EPISODE I

By PETER SCHUTT

There are many pieces to the puzzle of healthy soil and the decline thereof thanks to industrial scale farming of the modern era. In my opinion, no piece looms larger than the role of glyphosate in agribusiness.

Glyphosate is the active chemical in Roundup and other similar herbicides. Though it was first synthesized in Europe in 1970, Monsanto Corp. chemists coincidentally produced glyphosate in the early 1970s; the company subsequently patented it, said patent expiring in the early 2000s. So now other ag chemical companies are making and selling similar herbicides.

Glyphosate basically put Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) into our food culture. What better business than to make a supposedly nontoxic herbicide that kills all plant life, then find a gene that can be modified in any agribusiness crop that shields the crop from being killed by glyphosate. Thanks, Monsanto.

Objectively, I will grant that “advances” like GMOs and Roundup have increased yields of important grains over the years. By as much as 300% for corn and soybeans.

But I also suspect that, after many decades of taking chances with chemicals in farming (especially this one) we are just beginning to open our eyes to their longer term damaging effects on the soil and the plants and animals that live in and on the land.

Glyphosate kills plants by keeping them from taking up certain vital minerals, especially magnesium, from the soil. That is a simplistic but accurate explanation accepted by all. Early testing by the federal government and Monsanto claimed that glyphosate was pretty much nontoxic to lab mice, fish, ducks, the soil, water and so on. I could find no such studies done in the past 20 years, at least in the US.

Except one.

This one was done a year ago by MIT scientists and was recently published on the National Institutes of Health web site. It finds that there is an almost exact correlation between the increased use of glyphosate on US wheat crops and the rise in diagnoses of Celiac disease and gluten intolerance.

It finds that there are now increased instances of traces of glyphosate in the urine of Americans.

About 66% of US wheat harvested is done so by applying glyphosate onto the almost mature wheat plant in order to kill the plant so it will dry and be ready to harvest sooner.

Also of great importance is the work that German and other European researchers have been doing in the past 5 years on glyphosate. This work points to growing evidence that glyphosate in the soil and/or livestock feed may cause infertility, weight loss and other abnormalities in livestock by attacking beneficial bacteria in the digestive system and tainting the reproductive hormones.

A well known university researcher and equine expert with whom we’ve been consulting about the health of our soil at Winchester Farm is pretty certain that the relentless and increasing use of glyphosate in the US is creating new soil-borne pathogens that are previously unknown in animal science.

At issue on our farm are the questions: why has the nutritional content of the hay we grow not increasing, even though we have used no glyphosate or other chemicals on the farm in almost 10 years? Why do some of our cows now get a stomach ache when eating certain plants in our pastures that didn’t used to make them sick?

We know that the use of glyphosate in agribusiness has skyrocketed over the past 10 years; many common weeds have evolved so that they are now immune to the herbicide. For years, the common practice was to use stronger and stronger dilutions of the chemical and spray it more often in an effort to kill the weeds. So much glyphosate is now sprayed on ag fields that the USDA cannot keep up with the number of pounds or gallons, as it does with many other farm chemicals.

Could it be that in some agricultural areas where the chemical is used alot, glyphosate might be in the air?

I’ll address that and other questions in my next post.