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Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need

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Wednesday, October 30, 2024

What Our Investigation Revealed Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics each season. Many cannot identify the chemical coating on their seeds and only opt for it because a seed salesperson recommends it. Companies have made it nearly impossible for farmers to find corn seed that isn’t coated with neonics. Farmers often feel peer pressure not to ask questions or change their practices in the face of concerns about neonics’ safety. Like so many people whose lives were upended during the pandemic, Sean Dengler returned to his roots. In 2020, he went back to northern Iowa and joined his father in farming 500 acres of corn and soybeans. As he learned the ropes, he began engaging with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), a unique organization that attracts out-of-the-box thinkers and tinkerers across a wide spectrum of sustainable agriculture in the Midwest. Soon, he was reading about neonicotinoids—“neonics” for short—now the most common chemicals used to kill bugs in American agriculture. Why It Matters Neonic-treated seeds are planted on approximately 90 million acres of corn fields and more than 40 million acres of soybean fields each year. Research shows neonics threaten pollinators, birds, aquatic organisms, and mammals, and may pose risks to humans. Evidence shows there are no significant yield losses from planting seeds without neonic coatings. Farmers are paying extra for insecticide seed coatings they may not need. Farmers can spray them on fields, but these insecticides are also attached to seeds as an outer coating, called a seed treatment. As the seeds germinate and grow, the plant’s tissues become toxic to certain pests. However, neonics impact beneficial insects, too, like bees and other pollinators. Newer research also shows neonics threaten birds and some mammals, suggesting potential human health impacts. In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the three most common neonics were each likely to harm more than 1,000 endangered species. Also, neonics move through soil into groundwater, contaminating rivers and streams in the Midwest and beyond. Data from 2015 to 2016 showed about half of Americans over three years old were recently exposed to a neonic. Dengler suspected he had been planting neonic-treated seed, but he wasn’t sure exactly which chemicals the colorful coating was meant to warn him of. He also had no idea if it would be possible for him to order seeds without the treatment. “The corn is usually either red or purple when it comes,” he said. “That’s how it’s always been. You just get it that way.” In numerous interviews over the past year, other farmers, researchers, and industry insiders described the same scenario to Civil Eats. While the agrichemical industry claims farmers “carefully select the right pesticide for each pest and crop at issue” and “only use pesticides as a last resort,” when it comes to neonics, that is false in most cases. Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics at the start of each season; many cannot identify the chemical that’s in the coating and don’t even know if another option exists. These findings are significant for a few key reasons. First, the pesticide industry often calls seed treatment environmentally beneficial because it reduces the amount of insecticide applied per acre compared to spraying. This is true. But research shows that the preemptive coating of seed with neonics has resulted in farmers using insecticides, overall, on significantly more total acres than they were a few decades ago. A 2015 study published by researchers Maggie Douglas and John Tooker at Penn State University found that neonic seed treatments are now used on almost triple the area that had once been sprayed with insecticides, indicating their negative impacts could be more widely distributed. Chart showing the rise in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides between 1995 and 2011. The majority of neonics are used in corn and soybeans. (Source: Douglas and Tooker, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015, 49, 8, 5088–5097) Second, a significant portion of that use may be for nothing. In corn and soy fields, new research and evidence accumulated over the last few years suggest that widespread use of neonic-treated seeds provide minimal benefit to farmers. One study from Quebec helped convince the Canadian province to change its laws to restrict the use of neonic seed treatments. After five years and a 95 percent drop in the use of neonic-coated seeds, there have been no reported impacts on crop yields. But based on conversations with farmers and other industry insiders, agrichemical companies that sell seeds and pesticides continue to steer farmers toward using neonics on their seeds—and sometimes, there are no other options available. “They scare the farmers and say that you’re going to lose your yield, that you’re going to have crop failure, and the whole grain sector will just collapse,” said Louis Robert, a Canadian agronomist who previously worked for the Quebec government, where he revealed pesticide-industry meddling in research on neonics’ environmental harms. “They go very far in terms of misleading people.” Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide IndustryRead all the stories in our series: Overview: Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry How the agrichemical industry is shaping public information about the toxicity of pesticides, how they’re being used, and the policies that impact the health of all Americans. Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits As the agrichemical giant lays groundwork to fend off Roundup litigation, its use of a playbook for building influence in farm state legislatures has the potential to benefit pesticide companies nationwide. Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides? Many programs meant to help farmers address climate change are now owned by companies that sell chemicals, which could boost practices that depend on pesticides rather than those that reduce their use. Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need Neonicotinoids coat nearly all the corn and soybean seeds available for planting. Agrichemical companies have designed it that way. At the same time, the industry has engaged in a broad, sophisticated lobbying and public relations effort to block regulation in the U.S., muddy the research waters, and even influence Google search results for neonics, all of which has been documented in depth by The Intercept. So, while Europe and Canada have been moving away from the widespread use of neonics, the U.S. has barely budged in its approach. Neonic-treated seeds are planted on nearly 90 million acres of corn fields and more than 40 million acres of soybean fields each year. Only New York has passed a ban that includes eliminating them as coatings on corn and soy seeds—and that law does not go into effect until 2029. (Neonic treatments are common on many other seeds, including wheat, cotton, and vegetables, and farmers’ reliance on them varies across different crops. This investigation focused only on corn and soy, by far the two most widely planted crops in the country.) Over the course of three weeks in October, Civil Eats sent at least four interview requests and detailed questions to CropLife America, which represents the pesticide industry, but did not receive a response. We also sent emails to press contacts at the companies that make or sell pesticide and seed products mentioned in this story: Corteva (which owns Pioneer) and Winfield United (owned by Land O’Lakes) did not respond. A spokesperson for Syngenta directed Civil Eats to “Growing Matters,” an initiative of the American Seed Trade Association, and sent a statement that reads, “Planting seeds treated with crop-protection products is a more precise way for farmers to protect their crops from early season pests and diseases. As you can see from our global Seedcare Institute website, Syngenta is a leader in providing treated seeds of the highest quality and committed to helping farmers achieve their yield goals sustainably.” No Knowledge, No Choice For many years, Kynetec, a global data company, asked farmers to share which insecticides were on their seeds and then provided the federal government with estimates of how many acres were being planted with the chemicals included. But because farmers were so often unable to name the specific chemicals, it was impossible to warrant a reliable data set. They stopped in 2014. A few years later, in a 2020 paper, researchers reported in the journal Bioscience that only 65 percent of corn growers and 62 percent of soybean growers could name the seed treatment product they were using. Even if they did know the product, that didn’t mean they knew what was in it. In fact, in 15 to 35 percent of cases, corn growers incorrectly identified the pesticides included in the treatment. It speaks to why Damon Smith’s colleagues at the University of Wisconsin’s Nutrient and Pest Management Program dreamed up a resource dubbed “What’s on your seed?” When Smith, a biologist who studies field crop diseases, started working on it around 2010, the document was a page or two long, and they updated it every few years. Today, it’s a six-page PDF that the team updates at least once a year to keep up with new seed treatments hitting the market. Very few of those are new chemicals entirely. Most are new combinations of a neonic (or another insecticide) paired with anywhere from one to four fungicides, and maybe a nematicide, a chemical that targets pests called nematodes. Illustration by Civil Eats (click for a larger version) “There’s quite a few products out there, and it’s gotten increasingly complicated,” Smith said. Sales agronomists who work for seed companies, farmers said, sell product packages based mainly on their marketed “yield potential” and are unlikely to talk up the names of pesticides included in the coating. And they emphasize the need for seed coatings as insurance against crop loss. “The way it often gets marketed to [farmers] is, they get one chance a year to get it right,” explained Mac Erhardt, co-owner of Albert Lea Seed, a small, family-owned seed company based in Minnesota and Iowa. “The big chemical companies have been pretty successful at distributing counter-information where they show, ‘Well, if you plant naked seed, you’re giving up five bushels an acre.’” Six or seven years ago, before his company made a full switch to selling non-GMO and organic seeds, Erhardt said his contracts with big seed companies required him to treat corn seed with neonics before selling it. With soybeans, the system works a little differently, and farmers are able to select seed treatments at the time of sale. One Iowa farmer compared soybean seed selection to a car wash. Instead of exterior, interior, and a wax, it’s neonicotinoid, fungicide, and a nematicide. One Iowa farmer, who asked not to be named, compared the process to a car wash. “You can pick what you want on the screen, and then it formulates it and puts it through,” she said. Instead of exterior, interior, and a wax, it’s neonicotinoid, fungicide, and a nematicide. Still, farmers said they almost always defer to the seed dealers and are often unaware of what the treatments they’re selecting consist of. “From a farmer’s perspective, we want a seed to be protected, so we just trust that whatever potion they put on the seed, it’s going to be okay. They’re not in the business of selling seed that will yield less, so we just put our trust in them,” she said. “If we had real choices, those that know insecticides like neonics are harmful, we’re not going to push that button.” Fears About Speaking Out Against Treated Seeds Pesticide companies are so entrenched in the culture of agricultural communities, asking questions about insecticides and their merits or detriments also can feel taboo. One reason this farmer did not want to be named was because she thought, with all of the seed contracts she’d signed over the years, that it was possible she had signed a non-disclosure agreement without realizing it. For others, it’s much more personal. After Frank Rademacher, who has been farming corn and soybeans with his dad in east-central Illinois since 2018, talked about neonics to a reporter at a farming publication, another farmer yelled at him in public and accused him of hurting agriculture. Estimated agricultural use of the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam, by year and crop, between 1992 and 2019. 2014 was the last year that Kynetec provided USGS with data that included seed treatment, so the 2015 drop-off shows how much use is in seed coatings. (Source: U.S. Geological Survey data) Rademacher said that many farmers he encounters have a vague, visceral sense that there may be risks associated with the colorful dust that blows into the air as the high-powered vacuum system shoots seeds into the ground and the tractor shakes and bumps around. But pesticides are so commonplace that at a forum he attended, farmers laughed about which ones cause rashes and which lead to headaches. With neonics, he said, they’re grateful to have insecticides that are not as acutely toxic as the ones their parents handled. If they try not to touch the seeds with their bare hands or breathe too much of the dust in, it feels like enough. “The products that they were using growing up, they were just horrible,” he said of farmers in their 50s and older like his dad, who might have been exposed to insecticides like DDT, malathion, and chlorpyrifos that have now been banned or phased out. “This is kind of an invisible issue. It takes away a lot of the acute exposure, and what you trade is the long-term personal and environmental low-level exposure.” Illustration by Civil Eats Sean Dengler worried that even asking questions about neonics when buying his seed would upset others in his small farming community, some of whom he had known since childhood and considered friends. “My dad’s very conventional, and I don’t wanna make him feel uncomfortable in that way. It’s kind of like a peer pressure type of thing,” he said. But Dengler  recognized the power that gave the industry. “It’s a good thing for big business. You get everyone on one side, and you can’t have people think differently.” With the name of Dengler’s product in hand, Civil Eats tried to find out for him if the soybean treatment he had used contained a neonic. Because it was a newer product and wasn’t yet listed in Damon Smith’s resource, it took significant searching and emailing to track down the chemicals included. The insecticide was thiamethoxam—one of the most common neonics. Later, Dengler got his chance to ask about what was included in his corn seed treatments. Attending a plot tour hosted by Pioneer, one of the major seed companies, he learned that the corn seed had “seven fungicide treatments and two insecticide treatments on it. That’s the first time during my farming career I heard anything about it,” he explained by email to Civil Eats. Leaving Neonic-Coated Seeds Behind For those who do decide to swim upstream, the current encouraging them to stay the usual course is strong. “Even though there’s data showing that, ‘Hey, with a few tweaks, you can change your farming practices and you don’t need to use insecticides on your seed,’ [farmers] still want that protection. They don’t want that one-out-of-every-10-years problem,” said Erhardt, from Albert Lea Seed. That rare issue is the sticking point: Neonics are very good at killing some pests that can cause serious damage to crops, and companies are quick to point to that. One industry document created by CropLife to promote neonics on seeds highlights a study that found the number of plants that survived the season increased 18 percent, and crop yield increased by 12 percent, “when neonicotinoid-treated corn seed was planted into corn fields with high wireworm populations.” “Even though there’s data showing that, ‘Hey, with a few tweaks, you can change your farming practices and you don’t need to use insecticides on your seed,’ [farmers] still want that protection.” In other words, if you use neonics in a field infested with wireworm, it really helps. But using it on every field preventatively is like taking an antibiotic every day in case an infection pops up at some point. “Most of the pests that neonics really work well on are highly sporadic,” said Maggie Douglas, who is now an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dickinson College. “The question is: How many farmers are having a seedcorn maggot infestation in their field in a given year?” Seedcorn maggots are dreaded for their ability to burrow into seeds and kill a crop off the bat. But in New York, at least, there’s a clear answer. As the campaign to pass a law banning the use of neonicotinoid coatings on corn and soybean seeds heated up, farm groups were concerned, specifically, about how they’d control the pest. So, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences set out to quantify how big the problem was. They set up ten one-year trials in four different locations across the state, comparing neonic-treated fields to fields planted with alternative seed treatments. After they pooled and analyzed the data, their preliminary conclusions were that there were no significant differences and that overall, “seedcorn maggots were not a factor in establishing corn” in any of their trials. (They expect to release final results from three years of trials this winter.) In Quebec, researchers did find seedcorn maggot infestations that caused damage to young corn plants, but at the end of the day, the infestations still didn’t result in yield losses. Another big hurdle facing farmers who want to move away from neonics is that they would also likely have to switch to non-genetically modified seed, said Rademacher. “I’m not aware of any seed company that that offers untreated seed in a GMO variety,” he said. If it was available, he would likely know. Not only does Rademacher have a degree in crop science with a focus on pest management, he also has an off-farm job as a conservation agronomist for The Nature Conservancy. In his own fields, he began implementing all kinds of conservation practices and, to ditch neonic coatings on his corn, was able to navigate the accompanying switch to planting non-GMO seed. But even a neonic-skeptical farmer would likely balk at giving up the protection against other pests that genetic modification enables. For example, if corn seed is not genetically modified to withstand glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, farmers would have to stop spraying the widely used weedkiller to avoid killing their corn. “You’re asking people to make not just one big shift but potentially two or more big shifts,” he said. “It’s all or nothing.” One compelling reason to make the switch is cost savings. In Quebec, a group of farmers convened by the University of Vermont last spring all said their seed costs $10–$20 less per bag now that they’re not paying for the neonicotinoid coating. In Iowa, the farmer who paid to have her soybeans coated said she was charged $2/acre—or $1,000 extra for a 500-acre field. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, seed treatment “may account for around 15 percent of the seed price.” That got Dengler’s attention. With a degree in finance, he was particularly interested in opportunities to cut costs on the farm, and he was intrigued by a PFI farmer who conducted his own field trials on neonics. The results showed that the treatment applied to his soybean seeds might not be necessary: The farmer planted beans without the coating, the plants stayed healthy, and crop yields didn’t drop. “When you tie in the environmental impact of the seed treatment on the soybeans, I was like, ‘I’ll even take a bushel or two less, just because I believe that I’m doing the right thing,’” he said. While he couldn’t see how to do it with corn, he started opting out of neonic treatments on his soybean seeds. After harvest ended, he reported that all but one of his soybean fields yielded better than last year. But a clear takeaway on whether his choice to forgo neonics had an impact would be tough, he said. For one, growing conditions were better this season. Both years were dry, and wet conditions are often what precipitate early-season insect issues. So far, based on the lack of a clear difference, he said adding the neonic treatments “doesn’t seem worth the pay or environmental impacts.” Meanwhile, Rademacher is a few years in. Since planting seeds without neonic coatings, he said his yields might vary a few bushels here or there, but it’s nothing significant. However, he didn’t just change his seeds and continue farming the same way. Instead, he’s investing in an entirely different method of pest control. “As counterintuitive as it seems, our system is to promote insects. We have no tillage, so we don’t destroy their houses every year, and we provide year-round habitat via cover crops,” he said. Each small change adds up, and now, he and his dad are seeing significant numbers of beneficial insects returning, which keeps the bad guys in check. “Today, as we speak in 2024 in Quebec, over half of the corn and soy acreage doesn’t carry any insecticide, and we’re going to have a fantastic year in terms of yield.” In fact, the research that first spurred Douglas’ interest in neonics was on this very topic: In her lab, she accidently discovered that neonics were killing the beneficial beetles that prey on the slugs destroying Pennsylvania farmers’ yields—but not the slugs themselves. The discovery led her to a research trial that ultimately found that in their specific region, neonic treatments could actually reduce yields. Further north, Quebeçois farmers have the biggest head start. During the University of Vermont panel, one said he had learned a simple trick since ditching neonic seed treatments: He waits to see when his neighbor—an organic farmer—is ready to plant, and he follows his lead. That simple adjustment allows him to sidestep early season pest risks. For agronomist Louis Robert, the success of the Quebec government’s decision to move away from neonics on corn and soy seeds is apparent not in what’s being said, but in the silence. After five years, farmers aren’t talking about crop failure at their local meeting places, he said, and he hasn’t seen any media coverage of the neonic ban. Farmers can apply to use neonic-treated seed if they document a need, but almost no one’s doing so, he added. “The most reliable proof is that it’s not even a matter of discussion anymore,” Robert said. “Today, as we speak in 2024 in Quebec, over half of the corn and soy acreage doesn’t carry any insecticide, and we’re going to have a fantastic year in terms of yield. So, the demonstration is right there in front of you.” The post Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need appeared first on Civil Eats.

