in the UK.
The chemical contaminant problem is huge. The pressure to always lower food production costs has forced the industry to accept tradeoffs without considering the costs. The tradeoffs are at every step of the chain and if you ask anyone in the production chain about a specific contaminant, they will likely wave it off "no big deal, it's harmless" but by the time you go through the entire supply chain, this would accumulate to large numbers of contaminants from many different sources with complex interactions.
It's interesting that it works like fish and mercury contamination. Big fish accumulate mercury in higher concentrations than little fish. The little fish accumulate small amount over certain periods and are eaten by big fish which rapidly accumulate the chemical. The higher in the food chain the fish, the more mercury. It's a parallel with the degree of food processing. The more processed the food, the more contaminants.
You could characterize it as a general problem that humans and the planet are facing now. We have a problem with long chains. We are neglecting their costs. Even in the software industry, as a software developer, long chains of logic introduce their own problems with slight side effects at every stage accumulating into problematic unexpected behaviors and adding significant maintenance burdens. Guess what AI coding is contributing to? Longer chains of logic to solve the same problem.
At some point we have to put our foot down and reject unnecessary complexity and reject minor conveniences. There is too much fake convenience and fake safety which actually create much bigger inconveniences and hazards in the long run.
Everything in our society seems to be mirroring the debt-based system upon which our society is founded. Everything works like a debt which will have to be repaid later, with interest.
The worst part of organic produce is that it is worse on two things that matter a lot: climate change and biodiversity.
Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.
Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.
The vast majority of agricultural land is used for meat production. I hear you if you are on an carnivore organic keto diet. Myself, I eat vegan most of the time, but I'm not strict by any measure. The extra land use from my organic purchases is more than offset by eating lower on the food chain.
This argument at its logical extreme would be that we should grow slop in vats because that takes less land to feed people.
Agree that climate and biodiversity are two very important factors, but there's others. Health effects (e.g. quality-adjusted life years) being one, soil health & resilience another. Monocropping pesticide-laden foods is not some ideal state.
Nonsense. The intensive agriculture that conventional pesticides enable destroys biodiversity and kills land fertility. Organic monoculture is still monoculture but conventional monoculture is still worse.
I've noticed a naming issue that keeps cropping (heh) up. No-till. Organic. Free range. The confusion is caused by information asymmetry (or word fuzziness). I think organic means one thing, farmer thinks it means another (or, as is frequently the case in capitalism, maybe they know what I think it means, but that I won't be checking closely, so they can get away with it being "technically organic").
The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.
As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]
40/328 ≈ 12%
And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.
But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)
Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?
It should be fine if you remove the first layer. And the other layers as well after that one. If you throw away the whole thing it should be completely safe for you anyway. If you handle your trash carefully, with gloves and a mask, that is.
I think food quality is real and the same foods from certain stores taste better and make me feel better than from other stores. So I usually pick my food based on brand/store rather than organic labeling.
A lot of what I buy happens to be organic, but I eat it because it tastes good, not because of the label.
I do think organic bananas taste better than non-organic. Same with meat and eggs, but any high-quality meat is great, organic or not.
For flour, pasta, and cereal, I feel like it comes down to the brand, not whether it's organic.
Maybe food quality is more complex than what an organic label actually measures.
Maybe it's just because reducing treatment makes produces more fragile, which means by buying organic you end up eating fresher stuff just because it couldn't withstand the logistic that heavily treated food endure.
Even assuming it’s right, I don’t like this article. Not because of the claims it makes, but rather because of the implications it makes—or doesn’t care to avoid.
Organic farming is essentially the idea of farming more ‘in line with nature’, and is concretely defined and regulated by different laws in different places. If these regulations aren’t yielding the expected results, it may be a good idea to drop or improve them. What I find dangerous, though, is the easily acquirable belief that the idea of organic farming is deceptive and worthless.
Certain practices present in conventional farming are known to be problematic and it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned and seek to avoid them. Organic farming can miss the goal, but my understanding is that it’s aiming in the right direction. Therefore, I think a more responsible conclusion to draw would be ‘today’s organic farming isn’t what it should be’, not just the plain ‘organic foods are not superior’. In this form, I fear the message does far more harm than good.
