> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate in 2016:
"The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level"
"Glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures"
"Glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet"
"The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity"
"There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization...The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans"
When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate, ten prominent physicians wrote a letter to Columbia University in demanding his removal from the faculty for an "egregious lack of integrity" and for his "disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine." He replied "I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves" and provides "multiple points of view, including mine, which is offered without conflict of interest."
Here is Reuters with a 3000-word Special Inverstigative Report filed under "Glyphosate Battle" carrying water for Monsanto, after IARC declared the chemical 2A (probably carcinogenic):
It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate, which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate, which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that are used when glyphosate isn't.
I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no.
I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.
Very US-centric POV. The herbicides that would be used in the US to replace glyphosate, that are potentially worse (paraquat/diquat, atrazine, and 2,4-D), are are already banned in the EU.
If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food supply would increase in quality as a result, since these worse pesticides are not available.
The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply that
Sounds like you might be confused as to which crops use glyphosate as an herbicide, it’s not being used on vegetables and fruits being sold in the produce section, so it would do nothing for the quality of European produce. It’s possible that glyphosate overspray touches some human foods crops, but I wash my produce before eating it, I hope you do too.
Here is a list of plants that have glyphosate tolerant varieties: soybeans, alfalfa, corn, canola, sugar beets, and cotton. There is no glyphosate tolerant wheat plant.
These plants are used to make ethanol, sugar, soy animal feed, canola oil, cotton fabric, and feed corn. Humans consume canola oil and sugar, both of which are refined in a distillation process. Possibly some of the corn ends up as cornmeal or corn flour. All of the soy and alfalfa are sold as animal feed.
I’m not afraid of glyphosate or microplastics until the evidence shows otherwise.
Edit: I am out of replies, I hadn’t considered either of those routes for glyphosate to enter the human food supply. The concentration of glyphosate in a cow that eats feed grown with glyphosate has to be much more concentrated as well. Thanks for replying, my apologies for making a bad assumption.
While there isn't a commercially grown glyphosate tolerant wheat; there is a significant pathway for glyphosate into the wheat you eat through the process of desiccation[1]. It is common practice to kill the plant with an herbicide shortly before harvest, which helps to maximize yield.
Personally, I suspect that many people who present as wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the herbicides present in the wheat.
Thanks for the additional information, I wasn’t aware of glyphosate being used for burndown/crop desiccation on wheat fields until CGMthrowaway mentioned it. Makes perfect sense, given no wheat is glyphosate tolerant, but it’s a (seemingly) more direct pathway to human glyphosate consumption than say, eating sugar derived from sugar beets grown using glyphosate.
Confused where you think I said fruits and vegetables. There is glyphosate in beef and other meat, just because an animal eats it does not wash it away.
And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go directly to the grocery store
By the logic you're using here, the epidemiological impact of glyphosate should be widely observed across the population (you're going so far as to look at traces of it left in the meat supply). And yet the correlations we have all tend to focus on agricultural workers dealing with it in large volumes directly. Can you square that circle?
Ahhh, of course. Nobody in academia studying herbicide toxicity can get the funding to investigate whether one of the most famous and widely used modern herbicides has human health impacts. After all, there must only be a couple people in the world working on this, and not a couple people in every R1 and R2 research institution in the world, all of whom would become famous if they published a dispositive connection on this.
I'm not offended, it's just weird. And thank you! We've got fun stuff coming out. If anybody knows someone involved in GrapheneOS, we'd really like to get their perspective on modern mobile platform hardening. I will repay them in Monsanto Roundup-Ready(tm) gift certificates.
I agree. It's weird to see HN comments turn into cheap shots (albeit fallacious ones from someone who isn't making a logical argument) against other HN users.
Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.
The precautionary principle clearly states that if you have a chemical that kills living things and you have a company who stands to make a lot of money off of this chemical as long as it's safe for humans, that you should be very very careful about it. Probably should be avoided until there is not just proof from a lab or from paid off scientists.
Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.
It's not obvious to everybody because it's false. The Precautionary Principle is deeply problematic. For instance: it is generally interpreted to favor existing fossil fuel power sources over nuclear, despite the fact that fossil fuel power generation and extraction kills enormous numbers of people every year. Precautionary Principle thinking is extremely vulnerable to narrative capture. A closer-to-home example: Precautionary Principle thinking cautions against adoption of genetically modified crops. The status quo agriculture it favors instead have both lower yields (and thus greater ecological impact) and more pesticide/herbicide use.
Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!
You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.
Are we even talking about the same thing? The precautionary principle, at least as far as I understand it, is to emphasize caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations with potential for causing extreme harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. As risk increases, the threshold for certainty rises as well.
Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?
Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.
> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"
We are obviously talking about the same thing, and nothing I said about the PP is novel.
I very specifically did not say that PP analyses were dead on arrival, or that problems with PP thinking were dispositive. I said rather that it is not enough to simply invoke the PP in policy debates; that rhetorical habit has bad outcomes. Again: the idea is not that "precaution" is bad. It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default --- you have to make that argument on the merits.
There's a good Cass Sunstein thing about the PP if you're interested in understanding critiques of it:
> It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default
Not quite - it is true that you cannot assign a lower risk to the status quo by default, but the burden of proof is on the new intervention to prove that it's safe, not on detractors to prove that it isn't.
In other words, if the world is functioning today, you need to prove that your intervention won't cause ruin, no matter how small the chance or how big the upside.
Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.
This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.
Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.
The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
> Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:
> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.
And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.
These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.
I don't know what you're talking about. None of my opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025 that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking at all.
I'm not saying your views came from some professor drinking glyphosate. I'm saying the social and regulatory environment around glyphosate was distorted by decades of industry driven messaging, ghostwritten research, and normalization of reckless demonstrations.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
Would be more effective to simply ask for a point to be clearly made rather than grandstanding about what stupid people vs people with even slight intelligence believe as a way to try to indirectly insult other posts.
Retracting a paper showing it's safety isn't the same as proving it is unsafe. I don't see anything here that does that.
The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that actually
occurred) and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals (from studies of “pure” glyphosatese"*
Did you read the paper? I just did. There's no data in it. It's a broad statement about research directions in glyphosate accompanied by concerns that all chemical agricultural supplements are objects of concern, epidemiologically, with Parkinsonism.
I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is active".
Rotenone Mouse Oral gavage ↓ Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio, ↑ Rikenellaceae and Allobaculum; ↓ Bifidobacterium in both the caecal mucosa-associated and luminal microbiota community structure [169]
I'm definitely not going to go crate digging through the cites in this paper! I think for the level of discourse we keep here on HN, it's more than enough to note (1) glyphosate targets metabolic pathways animals don't have, but (2) bacteria do have those pathways, which could implicate the gut microbiome. Point taken!