As he learned the ropes, he began engaging with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), a unique organization that attracts out-of-the-box thinkers and tinkerers across a wide spectrum of sustainable agriculture in the Midwest. Soon, he was reading about neonicotinoids—“neonics” for short—now the most common chemicals used to kill bugs in American agriculture. Farmers can spray […] The post Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need appeared first on Civil Eats.

What Our Investigation Revealed
  • Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics each season.
  • Many cannot identify the chemical coating on their seeds and only opt for it because a seed salesperson recommends it.
  • Companies have made it nearly impossible for farmers to find corn seed that isn’t coated with neonics.
  • Farmers often feel peer pressure not to ask questions or change their practices in the face of concerns about neonics’ safety.

Like so many people whose lives were upended during the pandemic, Sean Dengler returned to his roots. In 2020, he went back to northern Iowa and joined his father in farming 500 acres of corn and soybeans.

As he learned the ropes, he began engaging with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), a unique organization that attracts out-of-the-box thinkers and tinkerers across a wide spectrum of sustainable agriculture in the Midwest. Soon, he was reading about neonicotinoids—“neonics” for short—now the most common chemicals used to kill bugs in American agriculture.

Why It Matters
  • Neonic-treated seeds are planted on approximately 90 million acres of corn fields and more than 40 million acres of soybean fields each year.
  • Research shows neonics threaten pollinators, birds, aquatic organisms, and mammals, and may pose risks to humans.
  • Evidence shows there are no significant yield losses from planting seeds without neonic coatings.
  • Farmers are paying extra for insecticide seed coatings they may not need.

Farmers can spray them on fields, but these insecticides are also attached to seeds as an outer coating, called a seed treatment. As the seeds germinate and grow, the plant’s tissues become toxic to certain pests.

However, neonics impact beneficial insects, too, like bees and other pollinators. Newer research also shows neonics threaten birds and some mammals, suggesting potential human health impacts. In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the three most common neonics were each likely to harm more than 1,000 endangered species. Also, neonics move through soil into groundwater, contaminating rivers and streams in the Midwest and beyond. Data from 2015 to 2016 showed about half of Americans over three years old were recently exposed to a neonic.

Dengler suspected he had been planting neonic-treated seed, but he wasn’t sure exactly which chemicals the colorful coating was meant to warn him of. He also had no idea if it would be possible for him to order seeds without the treatment. “The corn is usually either red or purple when it comes,” he said. “That’s how it’s always been. You just get it that way.”

In numerous interviews over the past year, other farmers, researchers, and industry insiders described the same scenario to Civil Eats. While the agrichemical industry claims farmers “carefully select the right pesticide for each pest and crop at issue” and “only use pesticides as a last resort,” when it comes to neonics, that is false in most cases. Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics at the start of each season; many cannot identify the chemical that’s in the coating and don’t even know if another option exists.

These findings are significant for a few key reasons.

First, the pesticide industry often calls seed treatment environmentally beneficial because it reduces the amount of insecticide applied per acre compared to spraying. This is true. But research shows that the preemptive coating of seed with neonics has resulted in farmers using insecticides, overall, on significantly more total acres than they were a few decades ago. A 2015 study published by researchers Maggie Douglas and John Tooker at Penn State University found that neonic seed treatments are now used on almost triple the area that had once been sprayed with insecticides, indicating their negative impacts could be more widely distributed.

Chart showing a rapid rise in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides between 1995 and 2011. The majority of neonics are used in corn and soybeans. (Source: Douglas and Tooker, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015, 49, 8, 5088–5097

Chart showing the rise in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides between 1995 and 2011. The majority of neonics are used in corn and soybeans. (Source: Douglas and Tooker, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015, 49, 8, 5088–5097)

Second, a significant portion of that use may be for nothing. In corn and soy fields, new research and evidence accumulated over the last few years suggest that widespread use of neonic-treated seeds provide minimal benefit to farmers. One study from Quebec helped convince the Canadian province to change its laws to restrict the use of neonic seed treatments. After five years and a 95 percent drop in the use of neonic-coated seeds, there have been no reported impacts on crop yields.

But based on conversations with farmers and other industry insiders, agrichemical companies that sell seeds and pesticides continue to steer farmers toward using neonics on their seeds—and sometimes, there are no other options available. “They scare the farmers and say that you’re going to lose your yield, that you’re going to have crop failure, and the whole grain sector will just collapse,” said Louis Robert, a Canadian agronomist who previously worked for the Quebec government, where he revealed pesticide-industry meddling in research on neonics’ environmental harms. “They go very far in terms of misleading people.”

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry

Read all the stories in our series:

  • Overview: Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
    How the agrichemical industry is shaping public information about the toxicity of pesticides, how they’re being used, and the policies that impact the health of all Americans.
  • Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits
    As the agrichemical giant lays groundwork to fend off Roundup litigation, its use of a playbook for building influence in farm state legislatures has the potential to benefit pesticide companies nationwide.
  • Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides?
    Many programs meant to help farmers address climate change are now owned by companies that sell chemicals, which could boost practices that depend on pesticides rather than those that reduce their use.
  • Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need
    Neonicotinoids coat nearly all the corn and soybean seeds available for planting. Agrichemical companies have designed it that way.

At the same time, the industry has engaged in a broad, sophisticated lobbying and public relations effort to block regulation in the U.S., muddy the research waters, and even influence Google search results for neonics, all of which has been documented in depth by The Intercept.

So, while Europe and Canada have been moving away from the widespread use of neonics, the U.S. has barely budged in its approach. Neonic-treated seeds are planted on nearly 90 million acres of corn fields and more than 40 million acres of soybean fields each year. Only New York has passed a ban that includes eliminating them as coatings on corn and soy seeds—and that law does not go into effect until 2029. (Neonic treatments are common on many other seeds, including wheat, cotton, and vegetables, and farmers’ reliance on them varies across different crops. This investigation focused only on corn and soy, by far the two most widely planted crops in the country.)

Over the course of three weeks in October, Civil Eats sent at least four interview requests and detailed questions to CropLife America, which represents the pesticide industry, but did not receive a response. We also sent emails to press contacts at the companies that make or sell pesticide and seed products mentioned in this story: Corteva (which owns Pioneer) and Winfield United (owned by Land O’Lakes) did not respond. A spokesperson for Syngenta directed Civil Eats to “Growing Matters,” an initiative of the American Seed Trade Association, and sent a statement that reads, “Planting seeds treated with crop-protection products is a more precise way for farmers to protect their crops from early season pests and diseases. As you can see from our global Seedcare Institute website, Syngenta is a leader in providing treated seeds of the highest quality and committed to helping farmers achieve their yield goals sustainably.”

No Knowledge, No Choice

For many years, Kynetec, a global data company, asked farmers to share which insecticides were on their seeds and then provided the federal government with estimates of how many acres were being planted with the chemicals included. But because farmers were so often unable to name the specific chemicals, it was impossible to warrant a reliable data set. They stopped in 2014.

A few years later, in a 2020 paper, researchers reported in the journal Bioscience that only 65 percent of corn growers and 62 percent of soybean growers could name the seed treatment product they were using. Even if they did know the product, that didn’t mean they knew what was in it. In fact, in 15 to 35 percent of cases, corn growers incorrectly identified the pesticides included in the treatment.

