Check out this recent comment on one of my videos about Grazon-contaminated manure.

“Great video David!

Hopefully I don’t ramble on and typo everyone into submission, BUT, this “grazon” toxin is now a part of my life’s great learning curve mistakes, and this subject is now something I am extremely passionate about sharing in the hopes that no one has to repeat my experience.

An “FYI” for all those who think you can “compost” grazon or it’s 7 or so similar sister “broadleaf” chemicals away, you are dead wrong, and a laboratory test will confirm it. The “we composted it and didn’t have problems”, quotes are from people who haven’t been using or consuming it for decades, and I would say… “just wait”… as they were spraying kids eating food, kids in swimming pools, young military recruits, and animals we consume, with DDT, and even had adds with singing cows and the words, “DDT is good for me-e-e”, for a long time before it was banned.

This family of broadleaf chemicals remain residual for years. And it doesn’t just destroy the garden and a few types of plants, it is a systemic in the plants (that don’t “visually” appear to be affected) and is passed on to the seed produced, and it will be a systemic in your body as well. Common sense should be all you need, but mine failed me, and last years “grazon straw mulch” mistake has continued to foment regret for me after starting seed from last years crops. I used “only” the hay and no manure, and didn’t till any in. I used it, only as mulch on top of the soil… no manure or compost.

Unfortunately, I used it everywhere in my garden last year, to my lasting regret, as this year when I started some seeds collected from last years harvest, from squash and sunflowers that were mulched with this pariah, and a lot of the seedlings look massively twisted, deformed, have retarded growth, and resemble the results I saw last year with my peas and beans curliqueing and dying. I was also baffled by the poor performance and stunting of my banana melon plants, and brassicas, and some deforming of tomato plants, stunted grapes, and stunted cucumbers from my “straw bale growing” experiment, which started my deep search for answers.

This channel is one of the many alarming results I came across in my search, and I was stunned by this find. The gardening community has been betrayed by the agencies that claim to be watching out for our well being, which instead, are in “big chem’s” wallet and under their influence. There is nothing out there to warn us. You virtually have to poison your garden and be diligent enough to search for why things went so wrong, and if you are lucky, you will find “Grazon” and friends. My conclusion is that I will never get straw, hay, manure, or anything else from anyone for my garden, unless I know 100% without a doubt, and with an ironclad guarantee, that they haven’t sprayed any chemical, period.

Even if it was 7 years ago, that’s a non sequitur for me, because one experience like this in 50 years of gardening is enough. I predict the future will ferret out results that show this chemical to be deleterious on human health as well as dangerous for animals, just as the majority of chemicals have been proven to be, after the decades of similar chemical mistakes man has made with a myriad of “solutions”, such as DDT and Glyphosate, to name only 2. If the cows eat it, then anything from that cow is laden with what it consumes, be it meat, milk, or manure.

Remember, you are what you eat.

I have spent a week of full days, of a nightmare of clean up, hauling every last blade of that Grazon contaminated straw that I could possibly remove from last year’s fatal mistake of straw mulch, to the dump.

What really concerns me is that the residuals are known to last up to 7 years (it will be decades before we see the long term effects), that may have been rinsed into my soil.

Unfortunately, I won’t know until I see how things are growing, surviving, stunting, or mutating, in those areas where straw was. Like many of you who shared “our” collective grazon experience, this grazon accident I made has been the worst garden mistake of my entire gardening adventures, and I’ve been at this for half a century. Good luck to everyone out there who is also on this unwanted adventure.”

He’s right. We don’t know how bad it is long-term, but we already know it’s very, very bad in the short-term as many wrecked gardens testify.

Don’t trust manure or hay.

This recent video from Cosmopolitan Cornbread on YouTube is just another example: