Over 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto's glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide

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PinkDiamond
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Over 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto's glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide

Post by PinkDiamond »

Finally! Monsanto has been hit with a $290 million cancer liability ruling in Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide trial. I suggest that everyone copy this information, including the full link, which you'll have to get by quoting me here, or clicking through to the site and copying, and send it to all you know so they know to get rid of this poison if they're using it. :!:

https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-08-11- ... trial.html

More than 4,000 lawsuits have already been filed against Monsanto over similar claims
If decided similarly, these glyphosate lawsuits could subject Monsanto / Bayer to over $1 trillion in financial liability; enough to completely bankrupt the corporation and end its mass poisoning of humanity and everything else on earth.

Public Legal NOTICE to all retailers selling Roundup

To Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe's and all retailers selling Roundup. Public Demand is herein made to remove and return to the manufacturer all Roundup products for full refund. Pursuant to Dewayne Johnson vs Monsanto the aforementioned companies, and all other retailers, as of the date of this NOTICE have knowledge and knew or should have known the effects of Roundup on Human and animal life forms. As of the date of receipt of this NOTICE you and your company are noticed of past and future liability for failing to protect the health of the public. Future sales of Roundup may subject the company to liability for failing to inform employees to said liability.
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Artfldgr
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Re: Over 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto's glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide

Post by Artfldgr »

Finally?
oh well, wait till its off the shelf and global production drops by how much
and then what happens to price and the starving that need it?

one thing... court proof is not sciecne proof... even iff you want to think so..
(silent spring was admitted by the author to not be science - and how many millions have died from lack of good pesticides against malaria alone?)

this was written WAY before the current court case.. which may be overturned...

remember... the person admitted that they BATHED in it and doused themselves by accident..
thats kind of not following how its used... [i followed the case too]


from a farm site i read... (odd tastes)
[i edited it a bit to downsize, but you can find such stuff if you want and read yards of it]


On our farm we use what amounts to large soda-sized cup of glyphosate per acre
• GE crops and glyphosate allowed us to switch to more sustainable no-till farming
• “Superweed” problem no worse using glyphosate than other pest chemicals
• Our use of most toxic chemicals has gone down, as it has for most conventional farmers
Banning glyphosate would result in using more toxic chemicals, abandoning no-till


How would the loss of glyphosate change what we do now? Are the alternatives better or worse than the current production model? To be sure, thinking this through was not a pleasant exercise, but it’s a critical one considering how overheated the global discussion has become on this chemical.

Most people reading this are probably familiar with glyphosate. It goes by the trade name Roundup. It does a great job at killing weeds. If you do any gardening, you’ve probably bought it at your local hardware store and used it on your lawn safely for decades. We use glyphosate with crops, like soybeans, that are herbicide resistant. That means we can spray it after the weeds and/or the crop has emerged and it will kill the weeds but not harm the crops. For farmers and consumers, that’s a good thing, I believe.

But if you’re an anti-GMO activist, glyphosate is the root of all evil. They say that farmers, like me, drench our crops in this herbicide; turns farmers into chemical junkies; hurts beneficial insects; destroys the vitality of the soil; leads to a massive infestation of monstrous weeds; and worst of all that it will kill me of cancer. Science says none of these are true, and that’s confirmed by my personal experience. But advocacy organizations are all over the Internet promoting these scare stories, and many of their claims are circulated by the mainstream news as if they are true. It hurts my brain to read that stuff.

There are people out there who truly believe that we farmers douse, drown, drench or saturate our crops in chemicals. Anti-GMO campaigners, organic activists and irresponsible news reports use those phrases all the time (see here, here, here, here). In graphic form it often looks something like this meme from GMOFreeUSA pictured here:
Image
[snip]
Sorry, that simply is not what we do on a modern farm.

On our farm, we grow both GMO and non-GMO crops. When planting season arrives in Iowa, I begin applying herbicides to prepare for planting. On our no-till ground — the most sustainable form of agriculture, and it’s been made possible by the use of GM crops — we use a combination of glyphosate, 2,4-D and metalachlor for corn. Forsoybeans we add a pre-packaged mix of chlorimuron, flumioxazin and thifensulfuron. On our tilled ground, we leave out the glyphosate and 2,4-D, as it’s not needed because tillage kills the weeds that are present.

