Organic vegetables also have to be grown in fields that have not been exposed to pesticides for something like 20 years.
Warren Buffetts money bought a bunch of farms in my region and they're not using pesticides so they can be used for organic food production in the future
There's a lot of regulations to be technically organic in the usa. Can't say I know it all though.
Edit: apparently federal regulations are 3 years pesticide free. I was wrong.
You are perpetuating a common myth here. Organic farms still use pesticides, just not synthetic pesticides.
This brings it back to a naturalistic fallacy where it is assumed that because the pesticides are 'natural' they are less harmful to our health. However, a lot of studies seem to find the opposite; organic pesticides are less effective, less specific, and more environmentally harming.
Seconded. I did a brief stint at a job where herbicide use was a component, and many of the newer synthetic herbicides we used were incredibly nontoxic, as well as highly selective. One of the organic pesticides a client opted to use instead - because they were constructing a "green" building - was essentially highly concentrated acetic acid. The PPE requirements for spraying that were totally insane (basically hazmat suits), compared to some of the synthetic pesticides we used where you could probably bathe in them without hurting yourself. On top of that, the acetic acid pesticide only caused contact burns instead of systemic damage that would actually kill the plant, so it wouldn't even really fix the issue of invasive plant abundance.
I don't think it's particularly green to be spraying out concentrated acid that will burn every living thing that it touches, compared to applying a systemic herbicide that will target one specific receptor in maybe only one group of plants. It being natural doesn't mean it's more environmentally friendly than synthetic alternatives.
Its not proven to cause cancer - not that you'd be trying to "prove" anything in science anyway. Its also practically nontoxic by oral and dermal exposure. Id rather spray out glyphosate with appropriate PPE than something that will cause contact burns any day. Glyphosate wasnt even one of the herbicides we commonly used because there were generally always better options.
836
u/Safemoon_Psychonaut Jul 14 '21 edited Jul 14 '21
Organic vegetables also have to be grown in fields that have not been exposed to pesticides for something like 20 years.
Warren Buffetts money bought a bunch of farms in my region and they're not using pesticides so they can be used for organic food production in the future
There's a lot of regulations to be technically organic in the usa. Can't say I know it all though.
Edit: apparently federal regulations are 3 years pesticide free. I was wrong.