It speaks to why Damon Smith’s colleagues at the University of Wisconsin’s Nutrient and Pest Management Program dreamed up a resource dubbed “What’s on your seed?” When Smith, a biologist who studies field crop diseases, started working on it around 2010, the document was a page or two long, and they updated it every few years. Today, it’s a six-page PDF that the team updates at least once a year to keep up with new seed treatments hitting the market.

Very few of those are new chemicals entirely. Most are new combinations of a neonic (or another insecticide) paired with anywhere from one to four fungicides, and maybe a nematicide, a chemical that targets pests called nematodes.

an illustration showing eight of the products that contain the neonicotinoid pesticide thiamethoxam - names include Cruiser 5FS, Avicta Duo 250, Seed Shield MAX Beans, and more. (Illustration by Civil Eats)

Illustration by Civil Eats (click for a larger version)

“There’s quite a few products out there, and it’s gotten increasingly complicated,” Smith said.

Sales agronomists who work for seed companies, farmers said, sell product packages based mainly on their marketed “yield potential” and are unlikely to talk up the names of pesticides included in the coating. And they emphasize the need for seed coatings as insurance against crop loss.

“The way it often gets marketed to [farmers] is, they get one chance a year to get it right,” explained Mac Erhardt, co-owner of Albert Lea Seed, a small, family-owned seed company based in Minnesota and Iowa. “The big chemical companies have been pretty successful at distributing counter-information where they show, ‘Well, if you plant naked seed, you’re giving up five bushels an acre.’” Six or seven years ago, before his company made a full switch to selling non-GMO and organic seeds, Erhardt said his contracts with big seed companies required him to treat corn seed with neonics before selling it.

With soybeans, the system works a little differently, and farmers are able to select seed treatments at the time of sale.

One Iowa farmer compared soybean seed selection to a car wash. Instead of exterior, interior, and a wax, it’s neonicotinoid, fungicide, and a nematicide.

One Iowa farmer, who asked not to be named, compared the process to a car wash. “You can pick what you want on the screen, and then it formulates it and puts it through,” she said. Instead of exterior, interior, and a wax, it’s neonicotinoid, fungicide, and a nematicide.

Still, farmers said they almost always defer to the seed dealers and are often unaware of what the treatments they’re selecting consist of. “From a farmer’s perspective, we want a seed to be protected, so we just trust that whatever potion they put on the seed, it’s going to be okay. They’re not in the business of selling seed that will yield less, so we just put our trust in them,” she said. “If we had real choices, those that know insecticides like neonics are harmful, we’re not going to push that button.”

Fears About Speaking Out Against Treated Seeds

Pesticide companies are so entrenched in the culture of agricultural communities, asking questions about insecticides and their merits or detriments also can feel taboo. One reason this farmer did not want to be named was because she thought, with all of the seed contracts she’d signed over the years, that it was possible she had signed a non-disclosure agreement without realizing it.

For others, it’s much more personal. After Frank Rademacher, who has been farming corn and soybeans with his dad in east-central Illinois since 2018, talked about neonics to a reporter at a farming publication, another farmer yelled at him in public and accused him of hurting agriculture.

Estimated agricultural use of the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam, by year and crop, between 1992 and 2019. Corn and soybeans are by far the crops with the most thiamethoxam use. (Source: U.S. Geological Survey data)

Estimated agricultural use of the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam, by year and crop, between 1992 and 2019. 2014 was the last year that Kynetec provided USGS with data that included seed treatment, so the 2015 drop-off shows how much use is in seed coatings.
(Source: U.S. Geological Survey data)

Rademacher said that many farmers he encounters have a vague, visceral sense that there may be risks associated with the colorful dust that blows into the air as the high-powered vacuum system shoots seeds into the ground and the tractor shakes and bumps around. But pesticides are so commonplace that at a forum he attended, farmers laughed about which ones cause rashes and which lead to headaches. With neonics, he said, they’re grateful to have insecticides that are not as acutely toxic as the ones their parents handled. If they try not to touch the seeds with their bare hands or breathe too much of the dust in, it feels like enough.

“The products that they were using growing up, they were just horrible,” he said of farmers in their 50s and older like his dad, who might have been exposed to insecticides like DDT, malathion, and chlorpyrifos that have now been banned or phased out. “This is kind of an invisible issue. It takes away a lot of the acute exposure, and what you trade is the long-term personal and environmental low-level exposure.”

infographic showing how complicated it is to find out what chemicals are included in a treated seed product. (Illustration by Civil Eats)

Illustration by Civil Eats

Sean Dengler worried that even asking questions about neonics when buying his seed would upset others in his small farming community, some of whom he had known since childhood and considered friends. “My dad’s very conventional, and I don’t wanna make him feel uncomfortable in that way. It’s kind of like a peer pressure type of thing,” he said. But Dengler  recognized the power that gave the industry. “It’s a good thing for big business. You get everyone on one side, and you can’t have people think differently.”

With the name of Dengler’s product in hand, Civil Eats tried to find out for him if the soybean treatment he had used contained a neonic. Because it was a newer product and wasn’t yet listed in Damon Smith’s resource, it took significant searching and emailing to track down the chemicals included. The insecticide was thiamethoxam—one of the most common neonics.

Later, Dengler got his chance to ask about what was included in his corn seed treatments. Attending a plot tour hosted by Pioneer, one of the major seed companies, he learned that the corn seed had “seven fungicide treatments and two insecticide treatments on it. That’s the first time during my farming career I heard anything about it,” he explained by email to Civil Eats.

Leaving Neonic-Coated Seeds Behind

For those who do decide to swim upstream, the current encouraging them to stay the usual course is strong.

“Even though there’s data showing that, ‘Hey, with a few tweaks, you can change your farming practices and you don’t need to use insecticides on your seed,’ [farmers] still want that protection. They don’t want that one-out-of-every-10-years problem,” said Erhardt, from Albert Lea Seed.

That rare issue is the sticking point: Neonics are very good at killing some pests that can cause serious damage to crops, and companies are quick to point to that. One industry document created by CropLife to promote neonics on seeds highlights a study that found the number of plants that survived the season increased 18 percent, and crop yield increased by 12 percent, “when neonicotinoid-treated corn seed was planted into corn fields with high wireworm populations.”

“Even though there’s data showing that, ‘Hey, with a few tweaks, you can change your farming practices and you don’t need to use insecticides on your seed,’ [farmers] still want that protection.”

In other words, if you use neonics in a field infested with wireworm, it really helps. But using it on every field preventatively is like taking an antibiotic every day in case an infection pops up at some point. “Most of the pests that neonics really work well on are highly sporadic,” said Maggie Douglas, who is now an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dickinson College. “The question is: How many farmers are having a seedcorn maggot infestation in their field in a given year?”

Seedcorn maggots are dreaded for their ability to burrow into seeds and kill a crop off the bat. But in New York, at least, there’s a clear answer. As the campaign to pass a law banning the use of neonicotinoid coatings on corn and soybean seeds heated up, farm groups were concerned, specifically, about how they’d control the pest.

So, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences set out to quantify how big the problem was. They set up ten one-year trials in four different locations across the state, comparing neonic-treated fields to fields planted with alternative seed treatments. After they pooled and analyzed the data, their preliminary conclusions were that there were no significant differences and that overall, “seedcorn maggots were not a factor in establishing corn” in any of their trials. (They expect to release final results from three years of trials this winter.) In Quebec, researchers did find seedcorn maggot infestations that caused damage to young corn plants, but at the end of the day, the infestations still didn’t result in yield losses.

Another big hurdle facing farmers who want to move away from neonics is that they would also likely have to switch to non-genetically modified seed, said Rademacher. “I’m not aware of any seed company that that offers untreated seed in a GMO variety,” he said.

If it was available, he would likely know. Not only does Rademacher have a degree in crop science with a focus on pest management, he also has an off-farm job as a conservation agronomist for The Nature Conservancy. In his own fields, he began implementing all kinds of conservation practices and, to ditch neonic coatings on his corn, was able to navigate the accompanying switch to planting non-GMO seed. But even a neonic-skeptical farmer would likely balk at giving up the protection against other pests that genetic modification enables. For example, if corn seed is not genetically modified to withstand glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, farmers would have to stop spraying the widely used weedkiller to avoid killing their corn.

“You’re asking people to make not just one big shift but potentially two or more big shifts,” he said. “It’s all or nothing.”