So, what about this drowning of our fields with glyphosate that we’ve been reading so much about? On our corn ground, before planting we apply 16 ounces of glyphosate along with a small amount of these other chemicals. To put that in perspective, it’s a little more than half a gallon of total herbicide spread out over an acre, or roughly the size of a football field.

[do read the court case and what he did with the stuff, how much was he using? - artfldgr]

In other words, per square foot, on the corn ground we apply what amounts to 1/3 of a drop per square foot. On soybean ground it’s approximately 1/12 of a drop per square foot. What we do is a misting and not a “dousing.” We’re not “drowning” plants in pesticides; we’re using what amounts to an eyedropper.

That’s what we do now. But as a farmer, I have to be sober about this. What happens if the activists scare enough people, or members of Congress, and a ban is put in place, like what may very well happen in Europe after the 18-month temporary renewal ends. What’s the worst case scenario?

Here’s How I Used to Farm

I’m not saying it would be a full-on nuclear winter here, but it would be a regression to an earlier time, and I know a far less sustainable time, before glyphosate came into wider use in the late 1980s. To take a phrase from a show from a while back — “Imagine if you will… a time not long ago…

One of the biggest issues for all farmers, conventional and organic, is how to prepare the soil for seeding by clearing away, and preventing weed competition. Let’s start at the beginning of the crop cycle and work through this. As a farmer, the first thing I need to decide before the season even begins, is what type of production model should I use: conventional tillage; conservation tillage; or no-till?

We used to rely a lot on conventional tillage (and many organic farmers still do).

Conventional tillage is a system in which the ground is tilled either in the fall after the previous crop is harvested or early in the spring before planting. A plow rolls the ground, which doesn’t do much good for the soil structure — it speeds up the decomposition of crop residue and soil organic matter. That leads to increases in carbon release from the soil via CO2.

Not good, and a practice that we’ve eliminated in our operation.

In fact, we have not used a moldboard plow (like the one seen below) in probably 25 years.

Next, we used a disk to level the ground and remove any weeds that may have germinated after the primary tillage was complete. The secondary tillage step was always done in the spring, and the timing could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks prior to planting. If weeds were present, we would perform yet another tillage pass. Then we would plant.

After planting, but before the crop emerged, we would make a herbicide application to prevent weeds from germinating and competing with the crop.

Weeds are a bitch. They really are. They steal water and nutrients from the crop, and can out-compete them because of their aggressive growth.

Organic farmers say that they are their number one headache; they use a combination of soil management techniques, some of which we use as well, and natural chemicals (some of which are quite toxic, like copper sulfate).

Depending on the crop, we would usually use a wide variety of pre-emergent herbicides.

These products were efficient in reducing broadleaf weeds and relatively good at preventing grass type weeds but they weren’t 100 percent effective.

Yep, it meant that we had to do one or two more tillage passes, this time with what we called a row-crop cultivator. So in total we made at times up to five tillage passes for each crop season. And once weeds emerged, we didn’t have many crop-safe herbicide options. Weedy fields were common, and resulted in loss of yield, and another increase in weed pressure the next season.

As we farmers became more aware of the damage tillage could do, we added conservation tillage to the mix, which resulted in less turning of the soil. Herbicides improved but they still weren’t 100 percent effective.

However, we were able to cut the number of tillage steps down from five to as few as two. [and that goes a long way towards no dust bowl again!!!!]

In the late 1970’s, the production system called no-till was being developed.

It was interesting to me as it solved a few of the soil issues, but as a complete system it didn’t seem workable when first introduced. It was heavily dependent on intense management. Even with all its ecological advantages, most conventional (and organic farmers, then and now) did not adopt it because it just didn’t control weeds very well — unless you used a lot of chemical applications, and few farmers, organic or conventional, want to do that.

Everything began to change in 1996, when herbicide tolerant (Ht) crops were introduced.

The first to market were soybeans tweaked to have a tolerance to glyphosate, known as Roundup Ready. You could spray a field with glyphosate to prevent weeds from growing, and if you had to spray after the soybeans emerged, the crop was unharmed.

This started to get interesting. Suddenly, as the chart below makes clear, the various systems started to come together in a great ecological package.