In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".
A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.
to build on this further, glyphosate disproportionally targets bifidobacterium and lactobacillus (PMC10330715). It mimics what happens to the gut as people age (PMC4990546) and increasing bifidobacterium, in research, improves dementia symptoms. In the guts of people with allergies, ibs, asthma, and cystic fibrosis there are decreased amounts of certain strains of bifidobacterium.
> even a broken clock can be right every now and then
But a broken clock isn't a reliable indicator of time: You don't know when it's right unless you have another, known-good indicator — in which case just use that other one.
I wouldn't really trust either one. Plenty of big companies have known how horrible their own products are, like cigarette companies, or fossil fuels. We'll probably learn about social media companies in a few years.
That said, just because a product comes from a big company doesn't mean it's bad either. I want to see independent research.
We already know about social media companies (allegedly, at least):
> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.
> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
Is this sarcasm or are you seriously saying you trust Monsanto on a thread about them committing scientific fraud to influence our perception of their product?
On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other studies did it put its finger on the scale for?
I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?
Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.
Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers who think that any loss for the other side is validation for their beliefs.
The subject of the article is about how one of the widely cited papers on the subject was ghost written by Monsanto, the company that produces Glyphosate. That was the accepted science everyone was trusting which we now know is flat out academic fraud.
So how do we know the assessments from organizations like the WHO weren't also based on this same faulty and fraudulent 'science' that was, at the time, widely accepted in academia? We would have to logically assume that any scientific conclusions based on fraudulent scientific studies and false data can not be provably true.
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
> Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
He was obviously poking fun at people who say "trust the science" when what they really mean is "trust these scientits" or, even better, "trust this one study".
Undoubtedly "trust the science" is little more than an appeal to authority when used in a casual debate, not some appeal to skepticism, peer review and testability.
“Trust the science” … always when talking to a flat-earther or similar huckster.
There definitely needs to be more nuance to the phrase in the general case. Eg: “trust established science” Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.
> Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.
I agree but if they're flat earthers they've already rejected established science, so what's that appeal to authority going to do?
This is why "trust the science" is so memeable, it's a lazy appeal to authority the other party has already told you they don't trust and yet people are shocked when this argument doesn't work.
“Trust x,y” will also basically never mean “trust, completely, always, equally, and blindly”.
Trust the science was a shorthand for “you, or even I, may not understand this thing in perfect detail, but the people working on it do, and they GENERALLY aren’t making catastrophic mistakes that you can detect as an amateur. And when these people collectively stand behind a conclusion the odds of it being completely wrong are exceptionally low. We don’t have a more accurate alternative regardless. Please stop JAQing off about it”
But writing all of that over and over again is annoying. And a lot of “”””critical thinkers”””” can’t be bothered to read it. So the shorthand emerges. Sometimes used incorrectly? Definitely.
Did they turn out to be right? Maybe, I'm not familiar with the research here, but no evidence for that has actually been posted. This study being untrustworthy doesn't make it prove its opposite instead.
Speaking of luddites, I've recently stumbled on posts that point out that the framing of "luddites" was intentionally misleading and that it was never being against technology but how it was wielded.
While it's not great I vastly prefer that sort of not great behavior to achieving the same results by being one of those people who has crappy opinions and then just cherry picks links to back them up when called out on it.
""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
> As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it.
> It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
It is a non-selective herbicide, but it's not a systemic herbicide. It functions by interfering with photosynthesis, but since it is minimally absorbed via root systems, it must be applied directly to the foilage. You can spray it on the ground around a plant and that plant will happily ignore it. This is why the instructions are explicit about applying directly to the foilage during sunny days when the wind is light.
As a homeowner, I loved glyphosate. It was cheap, simple, effective, and could be applied in a selective manner. It's not the best choice for getting rid of broadleaf weeds in a lawn, but I used it all the time in my gardens to kill weeds and keep the bermudagrasses out.
Roundup makes a product that looks like roll on deodorant. You literally roll it onto the leaves of the things you want to kill, and everything else remains unharmed.
I'm also a fan of glyphosphate. Nothing else works nearly as well. People who are critical of "chemicals" to control weeds have never had to deal with a weedy pavement before.
Yes! I also used glyphosate to kill things growing in and around my sidewalk, driveway, steps, and curb. I've also used a propane torch for the same purposes, but it requires more effort and cannot be applied quite so selectively. It works, though, and is a good choice for anyone who would rather use a petroleum product than an herbicide.
I looked up the product you mentioned and you're right -- it does look like deodorant! It's a gel that contains glyphosate and isopropylamine salt. Neat!
Dandelions are really, really hard to eradicate by pulling. The roots grow very deep, and if you don't get them completely, the plant can re-grow from what's left.
Even if you do successfully get it out, it really is going to be more work than painting a weed killer on them.
My dad use to have my brother and I work for hours during the summer pulling dandelions in the lawn (to be fair he was out there with us doing it himself also). We each had a knife with about a 4" long blade, we would cut the root as deep as we could and pull the top out. Never really seemed to reduce the number we had.
It depends on the target and the surrounding soil. It’s often easier to pull especially for the random weed that sprouts up around your landscaping. However if you are trying to manage an infestation of invasive species, where the surrounding soil will have a seed bank heavily contaminated with seeds from the years of invasive reproduction, it’s usually a bad idea to merely pull. You can expose soil to sunlight and cause an explosion of dormant seeds. And some nasty invasives are nearly impossible to remove by hand because of their root structure — some species even leave little rhizomes broken off in the soil along the root structure when you pull off the foliage causing a hydra effect.
tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for eons
When I really want to nuke it so that nothing grows, like in a decorative stone area, I use water softener salt. I dissolve it in a bucket of water until no more will dissolve then pour it wherever I want the vegetation to stop growing.
Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually. Usually once a year is sufficient.
Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
Thank you for making my morning coffee, consumed while looking down on downtown San Francisco, presently chock full of "AI" weeds, substantially more entertaining.
Unless you mow your grass too low. Always assume the old rule of "your grass reaches just as far underground as it reaches up in the air" still holds.
Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to fertilize it from above right or soon after, start aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting weeds ahead of yourself).
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it.
From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
Digging weeds and their roots up one by one by hand out of cracks in concrete/asphalt is much slower than spraying. Also much more physically challenging, which is a metric I didn't care about when young and able bodies but nowadays is very relevant to me. I'm not saying roundup is good, but there are plenty of reasons for it to be appealing. I haven't tried the boiling water method yet, it seems like it'd be easier than digging but harder than spraying, unless perhaps one has a mobile, outdoor source of boiling water.