One compelling reason to make the switch is cost savings. In Quebec, a group of farmers convened by the University of Vermont last spring all said their seed costs $10–$20 less per bag now that they’re not paying for the neonicotinoid coating. In Iowa, the farmer who paid to have her soybeans coated said she was charged $2/acre—or $1,000 extra for a 500-acre field. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, seed treatment “may account for around 15 percent of the seed price.”

That got Dengler’s attention. With a degree in finance, he was particularly interested in opportunities to cut costs on the farm, and he was intrigued by a PFI farmer who conducted his own field trials on neonics. The results showed that the treatment applied to his soybean seeds might not be necessary: The farmer planted beans without the coating, the plants stayed healthy, and crop yields didn’t drop.

“When you tie in the environmental impact of the seed treatment on the soybeans, I was like, ‘I’ll even take a bushel or two less, just because I believe that I’m doing the right thing,’” he said. While he couldn’t see how to do it with corn, he started opting out of neonic treatments on his soybean seeds.

After harvest ended, he reported that all but one of his soybean fields yielded better than last year. But a clear takeaway on whether his choice to forgo neonics had an impact would be tough, he said. For one, growing conditions were better this season. Both years were dry, and wet conditions are often what precipitate early-season insect issues. So far, based on the lack of a clear difference, he said adding the neonic treatments “doesn’t seem worth the pay or environmental impacts.”

Meanwhile, Rademacher is a few years in. Since planting seeds without neonic coatings, he said his yields might vary a few bushels here or there, but it’s nothing significant.

However, he didn’t just change his seeds and continue farming the same way. Instead, he’s investing in an entirely different method of pest control. “As counterintuitive as it seems, our system is to promote insects. We have no tillage, so we don’t destroy their houses every year, and we provide year-round habitat via cover crops,” he said. Each small change adds up, and now, he and his dad are seeing significant numbers of beneficial insects returning, which keeps the bad guys in check.

“Today, as we speak in 2024 in Quebec, over half of the corn and soy acreage doesn’t carry any insecticide, and we’re going to have a fantastic year in terms of yield.”

In fact, the research that first spurred Douglas’ interest in neonics was on this very topic: In her lab, she accidently discovered that neonics were killing the beneficial beetles that prey on the slugs destroying Pennsylvania farmers’ yields—but not the slugs themselves. The discovery led her to a research trial that ultimately found that in their specific region, neonic treatments could actually reduce yields.

Further north, Quebeçois farmers have the biggest head start. During the University of Vermont panel, one said he had learned a simple trick since ditching neonic seed treatments: He waits to see when his neighbor—an organic farmer—is ready to plant, and he follows his lead. That simple adjustment allows him to sidestep early season pest risks.

For agronomist Louis Robert, the success of the Quebec government’s decision to move away from neonics on corn and soy seeds is apparent not in what’s being said, but in the silence. After five years, farmers aren’t talking about crop failure at their local meeting places, he said, and he hasn’t seen any media coverage of the neonic ban. Farmers can apply to use neonic-treated seed if they document a need, but almost no one’s doing so, he added.

“The most reliable proof is that it’s not even a matter of discussion anymore,” Robert said. “Today, as we speak in 2024 in Quebec, over half of the corn and soy acreage doesn’t carry any insecticide, and we’re going to have a fantastic year in terms of yield. So, the demonstration is right there in front of you.”

The post Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need appeared first on Civil Eats.

Read the full story here.
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Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows

Experts say previous economic models underestimated impact of global heating – as well as likely ‘cascading supply chain disruptions’Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, , much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%. Continue reading...

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, , much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%.Even if governments around the globe hit their near-term and long-term climate targets, scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C.Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) – used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions – have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events.The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.Dr Timothy Neal, of the University of New South Wales’s Institute for climate risk and response and the lead author of the study, said the new research had looked at the likely impact of global heating of 4C – seen by many climate experts as catastrophic for the planet – finding it would make the average person 40% poorer. This compared with about 11% poorer when using the models without enhancements.Previous economic models that “inadvertently concluded” even high levels of global heating would have only modest impacts on the global economy had “profound implications for climate policy”, Neal said.He said economic models had tended to only account for changing weather on a local level, rather than how weather extremes like droughts or floods could affect global supply chains.“In a hotter future, we can expect cascading supply chain disruptions triggered by extreme weather events worldwide,” Neal said.Prof Andy Pitman, a climate scientist at UNSW and co-author of the research, said: “It’s in the extremes when the rubber hits the road. It isn’t about average temperatures”“Retooling economic models to account for extremes in your part of the world and its impact on supply chains feels like a very urgent thing to do so countries can fully cost their economic vulnerabilities to climate change and then do the obvious thing – cut emissions.”Some economists have argued global losses from global heating might be partially balanced by warming that could benefit some cold regions, such as Canada, Russia and northern Europe. But Neal said global heating would hit countries everywhere, because global economies are linked by trade.Prof Frank Jotzo, a climate policy expert at Australian National University who was not involved in the research, said economic climate modelling using IAMs assumed that if climate change made an activity such as agriculture unviable in one part of the world, increased output would simply come from somewhere else.“The result is that the models say that climate change makes little difference to the future world economy, which is contrary to what physical impact science and a nuanced understanding of interdependencies in the economy would suggest.”A report in January from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, representing the profession that underpins the risk management decisions of the world’s insurers and pension funds, said previous economic risk assessments had failed to account for real-world climate impacts like “tipping points, extreme events, migration, sea level rise, human health impacts or geopolitical risk.”“The benign but flawed results may reinforce the narrative that these are slow-moving risks with limited impacts, rather than severe risks requiring immediate action,” the report said.Mark Lawrence researches climate risk as a professor of practice at the University of Adelaide and previouslyworked in financial risk management with senior roles at major financial institutions including Merrill Lynch and ANZ Banking Group. He said the results of the new research were credible.“If anything, I believe the economic impacts [of climate change] could be even worse,” he said.A consequence of the disconnect between modelling and real-world climate impacts, Lawrence said, was that “the potential economic benefits of urgent climate policy action have also been significantly understated”.

Lack of fluoride, dentists leaves rural America at risk

Two recent polls have found that the largest share of Americans support fluoridation, but a sizable minority does not. Utah just became the first state to ban it.