I don't really believe in "organic foods" but I believe they sometimes are higher quality because their consumers expect more from them, although at a higher price. Just look at supermarket tomatos for example.
Organic foods could be a bit tastier (as opposed tasteless and bland) but that's not always the case. But when that's the case it's a no brainer to me what to buy.
Farmers market foods overall taste better. When I talk to the farmers frequently they will tell me they don't pay to be certified organic, but they use no sprays and fertilizer is organic (things like worm compost). They also do tend to use a lot of plastic, which I worry about but less than pesticides.
You do you. Me personally? I never buy organic if I can avoid it, to the point of, in the very very rare cases when organic is cheaper, I have still sometimes bought conventional.
Mostly a principled (although admittedly near totally useless) stand against exactly the kind of issue talked about in this article. The organic label, as it is used in the US, is basically BS marketing bordering on misinformation. I prefer that my one, tiny, consumer signal goes in the direction of not supporting that BS marketing label.
Organic is also more contaminated with fungicide toxins resulting in certain cancer rates beeing higher in the "organic" crowd and many orgsnic farmer fields hugging connventional farfields to get at least some fungicides
I do find it fascinating how blatantly people lie about things, the article mentions "Organic farming uses 84% more land for the same yield, but yields are 55% lower by area than conventional." yes, and that is the exact signature indicating that organic produce receives less harsh chemicals and is less exploitive of the ecosystem than "regular" produce. Not worth the read, it's simply anti-organic propaganda. Note: I'm not personally religious about organic/not-organic but neither do I enjoy overt misinformation campaigns.
If we accepted what this article states as true (big if, seems mostly hyperbolic) ... it also supposes that the only important thing about organic foods is what your body gets out of it. No consideration given to the land, the inputs, the workers, the surrounding environment. Not much logic to ImunoLogic.
This is very true. My parents were organic farmers back before there was any legal or official designation, and keeping synthetic pesticides out of the soil and watershed was a bigger motivation for them than fear of eating conventionally grown food.
I think as organic food became more mainstream it also became more about an individual's health and less about larger environmental and social concerns, but those concerns are at the heart of the original organic movement.
I've read the same kind of argumentative Mille-feuille garbage in French already.
You have to think about who is motivated to write this kind of stuff. Invariably, it's people selling conventional pesticides or people paid by such people. The lobbying is strong, contrary to the arguments. This is actually a very good sign, these despicable people feel threatened.
I don't know the rules of the organic label in the US, here in Europe it's not perfect, and yeah, thhere are still pesticides including some bad stuff like copper sulfates that are allowed, and the level of care absolutely vary from ome producer to another but it's still better than conventional products for pretty much everything except for the price if you don't factor in the cost of the damage done to the environment and yourself.
This kind of misinformation needs to be firmly fought back. They want to sell glyphosate, which they try to trick us into thinking it's not bad, that's the full extent of it. It's bad, we are better off without it, that's it, end of the story.
There is a long-lasting study (more than 10 years) on a huge French cohort (more than 100k) that proves exactly the opposite : people who eat mostly organic food have less cancer and several other diseases. This is straight disinformation.
Does that study account for the potential confounding factor of affluence? At least in the US, where I am, eating organic also correlates to being more wealthy. And being rich tends to help you avoid lots of these diseases and cancers just based on lifestyle factors.
Results Among 68 946 participants (78.0% female; mean [SD] age at baseline, 44.2 [14.5] years), 1340 first incident cancer cases were identified during follow-up, with the most prevalent being 459 breast cancers, 180 prostate cancers, 135 skin cancers, 99 colorectal cancers, 47 non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and 15 other lymphomas. High organic food scores were inversely associated with the overall risk of cancer (hazard ratio for quartile 4 vs quartile 1, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.63-0.88; P for trend = .001; absolute risk reduction, 0.6%; hazard ratio for a 5-point increase, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.88-0.96).