What is the point of removing weeds from those cracks in the first place? Do they cause some kind of physical harm to creatures or objects that move on that concrete or asphalt surface?
I rarely use weed killer on poison ivy to avoid coming into physical contact. Lawnmowers work fine for flat yards, but for steps down a steep embankment you really need a weed eater and weed eater + poison ivy is a major hassle.
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
I weed whack acres, it is a huge sink of my free time. But there are areas where I don't want to mow, I want to eliminate growth, like on my gravel driveway, and the area adjacent to my house. I should probably install concrete instead of gravel, but that's telling myself to just eat cake since I have no bread.
I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
Even then, spraying cancer causing chemicals into the land is beyond stupid. Killing yourself and the humans around your land for having a bit less work, one can't be more antisocial.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
What if I want to do something on my land that will poison the ground water for the area? What if I want to raise an invasive species on my land that will likely escape and devastate local wildlife? Should society be permissive and wait for the damage to be done before stopping me, instead of being proactive and stopping me from doing so before the fact?
No, this is HN where we voraciously advocate for the libertarian ideals of "I do what I want" then pontificate about the tragedy of the commons from an ivory tower when it inevitably all goes wrong.
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
"So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better."
Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...
If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a large area with similar effort expended to walking around spraying a liquid.
We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're clear for the season ...
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
The soap is a surfactant to make the vinegar stick to the weed leaves for longer.
It's not necessary, but it probably lets you use a little less vinegar, so it's probably worthwhile. I don't add soap, I just spray straight 30% (agricultural) vinegar in the small set of areas where a torch would be dangerous.
Dried vinegar does not irritate dogs. They will avoid the area while it smells like pickles.
A better chemist than I will hopefully corroborate this, but I think that the strength of smell is directly correlated to the reactivity of the acid. So when the smell is mild (i.e. near the level of household vinegar (5%)), the risk to skin and mucous membranes is low-to-zero.
I don’t think there will be much left of the vinegar when dried. Acetic acid is much more volatile than water. If it’s dry, it means that it’s gone. And it has an unpleasant smell even at harmless concentrations, if it’s not quite dry yet.
absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
Considering the cogs at corporations are going above and beyond to cover for their wrongdoings despite our perceived lack of consequences is concerning, it would seem their efforts to hide their actions would only balloon.
When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see the next sunrise.
I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.
Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
Can't you see the billionaires sprouting in the Spring? Didn't you know they spread their delicate flowers just like Jasmine has for millions of years?
The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate.
It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
I've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then wait a few weeks for them to dry
Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.
I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because:
> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
and
> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
A mechanism for harm could be that glyphosate disrupts the gut lining barrier and flora, which can cause or contribute to leaky gut, a loose term for digestive waste and foreign bodies entering the bloodstream.
Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent) can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage, which the body has little or no experience with, which may trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to be proven yet).
All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time.
Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for example, to protect US agribusiness.
Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note that I got these answers from AI and so will you.
My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019 from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my denial and sought medical attention.
For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you may need medication for a time to get your body out of dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and everything.
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?
Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
Are you asking me to describe modern pesticide safety testing protocols? I'm not qualified to do that authoritatively.
But I'm certain that "spray it everywhere for 30 years and see if people die" is not the way.
Bypassing the proper protocols, publishing dishonest research, is the issue under discussion today. Glyphosate might be safe, or safe enough. Proper research could reveal more subtle effects than mortality numbers.
I still don't understand what you're responding to.
Glyphosate is already out there.
We have large papers that look into occupational and dietary exposures of real world cohorts, and they don't converge on much of anything that should make us concerned about our dietary exposure.
Yet you have some sort of "testing protocol" in mind that would somehow be more robust than the analyses already being done on real world populations that were inconclusive?
At least pitch a rough idea of what these experiments look like.
Well we have no idea what the effects of glyphosate are because almost everybody has it in their system. Is it possible that's why autism, depression, add are so much higher among us than amish? Who's to say?
If you tell me that EPA doesn't have a better process than "dunno, seems OK", then I'll humbly defer.
Not holding EPA up as infallible, just asserting that intentionally-deceptive research should not be tolerated -- and should demand a higher degree of skepticism of other research from the same entities or with the same beneficiaries.
This is what I've come to expect from discussion on things like glyphosate, cholesterol, seed oils, etc.
You supposedly are raising an issue, yet you can't even squeak out the smallest concrete claim.
You're "in the field" enough to claim they didn't do the proper "testing protocols", but when simply asked what you mean by that or how it's different from the existing research, you're so "out of the field" that you can't even elaborate on the words you just used -- that's a task for the experts.
I never claimed to be "in the field" or anywhere adjacent. One does not need to be an expert to know that dishonest research is bad for the world. Why are you OK with this??
And I'm not raising an issue. The article is.
For the record, I do not have an opinion on the safety profile of glyphosate at all. And I've spent zero time even wondering about cholesterol, seed oils, etc. You're dropping me into the middle of the wrong argument.
I do have strong opinions about research integrity, and this story about Monsanto is unfavorable. Do you disagree with that?
The public discourse on glyphosate is useless. As witnessed by calling it a pesticide, which is quite common among those most vocal against its use.
Less is more when it comes to chemicals, which is why reasonable uses of glyphosate seems to be the best we have come up with so far as a species - regardless of abuses of the chemical.
It’s probably the most studied herbicide on the planet at this point with very little evidence that it causes human health issues when used as intended. Doesn’t mean it’s zero risk, but we also feed an incredible number of people off a very small amount of landmass at this point in history.
Herbicides are pesticides. Are you implying that I made a mistake with that word? I did not.
Your other points are valid, but would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?
Assuming you would not, then I think you'd agree that there should be repercussions. Monsanto is not Uber for agriculture.
> Herbicides are pesticides. Are you implying that I made a mistake with that word? I did not.
Fair, the word pesticide is technically accurate - simply not used where I am from to describe herbicides.
> would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?
I don't see where anyone is advocating this. I see a lot of attacks against the most tested and studied herbicide on the planet - many such studies and tests set about with a pre-determined agenda (by either side). If there was strong evidence of this chemical being widespread harmful to human health, I feel it'd have come out by now.
What it means is that instead of using glysophate, agriculture simply switches to less tested and newer chemicals that may end up actually being more harmful. Certainly more expensive. Using nothing is not an option for modern agriculture if we're going to feed the number of humans on the planet.
There are plenty of "bad actors" in this field (no pun intended) - but if used as directed and in conjunction with GMO crops engineered to reduce herbicide applications it's likely one of the best ag inventions of our lifetime. Why so many people are willing to die on this hill is beyond me. I see otherwise very intelligent people in my life who as they have aged went down the youtube conspiracy theory rabbit hole and now preach about how it's the devil.