In the wooded highlands of northern Arkansas, where small towns have few dentists, water officials who serve more than 20,000 people have for more than a decade openly defied state law by refusing to add fluoride to the drinking water.For its refusal, the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority has received hundreds of state fines amounting to about $130,000, which are stuffed in a cardboard box and left unpaid, said Andy Anderson, who is opposed to fluoridation and has led the water system for nearly two decades. This Ozark region is among hundreds of rural American communities that face a one-two punch to oral health: a dire shortage of dentists and a lack of fluoridated drinking water, which is widely viewed among dentists as one of the most effective tools to prevent tooth decay. But as the anti-fluoride movement builds unprecedented momentum, it may turn out that the Ozarks were not behind the times after all.“We will eventually win,” Anderson said. “We will be vindicated.”Fluoride, a naturally occurring mineral, keeps teeth strong when added to drinking water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Dental Association. But the anti-fluoride movement has been energized since a government report last summer found a possible link between lower IQ in children and consuming amounts of fluoride that are higher than what is recommended in American drinking water. asaDozens of communities have decided to stop fluoridating in recent months, and state officials in Florida and Texas have urged their water systems to do the same. Last week, Utah became the first state to ban it in tap water.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long espoused fringe health theories, has called fluoride an “industrial waste” and “dangerous neurotoxin” and said the Trump administration will recommend it be removed from all public drinking water.Separately, Republican efforts to extend tax cuts and shrink federal spending may squeeze Medicaid, which could deepen existing shortages of dentists in rural areas where many residents depend on the federal insurance program for whatever dental care they can find.Dental experts warn that the simultaneous erosion of Medicaid and fluoridation could exacerbate a crisis of rural oral health and reverse decades of progress against tooth decay, particularly for children and those who rarely see a dentist.“If you have folks with little access to professional care and no access to water fluoridation,” said Steven Levy, a dentist and leading fluoride researcher at the University of Iowa, “then they are missing two of the big pillars of how to keep healthy for a lifetime.”Many already are.James Flanagin, the only dentist in the tiny Arkansas town of Leslie, treats patients in the back of an antique store and, with hand-painted lettering, advertises his clinic and himself as a “pretty good dentist.” (Katie Adkins for KFF Health News)Katie AdkinsOverlapping ‘dental deserts’ and fluoride-free zonesNearly 25 million Americans live in areas without enough dentists — more than twice as many as prior estimates by the federal government — according to a recent study from Harvard University that measured U.S. “dental deserts” with more depth and precision than before.Hawazin Elani, a Harvard dentist and epidemiologist who co-authored the study, found that many shortage areas are rural and poor, and depend heavily on Medicaid. But many dentists do not accept Medicaid because payments can be low, Elani said.The ADA has estimated that only a third of dentists treat patients on Medicaid.“I suspect this situation is much worse for Medicaid beneficiaries,” Elani said. “If you have Medicaid and your nearest dentists do not accept it, then you will likely have to go to the third, or fourth, or the fifth.”The Harvard study identified over 780 counties where more than half of the residents live in a shortage area. Of those counties, at least 230 also have mostly or completely unfluoridated public drinking water, according to a KFF analysis of fluoride data published by the CDC. That means people in these areas who can’t find a dentist also do not get protection for their teeth from their tap water.A Flourish data visualizationThe KFF Health News analysis does not cover the entire nation because it does not include private wells and 13 states do not submit fluoride data to the CDC. But among those that do, most counties with a shortage of dentists and unfluoridated water are in the south-central U.S., in a cluster that stretches from Texas to the Florida Panhandle and up into Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.In the center of that cluster is the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority, which serves the Arkansas counties of Boone, Marion, Newton, and Searcy. It has refused to add fluoride ever since Arkansas enacted a statewide mandate in 2011. After weekly fines began in 2016, the water system unsuccessfully challenged the fluoride mandate in state court, then lost again on appeal.Anderson, who has chaired the water system’s board since 2007, said he would like to challenge the fluoride mandate in court again and would argue the case himself if necessary. In a phone interview, Anderson said he believes that fluoride can hamper the brain and body to the point of making people “get fat and lazy.”“So if you go out in the streets these days, walk down the streets, you’ll see lots of fat people wearing their pajamas out in public,” he said.Nearby in the tiny, no-stoplight community of Leslie, Arkansas, which gets water from the Ozark system, the only dentist in town operates out of a one-man clinic tucked in the back of an antique store. Hand-painted lettering on the store window advertises a “pretty good dentist.”James Flanagin, a third-generation dentist who opened this clinic three years ago, said he was drawn to Leslie by the quaint charms and friendly smiles of small-town life. But those same smiles also reveal the unmistakable consequences of refusing to fluoridate, he said.“There is no doubt that there is more dental decay here than there would otherwise be,” he said. “You are going to have more decay if your water is not fluoridated. That’s just a fact.”Flanagin, the only dentist in the tiny Ozark town of Leslie, Arkansas, runs his clinic in the back of an antique store. He says the town suffers from high levels of tooth decay because the local drinking water is not fluoridated.(Katie Adkins for KFF Health News)Fluoride seen as a great public health achievementFluoride was first added to public water in an American city in 1945 and spread to half of the U.S. population by 1980, according to the CDC. Because of “the dramatic decline” in cavities that followed, in 1999 the CDC dubbed fluoridation as one of 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.Currently more than 70% of the U.S. population on public water systems get fluoridated water, with a recommended concentration of 0.7 milligrams per liter, or about three drops in a 55-gallon barrel, according to the CDC.Fluoride is also present in modern toothpaste, mouthwash, dental varnish, and some food and drinks — like raisins, potatoes, oatmeal, coffee, and black tea. But several dental experts said these products do not reliably reach as many low-income families as drinking water, which has an additional benefit over toothpaste of strengthening children’s teeth from within as they grow.Two recent polls have found that the largest share of Americans support fluoridation, but a sizable minority does not. Polls from Axios/Ipsos and AP-NORC found that 48% and 40% of respondents wanted to keep fluoride in public water supplies, while 29% and 26% supported its removal.Chelsea Fosse, an expert on oral health policy at the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, said she worried that misguided fears of fluoride would cause many people to stop using fluoridated toothpaste and varnish just as Medicaid cuts made it harder to see a dentist.The combination, she said, could be “devastating.”“It will be visibly apparent what this does to the prevalence of tooth decay,” Fosse said. “If we get rid of water fluoridation, if we make Medicaid cuts, and if we don’t support providers in locating and serving the highest-need populations, I truly don’t know what we will do.”Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown what ending water fluoridation could look like. In the past few years, studies of cities in Alaska and Canada have shown that communities that stopped fluoridation saw significant increases in children’s cavities when compared with similar cities that did not. A 2024 study from Israel reported a “two-fold increase” in dental treatments for kids within five years after the country stopped fluoridating in 2014.Despite the benefits of fluoridation, it has been fiercely opposed by some since its inception, said Catherine Hayes, a Harvard dental expert who advises the American Dental Association on fluoride and has studied its use for three decades.Fluoridation was initially smeared as a communist plot against America, Hayes said, and then later fears arose of possible links to cancer, which were refuted through extensive scientific research. In the ‘80s, hysteria fueled fears of fluoride causing AIDS, which was “ludicrous,” Hayes said.More recently, the anti-fluoride movement seized on international research that suggests high levels of fluoride can hinder children’s brain development and has been boosted by high-profile legal and political victories.Last August, a hotly debated report from the National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program found “with moderate confidence” that exposure to levels of fluoride that are higher than what is present in American drinking water is associated with lower IQ in children. The report was based on an analysis of 74 studies conducted in other countries, most of which were considered “low quality” and involved exposure of at least 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water — or more than twice the U.S. recommendation — according to the program.The following month, in a long-simmering lawsuit filed by fluoride opponents, a federal judge in California said the possible link between fluoride and lowered IQ was too risky to ignore, then ordered the federal Environmental Protection Agency to take nonspecified steps to lower that risk. The EPA started to appeal this ruling in the final days of the Biden administration, but the Trump administration could reverse course.The EPA and Department of Justice declined to comment. The White House and Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about fluoride.Despite the National Toxicology Program’s report, Hayes said, no association has been shown to date between lowered IQ and the amount of fluoride actually present in most Americans’ water. The court ruling may prompt additional research conducted in the U.S., Hayes said, which she hoped would finally put the campaign against fluoride to rest.“It’s one of the great mysteries of my career, what sustains it,” Hayes said. “What concerns me is that there’s some belief amongst some members of the public — and some of our policymakers — that there is some truth to this.”Not all experts were so dismissive of the toxicology program’s report. Bruce Lanphear, a children’s health researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, published an editorial in January that said the findings should prompt health organizations “to reassess the risks and benefits of fluoride, particularly for pregnant women and infants.”“The people who are proposing fluoridation need to now prove it’s safe,” Lanphear told NPR in January. “That’s what this study does. It shifts the burden of proof — or it should.”Cities and states rethink fluorideAt least 14 states so far this year have considered or are considering bills that would lift fluoride mandates or prohibit fluoride in drinking water altogether. In February, Utah lawmakers passed the nation’s first ban, which Republican Gov. Spencer Cox told ABC4 Utah he intends to sign. And both Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller have called for their respective states to end fluoridation.“I don’t want Big Brother telling me what to do,” Miller told The Dallas Morning News in February. “Government has forced this on us for too long.”Additionally, dozens of cities and counties have decided to stop fluoridation in the past six months — including at least 16 communities in Florida with a combined population of more than 1.6 million — according to news reports and the Fluoride Action Network, an anti-fluoride group.Stuart Cooper, executive director of that group, said the movement’s unprecedented momentum would be further supercharged if Kennedy and the Trump administration follow through on a recommendation against fluoride.Cooper predicted that most U.S. communities will have stopped fluoridating within years.“I think what you are seeing in Florida, where every community is falling like dominoes, is going to now happen in the United States,” he said. “I think we’re seeing the absolute end of it.”If Cooper’s prediction is right, Hayes said, widespread decay would be visible within years. Kids’ teeth will rot in their mouths, she said, even though “we know how to completely prevent it.”“It’s unnecessary pain and suffering,” Hayes said. “If you go into any children’s hospital across this country, you’ll see a waiting list of kids to get into the operating room to get their teeth fixed because they have severe decay because they haven’t had access to either fluoridated water or other types of fluoride. Unfortunately, that’s just going to get worse.”Methodology: How We CountedThis KFF Health News article identifies communities with an elevated risk of tooth decay by combining data on areas with dentist shortages and unfluoridated drinking water. Our analysis merged Harvard University research on dentist-shortage areas with large datasets on public water systems published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The Harvard research determined that nearly 25 million Americans live in dentist-shortage areas that span much of rural America. The CDC data details the populations served and fluoridation status of more than 38,000 public water systems in 37 states. We classified counties as having elevated risk of tooth decay if they met three criteria:--More than half of the residents live in a dentist-shortage area identified by Harvard.--The number of people receiving unfluoridated water from water systems based in that county amounts to more than half of the county’s population.--The number of people receiving unfluoridated water from water systems based in that county amounts to at least half of the total population of all water systems based in that county, even if those systems reached beyond the county borders, which many do.Our analysis identified approximately 230 counties that meet these criteria, meaning they have both a dire shortage of dentists and largely unfluoridated drinking water.But this total is certainly an undercount. Thirteen states do not report water system data to the CDC, and the agency data does not include private wells, most of which are unfluoridated.KFF Health News data editor Holly K. Hacker contributed to this article.