Conclusions and Relevance A higher frequency of organic food consumption was associated with a reduced risk of cancer. If these findings are confirmed, further research is necessary to determine the underlying factors involved in this association.
It might be like that. Everyone should strive to make the best decisions and not go with the mainstream. Always question the mainstream, it's dangerous. Make a change for the better. Everything starts with you. Then your family, friends, neighbors...
Do you have the opportunity to grow something yourself? Do that.
There's some value in that line of thinking, as the mainstream often (okay, euphemism there) pushes bad choices, like in the past smoking being mainstream to the point of doctors being paid to promote the "health benefits" of cigarettes.
But at the same time I don't think its healthy to _always_ question everything in the mainstream. Its mainstream for a reason (sometimes an angle pushed by economic groups like big cig in the example above), and sometimes the reason is reasonable. Be critical and keep an open mind, but don't assume its fake because its mainstream.
That's completely false. It's been proven that, even though they aren't always entirely pesticide free because of pesticide remaining in soil / water / nearby fields that have been spread, their levels are much lower
It's common knowledge. Do more than 5 minutes of research into what it takes to earn a USDA sticker as well as the ingredients and administration practices of conventional pesticides.
There are studies in France that showed it. It's been widely discussed here because of the opposition of the population to the pro-pesticide agro-industrial lobbies.
> and was borne out of consumer demand and misinformation.
So there was absolutely no reliable data they used? It was _entirely_ misinformation? That seems dubious.
> Most people have been misled to believe that organic is superior and that’s not your fault
I'd like fewer cancer causing chemicals sprayed onto or around my food. I'm not sure that's "superior" but it seems "more reasonable than not."
> in order to drive people to purchase organic produce
Not exactly a "hard sell" is it?
> All pesticides are toxic
And "toxic" defines a _wide_ range of features and outcomes, does it not? Now who's fear mongering?
> Another study making claims about glyphosate in urine, that the median glyphosate levels in organic food consumers and individuals with known exposure are essentially identical (390 vs 400 parts per trillion, respectively).
So corporate farming is so onerous that there's no way to avoid glyphosate cross contamination? I found this whole thing to be a very goofy analysis that seems preoccupied with punching down on some imagined conspiratorial enemy.
The author of the piece seems to have some conflict of interest WRT organic farming. Here's a two year old LinkedIn post[1] where she claims to have been a keynote speaker at the Croplife America Annual Meeting.
Headline on the Croplife America website[2] is: "We Represent America's Pesticide Industry".
I rest my case. :)
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrea-love-phd_scientistlife...
[2]: https://croplifeamerica.org/
The point of this article is that "organic" farming uses organic pesticides. And more of them are required than when using synthetic pesticides. But I suppose it is the wrong pesticides for the industry lobby (except for copper sulfate?) and that's why they'd have someone write up this article. Not because of the true statements about the synthetic pesticides being safer (lower LD50, lower mass needing to be applied, etc).
Both "sides" that are involved (organic pesticides vs non-organic pesticides) here are arguing for pesticide use in practice.
It's written in bad faith in my opinion and also factually wrong in multiple places.
Nicotine sulfate which the srticle explicitly discusses as one of the "natural" substances, used in organic farming (i assune the context is US specifix here) is a) not the natural occuring nicotine of e.g. tobacco plants and b) stictly prohibihed for all types of agriculture, organic or notchemically modified nix.
And the use of the LD50 toxicity as sole metric is laughable: caring about not being exposed to carcinogenic substances, would not even make sense, when everythink that is harmful would also be accordingly toxic in the sense of an LD50 dose.
And? Does it make their argument incorrect?
Also, can we now discount all the studies of harm of pesticides, unless they come from the Croplife America?
Financial interest in a particular conclusion is a well-known mechanism of producing bullshit science, so yes.
So we should disregard all the research from Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and other environmental organizations?
Are they doing what they are doing for a profit motive?
Does it have to be a profit motive, or any motive would do?
Greenpeace is a terrorist organization, so yes.
It makes her arguments highly suspect, yes.
