Farms: The ill Effects of Glyphosate - Can We Farm Without it? - Howard Vlieger
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Howard Vlieger is a third generation family farmer, farming with his family in Sioux County Iowa. He's been a "student of the soil," studying why and how the soil works as it does, since 1989. Howard lives on the family farm where he was born in northwest Iowa, and assists his sons with some of the farming duties. In addition to his work on the farm, Howard also works and teaches as an independent crop nutrition advisor, and has international acclaim for his agronomy work as well as his work around glyphosate and GMO crops. He works in all systems of agriculture, helping farmers maximize their crops and optimize their soil biology, regardless of their management choices. He also works with remediation of glyphosate contaminated land, water livestocks and humans. He also works with scientists and researchers around the world to develop effective solutions, based on the latest science for the real-life problems farmers are experiencing because of GMO crops and glyphosate. Howard is a co-author and the primary coordinator of a "first of its kind" scientific study, the feeding of GMO grain and non-GMO grain to hogs for their lifetime as a meat animal.
HEY!
Those tricky corporations have people discussing glyphosate, but it's not the real problem. The reason we discuss glyphosate is because our corrupt FDA allows them to use glyphosate as a substitute for Roundup in studies. They pull this bait and switch all the time. Glyphosate isn't the worst toxin in the mix.
POE-15 More Toxic Than Glyphosate
The study below demonstrates that all the glyphosate based herbicides tested are more toxic than glyphosate alone, and explains why. Thus their regulatory assessments and the maximum residue levels authorized in the environment, food, and feed, are erroneous. The supposed non-toxicity of glyphosate serves as a basis for the commercial release of Roundup. The health and environmental agencies and pesticide companies assess the long-term effects on mammals of glyphosate alone, and not the full formulation. Adjuvants of the POE-15 family (polyethoxylated tallowamine) have now been revealed as actively toxic to human cells, and must be regulated as such. The complete formulations must be tested in long-term toxicity studies and the results taken into account in regulatory assessments. The regulatory authorization process for pesticides released into the environment and sold in stores must urgently be revised.
Finally, research has also been conducted to obtain glyphosate tolerant maize with higher resistance to the herbicide. Athenix Corp, for instance, expects to submit a regulatory package by the end of 2008 in the USA for maize capable of withstanding at least eight times the standard field rate of glyphosate recommended, providing ‘‘the highest levels of glyphosate tolerance available” (Athenix Corp., 2007). Field trials for soybean are about to begin.
STUDY:
Ethoxylated adjuvants of glyphosate-based herbicides are active principles of human cell toxicity
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X12003459
Abstract
Pesticides are always used in formulations as mixtures of an active principle with adjuvants. Glyphosate, the active ingredient of the major pesticide in the world, is an herbicide supposed to be specific on plant metabolism. Its adjuvants are generally considered as inert diluents. Since side effects for all these compounds have been claimed, we studied potential active principles for toxicity on human cells for 9 glyphosate-based formulations. For this we detailed their compositions and toxicities, and as controls we used a major adjuvant (the polyethoxylated tallowamine POE-15), glyphosate alone, and a total formulation without glyphosate. This was performed after 24 h exposures on hepatic (HepG2), embryonic (HEK293) and placental (JEG3) cell lines. We measured mitochondrial activities, membrane degradations, and caspases 3/7 activities. The compositions in adjuvants were analyzed by mass spectrometry. Here we demonstrate that all formulations are more toxic than glyphosate, and we separated experimentally three groups of formulations differentially toxic according to their concentrations in ethoxylated adjuvants. Among them, POE-15 clearly appears to be the most toxic principle against human cells, even if others are not excluded. It begins to be active with negative dose-dependent effects on cellular respiration and membrane integrity between 1 and 3 ppm, at environmental/occupational doses. We demonstrate in addition that POE-15 induces necrosis when its first micellization process occurs, by contrast to glyphosate which is known to promote endocrine disrupting effects after entering cells. Altogether, these results challenge the establishment of guidance values such as the acceptable daily intake of glyphosate, when these are mostly based on a long term in vivo test of glyphosate alone. Since pesticides are always used with adjuvants that could change their toxicity, the necessity to assess their whole formulations as mixtures becomes obvious. This challenges the concept of active principle of pesticides for non-target species.