World's Glaciers Are Losing Record Ice as Global Temperatures Climb, U.N. Says

By Alexander Villegas(Reuters) - Glaciers around the globe are disappearing faster than ever, with the last three-year period seeing the largest...

(Reuters) - Glaciers around the globe are disappearing faster than ever, with the last three-year period seeing the largest glacial mass loss on record, according to a UNESCO report released on Friday. The 9,000 gigatons of ice lost from glaciers since 1975 are roughly equivalent to "an ice block the size of Germany with the thickness of 25 meters," Michael Zemp, director of the Switzerland-based World Glacier Monitoring Service, said during a press conference announcing the report at the UN headquarters in Geneva.The dramatic ice loss, from the Arctic to the Alps, from South America to the Tibetan Plateau, is expected to accelerate as climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, pushes global temperatures higher. This would likely exacerbate economic, environmental and social problems across the world as sea levels rise and these key water sources dwindle.  The report coincides with a UNESCO summit in Paris marking the first World Day for Glaciers, urging global action to protect glaciers around the world.Zemp said that five of the last six years registered the largest losses, with glaciers losing 450 gigatons of mass in 2024 alone.The accelerated loss has made mountain glaciers one of the largest contributors to sea level rise, putting millions at risk of devastating floods and damaging water routes that billions of people depend on for hydroelectric energy and agriculture.Stefan Uhlenbrook, the director of water and cryosphere at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said that about 275,000 glaciers remain globally which, along with the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, comprise about 70% of the world's freshwater."We need to advance our scientific knowledge, we need to advance through better observing systems, through better forecasts and better early warning systems for the planet and the people," Uhlenbrook said.About 1.1 billion people live in mountain communities, which suffer the most immediate impacts of glacier loss, due to the increasing risks with natural hazards and unreliable water sources. The remote locations and difficult terrains also make cheap fixes difficult to come by.Rising temperatures are expected to worsen droughts in areas that rely on snowpack for freshwater, while increasing both the severity and frequency of hazards like avalanches, landslides, flash floods and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).One Peruvian farmer living downstream of a retreating glacier has taken the issue to court, suing German energy giant RWE for a portion of the glacial lake's flood defenses proportionate to its historic global emissions."The changes we see in the field are literally heartbreaking," glaciologist Heidi Sevestre, secretariat at the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, told Reuters outside the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Wednesday.    "Things in certain regions are happening actually much faster than we anticipated," Sevestre added, noting a recent trip to the Rwenzori Mountains, located in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in East Africa, where glaciers are now expected to disappear by 2030.Sevestre has worked with the region's indigenous Bakonzo communities who believe a deity called Kitasamba lives in the glaciers."Can you imagine the deep spiritual connection, this strong attachment they have towards the glaciers and what it might mean for them that their glaciers are disappearing?" Sevestre said.Glacial melt in East Africa has led to increased local conflicts over water, according to the new UNESCO report, and while the impact on a global scale is minimal, the trickle of melting glaciers around the world is having a compounding impact.    Between 2000 and 2023, melting mountain glaciers have caused 18 millimeters of global sea level rise, about 1 mm per year. Every millimeter can expose up to 300,000 people to annual flooding, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service. "Billions of people are connected to glaciers, whether they know it or not, and that will require billions of people to protect them," Sevestre said.(Reporting by Alexander Villegas; Editing by Gloria Dickie and Aurora Ellis)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Controversy erupts over claims Microsoft invented a new state of matter

This discovery could change the computing world entirely. But many are skeptical of their claims

The matter making up the world around us has long-since been organized into three neat categories: solids, liquids and gases. But last month, Microsoft announced that it had allegedly discovered another state of matter originally theorized to exist in 1937.  This new state of matter called the Majorana zero mode is made up of quasiparticles, which act as their own particle and antiparticle. The idea is that the Majorana zero mode could be used to build a quantum computer, which could help scientists answer complex questions that standard computers are not capable of solving, with implications for medicine, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. In late February, Sen. Ted Cruz presented Microsoft’s new computer chip at a congressional hearing, saying, “Technologies like this new chip I hold in the palm of my hand, the Majorana 1 quantum chip, are unlocking a new era of computing that will transform industries from health care to energy, solving problems that today's computers simply cannot.” However, Microsoft’s announcement, claiming a “breakthrough in quantum computing,” was met with skepticism from some physicists in the field. Proving that this form of quantum computing can work requires first demonstrating the existence of Majorana quasiparticles, measuring what the Majorana particles are doing, and creating something called a topological qubit used to store quantum information. But some say that not all of the data necessary to prove this has been included in the research paper published in Nature, on which this announcement is based. And due to a fraught history of similar claims from the company being disputed and ultimately rescinded, some are extra wary of the results. Although the paper describes the structure and architecture that could potentially be used to build a topological quantum computer, it’s not clear if all of these ingredients can be put together to actually construct the system, said Dr. Jelena Klinovaj, a theoretical physicist at the University of Basel who studies topology of quantum.  "Discourse and skepticism are all part of the scientific process." “In this Microsoft paper, they cannot show that they can really operate it,” Klinovaj told Salon in a video call. “They did not show in a peer-reviewed publication that it is really a topological state because some objects could have exactly the same properties in experiments.” Despite Microsoft’s announcement, one of the peer-review files accompanying the Nature paper also states, “The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices.” Dr. Chetan Nayak, Microsoft Station Q Director, said in an email that prior work published in Nature “confirms the existence of [Majorana zero modes] and demonstrates the basic operation needed for a topological qubit.” “Since then, we have fabricated and tested topological qubits, building on this prior work and further confirming the existence of [Majorana zero modes],” Nayak wrote. A Microsoft spokesperson said in an email that the company has made significant progress since the paper was submitted and has been able to demonstrate “the basic native operations in a measurement-based topological qubit.” Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. “Discourse and skepticism are all part of the scientific process,” they wrote. “That is why we are dedicated to the continued open publication of our research, so that everyone can build on what others have discovered and learned.” It’s not the first time there has been controversy in this research field. In 2018, a study partially funded by Microsoft but conducted by an independent university reported that they had detected the presence of Majorana zero-modes. Later, it was retracted by Nature, the journal that published it after a report from independent experts put the findings under more intense scrutiny. In the report, four physicists not involved in the research concluded that it did not appear that the authors had intentionally misrepresented the data, but instead seemed to be “caught up in the excitement of the moment.” Establishing the existence of these particles is extremely complex in part because disorder in the device can create signals that mimic these quasiparticles when they are not actually there.  "Me and many other experts do not think they have demonstrated even the basic science behind it." Modern computers in use today are encoded in bits, which can either be in a zero state (no current flowing through them), or a one state (current flowing.) These bits work together to send information and signals that communicate with the computer, powering everything from cell phones to video games. Companies like Google, IBM and Amazon have invested in designing another form of quantum computer that uses chips built with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Qubits can exist in both zero and one states at the same time due to a phenomenon called superposition.  However, qubits are subject to external noise from the environment that can affect their performance, said Dr. Paolo Molignini, a researcher in theoretical quantum physics at Stockholm University. “Because qubits are in a superposition of zero and one, they are very prone to errors and they are very prone to what is called decoherence, which means there could be noise, thermal fluctuations or many things that can collapse the state of the qubits,” Molignini told Salon in a video call. “Then you basically lose all of the information that you were encoding.” It’s necessary to correct errors that creep in with this noise, and in order to do so, you need to add many more qubits to the system. Within the last six months, Amazon announced it had built a computer chip that used five qubits, and Google announced that it had built one with 105 qubits. In December, Google said its quantum computer could perform a calculation that a standard computer could complete in 10 septillion years — a period far longer than the age of the universe — in just under five minutes.  However, a general-purpose computer would require billions of qubits, so these approaches are still a far cry from having practical applications, said Dr. Patrick Lee, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-authored the report leading to the 2018 Nature paper's retraction. Microsoft is taking a different approach to quantum computing by trying to develop  a topological qubit, which has the ability to store information in multiple places at once. Topological qubits exist within the Majorana zero states and are appealing because they can theoretically offer greater protection against environmental noise that destroys information within a quantum system. Think of it like an arrow, where the arrowhead holds a portion of the information and the arrow tail holds the rest, Lee said. Distributing information across space like this is called topological protection. “If you are able to put them far apart from each other, then you have a chance of maintaining the identity of the arrow even if it is subject to noise,” Lee told Salon in a phone interview. “The idea is that if the noise affects the head, it doesn’t kill the arrow and if it affects only the tail it doesn’t kill your arrow. It has to affect both sides simultaneously to kill your arrow, and that is very unlikely if you are able to put them apart.” In a Microsoft press release announcing the Majorana 1, the company says the chip could calculate catalysts that break down plastic pollutants and “lead to self-healing materials that repair cracks in bridges or airplane parts, shattered phone screens or scratched car doors.” “Enzymes, a kind of biological catalyst, could be harnessed more effectively in healthcare and agriculture, thanks to accurate calculations about their behavior that only quantum computing can provide,” it states. “This could lead to breakthroughs helping to eradicate global hunger: boosting soil fertility to increase yields or promoting sustainable growth of foods in harsh climates.” Yet Dr. Sergey Frolov, an associate professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh whose analysis of the 2018 study data led to its subsequent investigation and retraction, argues that the paper does not demonstrate the existence of a topological qubit which is critical in establishing the quantum computing system they say they are creating. “The long story short is that me and many other experts do not think they have demonstrated even the basic science behind it, let alone the leap into technology of scaling up, production, etc.,” Frolov told Salon in a phone interview.  Nevertheless, Lee believes that even if the data doesn’t entirely prove that topological qubits exist in the Majorana zero-state, it still represents a scientific advancement. But he noted that several important issues need to be solved before it has practical implications. For one, the coherence time of these particles — or how long they can exist without being affected by environmental noise — is still very short, he explained. “They make a measurement, come back, and the qubit has changed, so you have lost your coherence,” Lee said. “With this very short time, you cannot do anything with it.” It could be that some form of engineering is necessary to incrementally improve the coherence of the qubits to solve this problem, Lee said. Or, it could require other major scientific breakthroughs that change the way we think about them, he said.  Nayak said the company plans to present these findings at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit later this month. But it’s yet to be seen if all of the pieces necessary to make this form of quantum computer will come together into something with practical implications. “As far as the press announcement that they have a topological qubit, I would say most scientists would dispute that,” Lee said. “They are far from having a working qubit.” In the meantime, some are concerned that the back and forth on the topic within the field could cast a shadow on future developments in topological quantum computing. “I just wish they were a bit more careful with their claims because I fear that if they don’t measure up to what they are saying, there might be a backlash at some point where people say, ‘You promised us all these fancy things and where are they now?’” Molignini said. “That might damage the entire quantum community, not just themselves.” Read more about technology

