> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate in 2016:
"The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level"
"Glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures"
"Glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet"
"The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity"
"There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization...The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans"
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it.
From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see the next sunrise.
I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.
Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate.
It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.
I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?
Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because:
> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
and
> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies.
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill them.
Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
>> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria possess this pathway
One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.
A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.
We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
Why wasn’t the paper retracted 8 years ago?
Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate in 2016:
https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/agphome/documents/Pe...
Tptacek in 2018:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc...
How many retractions has Dr Oz published?
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
> The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans
It actually might be the case and it still can be damaging to people by affecting the gut microbiome:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
>Tptacek in 2018:
Oh man that's comedy gold.
Makes me want to punch everyone else on the high score board into a search engine.
Kinda funny how the "it kills stuff, it can't be good for ya" luddite crowd turned out to be right all along.
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> The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level
Was that the retracted study or a different one?
CGMthrowaway writes:
> Trust the science.
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
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Big Dr Oz fan eh? Got any quotes from Oprah or other HNers to balance the epistemic master class?
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It's hard to admit we're wrong
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
Don't spray herbicides everywhere (unless you're certain that's what you want or need).
Instead, just spray each weed a little bit, right above where the leaves connect to the stem.
I get a little paintbrush and paint the leaves of each dandelion with round-up - that ends up killing them but largely leaving other plants alone.
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Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it. From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
1 reply →
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
[dead]
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
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This is just a recipe to spread weeds everywhere. If you mow them, most of the time you’ll just break them open and spread their seeds
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I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
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In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
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I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
I live in an extremely high wildfire risk area. I also have an extreme rodent problem. Keeping the vegetation low around structures is indicated.
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We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd rather not have a dog and children covered in those.
Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.
It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.
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Pesticides aren't used to kill weeds.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
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Why is something someone else enjoys a "pesticide-ridden hellscape?"
How would you like me to come and pompously shit all over something you enjoy?
How about letting him do what he wants with his own land and not insulting his ideal home?
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Sorry you think my Japanese garden is a hellscape.
> I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
Doesn't the vinegar act pretty quickly? Keep the dog inside that afternoon, then hose it down in the morning.
Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
A garden torch is unreasonably effective.
Glyphosate is perfectly safe at the levels we use it domestically. If there is a safety issue it's at commercial dosages.
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
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absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
You sound neurotic. Anyway just pull the weeds out with a towel and you hands, or use boiling water to kill them
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
When are we going to start imprisoning people, I wonder.
Pay the fine and Pay for pardon is the business du jour.
When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see the next sunrise.
I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
When their employers stop giving freebies to politicians?
Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.
Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
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In this economy? We have people murdering CEOs for free!
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The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate.
It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
Oats too.
> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.
I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?
Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
Cutting dandelions with a lawnmower just sends the seeds everywhere making the problem worse.
Only if you wait for them to go to seed. If it's important to you, don't do that.
I let them grow. Dandelions are harmless.
Some neighbors spray poison ivy --- I just cover it with stones/bricks when I see it.
The sole surviving researcher attached to that paper is still actively publishing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...
Faking research data that then leads to the death of citizens from your product should result in a corporate death sentence.
It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because:
> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
and
> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
The problem is always how well one can prove that any harm was done, or that theoretical harm would be done.
What is a corporate death sentence? And if true, the list would be LONG
Wiping out shareholders. I bet shareholders would be a lot more cautious if that was an option.
and criminal penalty consequequences fornthe people who prepared and signed the paper in bad faith
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Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
OK, but that is not how you properly test pesticides for safety.
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So what's the current speculation on how it causes cancer?
Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in humans.
Is it killing gut bacteria?
Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S21522...
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
If what you say is true, we would know almost nothing about pharmacology and modern medicine wouldn't exist.
There are basic scientific and statistical methods to avoid this.
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When it comes to mechanistic speculation, absolutely.
Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill them.
Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
>> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria possess this pathway
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201120095858.h...
Tl; dr:
One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.
A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.
[ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.
We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines
https://archive.is/dRAMg
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