Roundup / weedkillers: how long til they breakdown?

zeke · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 07, 2007 Posts: 174

near where we live, berries are beginning to ripen and we'd like to start picking, partly to get practice (heh) and partly to learn making jam or even alkyhol, as a post-oil age skill.

but we are pretty sure that some areas are sprayed to keep weeds down or to kill unwanted berry bushes. One parks guy said, "well, even if they do spray, that Roundup breaks down in about 24 hours."

I have difficulty believing that, and wondered if anyone here can share information about Roundup or any other likely weedkillers' "half life," how to detect the presence of spray, etc.

We don't need berry-picking to be a fatal act...

zeke
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cynthia · Heavy Crude Joined: May 29, 2005 Posts: 348

Zeke, you are wise to question how long weed killers are active in the soil. Monsanto will tell you a day but check out the link on page 13 of the PDF and you'll see the USDA reports otherwise.
cynthia

http://www.pesticide.org/glyphosate.pdf

NCAP is a wealth of information.

cavemandoom30

Pretty much as soon as the stuff dries, it starts to break down, you can replant into a sprayed area a few days later with no problems. I personally would not eat anything I knew was sprayed with herbicide, but, if you are just concerned with getting some on you, Glyphosate is not terribly dangerous, generally, the surfactants thay mix it with are more toxic by far, ..not that I think it's good stuff, thrre just happens to be a lot more acutely toxic herbicides, like paraquat..

Anyway, here's the wikipidia link.Glyphosate

aflatoxin · Heavy Crude Joined: Jul 31, 2005 Posts: 252

I'm not an expert on roundup, but I have researched some other herbicides and pesticides.

Some of the danger with these chemicals is not necessarily in the active ingredient, but in the other chemicals present. These are the result of the process used to make them.

In a chemical plant, they mix part A with part B, cook it a while, add part C, cook it some more, etc. What happens is the reaction makes a lot of different things, not all of them are what is wanted as a product. A chemical engineer manipulates the variables to whatever degree they can to get greatest yield, but not all processes, and chemical engineers for that matter, are created equal.

So, with the desired compound, there are a lot of other things that are made. The label only lists what is a registered pesticide.

Lets look at a specific example: Agent Orange, AKA 2,4 D and 2,4,5T. These chemicals are still sold in the US for use as herbicides.

From Wikipedia:

Agent orange, given its name from the colour of the 210 litre (55 U.S. gallon) orange-striped barrels it was shipped in, is a (roughly) 1:1 mixture of two phenoxyl herbicides in ester form, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). At the time, agent orange was sold to the U.S. government for use in Vietnam, internal memos of its manufacturers reveal it was known that a dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD), is produced as a by-product of the manufacture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, and was thus present in any of the herbicides that contained it. The National Toxicology Program has classified TCDD to be a human carcinogen, frequently associated with soft-tissue sarcoma, Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). In a study by the Institute of Medicine, a link has been found between dioxin exposure and diabetes.[3][4], Porphyria cutanea tarda (a type of skin disease), acute and subacute transient peripheral neuropathy, spina bifida, Type 2 diabetes, and acute myelogenous leukemia found only in the second or third generation.[citation needed]

What apparently happened is that a (Czechoslovakian?) pesticide plant did not have it together, and made a bunch of Agent Orange that had a LOT of Dioxin in it, one of the most poisonous substances known. This was produced as a result of the chemistry being off a little bit. I guess somebody decided Viet Nam was a good place to get rid of it. A lot of people paid dearly for this.

As a chemist, I wouldn't be surprised one bit if ALL 2,4D and 2,4,5T had some dioxin in it. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something bad in Roundup either. I used to work for a nursery, and I had a pesticide applicators license. I used to be a big fan of poisonous chemicals. I changed my attitude when I took organic chemistry and started researching making my own organochlorine pesticides, like DDT and Chlordane because they were outlawed, and I wanted some. Didn't take long, hitting the library to figure out how to do this to discover that everything about these chemicals is bad, bad, bad. Even worse, there are a lot of truly evil chemicals like PCDD and PCDF that are produced as side reactions.

I'd rather eat worms in my apple. Malaria, I'm not so sure about, but one look at that politician from Ukraine that got poisoned with dioxins has made me absolutely sure that I want nothing at all to do with dioxins.

