Paraquat is the deadliest chemical in agriculture. It is banned in 74 countries, and now one U.S. state, Vermont.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s warning is, “One sip can kill,” and the agency has documented several deaths from the accidental ingestion of tiny amounts.

The EPA says paraquat is too toxic to use on golf courses, but it allows it to be sprayed where food is grown.

Farmers and farmworkers face the heaviest exposure. From 2013 to 2017, paraquat use doubled and Parkinson’s disease diagnoses increased by 107%. Lawyers for paraquat-exposed Parkinson’s victims say paraquat manufacturers Syngenta and Chevron knew for decades that paraquat caused Parkinson’s by destroying dopamine-creating brain cells.

Paraquat also contributes to cancer, the second leading cause of death among children ages 1-14. Paraquat is associated with childhood acute myeloid leukemia. In adults, it’s linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and thyroid cancer. It’s also a factor in birth defects.

Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) introduced the Paraquat Prevention Act in June. The bill would ban the use of paraquat and set a no-tolerance limit for residues on food to prevent paraquat from being used on imports.

TAKE ACTION: Tell your Congresspersons to pass the Paraquat Prevention Act!

Act now to ban paraquat in your state: Vermont Bans Paraquat—Your State Should Be Next!

Already took action? Help spread the word! Forward this alert via email or share it on FACEBOOK OR INSTAGRAM. Our paraquat posts already have thousands of likes!

LEARN MORE: Paraquat Health Risks and Hot-Spots: California, Mississippi, and Louisiana

On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Monsanto v. Durnell to strip cancer victims of a key legal pathway to hold Bayer accountable for Roundup. John Durnell was a gardener who used Roundup for decades. He got non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A Missouri jury awarded him over a million dollars after finding Monsanto failed to warn him of the risks. Last week the Supreme Court wiped that away, and with it, potentially the claims of tens of thousands of people just like him.

Bayer spent years and tens of millions of dollars building a network of influence that runs straight through the Trump White House, the Justice Department, and the EPA. The same administration that promised to Make America Healthy Again filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to side with a German corporation over American cancer patients. The people running the EPA right now came directly from the industry they are supposed to regulate. That pipeline delivered this ruling.

But the fight is not over. Lawyers say the ruling was narrow and cases built on negligence and design defect will continue. Bayer may have won Monsanto v. Durnell, but it will rue the day it kicked our hornets’ nest! Anger at the company had already inspired bills banning or restricting its carcinogenic glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide to be introduced in a dozen states. Let’s make it 50!

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State to Ban Glyphosate, Not Bail Out Bayer!

Read the full story of how Bayer bought its way to this ruling and dig deeper with Carey Gillam and Stacy Malkan’s essential reporting. Then help us make it 50 states.

Earlier this week, OCA supporters added 20,000 signatures to the public comment period urging the USDA not to deregulate genetically modified organisms.

The comment period has now closed. But the fight isn’t over, and there is still time to act! Congress is considering legislation that would strip oversight from pesticide-producing GMOs entirely, including crops genetically engineered to kill insects by silencing their genes, a process called RNAi. Independent researchers have raised concerns that this gene-silencing mechanism doesn’t always stay on target and may trigger immune responses in humans, particularly in newborns and people with gut health issues.

Bayer-Monsanto’s RNAi SmartStax corn has been growing on U.S. farms since 2023. The EPA never required immune system studies or assessed inhalation exposure, even though corn pollen can travel up to half a mile on the wind. With 20 to 30 percent of the 86 million acres of GMO corn now carrying RNAi traits, this is already happening.

If Congress removes oversight entirely, there may be no way to track what follows.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress Not to Deregulate Pesticide-Producing GMOs!

by Andrew Watman, Forbes:

“It’s not too much of a distant memory when nobody knew how to pronounce ‘quinoa.’ Now it’s part of mainstream vernacular. Many may raise an eyebrow similarly today when they hear ‘einkorn.’ It’s ironic, given it’s been around longer than practically any other food product we know today.

Einkorn is the first wheat ever grown on this earth. ‘Einkorn is the wheat that Caesar ate,’ Werner Forster, founder of the brand working to bring einkorn back into everyday diets, Revival Einkorn, tells me. ‘Whatever they were eating–it was all based on einkorn.’

Einkorn is a non-hybridized ancient grain that’s extremely high in protein, fiber and a plethora of nutrients, which also happen to make it taste nutty and delicious. ‘We decided to double down and just be einkorn nerds,’ Forster says. ‘Americans would prefer to eat wheat if it was healthy. Plus its ability to promote long-term, sustainable productivity of soil–it’s the perfect food.’”

Ancient grains like einkorn, particularly when they are farmed regeneratively and organically, have a more natural connection with the human body and nourish us the way nature intended.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell landed hard. But for OCA, it was also a reminder of how long we have been in this fight and why we are not stopping now.

