Talk:Glyphosate

Diligent weeding?

What is the point of the "Monarch butterfly" section? How does any member of the farming community's diligent mechanical weeding escape such scorn?

This article provides a quintessential exemplar for librarians to explain to young researchers about when NOT to rely on Wikipedia. Rt3368 (talk) 19:38, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Arguably, the ease of weeding that use of relatively harmless herbicide like glyphosate has permitted does seem to have reduced the amount of milkweed (other factors may exist), which could be expected to impact monarch populations; however, as you say, farmers aren't obligated to permit weeds to grow. In addition, there may be other factors to consider, like logging and weather, so perhaps the section shouldn't imply quit so definite a connection. tronvillain (talk) 22:34, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I'd also like to question that section. It is not the glyphosate that is harmful for the butterflies. It is the lack of milkweed. The logic of the section is similar to: "I used an axe to cut down my cherry tree. Now the bees do not come to collect any nectar. Therefore axes are dangerous for bees." Mlewan (talk) 05:48, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

Controversy absent

I see no one has added this [2] or [3]. I put it in the government section, but it might be better in a controversy section. --David Tornheim (talk) 23:14, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Being critical and factual is unwanted here. The Banner talk 18:11, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Nitpick extreme

For what it's worth, the symbol-and-stick diagram for the molecule is swapped left-for-right compared to the two graphical versions (see P on left in symbol, but orange globe on right in graphics) I don't know if it's difficult to swap either of these across the vertical axis, but if it's easy, perhaps someone can take the time and do it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Riventree (talk • contribs) 17:59, June 11, 2016‎

My photo editor is replacing the white with a black background, but it will be easier to flip the bottom two pictures as the letters will get reversed in the top image. I'll look into it a bit. Kingofaces43 (talk) 18:28, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Use

Folllowing was removed by kingofaces43 due to the quality of the references. I agree the Poisoned Fields docu may not be the best of sources, but I mainly rely on the papers written by Günther Neumann. Anyway, perhaps look into it, perhaps see if you can find more references, and reinclude.

Old text added:

For agricultural use however, despite the benefits that can be attained from the use of the product in the first (2 to 3) years, it has shown to impair the growth of crops if used for several (7 or more) successive years on a same field. According to one farmer, some fields in which the pesticide has been used for over 7 years experienced a reduction of the yields by over 50%. KVDP (talk) 15:45, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Poisoned Fields can fall into what we call WP:FRINGE territory. There are a lot of activist "documentaries" out there, especially in this topic, that aren't considered reliable at all. The main reason I reverted though was because PhD dissertations generally aren't considered reliable, much of which is covered in WP:SCIRS. It would need to undergo peer-review and be published in a reputable journal first to be considered. Being a controversial topic, we typically rely on secondary sources in science (e.g. review articles) instead of relying on primary sources that put forth novel ideas that we cannot assess as anonymous editors. We need the larger scientific community to weigh in showing they are taking the ideas seriously. Kingofaces43 (talk) 16:03, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

The research has been published in Plant and Soil but does not support the broad claim of:

"For agricultural use however, despite the benefits that can be attained from the use of the product in the first (2 to 3) years, it has shown to impair the growth of crops if used for several years (7 years or more) on a same field."

The paper is a lab-based and makes no such claim about the effects of glyphosate in agriculture, concluding:

"the development of strategies to avoid these negative side effects requires further attention to characterize responsible factors and to investigate underlying mechanisms of action and their degree of expression under field conditions."

I've looked through the thesis as well and the only thing I can see that is related is an anecdote on page 171 of the pdf that doesn't support the claim and again in the conclusion they state that further research is required to place this into context of field grown crops. As I've been unable to verify the information, I have removed it. SmartSE (talk) 21:28, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Error in number of resistant weed species

This article states that 211 species of plant have developed resistance to glyphosate here but this is incorrect. The number of species is much lower. The source is this website where you pull down "glyphosate" and see a table but the species are duplicated many times over, so it is not actually 200+ species. I've been told it's currently 36 species resistant to glyphosate. Anyway, this is a significant error and i'm going to edit this out right now because it should not be reflected in the world's supposed collective knowledge base. SageRad (talk) 22:08, 19 July 2016 (UTC)