If Monsanto (or others) conducted research or scientific fraud they should absolutely be punished for it. To be blunt - especially the scientists - since it is absolutely deleterious to public trust.
Right, I think we agree on everything of substance.
I'm just particularly bothered by sketchy research on the edges of contentious public health issues.
I hope this issue is litigated to conclusion, and if Monsanto is found to have pushed fraudulent research for their own benefit, I hope regulatory agencies around the world come down hard, even if the net effect on human health is small or zero. There's just no place for that kind of shite any more.
HN is plagued by bots and shills. Arguably is one of the main selling points of the site -- it's a news aggregator run by Angel Investors
Why would you expect anti-corporate narratives? If I'm F500 and am trying to sway opinion here is one of the places I'd direct my marketing drones to hit hard, as the tech-bro demographic would then parrot it everywhere else
Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies.
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
There are, but there are also strong incentives for what amounts to fraud, on both sides. Glyphosate has become both highly politicized -- it's used as an argument against GMOs -- and subject to concerted and lucrative legal attack. At the same time, the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection.
Even when supposedly honest scientists publish, it's often wrong.
> the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection
That doesn't square with the fact that Monsanto thought it worthwhile to commit scientific fraud to push the narrative that glyphosate is safe, in a scientific paper published the same year that the patent expired.
Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill them.
Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
>> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria possess this pathway
One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.
A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.
We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and related studies shows glyphosate negatively impacts bees by disrupting their gut microbiota, weakening immune responses, impairing learning/memory, affecting foraging behavior, and increasing mortality, with effects seen from both pure chemical and commercial formulations at environmentally relevant levels, impacting both adult bees and larval development.
Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
Science and law (in snail motion) are clearly broken. The paper “Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate” [1] shows population groups with significantly higher cancer incidence linked to glyphosate exposure. When findings like these struggle to gain broad acknowledgment, it becomes evident how powerful companies can still "hide the sun with their hands"
[1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate
> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
Why wasn’t the paper retracted 8 years ago?
Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate in 2016:
https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/agphome/documents/Pe...Tptacek in 2018:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043887When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate, ten prominent physicians wrote a letter to Columbia University in demanding his removal from the faculty for an "egregious lack of integrity" and for his "disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine." He replied "I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves" and provides "multiple points of view, including mine, which is offered without conflict of interest."
https://www.agrimarketing.com/ss.php?id=95305
Here is Reuters with a 3000-word Special Inverstigative Report filed under "Glyphosate Battle" carrying water for Monsanto, after IARC declared the chemical 2A (probably carcinogenic):
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc...
It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate, which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate, which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that are used when glyphosate isn't.
I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no.
I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.
Very US-centric POV. The herbicides that would be used in the US to replace glyphosate, that are potentially worse (paraquat/diquat, atrazine, and 2,4-D), are are already banned in the EU.
If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food supply would increase in quality as a result, since these worse pesticides are not available.
The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply that
Sounds like you might be confused as to which crops use glyphosate as an herbicide, it’s not being used on vegetables and fruits being sold in the produce section, so it would do nothing for the quality of European produce. It’s possible that glyphosate overspray touches some human foods crops, but I wash my produce before eating it, I hope you do too.
Here is a list of plants that have glyphosate tolerant varieties: soybeans, alfalfa, corn, canola, sugar beets, and cotton. There is no glyphosate tolerant wheat plant.
These plants are used to make ethanol, sugar, soy animal feed, canola oil, cotton fabric, and feed corn. Humans consume canola oil and sugar, both of which are refined in a distillation process. Possibly some of the corn ends up as cornmeal or corn flour. All of the soy and alfalfa are sold as animal feed.
I’m not afraid of glyphosate or microplastics until the evidence shows otherwise.
Edit: I am out of replies, I hadn’t considered either of those routes for glyphosate to enter the human food supply. The concentration of glyphosate in a cow that eats feed grown with glyphosate has to be much more concentrated as well. Thanks for replying, my apologies for making a bad assumption.
While there isn't a commercially grown glyphosate tolerant wheat; there is a significant pathway for glyphosate into the wheat you eat through the process of desiccation[1]. It is common practice to kill the plant with an herbicide shortly before harvest, which helps to maximize yield.
Personally, I suspect that many people who present as wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the herbicides present in the wheat.
Thanks for the additional information, I wasn’t aware of glyphosate being used for burndown/crop desiccation on wheat fields until CGMthrowaway mentioned it. Makes perfect sense, given no wheat is glyphosate tolerant, but it’s a (seemingly) more direct pathway to human glyphosate consumption than say, eating sugar derived from sugar beets grown using glyphosate.
I always hear Oatmeal uses glyphosates heavily
Confused where you think I said fruits and vegetables. There is glyphosate in beef and other meat, just because an animal eats it does not wash it away.
And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go directly to the grocery store
By the logic you're using here, the epidemiological impact of glyphosate should be widely observed across the population (you're going so far as to look at traces of it left in the meat supply). And yet the correlations we have all tend to focus on agricultural workers dealing with it in large volumes directly. Can you square that circle?
Study funding (or lack of)
Ahhh, of course. Nobody in academia studying herbicide toxicity can get the funding to investigate whether one of the most famous and widely used modern herbicides has human health impacts. After all, there must only be a couple people in the world working on this, and not a couple people in every R1 and R2 research institution in the world, all of whom would become famous if they published a dispositive connection on this.
I think it's quite the compliment - you should be flattered!
Unrelated:
I really enjoy "Security, Cryptography, Whatever".
I'm not offended, it's just weird. And thank you! We've got fun stuff coming out. If anybody knows someone involved in GrapheneOS, we'd really like to get their perspective on modern mobile platform hardening. I will repay them in Monsanto Roundup-Ready(tm) gift certificates.
I agree. It's weird to see HN comments turn into cheap shots (albeit fallacious ones from someone who isn't making a logical argument) against other HN users.
Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.
The precautionary principle clearly states that if you have a chemical that kills living things and you have a company who stands to make a lot of money off of this chemical as long as it's safe for humans, that you should be very very careful about it. Probably should be avoided until there is not just proof from a lab or from paid off scientists.
Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.
It's not obvious to everybody because it's false. The Precautionary Principle is deeply problematic. For instance: it is generally interpreted to favor existing fossil fuel power sources over nuclear, despite the fact that fossil fuel power generation and extraction kills enormous numbers of people every year. Precautionary Principle thinking is extremely vulnerable to narrative capture. A closer-to-home example: Precautionary Principle thinking cautions against adoption of genetically modified crops. The status quo agriculture it favors instead have both lower yields (and thus greater ecological impact) and more pesticide/herbicide use.
Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!
You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.
Are we even talking about the same thing? The precautionary principle, at least as far as I understand it, is to emphasize caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations with potential for causing extreme harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. As risk increases, the threshold for certainty rises as well.
Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?
Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.
> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"
We are obviously talking about the same thing, and nothing I said about the PP is novel.
I very specifically did not say that PP analyses were dead on arrival, or that problems with PP thinking were dispositive. I said rather that it is not enough to simply invoke the PP in policy debates; that rhetorical habit has bad outcomes. Again: the idea is not that "precaution" is bad. It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default --- you have to make that argument on the merits.
There's a good Cass Sunstein thing about the PP if you're interested in understanding critiques of it:
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
> It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default
Not quite - it is true that you cannot assign a lower risk to the status quo by default, but the burden of proof is on the new intervention to prove that it's safe, not on detractors to prove that it isn't.
In other words, if the world is functioning today, you need to prove that your intervention won't cause ruin, no matter how small the chance or how big the upside.
Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.
This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.
Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.
The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
> Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:
> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.
And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.
These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.
I don't know what you're talking about. None of my opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025 that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking at all.
I'm not saying your views came from some professor drinking glyphosate. I'm saying the social and regulatory environment around glyphosate was distorted by decades of industry driven messaging, ghostwritten research, and normalization of reckless demonstrations.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including [...] yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
No it isn't.
How many retractions has Dr Oz published?
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
This is a lot of words to make no real point to who it’s replying to.
The guy they replied to didn't make a point, instead threw together some quotes by an HN user and Dr. Oz, relying on you to make the point for them.
Would be more effective to simply ask for a point to be clearly made rather than grandstanding about what stupid people vs people with even slight intelligence believe as a way to try to indirectly insult other posts.
Retracting a paper showing it's safety isn't the same as proving it is unsafe. I don't see anything here that does that.
The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that actually occurred) and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals (from studies of “pure” glyphosatese"*
* https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/QA_Glyph...
> The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans
It actually might be the case and it still can be damaging to people by affecting the gut microbiome:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
I would disagree with the claim/usage of “inert” if it was damaging to gut microbiome.
> affecting the gut microbiome
That is so vague it can apply to everything. Probably drinking a glass of water affects the gut microbiome.
Did you read the paper? I just did. There's no data in it. It's a broad statement about research directions in glyphosate accompanied by concerns that all chemical agricultural supplements are objects of concern, epidemiologically, with Parkinsonism.
I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is active".
reference [5] (right in the middle of point 3, the one about gut microbiome) links to https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3233/JPD-230206 which is way too dense for me to unpack in general...
e.g.
I'm definitely not going to go crate digging through the cites in this paper! I think for the level of discourse we keep here on HN, it's more than enough to note (1) glyphosate targets metabolic pathways animals don't have, but (2) bacteria do have those pathways, which could implicate the gut microbiome. Point taken!
In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".
A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.
to build on this further, glyphosate disproportionally targets bifidobacterium and lactobacillus (PMC10330715). It mimics what happens to the gut as people age (PMC4990546) and increasing bifidobacterium, in research, improves dementia symptoms. In the guts of people with allergies, ibs, asthma, and cystic fibrosis there are decreased amounts of certain strains of bifidobacterium.
In mice models, Alzheimer’s is transferrable via gut microbiota. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02216-7?fromPaywa...).
So to say it messes with the gut is no small thing.
> The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level
Was that the retracted study or a different one?
Big Dr Oz fan eh? Got any quotes from Oprah or other HNers to balance the epistemic master class?
even a broken clock can be right every now and then
> even a broken clock can be right every now and then
But a broken clock isn't a reliable indicator of time: You don't know when it's right unless you have another, known-good indicator — in which case just use that other one.
No the opposite. I trust Monsanto, they know this chemical better than anyone.
I wouldn't really trust either one. Plenty of big companies have known how horrible their own products are, like cigarette companies, or fossil fuels. We'll probably learn about social media companies in a few years.
That said, just because a product comes from a big company doesn't mean it's bad either. I want to see independent research.
We already know about social media companies (allegedly, at least):
> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.
> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Edit: it was discussed here a few days ago [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817
Is this sarcasm or are you seriously saying you trust Monsanto on a thread about them committing scientific fraud to influence our perception of their product?
Sarcasm, given the previous comments.
Got any hot tips from Marlboro I should read as well?
Thank You for Smoking !
Great movie, opened the Santa Barbara International Film Festival years back.
On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other studies did it put its finger on the scale for?
> Trust the science.
I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?
Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.
Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers who think that any loss for the other side is validation for their beliefs.
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma odds ratio 1.41-1.45 (AKA 41-45% higher relative risk): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31342895/
NHL odds ratio 2.26: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18623080/
Positive trend of NHL risk with exposure: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12937207/
7x risk of follicular lymphoma in those ever exposed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8082925/
The subject of the article is about how one of the widely cited papers on the subject was ghost written by Monsanto, the company that produces Glyphosate. That was the accepted science everyone was trusting which we now know is flat out academic fraud.
So how do we know the assessments from organizations like the WHO weren't also based on this same faulty and fraudulent 'science' that was, at the time, widely accepted in academia? We would have to logically assume that any scientific conclusions based on fraudulent scientific studies and false data can not be provably true.
Your assertion relies on circular logic.
CGMthrowaway writes:
> Trust the science.
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
> > Trust the science.
>
> Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
He was obviously poking fun at people who say "trust the science" when what they really mean is "trust these scientits" or, even better, "trust this one study".
Undoubtedly "trust the science" is little more than an appeal to authority when used in a casual debate, not some appeal to skepticism, peer review and testability.
“Trust the science” … always when talking to a flat-earther or similar huckster.
There definitely needs to be more nuance to the phrase in the general case. Eg: “trust established science” Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.
> Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.
I agree but if they're flat earthers they've already rejected established science, so what's that appeal to authority going to do?
This is why "trust the science" is so memeable, it's a lazy appeal to authority the other party has already told you they don't trust and yet people are shocked when this argument doesn't work.
“Trust x,y” will also basically never mean “trust, completely, always, equally, and blindly”.
Trust the science was a shorthand for “you, or even I, may not understand this thing in perfect detail, but the people working on it do, and they GENERALLY aren’t making catastrophic mistakes that you can detect as an amateur. And when these people collectively stand behind a conclusion the odds of it being completely wrong are exceptionally low. We don’t have a more accurate alternative regardless. Please stop JAQing off about it”
But writing all of that over and over again is annoying. And a lot of “”””critical thinkers”””” can’t be bothered to read it. So the shorthand emerges. Sometimes used incorrectly? Definitely.