Rain gave Australia’s environment a fourth year of reprieve in 2024 – but this masks deepening problems: report

Favourable short-term conditions kept Australia’s environmental scorecard high in 2024 – but long-term problems are worsening.

Lauren Henderson/ShutterstockFor the fourth year running, the condition of Australia’s environment has been relatively good overall. Our national environment scorecard released today gives 2024 a mark of 7.7 out of 10. You might wonder how this can be. After all, climate change is intensifying and threatened species are still in decline. The main reason: good rainfall partly offset the impact of global warming. In many parts of Australia, rainfall, soil water and river flows were well above average, there were fewer large bushfires, and vegetation continued to grow. Overall, conditions were above average in the wetter north and east of Australia, although parts of the south and west were very dry. But this is no cause for complacency. Australia’s environment remains under intense pressure. Favourable conditions have simply offered a welcome but temporary reprieve. As a nation we must grasp the opportunity now to implement lasting solutions before the next cycle of drought and fire comes around. This snapshot shows the environmental score for a range of indicators in Australia. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND Preparing the national scorecard For the tenth year running, we have trawled through a huge amount of data from satellites, weather and water measuring stations, and ecological surveys. We gathered information about climate change, oceans, people, weather, water, soils, plants, fire and biodiversity. Then we analysed the data and summarised it all in a report that includes an overall score for the environment. This score (between zero and ten) gives a relative measure of how favourable conditions were for nature, agriculture and our way of life over the past year in comparison to all years since 2000. This is the period we have reliable records for. While it is a national report, conditions vary enormously between regions and so we also prepare regional scorecards. You can download the scorecard for your region at our website. Different jurisdictions had quite different environmental scores in 2024. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND Welcome news, but alarming trends continue Globally, 2024 was the world’s hottest year on record. It was Australia’s second hottest year, with the record warmest sea surface temperatures. As a result, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its fifth mass bleaching event since 2016, while Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia also experienced bleaching. Yet bushfire activity was low despite high temperatures, thanks to regular rainfall. National rainfall was 18% above average, improving soil condition and increasing tree canopy cover. States such as New South Wales saw notable improvements in environmental conditions, while conditions also improved somewhat in Western Australia. Others experienced declines, particularly South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania. These regional contrasts were largely driven by rainfall – good rains can hide some underlying environmental degradation trends. Favourable weather conditions bumped up the nation’s score this year, rather than sustained environmental improvements. Mapping the environmental condition score to local government areas reveals poor (red) conditions in the west and the south, with good scores (blue) in the east and north. White is neutral. Australia’s Environment Explorer, CC BY-NC-ND A temporary respite? The past four years show Australia’s environment is capable of bouncing back from drought and fire when conditions are right. But the global climate crisis continues to escalate, and Australia remains highly vulnerable. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather and fire events continue to threaten our environment and livelihoods. The consequences of extreme events can persist for many years, like we have seen for the Black Summer of 2019–20. To play our part in limiting global warming, Australia needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Progress is stalling: last year, national emissions fell slightly (0.6%) below 2023 levels but were still higher than in 2022. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions per person remain among the highest in the world. Biodiversity loss remains an urgent issue. The national threatened species list grew by 41 species in 2024. While this figure is much lower than the record of 130 species added in 2023, it remains well above the long-term average of 25 species added per year. More than half of the newly listed or uplisted species were directly affected by the Black Summer fires. Meanwhile, habitat destruction and invasive species continue to put pressure on native ecosystems and species. The Threatened Species Index captures data from long-term threatened species monitoring. The index is updated annually but with a three-year lag due largely to delays in data processing and sharing. This means the 2024 index includes data up to 2021. The index revealed the abundance of threatened birds, mammals, plants, and frogs has fallen an average of 58% since 2000. But there may be some good news. Between 2020 and 2021, the overall index increased slightly (2%) suggesting the decline has stabilised and some recovery is evident across species groups. We’ll need further monitoring to confirm whether this represents a lasting turnaround or a temporary pause in declines. This graph shows the relative abundance of different categories of species listed as threatened under the EPBC Act since 2000, as collated by the Threatened Species Index. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND What needs to happen? The 2024 Australia’s Environment Report offers a cautiously optimistic picture of the present. Without intervention, the future will look a lot worse. Australia must act decisively to secure our nation’s environmental future. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, introducing stronger land management policies and increasing conservation efforts to maintain and restore our ecosystems. Without redoubling our efforts, the apparent environmental improvements will not be more than a temporary pause in a long-term downward trend. Australia’s Environment Report is produced by the ANU Fenner School for Environment & Society and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), which is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Albert Van Dijk receives or has previously received funding from several government-funded agencies, grant schemes and programs. Shoshana Rapley is a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the Australian National University and has received funding from the Ecological Society of Australia and BirdLife Australia. Tayla Lawrie is a current employee of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

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