Rethinking Lifestyle

Sometime in early August I passed a nearly-ripe barley field when I noticed that the field was being sprayed. Ah, yes, this was desiccation in action. Over the past decade or more it has become customary for farmers to spray their nearly ripened crops with chemicals to speed up the drying process to allow for earlier harvest. Potatoes, cereals, canola and pulses are desiccated regularly. The most common chemical used is glyphosate, the active chemical in Roundup.

There are definite advantages to this new farming practice. “Pushing” a crop through desiccation allows for harvest before the rains come or other calamities occur, which is, in effect, a relatively cheap insurance policy. At the same time dousing fields with Roundup just before harvest has the advantage of killing off perennial weeds in fall and so prepares the field for a clean start next spring. And the bonus is that all this can be done with a chemical that its makers continue to market as an environmentally safe product. By the way, it is also good for their profit margins.

But the story is not so simple. Around the world veterinarians, medical doctors, scientists and environmentalists are concerned by the fact that glyphosate is increasingly being detected in animals and humans. And it is not only affecting farmers dealing directly with this chemical. People who never come close to a farm also are showing increased levels of glyphosate in their bodies. Somehow glyphosate is finding its way into the food chain and eventually into the population at large. As someone has said, you may as well be mixing glyphosate directly into the dough at bakeries throughout the country.

On another level, studies have shown that glyphosate is strongly absorbed by soil particles where it inhibits useful bacteria and kills off beneficial algae. As well, glyphosate can cause micronutrients, especially manganese, to become unavailable and so leads to deficiency diseases. While more studies need to be done, work done so far seems to suggest quite strongly that glyphosate has a negative effect on the micro-flora of the gastrointestinal tract of humans and animals.

There have been earlier signs of concern about desiccation. For example, glyphosate cannot be used on malting barley because grains that have been “sprayed to death” will not brew beer. Also grains that are intended for seed cannot be desiccated because desiccation dramatically reduces germination. This is enough information to know that something of significance happens to crops sprayed with glyphosate and makes it hard to believe the claims of the chemical companies that glyphosate residue does not remain on crops sprayed with glyphosate.

As was the case with the use of DDT in the mid-twentieth century, it will take a lot of concerted effort on many fronts to eliminate the ubiquitous presence of glyphosate in our soils, our food and our bodies. But it can be done. A good place to start would be to discontinue the practice of desiccating crops just before they are harvested.