You can also argue the opposite, that due to her working with a particular interest in proving the organic industry wrong, she is finding factual information about it. As usual, information should be dismissed or confirmed with more information, not with fallacies
OTOH this stuff has already been refuted and pesticide makers lobbying like this, spreading FUD on organic food, is a well known pattern already.
We can't afford properly refuting each occurrence, the effort is highly asymmetrical.
The principle of charity suggests we should assume good intentions about others and their ideas, and give them the benefit of the doubt before criticising them.
https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-char...
Does no one think this is a little strange and suspicious? This blog post from 2024 is citing another blog post that cites a survey with a sample of 813 people in the UK, but without an actual link to the survey. And while dancing around with other things is of course a pro glyphosate argument.
I think there is a difference between avoiding all pesticides, and say avoiding glyphosate, which is why I prefer the buy the organically grown version or some vegetables. If anyone wants to chow down on glyphosate, knock yourself out, but so what if other people are paying a little more to not. That's their prerogative. Everyone can have what they want. What is this blog even arguing?
Exactly. Also, it doesn't even mention the fact that when a crop becomes dis-organic (or unorganic), it's no longer food since the taste and texture changes somewhat. The change of taste is a good indicator that you're eating poison. Or at least, it has no health benefits. Organic crops may have pesticides too, but at least they are still health-giving food that may counter some of the effects of pesticides. With inorganic, you are hurt twice: the chemicals and then the food itself offers no benefits.
The USDA only permits very specific and highly restricted pest control substances to be used under the "organic" label [1]. So yes, they may still use pesticides, but they are miles away from the usual pesticides used in conventional farming. That stuff will literally kill you if you aren't careful [2]. Beware that there is a lot of misinformation out there targeting anything that dares to go against the conventional farming industry. Of course not all eco hippie alternatives are great, but the usual stuff out there is without question outright terrible in many cases.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
This is also incorrect.
Many of the "organic approved" substances are also incredibly dangerous. Rotenone is a naturally derived neuro-toxin linked to Parkinson's. Pyrethrin is poison. Then you have a bunch of chlorine and ammonia based elements - maybe not as dangerous in their pure industrial concentrations as paraquat would be but certainly not safe.
(Paraquat is also very unique because it neutralizes itself in contact with soil so it's actually a lot safer in a lot of situations).
>Pyrethrin is poison
to whom and at what dose? It's a paralytic nerve agent, so scary!! But mostly to bugs...
"mammals are able to process pyrethrin quickly and have higher body temperatures which prevent pyrethrin from working effectively"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3550062/
That is false. Check the USDA source linked above. Rotenone is prohibited according to §205.602.
Rotenone is not allowed in USDA Organic produce. [1]
Pyrethrin in USDA Organic produce is required to be natural, not synthetic, so don't confuse the two. Also, even natural pyrethrin is a last resort Organic pesticide.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
This is untrue. For example, Copper Sulfate is a moderately toxic substance used in organic farming and is highly corrosive. It is approximately 5 to 10 times more toxic than Glyphosate (LD50 of ~300 to 790 mg/kg for Copper Sulfate vs. >4,320 mg/kg for Glyphosate.)
https://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/cuso4tech.html https://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html
These two substances are used at entirely different times, for entirely different purposes, in entirely different manners, with different levels of persistence in both the environment and the final product.
Indeed. Copper sulfate is persistent (it's copper!) and is often used not long before harvest.
Meanwhile, glyphosate is used early before planting to kill off the weeds and so it's naturally degraded (to harmless CO2 and water) by the harvest time.
You're conflating two different categories of product and their targets.
Copper is a fungicide, which is a category of product that both chemical ("conventional") and organic farmers often need to use for certain types of crops in certain types of climates, including pretty much any fruit. There are chemical fungicides which are more targeted and thus can be "greener" in some ways than copper, but there's also a lot more which are substantially worse.
Whereas RoundUp/glyphosate is an herbicide, which is a category of product that chemical farmers use extensively but organic farmers use rarely to not at all, relying instead on cultural and mechanical means. And what organic herbicides are used rely on contact rather than systemic action.
