[Market-farming] treated seeds consequences
Bill Shoemaker
wshoemak at inil.com
Thu Jun 12 15:54:58 EDT 2008
Unless you plant on a massive scale and use lots of the seed treatment, it
will probably biologically degrade before it causes any groundwater
problems, especially if you feed your soil through composting, green
manures, animal manures, etc. The microflora are actually quite capable of
"feeding" on these substances to break them down and use the energy
released. Most groundwater contamination results from massive, repeated use
of pesticides, particularly herbicides. Also, they are not usually systemic,
meaning the plant does not take them in. They will remain outside the plant
and in the soil. The beans you harvest will not be contaminated and the
shoot system will have no residues. They stay with the seed remnants.
Bill Shoemaker, Sr Research Specialist, Food Crops
University of Illinois - St Charles Horticulture Research Center
www.nres.uiuc.edu/faculty/directory/shoemaker_wh.html
> Folks: I inadvertedly planted some seeds, unmarked, that were treated. My
> questions: what effect does this have? I know it will "pollute" the soil
> and eventually drain into the water table. But what will it do to the
> plant
> (bean)? Will there be residue in the beans themselves? Should I destroy
> the
> plant after harvest instead of putting it into the compost pile or
> tunrning
> it in?
Do you know what the seeds were treated with? If beans, I'm guessing most
likely it was a fungicide. Here's a website with some information that may
be useful:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/b639/index.html
I don't know how the organic regs deal with this question, but if that's not
a concern, my own inclination would be to not worry any more about it. The
amount of fungicide per seed is quite small. It is likely to be largely
confined to the seed coat, which will either remain in the soil after the
cotyledons emerge, or to be dropped off by them as they sprout. Any small
amount that penetrates to the cotyledons or the root tip would be so small,
that it is likely to be dwarfed by the toxins we all ingest daily from just
living in the world we do. I don't know what the half-life of the chemical
used is, but it's pretty likely that, by harvest time, it's all broken down
anyway. I wouldn't worry at all about composting.
If you really want something to worry about, ask yourself (as I do) what the
effect is of all that rotenone we've been exposed to. Rotenone is used to
induce Parkinson's disease in rats.
--
Richard Robinson
http://www.nasw.org/users/rrobinson/
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