What's so bad about Roundup?

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by insipidtoast, Sep 5, 2011.

  1. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    "It would therefore provide a quick, safe and effective means for controlling Ragwort."

    And thus enabling destructive farming practices, as well as destruction of wild ecosystems when it gets used on road verges etc.

    Springtide, tell us more about the land and situation. What else grows there, what was the land used for, what do you want to use the land for once it is cleared etc. Maybe start a new thread so the posts don't get lost amongst the RU discussion?
     
  2. TheDirtSurgeon

    TheDirtSurgeon Junior Member

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    Aw now, eco... but we were up to our eyeballs in weeds! There were no crops! No one had any food to eat before chemicals! It was turrrrrrible! My grandparents starved to death as children!



    :think:
     
  3. martyn

    martyn Junior Member

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    Generally weeds are non native species that have been transported or introduced from second countries, Our two major weed problems were brought from South America and South Africa as either saddle padding or as a way to stablise earth banks for railway lines. The reason they become a problem is because they lack the predator or competion they had in their native environment.
     
  4. TheDirtSurgeon

    TheDirtSurgeon Junior Member

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    I was wondering when you'd catch on. But you needn't leave. You could still learn something. :nod:


    So is nuclear waste. When handled correctly.

    It's really quite stupid to talk of "safe" poison, but I'm guessing that irony isn't your strong suit so much as trolling.

    And we're all very sorry you find us "humorless ideologues." Someday I'm sure we'll all find the humor in poisoning our environment, and have a jolly good laugh over how silly we were to worry about a wee bit of toxic crap. Party on!
     
  5. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    That's what I suspected. Those old paintings of farmers bringing in a cart full of wheat are obviously produced by the same people that made the moon walk video.
     
  6. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    "My grandparents starved to death as children!"

    :D


    Martin, I think that's true to an extent, but permaculture is the art of responding to that creatively rather than from a slash and burn mentality. An example would be gorse here in NZ, which grows much more prolifically than in the UK where it came from with the settlers. It's a noxious weed according to some and so must be burnt or sprayed, but permies are finding all sorts of ways to respond that make good use of the plants (it's used as a nursery crop to regenerate native bush for instance).

    I also think it's important that farming is not a native practice in our countries either ;-)
     
  7. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    Hi pebble, thanks for your more moderate views - my back yard is only 20 by 17 metres and it is sand like most of Perth, all i wanted was some raised garden beds and some grass for the kids, but my statement was more than just my own situation. Before the industrial revolution peasants - and i don't mean wealthy land owners with time to kill but the little people who spent over 50% or their waking hours foraging, farming or fixing (fences, plows, etc) and hunting too. Now many of us are slaves to our own lives in different ways spending way over 50% of our waking hours working to pay off mortgages, school fees, etc. Now I possibly could have dug up the entire back yard to a depth of 300mm or so and sifted the lot, "but" i did not have the time or to be honest the inclination after mowing, digging and literally dozens of trips to the tip to get the cuttings off site. So i sprayed it, once a fortnight for a few months and then continued digging - now i have raised garden beds with veggies, a few fruit trees, a trampoline for the kids and i have a life.
    Now the evidence against use of roundup has been around for a while and i still find it terrible that a lot of the food in supermarkets comes as a direct or indirect result of roundup use - it's a poison, it doesn't fully break down and due to over use people are creating "super weeds" that are near impossible to controll on a large scale.
    Most weeds are introduced, and were not much of a problem before settlers and highways but we have them now, and ocasionally they get killed using unsavory means but to hold ecological standards so high is to deny a way of life to all but a few amongst the infinite millions - and that is not what permaculture is to me.
    Teach, don't lecture.
     
  8. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    Hi springtide,

    What you present there is a choice between weedkiller and back breaking work. I think there are other options, and those other options are what permaculture is about - working with what is onsite in a way that mimics nature and utilised the natural energy inherent in the system. "getting rid' of the weeds is gardening, not permaculture. I'm not saying for you that this was a bad or wrong choice as only you know your situation and needs.

    I don't know much about your situation but some of the things I might try would be:

    Selective digging: bindweeds hate disturbed soil, so regular digging or hoeing and removing the root pieces in a limited area would free that up that plot (the whole yard doesn't have to be done). Put any root/stem pieces into black plastic and heat kill and then compost. Or drown in a water barrel to make liquid manure. (no need to take to the tip).

    Build raised beds high enough that the bind weed couldn't grow up through it.

    Investigate smother crops (HDRA suggests chickweed for some species)

    Lay black plastic over the bindweed in the height of summer.

    Investigate what animals can help: chickens?

    I'm sure there are others.


    It's a personal decision whether to use weedkiller or not (I've made the argument for in other places), but I think it's a hard row to hoe justifying it in permaculture terms.
     
  9. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    The roots are like long narrow tubers and you have to get all of it, and the stem, chickens and goats wont touch it and one summer i watched over two weeks (out of morbid curiosity) as one of the runners came up to a 4 metre long piece of 1/2 inch darkened copper pipe, grow through it, put up a few leaves on the other side and keep on going! - the pipe was too hot to touch - it was amazing (ly bad). Even after poisoning i had to crawl along the fence line 2-3 times a week to get all the new shoots.

    This is going to sound like i'm making excuses to some but i'm more of a doomer i guess and like a lot of people i make it up as i go along. My life is a balance, i have used round up but my car uses 6.5 l/100 (and is quite quick :) ), we travel a bit by plane but walk the kids to school and work is 15 minutes drive for me, we consume a lot but most of our food comes from the "Spud Shed" - local fruit and veg + butcher shop, etc.... it's not like i own a commodore or anything!

    Thanks Pebble for asking before judging.
     
  10. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    The Native Americans disagree with you, and I am sure nearly every single indigenous tribe world wide would as well. Have a good one.
     
  11. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    Yes, I especially liked the "Ragwort is a common British weed which thrives on wasteland, horse paddocks,road verges and railway land." bit. So we need to kill it because. . .? Already in the UK the hegdrows are preserved now because they have such ecological diversity. Soon, here, we will be preserving the land around railway lines for the same reason.

    Yes and no springtide. I am not trolling, I just post stuff that I think might be of interest to the people here. For me there is no absolute truth; but there does seem to me to be astounding and profound, human ignorance on how ecosystems work ( or our current best guesses of how it works).
    We are using abouT 700,000-1.000,000+? tones of the concebtate of glyphosate a year. About 10 mls is added to a litre of water. So my poor maths make that 'many billions' of tonnes of spray. It just seems to be a lot of crap for the ecosystem to cope with on a yearly basis. There are possibly good reasons to use it, but this amount seems staggeringly high; and more will be needed when GM glyphosate resistant crops come more on line.
    PS
    An interesting article
    https://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2008/04/08/monsanto_and_glyphosate
     
  12. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    I heard something the other day (maybe a review of Gaia's Garden?) where the point was made that we will never know all the things that plants do. I think this is even more true for ecosystems - no matter how smart we get there will always be complexities we are a part of but can't grasp in their entirety. Putting manmade poisons in that seems insane (except in very rare circumstances, perhaps) because as well as the things we can see are a problem, we have no way of knowing the fullness of it.
     
  13. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    No we still need to analyse c.40,000+ medicinal plants.
    We still can't make a solar panel as effective as a leaf.
    We haven't even named all the bugs in soil (and our own guts for that matter)
    Yet hubris and arrogance abounds.
     
  14. Dzionik

    Dzionik Junior Member

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