Funnily enough, both are pretty terrible when used near bodies of water. But chemical agriculture requires a much greater volume begetting much greater runoff.
Sadly that is no longer the case. Glyphosate is sprayed to kill crops for harvest now. It's called pre-harvest desiccation.
300mg/kg is still 6 times higher than for Paraquat. So you only confirmed what was said above.
LD50 is a very poor measurement for this kind of stuff though, there are plenty of stuff that can severely harm you on the long term at relatively low doses but will never realistically kill you in the short term no matter how high the dose (asbestos fibers for instance). Many carcinogenic or reprotoxic stuff are like that.
Really sad to see an article like this at the top of HN
The problem is that there's a part that's true (the “organic” label is based in part on “appeal to nature”, allowing certain stuff on the basis that it is natural, which truly isn't a great way of drawing the limit).
So of course, the (often paid) promoters of “YOLO agriculture” will use that as an argument, putting under the rug that the industry they defend is doing bullshit with people's health and the environment.
There ought to be a middle ground, but unfortunately we live in a permanent culture war so there cannot be reasonable discussion about anything, really.
Exactly. The OP article is pure nonsense
The claim in the article is that there's nothing intrinsically safer about the "organic" pesticides. And that just because "organic" labeled pesticides can be found as is in nature doesn't mean they are safer. Many of the "organic" pesticides, copper sulfate, rotenone, and nicicotine sulfate actually require more per unit area farmed while at the same time having a lower LD50 than the other non-organic pesticides.
What do you find is nonsense about this? Did you not read the article and think it was about "pesticides" vs "no pesticides"? It is actually about how the organic label often results in farmers using more pesticides.
Except those "organic pesticide" are largely NOT used in modern organic farming, and when they are, they're used at a much lower level than "conventional pesticides"
> Many of the "organic" pesticides, copper sulfate, rotenone, and nicicotine sulfate
That's highly misleading:
1. Copper sulfate is required to be used such that copper accumulation is limited in the soil. [1]
2. Rotenone [2][3] and nicotine sulfate [3] are not allowed as USDA Organic pesticides.
Really, superkuh, for a user like you, your comment is embarrassing.
[1] https://pnwhandbooks.org/plantdisease/pesticide-articles/mat...
[2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/national-organic-...
[3] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
"Organic means better" is the embarrassing and misleading talking point here though, not being against having toxic chemicals in our food sold as "organic". I don't want added copper compounds and residue in my food, and copper sulfate used in organic farming empirically does that.
"The most frequently quantified [organic] pesticide was copper." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/5570...
This doesn't say that conventional cultures are better on that front.
Your own reference says:
> Analysis of these articles revealed no significant difference in ..., zinc, and copper.
> restrictions limit the use of copper salts.
I see a theoretical risk but not a practical problem here. At best you've identified a place where the regulations might need tightening.
I will provide one example where organic food is healthier: nitrate levels in organic spinach are lower. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25850811/
Apart from that I buy organic because it's also better for the environment. Among other things also due to lower nitrate levels in the groundwater. Which is consistently above the maximum allowed concentration in Germany for years. https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/nitrate-in-...
Every few years, I hear something like this. And every time, I wonder who is going to believe them, because almost without exception when I purchase organic produce it tastes noticeably better.
Perhaps one could argue "well, that's not because it's certified organic, it's because it's a smaller farm that uses these other crop-growing techniques blah blah blah". OK. Irrelevant. The point is, when I buy conventional produce, and then I buy organic produce, the organic stuff is clearly higher quality. Even better? Go to a farmers market and buy directly from the source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Public_perception
What about food produced in Europe? We have an Italian restaurant in my Tennessee town that imports all of its ingredients from Italy.
I know several people who are otherwise gluten-intolerant but can eat anything there with no trouble.
All of the food issues we're suffering from in the US -- celiac's disease, food allergies, gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance -- are relatively rare in Europe.
I use a lot of italian imports from my cooking, but it's less to do with the organic nature and more to do with a combination of terroir + refined techniques + heritage breeds of crops.
