Hmmm, apparently (according to Domyown.com) its sale is forbidden in 41 of the 50 states. That rules out me in PA and a ton of other people. 
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Depends on the brand/formulation. I saw several that were available in PA.
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Over the weekend I had some time to spray weeds and did about 1/3 with the lonarch solution (using softened water), and about 1/4 with 5% vinegar and some soap. Hopefully by next weekend I should see if either shows any progress.
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Have to realize, glyphosate is a Herbicide, Not a dessicant. It has to translocate.
Diaquat (reglone) is a true dessicant, it is purely contact and stops the plants ability to photosynthesis.
Not to be confused with paraquat(agent orange). Completely different.
Back in the day flying sprayplanes I dessicated uncounted acres of potatoes(get too big won’t fit through the chip(french fry) making machines, ya, really). Spuds I was told best money fresh market, next fry’s, last resort powdered.
Nothing wrong with diquat. Don’t even know if can still get it. That would be my choice. Will kill anything green. Contact Only.
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Reminds me of a story I was told from ~40 years ago of one of my uncles where the house phone was basically being spammed by survey people wanting to know what herbicides they used on things and he started to say that they sprayed all their crops with paraquat.
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Such a HOT topic! I recall years ago while a college student my soil science teacher praised Roundup as the BEST herbicide as supposedly broke down very fast when it came into contact with soil.
I do not want to think of how many gallons I sprayed while working in a commercial orchard. We used to use a lot of it in the nursery I work at in our plant holding yards.
I do not agree with WHO for putting out a report that it MAY be carcinogenic when their study was very short. Boo to WHO.
Canada did a 2nd study after that and found no problems and deemed it safe.
sorry but I have to go with good science on this til proven otherwise.
I find it odd all the news on tv about lawyers begging me to call if I sprayed roundup. Yet I can go down to my local fleet farm store in town and still buy products containing glyphosate. IF so dangerous, why is it not banned
but still sold.
However I do see people spraying it with NO chemical proof gloves on, using backpack sprayers and then walking forward thru what just got sprayed with street shoes ect.
I do think it wise to at least wear chemical proof gloves, rubber boots and a long sleeve shirt. And avoid windy days for spraying. Wise to use precaution even on “safe” products including strong vinegar concentrations.
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Actually, Paraquat and Diquat are very closely related. Both are group L herbicides. Both have very low LD50 values, which means they can be potentially very dangerous to applicators.
Paraquat is not Agent Orange, nor was it a component of Agent Orange. Agent Orange contained 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. The latter was the bad actor because the manufacturing process produced the bi-product Dioxin, which is very carcinogenic.
There is a reason there was no paraquat included in Agent Orange, or Agent White (which was a combination of 2,4-D and Picloram). Namely, these agents were designed to kill large areas of forestation. Systemic herbicides were needed to achieve that goal. But systemic herbicides need some time for absorption and translocation.
Paraquat as a desiccant works so rapidly it wouldn’t allow time for the foliage to absorb systemic products like 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T or picloram. So it would actually work in the opposite direction of the systemic products, rendering them less effective.
I’ve sprayed a fair amount of paraquat on newly planted non-bearing areas of the orchard. It is fairly safe for young trees, as it only defoliates what it touches. So if a little overspray gets on a young tree, it won’t kill the whole tree. Glufosinate does the same thing, but the disadvantage of glufosinate is that repeated sprays kill some bark on trees and cause some canker. Glufosinate also doesn’t do a great job on killing grasses if the grasses are more mature.
Glufosinate is much safer for people to use vs. paraquat. But both are valuable tools used to control weeds.
One common trade name for glufosinate is Liberty. It’s widely used in in agriculture, so would be surprised if it’s not available in all but the most restrictive states (California, New York). Paraquat is very restricted. Not only does it require a pesticide applicator license, it also requires another special paraquat license to buy it.
As mentioned, it has a very low LD50 value which makes it very dangerous. There have been some deaths associated with paraquat. Most of them are suicides. But in some cases farmers put a small amount of paraquat in a pop bottle and someone accidentally drank it. It takes a very small amount for lethal ingestion. One sip = 
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The great irony is, the new retail version of RoundUp now contains diquat. It also contains imazapic, which has an extremely long soil half-life.
But hey, at least it doesn’t contain the much safer, much faster to break down, and arguably much less environmentally harmful glyphosate anymore.
