6.25-lbs Miracle-Gro Water Soluble All Purpose Plant Food Expired

Sigh. Until the last five.or so years, as degenerative spinal disease has slowed me down, I posted a fair bit on SD on glyphosate and PFAS (teflon). Glyphosate is a problem, but Round-up and the other generic versions have a much bigger health issue. Adjuvants.

These are chemicals that make it "stick" to leaves longer, resist rain washing it off, and worst of all penetrate leaves, especially "weed" leaves. The problem is plants have various strategies to prevent bacteria, fungi, and certain parasites from penetrating into the plant tissue. Some of these are waxy, and the adjuvants are very effective at damaging or even stripping away that protective layer.

Now imagine that same chemical in your gut. The more a tissue has to regenerate, the more likely errors are to creep into the genes, i.e. mutations. Mutations lead to cancer. Plus the modern uses increases our exposure to radically higher levels than were ever tested for.

Why? Because a major use of Glyphosate is killing all the grain plants in the field at the same time. To what purpose? Well, it means you get less under-ripe grain, which effectively means less energy drying the harvest. It also mean less mold, as in Ergot, affecting wheat and rye. From Brittanica.


There are ways around this, which include food inspections and when necessary disposing of grain in multi-ton lots, as in an entire grain elevator. This application of Glyphosate simply is easier, and cheaper. EXCEPT you cannot "wash" it off the grain, as it sort of defeats the purpose of helping killing all the wheat in the field at the same time so it dries evenly.

So now instead of spraying it I believe it used to be five days before planting to kill off especially hardy weeds, we are spraying it post harvest on the part we eat. Roundup ready crops lead to up to four sprayings over the growing season (for example sugar beets). So the initial approval of Glyphosate as a pre-emergent herbicide has now morphed into multiple sprayings directly on to our food. I believe they have found d Glyphosate residue on 80% of the food we purchase at the grocery.

GM corn, or just about any other genetically modified Round-up ready plant, isn't going to cause cancer or the other maladies attributed to it. BUT the changes it makes to agriculture, leading to more intensive use of chemicals that cause problems (like Glyphosate plus adjuvants) will cause more health problems.

So why am I nitpicking. First, as your initial link alludes to, agri-chemical companies will fund a study showing GM corn isn't dangerous at all. If you use specially grown GM corn without the harmful chemicals, it will be no different than other corn. So it's "safe". Lobbying and regulatory capture will guarantee nobody has the funding to actually due good studies that contradict this narrative.

They will claim that the poor, little farmer will bear the cost and go bankrupt. Except often due to the increased equipment and upfront costs, its actually what's let corporate farms put small farmers out of business. Plus, and this is absolutely true, families will pay more for food. Now how much food could be purchased for the costs of one child being treated for a rare cancer that we almost never say 59 years ago. That's different, you cannot confuse consumers with facts.

In fact that's the biggest risk from Bovine Growth Hormone. Yes, you get insanely increased milk yields. BUT no animal has ever evolved to produce milk at those levels, so you get much more inflammation of the udders (Bovine mastitus), and infections. So we use way more antibiotics. Plus when you look at the increased vet costs, the money savings can be illusionary.

Why does this matter. Cost shifting. Medical costs. As in antibiotic resistant pathogens. Which are becoming an increasingly common cause of death worldwide. Now if you think the Bovine Growth Hormone is the primary issue, ban it and case closed. But huge corporate animal farms also require massive overuse of antibiotics. Which has led to new super bugs like E. coli "superbug" strains, which are why when I was a kid people could have hamburgers cooked rare, which can now be fatal.

Which also put small farmers out of business, as they cannot compete with huge feedlot operations. Which has helped lead to four companies dominating meat packing. Going back to your lobbying link. But until it makes you sick, that food IS cheaper. The problem is people don't look at the system, and don't vote where it counts. How many Primary Elections have you voted in, and how.many have you missed? Do you try to get friends and families to vote in your primaries, where your vote counts to select who is in the November election, which in over 80% of our districts is preselected in the primary (unless the main party candidate is so awful his own party won't vote for him).

If you do that, my compliments. If you volunteer to help political campaigns for candidates that will help change this, you are a better person than I am. If you don't, or any other SD type here - please go vote in your primary elections, and try to help get us good candidates for the general election. Not the abominations we've had in several recent elections.

Who is bashing? ...and thats not as bad as what they got caught doing.

"On January 27, 2012, Scotts Miracle-Gro pled guilty in federal court and paid $4.5 million in fines for selling 73 million units of bird seed between November 2005 to March 2008 that was coated with pesticide known to be deadly to birds and fish".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...and%20fish.

"Scotts pleaded guilty in
February 2012 to illegally applying insecticides to its wild bird food products that are toxic to birds, falsifying pesticide registration documents, distributing pesticides with misleading and unapproved labels and distributing unregistered pesticides".

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/sc...pesticides.

Not exactly, Miracle-Gro is owned by Scotts, which is a supporter of Monsanto.