I tend to suspect that the "gluten-intolerant but can eat noodles in Europe" is a bit bunk. These days the top source of Durum wheat used in luxury European products is ... North Dakota and Canada.
I suspect the root of the issue is that the European lifestyle in general is so much healthier (less processed food, smaller portions, more walking) combined with the excitement of travel gives people a overall boost in their constitution.
Not sure about the other stuff but food allergies in Europe are very high as well https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S193945512.... It seems to be linked with economic development.
Anecdotally, we have no history of food allergies in the family but my daughter has severe sesame allergy, milk, egg and nuts allergy. We are from South America but live in the UK.
The chemical contaminant problem is huge. The pressure to always lower food production costs has forced the industry to accept tradeoffs without considering the costs. The tradeoffs are at every step of the chain and if you ask anyone in the production chain about a specific contaminant, they will likely wave it off "no big deal, it's harmless" but by the time you go through the entire supply chain, this would accumulate to large numbers of contaminants from many different sources with complex interactions.
It's interesting that it works like fish and mercury contamination. Big fish accumulate mercury in higher concentrations than little fish. The little fish accumulate small amount over certain periods and are eaten by big fish which rapidly accumulate the chemical. The higher in the food chain the fish, the more mercury. It's a parallel with the degree of food processing. The more processed the food, the more contaminants.
You could characterize it as a general problem that humans and the planet are facing now. We have a problem with long chains. We are neglecting their costs. Even in the software industry, as a software developer, long chains of logic introduce their own problems with slight side effects at every stage accumulating into problematic unexpected behaviors and adding significant maintenance burdens. Guess what AI coding is contributing to? Longer chains of logic to solve the same problem.
At some point we have to put our foot down and reject unnecessary complexity and reject minor conveniences. There is too much fake convenience and fake safety which actually create much bigger inconveniences and hazards in the long run.
Everything in our society seems to be mirroring the debt-based system upon which our society is founded. Everything works like a debt which will have to be repaid later, with interest.
The worst part of organic produce is that it is worse on two things that matter a lot: climate change and biodiversity.
Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.
Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.
The vast majority of agricultural land is used for meat production. I hear you if you are on an carnivore organic keto diet. Myself, I eat vegan most of the time, but I'm not strict by any measure. The extra land use from my organic purchases is more than offset by eating lower on the food chain.
This argument at its logical extreme would be that we should grow slop in vats because that takes less land to feed people.
Agree that climate and biodiversity are two very important factors, but there's others. Health effects (e.g. quality-adjusted life years) being one, soil health & resilience another. Monocropping pesticide-laden foods is not some ideal state.
Nonsense. The intensive agriculture that conventional pesticides enable destroys biodiversity and kills land fertility. Organic monoculture is still monoculture but conventional monoculture is still worse.
I've noticed a naming issue that keeps cropping (heh) up. No-till. Organic. Free range. The confusion is caused by information asymmetry (or word fuzziness). I think organic means one thing, farmer thinks it means another (or, as is frequently the case in capitalism, maybe they know what I think it means, but that I won't be checking closely, so they can get away with it being "technically organic").
The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.
As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]
40/328 ≈ 12%
And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.
But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)
Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/111436 [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720760115
That's just one aspect of it. I don't believe one can take such argument seriously and make conclusions from it. That's just silly.
The climate scam is a different topic.
tldr: prefer roundup-soaked salad to save the planet.
Hey, at least you won't find any worm in there!
It should be fine if you remove the first layer. And the other layers as well after that one. If you throw away the whole thing it should be completely safe for you anyway. If you handle your trash carefully, with gloves and a mask, that is.
I think food quality is real and the same foods from certain stores taste better and make me feel better than from other stores. So I usually pick my food based on brand/store rather than organic labeling.
A lot of what I buy happens to be organic, but I eat it because it tastes good, not because of the label.
I do think organic bananas taste better than non-organic. Same with meat and eggs, but any high-quality meat is great, organic or not.
For flour, pasta, and cereal, I feel like it comes down to the brand, not whether it's organic.
Maybe food quality is more complex than what an organic label actually measures.