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Good advice. I could certainly stand to improve there.
I don’t know what the LD50 value is, but it does seem a little weird to go from something that from my comprehension of this discussion is less dangerous with a bad reputation to something more dangerous with an unknown reputation. So I guess the takeaway there is that the generic “roundup” using glyphosate is less dangerous than the brand name roundup.
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If Glyphosate truly does break down rapidly in soil, and if it’s not systemic… Then I can protect myself from direct contact with it and hopefully avoid any negative consequences.
It’s what other people are doing with it that concerns me though. Presumably this is an off-label application by unscrupulous farmers:
Before harvest, glyphosate is applied to grains like wheat, oats, and barley as a desiccant to speed up drying and facilitate harvesting.
There’s a Youtuber who tested very high for Glyphosate in her system. They determined it was from using eggs from their chickens, which were eating grains they were purchasing locally.
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That’s fair. Unscrupulous use of things is tough to prevent, and trying to prevent bad behavior usually creates even more trouble. What’s the solution though? If those farmers can’t use glyphosate, they’ll use something else, probably something worse.
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Although I’ve never seen sprayers in mature wheat fields (and I’ve seen a lot of wheat fields in Kansas) the practice you describe is not off-label.
It has a 7 day pre-harvest interval for wheat.
The problem is that, unless the product is applied by air, spraying glyphosate pre-harvest tracks up the field. Trampled crops lead to pre-harvest loss. There is also the cost of glyphosate and the cost of application. Additionally, glyphosate, is a very slow acting herbicide. There are much faster desiccants labeled for wheat, though again rarely used.
Apparently, this isn’t just my own observation. Here is an article from Snopes which discusses the practice.
The article is a bit lengthy, but as it relates to the rarity of using glyphosate pre-harvest in wheat here is a snippet:
"While the data on glyphosate use in pre-harvest application is either proprietary or non-existent, the testimony of numerous farmers speak to the fact that glyphosate desiccation is a rare practice in the United States, with its use generally relegated to North and South Dakota. One such piece, republished on Huffington Post, reports:
Pre-harvesting wheat with glyphosate (most commonly Roundup) is not something the majority of wheat farmers across the nation do. There is a small sector and region of wheat production that practices this: mainly North Dakota, small parts of South Dakota, and parts of Canada. In the United States, North Dakota represents about 5% of total wheat acres produced. We are, however, the second hard red spring wheat producer in the nation. So the claim that this occurs everywhere is not at all valid or true since only about 5% of the total production practices this pre-harvesting.
We ourselves surveyed a number of farmers in the Walla Walla Valley, which has been a large wheat-growing area for many years, and found none who had engaged in — or even heard of — the practice of “desiccating” wheat with Roundup just prior to harvest."
I also came across this academic article on the subject, as I was looking for the maximum residue level for glyphosate on wheat. This was published in Plants (MDPI).
From the abstract of the article:
“The use of glyphosate at pre-harvest, despite the dosage and application timing, led to glyphosate’s, as well as its metabolite, aminomethosphonic acid’s, occurrence in grain/seeds, but the amounts did not reach the maximum residue levels according to Regulation (EC) No. 293/2013. The grain storage test showed that glyphosate residues remain in grain/seeds at steady concentrations for longer than one year. A one year study of glyphosate distribution within main and secondary products showed that glyphosate residues were mainly concentrated in wheat bran and oilseed rape meal, while no residues found in cold-pressed oil and wheat white flour, when glyphosate used at pre-harvest at the label rate.”(emphasis added)
While one may disagree with the use of glyphosate pre-harvest, though rare, it’s not off-label.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing that particular label use rescinded. Not because I believe it to be a health risk, rather people are so afraid of glyphosate in today’s climate, a pre-harvest label for glyphosate just adds fuel to the fire.
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Unfortunately, this is something that happens again and again with ingredients/components in multiple industries. Public opinion demands for the removal of a certain, usually crucial component without giving a thought about what the alternative entails since what people want even more than eliminating “unsafe” ingredients is to have consistent quality and availability of the products they buy. For example, when the public demanded manufacturers remove BPA from plastics, they simply switched to BPS, a similar compound, and slapped a BPA-Free label on their products, and suddenly the matter was “solved” for the general population who then moved onto whatever new chemical social media is saying is killing us.