>Tptacek in 2018:
Makes me want to punch everyone else on the high score board into a search engine and see how they did.
Kinda funny how the "it kills stuff, it can't be good for ya" luddite crowd turned out to be right all along.
Did they turn out to be right? Maybe, I'm not familiar with the research here, but no evidence for that has actually been posted. This study being untrustworthy doesn't make it prove its opposite instead.
Speaking of luddites, I've recently stumbled on posts that point out that the framing of "luddites" was intentionally misleading and that it was never being against technology but how it was wielded.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-luddites...
[ On second thoughts, retracted ]
While it's not great I vastly prefer that sort of not great behavior to achieving the same results by being one of those people who has crappy opinions and then just cherry picks links to back them up when called out on it.
Probably a good call on the retraction TBH.
It takes time for conspiracy theory to become conspiracy fact.
It's hard to admit we're wrong
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
> As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it.
> It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
It is a non-selective herbicide, but it's not a systemic herbicide. It functions by interfering with photosynthesis, but since it is minimally absorbed via root systems, it must be applied directly to the foilage. You can spray it on the ground around a plant and that plant will happily ignore it. This is why the instructions are explicit about applying directly to the foilage during sunny days when the wind is light.
As a homeowner, I loved glyphosate. It was cheap, simple, effective, and could be applied in a selective manner. It's not the best choice for getting rid of broadleaf weeds in a lawn, but I used it all the time in my gardens to kill weeds and keep the bermudagrasses out.
Roundup makes a product that looks like roll on deodorant. You literally roll it onto the leaves of the things you want to kill, and everything else remains unharmed.
I'm also a fan of glyphosphate. Nothing else works nearly as well. People who are critical of "chemicals" to control weeds have never had to deal with a weedy pavement before.
Yes! I also used glyphosate to kill things growing in and around my sidewalk, driveway, steps, and curb. I've also used a propane torch for the same purposes, but it requires more effort and cannot be applied quite so selectively. It works, though, and is a good choice for anyone who would rather use a petroleum product than an herbicide.
I looked up the product you mentioned and you're right -- it does look like deodorant! It's a gel that contains glyphosate and isopropylamine salt. Neat!
Carbon Robotics sells a weed burner that works via a laser, if you’re dead set against both petrochemicals and glyphosate.
Sadly: no consumer model yet.
Don't spray herbicides everywhere (unless you're certain that's what you want or need).
Instead, just spray each weed a little bit, right above where the leaves connect to the stem.
I get a little paintbrush and paint the leaves of each dandelion with round-up - that ends up killing them but largely leaving other plants alone.
I learned to appreciate the dandelions.
How is this easier than pulling the plant out of the soil?
Dandelions are really, really hard to eradicate by pulling. The roots grow very deep, and if you don't get them completely, the plant can re-grow from what's left.
Even if you do successfully get it out, it really is going to be more work than painting a weed killer on them.
My dad use to have my brother and I work for hours during the summer pulling dandelions in the lawn (to be fair he was out there with us doing it himself also). We each had a knife with about a 4" long blade, we would cut the root as deep as we could and pull the top out. Never really seemed to reduce the number we had.
It depends on the target and the surrounding soil. It’s often easier to pull especially for the random weed that sprouts up around your landscaping. However if you are trying to manage an infestation of invasive species, where the surrounding soil will have a seed bank heavily contaminated with seeds from the years of invasive reproduction, it’s usually a bad idea to merely pull. You can expose soil to sunlight and cause an explosion of dormant seeds. And some nasty invasives are nearly impossible to remove by hand because of their root structure — some species even leave little rhizomes broken off in the soil along the root structure when you pull off the foliage causing a hydra effect.
tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for eons
I did much the same, but with a hypodermic syringe, on knotweed many years ago.
Yours is so much more.. tender though. Poor dandelions, but at least you made it personal!
When I really want to nuke it so that nothing grows, like in a decorative stone area, I use water softener salt. I dissolve it in a bucket of water until no more will dissolve then pour it wherever I want the vegetation to stop growing.
Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually. Usually once a year is sufficient.
Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
Never had much luck with burning or cutting weeds from the top. They just resprout and grow back. Haven't tried boiling water.
I just use roundup, honestly. It works.
Thank you for making my morning coffee, consumed while looking down on downtown San Francisco, presently chock full of "AI" weeds, substantially more entertaining.
This is just a recipe to spread weeds everywhere. If you mow them, most of the time you’ll just break them open and spread their seeds
I you mow them after they have developed seeds, you are mowing them too late.
But if you then keep mowing the lawn regularly, those seeds won't be able to compete with the grass.
Unless you mow your grass too low. Always assume the old rule of "your grass reaches just as far underground as it reaches up in the air" still holds.
Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to fertilize it from above right or soon after, start aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting weeds ahead of yourself).
Why wouldn't they be able to compete?
Usually seeds need soil contact and sunshine to germinate and grow. Thick lawn can mitigate that.
IIRC grass grows from the bottom, which means it is very resistant to being mowed or grazed. Weeds/wildflowers not so much.
Or you can learn the lifecycle of plants and don't let them go to seed.
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it. From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
2023, so yea, there may still be some older product around.
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
In Canada while the majority is vinegar now, I still see glyphosate roundup products.
I wonder if that includes Roundup Pro, because they still have it as being glyphosate on their website:
https://www.rounduppro.com/products/roundup-promax-herbicide...
How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
Digging weeds and their roots up one by one by hand out of cracks in concrete/asphalt is much slower than spraying. Also much more physically challenging, which is a metric I didn't care about when young and able bodies but nowadays is very relevant to me. I'm not saying roundup is good, but there are plenty of reasons for it to be appealing. I haven't tried the boiling water method yet, it seems like it'd be easier than digging but harder than spraying, unless perhaps one has a mobile, outdoor source of boiling water.
What is the point of removing weeds from those cracks in the first place? Do they cause some kind of physical harm to creatures or objects that move on that concrete or asphalt surface?
The concrete itself can be damaged further over time by expanding root networks / growth.
I rarely use weed killer on poison ivy to avoid coming into physical contact. Lawnmowers work fine for flat yards, but for steps down a steep embankment you really need a weed eater and weed eater + poison ivy is a major hassle.
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
This is how humans had to do it for millennia- by hand. Backbreaking work. But necessary unless you wanted to lose half the harvest.
I dislike gardening and enjoy my apartment!