I was able to cut down drastically on the use of far more toxic chemicals and substitute glyphosate, which was also more effective, and that enabled us to move to more no-till farming, a huge boost to our commitment to sustainability. Everything was coming together, as you can see here:

Image

[look at that curve above... think of how much the cost of food and all that will happen GLOBALLY now.. think of how much of the bad old chemicals we will HAVE to go back to... jump for joy... i guess]

How Herbicide Resistant Farming Has Changed Farming, and Me

The older generation of farmers loved to see fields that were flat and free of surface residue prior to planting.

They took great pride in the ability to plow and not have a single corn stalk on the surface.

I get that, however I’m not as OCD as those old guys were. They liked things neat and orderly. That tendency went back for generations. You see, we have traced our farming lineage back to colonial days, and we’ve always been farmers in the New World. We worked our way through what is now known as Long Island, through New Jersey, then Ohio and Indiana, landing in East Central Iowa. When I say I had to fight some history, I really had to fight some history. Many farm families in the Midwest followed a similar path, and they equally hated disorder. No-till was first seen by many Midwest farmers as nearly sacrilegious; residue everywhere, and weeds were sometimes allowed to emerge. Scandalous!

I had to fight that perspective in our own operation. I’m not a traditional guy. I love to make hamburger out of sacred cows, and I try to do it nearly every day in my farming operation. Other farmers around us had begun to use no-till for planting soybeans into corn residue, but they still mostly tilled using conservation tillage prior to planting corn. For them, the traditional process was hard to break. But we jumped into the no-till production system with both feet.

Let’s look for a second at the herbicides we used in the past, compared to what we use now what we would have to go back to if glyphosate were banned.

We still use a range of older chemicals, primarily, acetachlor, metalachlor, pendimethalin, atrazine, dicamba, 2,4-D and glyphosate They’ve all been around since I started farming in the early 1980’s, and most were produced much earlier — including glyphosate.

No, glyphosate is not new, despite what the activists say and it wasn’t invented for use on herbicide tolerant crops. It’s been on the market since 1974, and quickly became the best-selling herbicide in the world. Why? Because it is so effective, and allowed us to cut down on the use of far more toxic chemicals.

For example, I’ve reduced my use of paraquat — which, although safe for farming, is 1500 times more toxic than glyphosate — to almost nothing. [boy, its going to be fun going back to THAT!]

What about claims that since the introduction of herbicide resistant GMO crops we use even more chemicals than we did before? That’s not my experience, as I will explain, despite what you may read on some websites. Sure, it’s use has gone up. How could it not! It’s paired with GMO crops whose use has boomed.

But that’s kind of a silly statistic.

If critics were genuinely interested in sustainability, they’d ask, “Has the overall use of the chemicals and in particular the most toxic chemicals gone up?” Those are questions that really matter to the soil and humans. The answers are clear, according to independent government statistics. According to the USDA, in a 2014 report, pesticide use in the US peaked in 1981, and has trended downward since then.
[and if banned then what?]

Here are two graphs they used to illustrate the trend. Note the drop off beginning in 1996 when GMO crops were introduced.

While glyphosate use has, of course, grown, it has not increased the use of chemicals, as some claim.

Glyphosate, a very mild toxicant, has replaced far harsher ones, as this chart of the usage of chemicals on corn in the US, though 2015, illustrates.
Image

Source: Wyoming Weed Sciences

What about the claim, made as an accusation, that glyphosate causes “superweeds”? I hear it mentioned quite a bit. It’s a genuine issue for farmers, but the reality is weed resistance is nothing new. Pests, whether they are weeds or insects, evolve. It’s what they do. According to the Weed Science Society of America, weed resistance predates herbicide tolerant crops by at least 40 years.

Our job as farmers is to be stewards of not only the land, but of the herbicide tolerant technology and herbicides themselves, it is also our responsibility to minimize the chance of resistance. Banning glyphosate won’t solve the superweed problem. Soybean farmers who have switched away from glyphosate to other conventionally bred non-GMO herbicides such as ALS inhibitors have it even worse — their superweed problem is far worse than with glyphosate. Beware of what you wish for.

Sustainability

That brings me to my last, and likely most important, point. Let’s look forward instead of back.

I dislike the term ‘sustainability’ because it’s such an ill-defined buzzword. Sustainable farming is a nebulous term, because everything we do involves environmental trade-offs. Our operation attempts to embrace the three pillars of ecological farming: It has to be economically stable, environmentally sound and socially acceptable. The concept we’ve handed down for generations isn’t unique to us; it’s ingrained in our family to leave the land in a better condition than we found it. That means lots of things. I must take care of the soil so it remains fertile for my lifetime and for my children, and for all generations to come.


