Weed Killer Under Attack From Tree Huggers

For over two years now, environmental activists and anti-industry groups have been raging against the U.S. government, the European Union, and practically anybody else that would listen about the herbicide glyphosate.

Glyphosate is a weed killer and the main ingredient in RoundUp. Weed killers are obviously a critical tool for American farmers and farmers around the world. The left-wingers are attacking weed killers despite the chemical receiving a clean bill of health from both the EPA and Europe’s main food safety and chemical authorities.

PRI.org reported late last year that “in November 2015, the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA, found that glyphosate was ‘unlikely’ to cause cancer in humans. In the US, the EPA released a report that also said glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer. That report was posted online in late April, but disappeared three days later. The EPA says that, although the report was labeled ‘final’ on every page, it was prematurely released.” Yet the left wingers are protesting from California to France and have been marching in the streets and testing their own urine to get it banned or restricted.

The impact to consumers of the anti-weed killer mafia would be to ban glyphosate, the most widely-used agricultural chemical of all time. U.S. farmers use 300 million pounds of the stuff each year. While anti-glyphosate activists argue that all that use is a threat to public health, they now have a major problem in trying to make their story stick.

Reuters reported on June 14, 2017 in a bombshell article titled “The WHO's cancer agency left in the dark over glyphosate evidence,” that “When Aaron Blair sat down to chair a week-long meeting of 17 specialists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France in March 2015, there was something he wasn’t telling them. The epidemiologist from the U.S. National Cancer Institute had seen important unpublished scientific data relating directly to a key question the IARC specialists were about to consider: Whether research shows that the weedkiller glyphosate, a key ingredient in Monsanto’s best-selling RoundUp brand, causes cancer.” It appears that the one study that drives their entire campaign has been exposed as bogus.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found that the weed killer was “probably carcinogenic,” yet the review’s chairman ignored some evidence that contradicted that conclusion. In fact, and according to EcoWatch, Blair himself worked on the decades-long Agricultural Health Study (AHS), which debunked allegations of a link between glyophosphate exposure and cases of cancer. The scientist was part of a team that looked at health data from 89,000 U.S. farm workers and family members that dated back to the 1990s on. Earlier data from that study had already found no link between the two, and the latest findings only strengthened that case. And Blair testified that the data would have changed the IARC’s whole analysis.

For some reason, this report was never published. Results oriented scientific research has no place in this type of important analysis. This cuts the legs out of the protesters who are relying on this IARC “study” to work over governments to ban the popular weed killer. According to the Reuters story, one of Blair’s researchers emailed him before a 2015 meeting that “it would be irresponsible if we didn't seek publication of our NHL manuscript in time to influence IARCs decision." Three years later, that data has yet to be published because as Blair states, “you couldn’t put all that in one paper.”

One reason why Americans should be angry with results oriented scientific research is that they pay for it. American taxpayers’ money pays for IARC’s work through the World Health Organization and the United Nations, in addition to direct grants from the U.S. government.

In Europe, the head of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) came under attack by green campaigners because his researchers dared contradict IARC’s conclusion. For mild-mannered scientists, EFSA raised eyebrows for coming out swinging against what it called “Facebook science.”

The federal government and the states rely on IARC to make determinations of what substances can be linked to cancer. Sept. 11 first responders relied on the IARC to determine that 15 of the compounds present at the World Trade Center were known carcinogens. Yet, in this case the new revelations have spurred talk of withdrawing the IARC glyphosate monograph that is the underpinning of a pending case against RoundUp in California right now. The IARC needs to fix the deliberative process and stop suppressing scientific evidence that contradicts the finding they want to conclude. The public deserves an organization to produce an accurate judge of potential cancer hazards – the IARC has called into question whether they deserve to be that source for reliable scientific analysis.

Snopes is a liberal site.

http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2012/01/a-wheat-farmer-weighs-in-on-wheat-belly/

(From a wheat farmer)

And this...

“Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., who published the paper on the mounting use of glyphosate, says the practice of spraying glyphosate on wheat prior to harvest, known as desiccating, began in Scotland in the 1980s.

“Farmers there often had trouble getting wheat and barley to dry evenly so they can start harvesting. So they came up with the idea to kill the crop (with glyphosate) one to two weeks before harvest to accelerate the drying down of the grain,” he said.

The pre-harvest use of glyphosate allows farmers to harvest crops as much as two weeks earlier than they normally would, an advantage in northern, colder regions.

The practice spread to wheat-growing areas of North America such as the upper Midwestern U.S. and Canadian provinces such as Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

“Desiccation is done primarily in years where conditions are wet and the crop is slow to dry down,” Joel Ransom, an agronomist at North Dakota State University, said.

Ransom says desiccating wheat with glyphosate has been a useful tool for farmers.

“It does help hasten dry down and controls grain weeds and other material that slows down the threshing practice,” he said. “It has an important role in areas where it’s wet.”

Ransom says the practice has increased in North Dakota, which is the leading wheat-producing state in the U.S., over the past 15 years due to wetter weather.

While more common in Upper Midwestern states where there is more moisture, desiccation is less likely to be done in drier wheat growing areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, Washington and Oregon.

All Conventional Farmers in Saskatchewan Desiccate Wheat

According to a wheat farmer in Saskatchewan, desiccating wheat with glyphosate is commonplace in his region. “I think every non-organic farmer in Saskatchewan uses glyphosate on most of their wheat acres every year,” the farmer speaking on condition of anonymity said.

He has concerns about the practice. “I think farmers need to realize that all of the chemicals we use are ‘bad’ to some extent,” he said. “Monsanto has done such an effective job marketing glyphosate as ‘safe’ and ‘biodegradable’ that farmers here still believe this even though such claims are false.”

The vast majority of farmers in Manitoba, Canada’s third largest wheat producing province, also use glyphosate on wheat, said Gerald Wiebe, a farmer and agricultural consultant. “I would estimate that 90 to 95 percent of wheat acres in Manitoba are sprayed pre-harvest with glyphosate; the exception would be in dry areas of the province where moisture levels at harvest time are not an issue,” he said.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy

According to Tom Ehrhardt, co-owner of Minnesota-based Albert Lea Seeds, sourcing grains not desiccated with glyphosate prior to harvest is a challenge.

“I have talked with millers of conventionally produced grain and they all agree it’s very difficult to source oats, wheat, flax and triticale, which have not been sprayed with glyphosate prior to harvest,” he said. “It’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy’ in the industry.”

Ehrhardt also says that crops grown to produce seed are not usually sprayed with glyphosate prior to harvest because this can damage seed germination.

Grain Millers, which has grain processing facilities in the U.S. and Canada, announced last year that it would not buy oats from Canada that had been desiccated with glyphosate. The company’s Canadian procurement manager, Terry Tyson, told Western Producer that glyphosate disrupts the natural maturing process and starch development, resulting in lower quality flakes and flour. He said the decision had nothing to do with health or safety concerns.

From ecowatch.com

More importantly, wheat is sprayed throughout the season.

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