I live in an extremely high wildfire risk area. I also have an extreme rodent problem. Keeping the vegetation low around structures is indicated.
Keeping vegetation low is a different problem from removing weeds in a targeted fashion. A simple mower or trimmer should suffice.
You can do that by mowing, fyi.
Can't do that in cracks in a sidewalk, between pavers, on a wall, etc. where plant growth can damage them.
Weed whacker and edger? You'll have them out anyway.
I weed whack acres, it is a huge sink of my free time. But there are areas where I don't want to mow, I want to eliminate growth, like on my gravel driveway, and the area adjacent to my house. I should probably install concrete instead of gravel, but that's telling myself to just eat cake since I have no bread.
I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd rather not have a dog and children covered in those.
Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.
It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.
Even then, spraying cancer causing chemicals into the land is beyond stupid. Killing yourself and the humans around your land for having a bit less work, one can't be more antisocial.
Pesticides aren't used to kill weeds.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
Pesticide is a catch-all term that encompasses herbicides, insecticides, fungicides etc.
No, it isn't. Pesticide are used to kill pests, such as insects in the case of insecticide or rodents. It does not include fungicides nor herbicides
> Pesticide are used to kill pests, such as insects in the case of insecticide or rodents. It does not include fungicides nor herbicides
Wrong.
See, e.g., https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-pesticides/pe...
“Pesticides are used in agriculture to protect crops from insects, fungi, weeds, and other pests.”
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
How about letting him do what he wants with his own land and not insulting his ideal home?
What if I want to do something on my land that will poison the ground water for the area? What if I want to raise an invasive species on my land that will likely escape and devastate local wildlife? Should society be permissive and wait for the damage to be done before stopping me, instead of being proactive and stopping me from doing so before the fact?
Last time I checked that wasn't what he was planning on doing.
That is literally what he is doing. None of your lawn grass is native.
Last time i checked you were giving out blank checks. We live in a society
You're entitled to your own opinion, but imo the point of posting anything on HN is to subject yourself to feedback. That's what I gave. Feedback.
Their comment asked for an alternative.
He wanted an alternative method to achieve X, not abandon X and do Y.
How about thinking about society and not just every man for himself? Clearly you didn’t read TFA.
No, this is HN where we voraciously advocate for the libertarian ideals of "I do what I want" then pontificate about the tragedy of the commons from an ivory tower when it inevitably all goes wrong.
Sorry you think my Japanese garden is a hellscape.
Why is something someone else enjoys a "pesticide-ridden hellscape?"
How would you like me to come and pompously shit all over something you enjoy?
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
> I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
Doesn't the vinegar act pretty quickly? Keep the dog inside that afternoon, then hose it down in the morning.
"So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better."
Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...
If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a large area with similar effort expended to walking around spraying a liquid.
We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're clear for the season ...
A garden torch is unreasonably effective.
Terrible for the environment though what with all the co2.
Places with common sense regarding human health do weed control with a small torch.
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
The soap is a surfactant to make the vinegar stick to the weed leaves for longer.
It's not necessary, but it probably lets you use a little less vinegar, so it's probably worthwhile. I don't add soap, I just spray straight 30% (agricultural) vinegar in the small set of areas where a torch would be dangerous.
Dried vinegar does not irritate dogs. They will avoid the area while it smells like pickles.
A better chemist than I will hopefully corroborate this, but I think that the strength of smell is directly correlated to the reactivity of the acid. So when the smell is mild (i.e. near the level of household vinegar (5%)), the risk to skin and mucous membranes is low-to-zero.
I don’t think there will be much left of the vinegar when dried. Acetic acid is much more volatile than water. If it’s dry, it means that it’s gone. And it has an unpleasant smell even at harmless concentrations, if it’s not quite dry yet.
Salt for cattle.
Lasts for a few months.
Glyphosate is perfectly safe at the levels we use it domestically. If there is a safety issue it's at commercial dosages.
absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
You sound neurotic. Anyway just pull the weeds out with a towel and you hands, or use boiling water to kill them
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
Considering the cogs at corporations are going above and beyond to cover for their wrongdoings despite our perceived lack of consequences is concerning, it would seem their efforts to hide their actions would only balloon.
When are we going to start imprisoning people, I wonder.
When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see the next sunrise.
I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
Pay the fine and Pay for pardon is the business du jour.
When their employers stop giving freebies to politicians?
Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.
Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
capitalism is our natural environment. like the air we breathe. how can you punish it?
Can't you see the billionaires sprouting in the Spring? Didn't you know they spread their delicate flowers just like Jasmine has for millions of years?
/s
In this economy? We have people murdering CEOs for free!
Are you saying Mangione should be tried for illegal dumping of assassination services?
The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate.
It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
> Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest.
Wheat, soy, lentils, ...
Oats too.
Not just wheat. Other crops. I was pretty shocked to see a field full of soybeans that were all dead. They were being dried before harvest.
Terrible scheme.
I've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then wait a few weeks for them to dry
Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.
I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
Faking research data that then leads to the death of citizens from your product should result in a corporate death sentence.
It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because:
> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
and
> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
The problem is always how well one can prove that any harm was done, or that theoretical harm would be done.
What is a corporate death sentence? And if true, the list would be LONG
Dissolution of a company by revoking the charter and liquidating all it's assets to anyone who will buy them.
Ideally this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
Wiping out shareholders. I bet shareholders would be a lot more cautious if that was an option.
A mechanism for harm could be that glyphosate disrupts the gut lining barrier and flora, which can cause or contribute to leaky gut, a loose term for digestive waste and foreign bodies entering the bloodstream.
Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent) can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage, which the body has little or no experience with, which may trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to be proven yet).
All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time.
Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for example, to protect US agribusiness.
Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note that I got these answers from AI and so will you.
My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019 from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my denial and sought medical attention.
For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you may need medication for a time to get your body out of dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and everything.
and criminal penalty consequequences fornthe people who prepared and signed the paper in bad faith
The sole surviving researcher attached to that paper is still actively publishing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?
Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
Cutting dandelions with a lawnmower just sends the seeds everywhere making the problem worse.
Only if you wait for them to go to seed. If it's important to you, don't do that.
I let them grow. Dandelions are harmless.
Some neighbors spray poison ivy --- I just cover it with stones/bricks when I see it.
Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
OK, but that is not how you properly test pesticides for safety.
Well, don't leave me hanging.
Though I didn't prescribe a test. I set a low bar of evidence that we should at least pass before we Kony up over our bowl of Cheerios.
Are you asking me to describe modern pesticide safety testing protocols? I'm not qualified to do that authoritatively.
But I'm certain that "spray it everywhere for 30 years and see if people die" is not the way.
