Hi All,
First time post. My husband told me he read that there is roundup/glyphosate used in wheat. As it matures it is used to ripen faster. I hope this is not something done in the flour I purchase here, but not sure about how to find out if any other organic flours are treated with this herbicide. Does anyone know? I did find it online with an article from EWG from 2019/ glysophate contamination in food…
There are other articles but this is the one that got my attention.
Thanks
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Hi Rita, Yes, this product/glysophate, seems to be in lots of food, sadly. After trying for years to continually search for clean products, it’s getting so difficult. One Degree Organics labels some of their products, glysophate free. Look for the symbol for other products as well…It’s just like the Organic Symbol that is on products.
We can do the best we can in growing as much as we can and buying quality food for ourselves and our families.
EWG is a very good site. I do my best for cleaning products and skin products. There too, I try and make as much as I can of cleaning products and skin products. Branch Basic Women have an informative story about the danger of cleaning products as well.
Patty
Thanks, I read that article and am glad to have that information.
Breadtopia states that they source “certified organic grains.” Certified organic food products are not allowed to have synthetic herbicides like glyphosate. That doesn’t mean drift can’t occur from neighboring fields. I don’t know if there are distance requirements between organic and non-organic crops and I’d be curious to know how often the grains from these farms are randomly tested by the USDA or whatever standardizing body governs “certified organic.”
That said, I’m not too worried about it. I’m going to give their flours a try in any case as I won’t give another dime to King Arthur and their political initiatives. I currently buy all stone-milled from a small mill in IL, but would love to add a source of more-refined high-protein flour for some of my products (like Breadtopia offers).
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At the present time, Breadtopia exclusively purchases certified organic grain (from a variety of farmers and distributors). Organic certification precludes the use of glyphosate on any fields used to produce grains labeled as organic. In addition, Organic farmers must maintain defined “buffer zones” between their organic fields and adjacent agricultural land that is not under organic management.
Still, as mentioned in a post above, drift of sprayed chemicals can happen and we are not independently testing the individual lots of grain that we receive from our suppliers so we cannot state with absolute certainty that there is 0% chance of any glyphosate contamination in grain we sell.
What we can say is that we are not purchasing grain products from farmers who use glyphosate and we are making a best faith effort to sell 100% clean, glyphosate-free grain. In addition we are working very hard to support and nurture relationships with farmers who are specifically dedicated to producing the safest, cleanest, healthiest grain possible. That’s what we want to put in our own bodies and that’s what we sell.
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Thank you very much. I have not been disappointed in anything I have bought from your company. Your customer service (questions) is also head and shoulders above the rest.
Camas Country Mill - Oregon
Central Milling - Calif and Utah
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Glyphosate is sprayed on grains 7 to 10 days before harvest. As a systemic herbicide, it causes the plant to throw everything it has into the next generation by developing out the seed before the plant dies. The seeds can be 20% bigger than if allowed to mature naturally, making for a larger crop yield.
As treating pre-harvest grains with glyphosate increased in popularity, the FDA increased the allowable level of glyphosate in grains by 35-times the previous allowable level. I supposed some folks could look at that and conclude glyphosate is not as bad as we were initially led to believe.
You can avoid glyphosate drift on wheat by growing your own. To avoid glyphosate, I tried growing my own wheat, just to see if it is possible. It is amazingly easy to do, you can do it in your backyard. For anyone giving it a go, I suggest researching the variety of wheat best suited to your area that is hull-able. Not all wheat varieties are easy to get the seed out of the hull, some wheat varieties are best left to industrial machines. I grew Sonora wheat, it practically hulls itself, just slap it around in a 5-gal bucket and the seeds fall right out of the hulls, literally. There are a couple other varieties like that, those varieties are best for growing wheat at home.
Note: for folks in the San Francisco bay area, up and over to the Sacramento region, and across to the coast, growing your own wheat in your backyard and milling it yourself will produce San Francisco sourdough bread, whether you want it to or not. 
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Hi there. I see a few other people already noted this, but by definition organic farming completely forbids the use of anything like glyphosate in any part of the farming process. It also does take reasonable measures to address any serious accidental contamination by drift from neighboring farms etc. So while trace contamination of groundwater, etc, by widespread use of glyphosate is an increasingly troubling issue, organic grain should be just as safe as any other product.
This disgusting practice of “chemical ripening” is definitely something that people should be more widely aware of. I do my best to educate and I only ever recommend buying organic grain when people ask me or when we discuss sourcing flour/grain in workshops. Is the system perfect? Of course not. But it’s so vaaaastly better than the alternative that to cast aspersions on its “perfection”, as cynically-minded or skeptical people often like to do, is to be misleading.
Be well and welcome to the forum.