> Alex,
>
> > Another problem is that glyphosates aren't broken down
> > in the soils as fast as claimed. The lower the
> > bioactivity, the longer it takes. I imagine a good deal of
> > this is leaching into our water supplies.
>
> I'm sure you have a good imagination, but wouldn't you rather see evidence.
> I did a search on glyphosate persistence a while back and got 109 relevant
> papers. I'll send it to you. Reading the abstracts confirmed what I have
> heard about the safety of Roundup. Compared to horrible weeds like
> johnsongrass, Roundup looks awfully safe, environmentally speaking. I
> wouldn't hesitate for a second, not for a microsecond, going out and killing
> patches of johnsongrass with Roundup.
>
> Here is the file on glyphosate toxicity and fate:
>
> Dale
So, your extensive citations include this quote:
0818. Analytical results of selected test water samples indicated that the free acid equivalent of glyphosate in Roundup TM
was
approximately 30%. Also glyphosate did not degrade to any significant degree during the 96 hour test period.
(from Wan et al.)
So, the glyphosate did not degrade during the test period. My point. Have you looked at the uptake by all plants treated with
Roundup and it's persistence in the soil? If you would rather eat glyphosate than johnsongrass, I suspect you have embraced
the theory that someone has to mutate in order to live in the chemicalized world we have created.
A saner approach is to scale back our farming operations to a more human scale and to do what I do. Take a fork out to the
field and dig up the rhizomes. It usually takes 2 or 3 attempts to wipe it out. I've also removed large patches of bermuda
grass this way. No problem. We get in trouble with these plants when we get our farms beyond a scale we can handle and then
look for "quick fixes" which do more harm than good. If herbicides really worked on these plants, we'd be rid of them by now.
God knows we've poured enough of them on our soil.
About your reference to my imagination- personal attacks can only fall back on those who make them. My reference to glyphosate
uptake by plants comes from one of the top research plant physiologists in the country- head of the largest botany department
in the USA.
Another factor is that there's nothing sustainable about farmers spending all their profits on chemicals. It results in what
we see all over the continent- loss of farms and degradation of soils. It appears that our agricultural fields will be the
brown fields of tomorrow.
One more thing- you "I wouldn't hesitate for a second, not for a microsecond, going out and killing
patches of johnsongrass with Roundup." That sounds theoretical to me. And you call Johnsongrass "horrible". There's nothing
horrible about any plants on this planet, only some of the things we do.
Sorry to have offended you enough to elicit an attack by you and a feeling of superiority. As Rosanne Rosanna Danna would say,
"Aren't we getting just a leeetle defensive here?"
Alex
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with "unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".