So, if this sort of stuff bothers you, I would go a little further into the weeds to get blackberries. There are a lot of different things used as weed killers, and you have no way of telling what, who, or when they sprayed last. God only knows what they may have pulled out of grandma's barn too.

<edit> back to the original question. Some of these chemicals, and especially Benzene and chlorine-containing chemicals, take a very, very long time to break down. Years>>decades long.

zeke · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 07, 2007 Posts: 174

thank you, aflatoxin;

we found your response alarming, confirming, informative, and vindicating all at the same time and we wonder how can a person test some berries or fruit or other plant material for these dangerous substance?

is there a "dioxin litmus paper" or some other kind of testing agent that a non-chemist can use?

the safest thing is I suppose never to touch any plant out there, assuming they've all been poisoned, but we here at this forum are realizing that we'll have to rely heavily on plants in the future.

burns me up no end that some peoples' hatred of the natural world moves them to such levels of ghastlyness as to develop these live-killing chemicals, but...here we are...

zeke
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aflatoxin · Heavy Crude Joined: Jul 31, 2005 Posts: 252

No easy way to test for Dioxins. We use a HPLC method at work.

I wouldn't get too worried. Although Dioxins are probably ubiquitous in the environment, your chances of bio-accumulating enough in your body to pose a health risk are small.

Unless, that is you like to burn wire, PVC pipe, electronic trash, used transformer oil, or other chlorine-containing plastic. (don't breathe the smoke)

And, I wouldn't graze my dairy cow on pasture that has been treated with broadleaf killer either.

One of the few bright points when it comes to agricultural chemicals is that they are really expensive. That means that unless someone had a reason to spray, they probably didn't. So, if you just get off the beaten path a bit, you should be fine.

And, looking at the formula for Roundup a little more closely, I'm pretty sure that it breaks down completely. The other substances in the mix, who knows. The usual environmental complaint about surfactants is that they can screw up watersheds and aquatic life, but I don't think that most of the common ones, like dish detergent, are particularly toxic.

zeke · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 07, 2007 Posts: 174

well, that is reassuring in that there are things we can do to avoid or minimize contact.

I didn't know the stuff was expensive for the user! Also quite good to know...

z
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aflatoxin · Heavy Crude Joined: Jul 31, 2005 Posts: 252

I've seen people use a $20 bottle of pesticide to spray fruit trees that had maybe 10 pounds of fruit, and it already had bugs. Then they wouldn't eat it because it had worms and it had been sprayed.

Go figure.

Professional growers do not do this.

Back to the subject of weedkillers, I've got an agenda and an attitude. People who are too damn lazy to pull a dandelion or two (I eat them) should not have access to 2,4D.

bobaloo · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 468

BTW, so far as I know, Roundup isn't used on blackberries, what's commonly used is called Crossbow. I once read the label on that stuff and it said not to pasture animals on land that had been sprayed with it for TWO YEARS after application.

I once made that mistake, stopped and ate some roadside fruit and got sick as a dog, went by the next week and it was all turning brown from being sprayed. God knows what that stuff did to me.

zeke · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 07, 2007 Posts: 174

Ludi

aflatoxin · Heavy Crude Joined: Jul 31, 2005 Posts: 252

Crossbow is what they use on pipeline easements. I havent read the label, but I think it is a close relative of 2,4d, et al. Word is that they kill the sh*t out of blackberries. They use it a lot in WA state, and Oregon.

Get a machete, and hack your way into the patch a bit. No joke, with roundup, and all of the other herbicides costing upward of $50 (2,4,d) to $100 (roundup) for a 2.5 gallon jug @ 3-4 gallons/acre, people aren't wasting this stuff. Stay away from the highways, powerline and pipeline easements, and you'll be cool. Come around from the backside, and work your way to the road. Chop up what you have picked so you don't get scratched up. Stop when you are 40'-50' from the road. Hacking the plants up on the way will only improve the size and quality of the fruit in future years. Consider it pruning.

Some people rent goats here in NM. They happily eat russian olive. no blackberries here, wild raspberries are pretty tasty tho.

Enjoy your likker. I have a mulberry tree that makes one of my fave wines, mixed with cherries. And I also have some 100+ YO pear trees that give me over a ton of pears a year. I ran out of storage space for the brew from them. Yeast makes short work of bugs.

HeckuvaJob · Coal Joined: Aug 09, 2008 Posts: 11 Location: Pittsburgh

New evidence establishes dangers of Roundup

...from my favorite website Smile