Maybe it's just because reducing treatment makes produces more fragile, which means by buying organic you end up eating fresher stuff just because it couldn't withstand the logistic that heavily treated food endure.
Even assuming it’s right, I don’t like this article. Not because of the claims it makes, but rather because of the implications it makes—or doesn’t care to avoid.
Organic farming is essentially the idea of farming more ‘in line with nature’, and is concretely defined and regulated by different laws in different places. If these regulations aren’t yielding the expected results, it may be a good idea to drop or improve them. What I find dangerous, though, is the easily acquirable belief that the idea of organic farming is deceptive and worthless.
Certain practices present in conventional farming are known to be problematic and it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned and seek to avoid them. Organic farming can miss the goal, but my understanding is that it’s aiming in the right direction. Therefore, I think a more responsible conclusion to draw would be ‘today’s organic farming isn’t what it should be’, not just the plain ‘organic foods are not superior’. In this form, I fear the message does far more harm than good.
I don't really believe in "organic foods" but I believe they sometimes are higher quality because their consumers expect more from them, although at a higher price. Just look at supermarket tomatos for example.
Organic foods could be a bit tastier (as opposed tasteless and bland) but that's not always the case. But when that's the case it's a no brainer to me what to buy.
Farmers market foods overall taste better. When I talk to the farmers frequently they will tell me they don't pay to be certified organic, but they use no sprays and fertilizer is organic (things like worm compost). They also do tend to use a lot of plastic, which I worry about but less than pesticides.
Making me not wanna eat anything lol…
In seriousness does this mean I’m ok to buy the regular broccoli at the store next time?
Broccoli seems to be covered in something that is heat sensitive. I like to wash with boiling water.
Yes.
It seems so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Public_perception
You do you. Me personally? I never buy organic if I can avoid it, to the point of, in the very very rare cases when organic is cheaper, I have still sometimes bought conventional.
Why tho?
Mostly a principled (although admittedly near totally useless) stand against exactly the kind of issue talked about in this article. The organic label, as it is used in the US, is basically BS marketing bordering on misinformation. I prefer that my one, tiny, consumer signal goes in the direction of not supporting that BS marketing label.
I don't think using the median lethal dose of toxicity is a good metric to compare pesticides.
Organic is also more contaminated with fungicide toxins resulting in certain cancer rates beeing higher in the "organic" crowd and many orgsnic farmer fields hugging connventional farfields to get at least some fungicides
Do you have a source for this?
I do find it fascinating how blatantly people lie about things, the article mentions "Organic farming uses 84% more land for the same yield, but yields are 55% lower by area than conventional." yes, and that is the exact signature indicating that organic produce receives less harsh chemicals and is less exploitive of the ecosystem than "regular" produce. Not worth the read, it's simply anti-organic propaganda. Note: I'm not personally religious about organic/not-organic but neither do I enjoy overt misinformation campaigns.
If we accepted what this article states as true (big if, seems mostly hyperbolic) ... it also supposes that the only important thing about organic foods is what your body gets out of it. No consideration given to the land, the inputs, the workers, the surrounding environment. Not much logic to ImunoLogic.
This is very true. My parents were organic farmers back before there was any legal or official designation, and keeping synthetic pesticides out of the soil and watershed was a bigger motivation for them than fear of eating conventionally grown food.
I think as organic food became more mainstream it also became more about an individual's health and less about larger environmental and social concerns, but those concerns are at the heart of the original organic movement.
The article does contain sections on climate and ecology, even if the focus is largely on pesticides.
I've read the same kind of argumentative Mille-feuille garbage in French already.
You have to think about who is motivated to write this kind of stuff. Invariably, it's people selling conventional pesticides or people paid by such people. The lobbying is strong, contrary to the arguments. This is actually a very good sign, these despicable people feel threatened.
I don't know the rules of the organic label in the US, here in Europe it's not perfect, and yeah, thhere are still pesticides including some bad stuff like copper sulfates that are allowed, and the level of care absolutely vary from ome producer to another but it's still better than conventional products for pretty much everything except for the price if you don't factor in the cost of the damage done to the environment and yourself.
