If the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the authority to regulate industrial chemicals along the lines of the FDA's regulation of pharmaceuticals, this type of clinical study would have been required before Roundup ever hit the shelves.
This is not exactly the first study on glyphosate. There are 857 studies on links on the links between glyphosate and Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma alone. Pubmed finds 4,585 studies mentioning glyphosate, going back to 1975.
When Roundup first hit shelves, "soil erosion" was the big concern and it was a miracle chemical that enabled "no till" agriculture. Now erosion is not a concern anymore, hardly anyone does more than disc their fields once a decade.
Of course while that helps erosion, it doesn't fully solve the problem, and it also took down the flood control benefits the erosion mitigation efforts gave us, too.
Now erosion is not a concern anymore, hardly anyone does more than disc their fields once a decade.
That's a bit of a stretch. Really depends on location and crop type. At least around this local village, lots of hills, it is still an issue. As in: every rainfall which is like a tad rougher than average results in several streets being flooded with mud. Totalling several metric tonnes (official measurements, weird these numbers are weight, not volume) of soil disappearing from only a couple of km^2 of farmland every single year. This isn't the type of issue Roundup or anything like that is going to solve, it really need thorough systematic change.
not weird at all the the measurements are in mass. Mass is conserved, volume is not. For instance what do you get when you add half a yard of silt to a yard of pebbles? thats right, a yard of silty pebbles
Great point; around me they let the small fields on the hills go back to forest and stopped building little dams. Can still find traces of the horse drawn plowed fields, further up the hills, where they turned furrows to be terraces. Those last got plowed 100+ yr ago in some cases and now stand out from the gullies below them.
