The author of the piece seems to have some conflict of interest WRT organic farming. Here's a two year old LinkedIn post[1] where she claims to have been a keynote speaker at the Croplife America Annual Meeting.
Headline on the Croplife America website[2] is: "We Represent America's Pesticide Industry".
The point of this article is that "organic" farming uses organic pesticides. And more of them are required than when using synthetic pesticides. But I suppose it is the wrong pesticides for the industry lobby (except for copper sulfate?) and that's why they'd have someone write up this article. Not because of the true statements about the synthetic pesticides being safer (lower LD50, lower mass needing to be applied, etc).
Both "sides" that are involved (organic pesticides vs non-organic pesticides) here are arguing for pesticide use in practice.
It's written in bad faith in my opinion and also factually wrong in multiple places.
Nicotine sulfate which the srticle explicitly discusses as one of the "natural" substances, used in organic farming (i assune the context is US specifix here) is
a) not the natural occuring nicotine of e.g. tobacco plants and b) stictly prohibihed for all types of agriculture, organic or notchemically modified nix.
And the use of the LD50 toxicity as sole metric is laughable: caring about not being exposed to carcinogenic substances, would not even make sense, when everythink that is harmful would also be accordingly toxic in the sense of an LD50 dose.
It is good to known many of these toxic organic pesticides are banned in the USA. I do wonder about the large fraction of the produce in US grocer's stores that comes from other countries though.
>Acetic acid is used at 20% concentration in vinegar-based organic herbicides. The acute oral LD50 of 20% acetic acid is 3,310 mg/kg. That means acetic acid is 1.7 times more toxic than glyphosate.
>So, that same 70 kg person would only need to ingest 8 ounces of 20% acetic acid for acute toxicity to occur.
"Did you know if you drink a liter of white vinegar (i.e. acetic acid at 5% dilution), it'll harm you? Glyphosate wins again!"
>They’re also not applying glyphosate to finished produce items; glyphosate is applied to plants early in the growth phase, well before the actual product (corn, soybean, etc) has been produced.
They do spray it on finished crops! They spray glyphosate on crops after the cereal or seed has been produced. It's called crop dessication! They spray glyphosate, diquat, glufosinate, or other herbicides (but primarily glyphosate) on mature crops to kill the plants ("dry-down") to speed up and regulate the harvest window.
Of course, Monsanto assures the grower that "when the bulk seed/ grain moisture content is below 30% then residue levels are minimal as at this moisture level there is no longer translocation into the seed/ grain."[1]
But I have my doubts.
Crop dessication has become an increasingly common practice in the United States and Canada since it began in the 1990s with dessicating wheat and barley.
Non-celiac "gluten intolerance" began becoming a "fad" ailment in the early 2000s. There are also voluminous online self-reports of Americans with non-celiac gluten intolerance that have no such reaction in Europe. For some reason.
It is also highly suspicious that cereal crops continously grown for over ten thousand years suddenly starts to trigger symptoms in the general population in the last twenty.
After wheat and barley in the 1990s, crop dessication also started to be performed on canola and soybeans in the 2000s and went on to include sunflowers in the 2010s.
I don't think it's a coincidence that "seed oil" hatred emerged when it did.
Even further, the problem is not even necessarily glyphosate in isolation but Roundp specifically. The ingredients of any Roundup formulation are commercially confidential and are not available to the public, but one commonly known and used adjuvant is the surfactant polyoxyethylene amine (POEA).
Experimental studies suggest that the toxicity of POEA is greater than the toxicity of glyphosate alone and commercial formulations alone.
Transparency and the precautionary principle should dominate any discussion of what happens to the global food supply as it is the foundation for human flourishing. Attacking skeptics as "anti-progress chemophobes" is exactly what I'd expect someone on the payroll the pesticide ibdustry to say.
You can also argue the opposite, that due to her working with a particular interest in proving the organic industry wrong, she is finding factual information about it. As usual, information should be dismissed or confirmed with more information, not with fallacies
The principle of charity suggests we should assume good intentions about others and their ideas, and give them the benefit of the doubt before criticising them.
Both "sides" that are involved (organic pesticides vs non-organic pesticides) here are arguing for pesticide use in practice.