So then, what happens if herbicide tolerant crops, or specifically glyphosate, is taken away?


Simply said, we can only use what’s on the shelf already. We’d have to regress to a prior production model that includes one of several distasteful options. including more tillage and less environmentally smart chemicals.

That’s simply not acting as a steward to our land and our children.

Dave Walton is a full-time Farmer in Cedar County Iowa, 6th Generation, growing GM and non-GM corn, soybeans, alfalfa and hay on 500 acres. Iowa State University, studied Animal Science. Director, Iowa Soybean Association and licensed Commercial Pesticide Applicator and former Certified Crop Advisor.
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Re: Over 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto's glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide

Post by rocks2dust »

I have no problem with Roundup, selectively, properly and carefully used. Certainly, it isn't only cautious licensed professionals using glyphosphate, however. It is mass-marketed to consumers and I've seen landscapers, farmers and others dumping the stuff on the land in what could not be considered proper or safe application.

Around here (sandy loam soils) it doesn't work very well. Does not kill all listed plants to the root, and I have noticed weeds that develop resistance after only a few years. They keep tweaking the Roundup brand, too. It takes increasing strength as the plants develop resistance, until they are nigh on unkillable. And although it might be due to misuse, it is showing up in groundwater - a serious matter for a large part of the country. Moreover, I absolutely loathe the glyphosphate-GMO business model where Monsanto/Bayer sells GMO seed resistant to glyphosphate to farmers, then sues seed farmers and seed savers whose crops become cross-pollinated with GMO genes from neighboring, sometimes distant, fields.
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Re: Over 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto's glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide

Post by PinkDiamond »

You hit the nail on the head, r2d. It's common knowledge that those chemicals do not wash off the foods we eat because they're locked into the plant's cells, and there's a whole slew of evidence that it's causing stomach cancers in people, among a myriad of other problems, but stomach cancer seems to be the one that's' being reported most often, and too many farmers who use it become too sick to farm their lands, becoming incapacitated, and if you do a search you will find evidence that an inordinate number of farmers in India have committed suicide after the resistant weeds took over their farms rendering them unusable. It is said that the weeds that come up despite the poison are so hard and so profuse that the land is rendered unusable; thus the suicides.

As far as consumers using the product goes, it is making pets ill, and parents are being warned not to let their children play in fields it has been sprayed on. Also, there's a lot of proof that the honeybee hive collapses are related to them ingesting contaminated pollen, causing the hive to die off.

It's absurd that Monscamto has been allowed to sue organic farmers whose lands were contaminated by cross-pollination contamination of their crops, as well as the spray blowing in the wind and contaminating entire farms, rendering them non-organic, and ruining their investment and their livelihood, so I hope this lawsuit stands, and the organic farmers whose lands were contaminated can still get restitution for their losses.

You won't hear all the evidence in the lamestream news that invents news stories every day, but it's out there, with photos to prove their claims for any sane person who wants to make sure they know all the risks involved in dousing foods and fields with chemicals that do not belong in the soil or water, much less the human body, so with any luck this won't be the last we hear on this. I suggest you search the alternate news and natural health websites to get the information Monscamto keeps hidden from the public if you need more than their own studies, and the WHO, which declared it a probable carcinogen a long time ago, to convince you to steer clear of this poison. :roll:

We are bombarded with chemicals everywhere, and our drinking water is also full of the drugs people take, and apparently they can't pull them out of the water we drink, so unless you want to be taking the meds other people are for any and everything, including diseases big pHARMA has invented to make money on, I suggest you get a 5 stage reverse osmosis water filter so you can at least drink clean water, and if there's bacterial contamination you also need a UV light built into the filter.

If people don't start paying attention to the chemicals they're exposed to every day, pretty soon every male on earth will be walking around with a permanent erection, not because they took the purple the pill, but because their drinking water was contaminated with it and every other drug under the sun. :?
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Re: Over 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto's glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide

Post by SwordfishMining »

Now that Bayer has bought out Monsanto, they have bought the best lawyers money can buy to stop that payout flood before it leaves the dike. The way tort is paid out in America the first 10,000 litigants each getting the hundreds of millions in punishment penalties, Bayer will go bankrupt and the golden parachutes will all float away.
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