This kind of misinformation needs to be firmly fought back. They want to sell glyphosate, which they try to trick us into thinking it's not bad, that's the full extent of it. It's bad, we are better off without it, that's it, end of the story.
There is a long-lasting study (more than 10 years) on a huge French cohort (more than 100k) that proves exactly the opposite : people who eat mostly organic food have less cancer and several other diseases. This is straight disinformation.
Does that study account for the potential confounding factor of affluence? At least in the US, where I am, eating organic also correlates to being more wealthy. And being rich tends to help you avoid lots of these diseases and cancers just based on lifestyle factors.
Nice! Link?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Results Among 68 946 participants (78.0% female; mean [SD] age at baseline, 44.2 [14.5] years), 1340 first incident cancer cases were identified during follow-up, with the most prevalent being 459 breast cancers, 180 prostate cancers, 135 skin cancers, 99 colorectal cancers, 47 non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and 15 other lymphomas. High organic food scores were inversely associated with the overall risk of cancer (hazard ratio for quartile 4 vs quartile 1, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.63-0.88; P for trend = .001; absolute risk reduction, 0.6%; hazard ratio for a 5-point increase, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.88-0.96).
Conclusions and Relevance A higher frequency of organic food consumption was associated with a reduced risk of cancer. If these findings are confirmed, further research is necessary to determine the underlying factors involved in this association.
> High organic food scores were inversely associated with the overall risk of cancer
So rich people who can afford expensive food get cancer less often.
Or people that choose organic are also choosing other things that they think are healthy, and they're right at least some of the time.
It might be like that. Everyone should strive to make the best decisions and not go with the mainstream. Always question the mainstream, it's dangerous. Make a change for the better. Everything starts with you. Then your family, friends, neighbors... Do you have the opportunity to grow something yourself? Do that.
There's some value in that line of thinking, as the mainstream often (okay, euphemism there) pushes bad choices, like in the past smoking being mainstream to the point of doctors being paid to promote the "health benefits" of cigarettes.
But at the same time I don't think its healthy to _always_ question everything in the mainstream. Its mainstream for a reason (sometimes an angle pushed by economic groups like big cig in the example above), and sometimes the reason is reasonable. Be critical and keep an open mind, but don't assume its fake because its mainstream.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34661620/
Exactly. The OP article is nonsense
2024. I don’t think “our food is safer than ever before” is true anymore in the United States.
In non-Organic produce, we literally use sewage mulch as a fertilizer which is PFAS and toxin ridden. It doesn't get much more poisonous than this.
That's completely false. It's been proven that, even though they aren't always entirely pesticide free because of pesticide remaining in soil / water / nearby fields that have been spread, their levels are much lower
> It's been proven
You can't just say this without a link.
It's common knowledge. Do more than 5 minutes of research into what it takes to earn a USDA sticker as well as the ingredients and administration practices of conventional pesticides.
There are studies in France that showed it. It's been widely discussed here because of the opposition of the population to the pro-pesticide agro-industrial lobbies.
> and was borne out of consumer demand and misinformation.
So there was absolutely no reliable data they used? It was _entirely_ misinformation? That seems dubious.
> Most people have been misled to believe that organic is superior and that’s not your fault
I'd like fewer cancer causing chemicals sprayed onto or around my food. I'm not sure that's "superior" but it seems "more reasonable than not."
> in order to drive people to purchase organic produce
Not exactly a "hard sell" is it?
> All pesticides are toxic
And "toxic" defines a _wide_ range of features and outcomes, does it not? Now who's fear mongering?
> Another study making claims about glyphosate in urine, that the median glyphosate levels in organic food consumers and individuals with known exposure are essentially identical (390 vs 400 parts per trillion, respectively).
So corporate farming is so onerous that there's no way to avoid glyphosate cross contamination? I found this whole thing to be a very goofy analysis that seems preoccupied with punching down on some imagined conspiratorial enemy.
Not saying this lad is lying, vut it would helpnif they added at least the sources to their claims
> All y aren't x, therefore z better than y
Some kind of fallacious argument in this form