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It kind of looks like we’re in the middle of one such example with Teflon. It’s exciting to wait and see what unholy substance ends up replacing Teflon once all the influencers realize that cooking eggs on steel is actually annoying as heck unless you buy a new steel pan every month.
I’m reminded of the evolution of grocery bags too. In the old days, everyone just used paper, both reusable and single-use. Then single-use plastic bags became the norm. Then concerns for the wastefulness of single-use plastic bags briefly drove a bit of reversion back to paper, but that mostly died and now the environmentally friendly thing to do is buy a whole bunch of permanent plastic bags that you’ll mostly forget at home anyway. Never mind that the permanent bags have a bunch of issues that are worse than the single-use bags. They use way more plastic, are thicker and contain more stabilizers and dyes and such and so break down far, far slower. They probably release far more microplastics and certainly release more UV-blockers and other stabilizer chemicals that are very problematic. And, again, they don’t seem that effective since people don’t seem to actually reuse them that much. And of course, never mind that the groceries themselves are packaged in way, way more single-use plastic than the bag you carry them in. And, finally, of course never mind the fact that we had a perfectly safe, completely renewable, and very environmentally friendly option this whole time: paper. But cutting down trees that were specifically planted to be cut down is wicked, so let’s use way, way more plastic in the hopes of having fewer forests (lower paper demand means lower pulp demand which means fewer forestry plantations and fewer marginal lots and cutovers left to reforest and instead get turned into low-productivity rangeland or row crops). I love the environment, but dang are there a lot of times when it’s the environmentalists who trying their hardest to destroy the environment…
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I’ll stick with stainless and cast iron. We were warned about Teflon in school by the early 2k. But I don’t care what other people use.
Remember this guy lol? ceo said he would drink glyphosate
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More power to you. I don’t expect most people to follow your good example though. They’re going to want non-stick pans. We might could ban Teflon, but that won’t lead to a world where everyone cooks with metal pans, it’ll lead to a world where non-stick coatings are switched from Teflon to something else, and I doubt that something else will be safer. That’s the issue we as a society keep running into. We find out something is 10% harmful, we ban it, and then the replacements end up being 15% or 40% harmful. Rinse, cycle, repeat.
Every now and then it actually works and we make the world a better place (CFCs and asbestos come to mind) but perhaps just as often if not more often we end up making things worse.
It’s worth mentioning that primary danger of Teflon isn’t actually the finished product anyway, since it’s adhered to the pan and what small pieces break off when it’s scratched generally are still quite big microscopically speaking and so pass right through you. The main danger is to the people who work in the factories making the stuff, since they’re exposed to aerosolized particles of it day-in, day-out. And non-stick pans are actually a really tiny portion of the use for PFAS like Teflon, there’s way more Teflon getting used in food packaging than what gets sprayed onto frying pans. Also clothing, sportswear, and apparel, lots of PFAS coatings on those. It’s from all of those sources that you and the environment are getting exposed to Teflon and other PFASs, not from frying pans.
As for the CEO, it seems pretty dumb, I agree. That being said, if I had to choose, I’d rather drink the old glyphosate version of RoundUp than drink the new version of RoundUp…
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Thanks I’m glad to know they reformulated the round up. Doesn’t surprise me they would make it more deadly. Wonder if they’re using all the lawsuits from cancers as a reason?
Yes, Bayer cited adversarial litigation and better consumer acceptance for why they’ve reformulated the retail version of Round Up. And since glyphosate is by most accounts one of the least toxic herbicides, it was more or less impossible for them to reformulate Round Up without making it more toxic, which is what they did. So yeah, the world is objectively a worse place now, but at least decades of legal action against one of the least dangerous herbicides was successful in removing that option from the market, leaving only the more toxic options…
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I’m glad to be able to participate in this discussion.
Probably like most people I’ve only casually heard of the issues with Roundup and wanted to use something else. While researching “what else” exists, I’ve also learned how we got here and the alternatives.
The dumb “solutions” I expect are probably a little more complex, but it is a shame that we would live in a world where fixing a problem involves just changing one issue for another instead of a solution.
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That’s what I get for assuming. I didn’t think it possible that spraying a systemic herbicide on grains intended for human consumption, would be labeled/allowed.
Of the commonly available broad leaf herbicides, which are not systemic and therefore somewhat safer for use in the vicinity of fruit trees? Broad leaf killing only, when the goal is to not harm grasses.