Bypassing the proper protocols, publishing dishonest research, is the issue under discussion today. Glyphosate might be safe, or safe enough. Proper research could reveal more subtle effects than mortality numbers.
I still don't understand what you're responding to.
Glyphosate is already out there.
We have large papers that look into occupational and dietary exposures of real world cohorts, and they don't converge on much of anything that should make us concerned about our dietary exposure.
Yet you have some sort of "testing protocol" in mind that would somehow be more robust than the analyses already being done on real world populations that were inconclusive?
At least pitch a rough idea of what these experiments look like.
Well we have no idea what the effects of glyphosate are because almost everybody has it in their system. Is it possible that's why autism, depression, add are so much higher among us than amish? Who's to say?
This is outside my field.
If you tell me that EPA doesn't have a better process than "dunno, seems OK", then I'll humbly defer.
Not holding EPA up as infallible, just asserting that intentionally-deceptive research should not be tolerated -- and should demand a higher degree of skepticism of other research from the same entities or with the same beneficiaries.
> This is out of my field.
This is what I've come to expect from discussion on things like glyphosate, cholesterol, seed oils, etc.
You supposedly are raising an issue, yet you can't even squeak out the smallest concrete claim.
You're "in the field" enough to claim they didn't do the proper "testing protocols", but when simply asked what you mean by that or how it's different from the existing research, you're so "out of the field" that you can't even elaborate on the words you just used -- that's a task for the experts.
I never claimed to be "in the field" or anywhere adjacent. One does not need to be an expert to know that dishonest research is bad for the world. Why are you OK with this??
And I'm not raising an issue. The article is.
For the record, I do not have an opinion on the safety profile of glyphosate at all. And I've spent zero time even wondering about cholesterol, seed oils, etc. You're dropping me into the middle of the wrong argument.
I do have strong opinions about research integrity, and this story about Monsanto is unfavorable. Do you disagree with that?
The public discourse on glyphosate is useless. As witnessed by calling it a pesticide, which is quite common among those most vocal against its use.
Less is more when it comes to chemicals, which is why reasonable uses of glyphosate seems to be the best we have come up with so far as a species - regardless of abuses of the chemical.
It’s probably the most studied herbicide on the planet at this point with very little evidence that it causes human health issues when used as intended. Doesn’t mean it’s zero risk, but we also feed an incredible number of people off a very small amount of landmass at this point in history.
Herbicides are pesticides. Are you implying that I made a mistake with that word? I did not.
Your other points are valid, but would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?
Assuming you would not, then I think you'd agree that there should be repercussions. Monsanto is not Uber for agriculture.
Herbicides kill plants, pesticides kill bugs, right?
Weeds are pests, as defined by the EPA at least.
https://www.epa.gov/minimum-risk-pesticides/what-pesticide
> Herbicides are pesticides. Are you implying that I made a mistake with that word? I did not.
Fair, the word pesticide is technically accurate - simply not used where I am from to describe herbicides.
> would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?
I don't see where anyone is advocating this. I see a lot of attacks against the most tested and studied herbicide on the planet - many such studies and tests set about with a pre-determined agenda (by either side). If there was strong evidence of this chemical being widespread harmful to human health, I feel it'd have come out by now.
What it means is that instead of using glysophate, agriculture simply switches to less tested and newer chemicals that may end up actually being more harmful. Certainly more expensive. Using nothing is not an option for modern agriculture if we're going to feed the number of humans on the planet.
There are plenty of "bad actors" in this field (no pun intended) - but if used as directed and in conjunction with GMO crops engineered to reduce herbicide applications it's likely one of the best ag inventions of our lifetime. Why so many people are willing to die on this hill is beyond me. I see otherwise very intelligent people in my life who as they have aged went down the youtube conspiracy theory rabbit hole and now preach about how it's the devil.
If Monsanto (or others) conducted research or scientific fraud they should absolutely be punished for it. To be blunt - especially the scientists - since it is absolutely deleterious to public trust.
Right, I think we agree on everything of substance.
I'm just particularly bothered by sketchy research on the edges of contentious public health issues.
I hope this issue is litigated to conclusion, and if Monsanto is found to have pushed fraudulent research for their own benefit, I hope regulatory agencies around the world come down hard, even if the net effect on human health is small or zero. There's just no place for that kind of shite any more.
HN is plagued by bots and shills. Arguably is one of the main selling points of the site -- it's a news aggregator run by Angel Investors
Why would you expect anti-corporate narratives? If I'm F500 and am trying to sway opinion here is one of the places I'd direct my marketing drones to hit hard, as the tech-bro demographic would then parrot it everywhere else
So what's the current speculation on how it causes cancer?
Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in humans.
Is it killing gut bacteria?
Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S21522...
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
If what you say is true, we would know almost nothing about pharmacology and modern medicine wouldn't exist.
There are basic scientific and statistical methods to avoid this.
There are, but there are also strong incentives for what amounts to fraud, on both sides. Glyphosate has become both highly politicized -- it's used as an argument against GMOs -- and subject to concerted and lucrative legal attack. At the same time, the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection.
Even when supposedly honest scientists publish, it's often wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...
> the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection
That doesn't square with the fact that Monsanto thought it worthwhile to commit scientific fraud to push the narrative that glyphosate is safe, in a scientific paper published the same year that the patent expired.
They had patents on Roundup Ready seeds. Those patents have also now expired.
This was and probably still is true about tobacco. Personally, I choose to not smoke.
The evidence against tobacco was overwhelming.
When it comes to mechanistic speculation, absolutely.
Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill them.
Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
>> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria possess this pathway
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201120095858.h...
I’m not actually familiar with current state of scientific research. Are there any quality studies that contradict the ghost-written report?
I understand the valid reasons for pulling the study, but that does nothing to specifically address its claims or evidence.
Tl; dr:
One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.
A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.
[ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.
We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
I have a feeling that it is this causing the collapse of our insect population.
If so, presumably because it kills the weeds that feed the bugs.
Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and related studies shows glyphosate negatively impacts bees by disrupting their gut microbiota, weakening immune responses, impairing learning/memory, affecting foraging behavior, and increasing mortality, with effects seen from both pure chemical and commercial formulations at environmentally relevant levels, impacting both adult bees and larval development.
https://archive.is/dRAMg
Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines
So any misdirection has served its purpose.
Science and law (in snail motion) are clearly broken. The paper “Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate” [1] shows population groups with significantly higher cancer incidence linked to glyphosate exposure. When findings like these struggle to gain broad acknowledgment, it becomes evident how powerful companies can still "hide the sun with their hands"
[1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate
The same thing is going to happen with that covid "vaccine" study that claims there were no excess deaths found. Wait and see.