Back in April 2017, OCA joined Beyond Pesticides in filing a federal lawsuit directly challenging Monsanto’s claim that Roundup “targets an enzyme found in plants, but not in people or pets.” We argued it was false and misleading, because glyphosate devastates the beneficial bacteria in the human gut microbiome. In May 2018, a federal judge ruled the lawsuit could move forward, refusing to dismiss it. That was a win, hard fought and meaningful.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week closed one legal door. But OCA has never relied on a single door. We have been building this case in courts, in statehouses, in grocery store aisles, and in the inboxes of hundreds of thousands of people like you for nearly thirty years.

All of this takes a lot of time, effort, and people power. Fighting Bayer in court, organizing our network to take action, keeping the pressure on Washington.. it all takes money. Right now we’re pushing for state bans on glyphosate, fighting PFAS pesticide approvals, urging Congress to ban paraquat, and demanding the USDA stop sitting on the regenerative agriculture funding Congress already appropriated.

Your donation goes to making this a healthier, more biodiverse world.

If this week’s news made you angry, please put that anger to work. Every dollar counts, however it comes.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Have you considered making a gift from your IRA?

NATURE RELATIONSHIP INDEX

Stockholm Resilience Centre:

“A new paper published in Nature proposes an optimistic, practical approach to inspire stronger action on nature. Rather than focusing on what we’re doing wrong, the paper proposes a bold new way forward; a global framework that measures how well people and nature are thriving together.

The paper, titled ‘An Aspirational Approach to Planetary Futures,’ is the result of a groundbreaking international collaboration from researchers from around the world, including professor Laura Pereira, from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Global Change Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The team calls for the creation of a ‘Nature Relationship Index’ to sit alongside the Human Development Index (HDI). The aim is to track how countries are improving human relationships with the rest of life on Earth, including a thriving and accessible nature, using natural resources responsibly, and protecting ecosystems – turning these into measurable goals for progress.”

The Nature Relationship Index offers a new way of understanding whether a country is truly on a sustainable path, and how it uses and protects its natural resources for achieving wellbeing.

READ: The Measure of Flourishing- Human Prosperity Depends on Nature, but No Global Metric Has Captured This With Precision. Enter the Nature Relationship Index

Dr. Sai Balasubramanian, M.D., J.D.,Forbes:

“The concept of autonomous pharmacies is becoming more popular. This week, startup Queue emerged from stealth, with a goal to create autonomous robotic driven pharmacies. Queue operates by taking sealed pill bottles in one end and produces filled prescription vials in the other. The company claims that it can ‘deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations and can be deployed across retail locations, hospitals, rural communities and other care settings where pharmacy access is constrained.’

As one of Queue’s lead investors explains, ‘pharmacy has an infrastructure problem. While the industry has been forced to work around labor shortages, store closures and broken unit economics, [Queue] has taken a fundamentally different approach: automating the physical fulfillment layer itself. It has exceptional founders solving a massive, urgent problem with technology that can deliver outsized impact.’”

But important questions remain. For many communities, human pharmacists are not just purely dispensing labor; they advise, counsel and often provide valuable insights to their patients. 

President Trump signed an executive order this week promising to expand support for regenerative agriculture. But the order came just hours after the Supreme Court handed Bayer a win shielding it from Roundup cancer liability, a case the administration’s own lawyers pushed for. Even some of the administration’s own health allies weren’t buying it, with one prominent food safety advocate calling it an empty gesture that sidesteps the real chemical regulation farmers have actually been asking for.

Here is what the order actually committed to: the President directed the Secretary of Agriculture to “maximize the funding of the current Regenerative Pilot Program and evaluate ways to expand the reach of the program, including by sharing the results of the program with a broad audience of stakeholders. This expansion shall include using existing authorities to create public-private partnerships that can bring new capacity to producers interested in adopting regenerative practices.” In other words, nothing new. Just a directive to evaluate and use what already exists.

This also comes after more than a year of USDA yanking or freezing hundreds of millions in grants that were already helping farmers make that transition. Grants that working farmers had built their plans around were cancelled without warning.

TAKE ACTION: Congress Appropriated $4.5B for Regenerative, Why Is USDA Only Giving It $700M?

Read more here.

On June 30, just days after the Supreme Court handed Bayer a win shielding it from Roundup cancer liability, the Trump EPA quietly approved more PFAS-based “forever chemical” pesticides for use on crops. PFAS chemicals, the same class linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, and immune damage in countless studies, are now heading to more American farmland with a government green light.

Six new PFAS pesticides have now been approved, from Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva. Advocates weren’t mincing words, calling it a national outrage and a direct betrayal of every MAHA promise. One critic said Trump’s legacy will be measured in the millions his policies sicken and prematurely kill.

This is the same EPA that says paraquat is too toxic for golf courses, but allows it to be sprayed on the food we eat.

The pattern speaks for itself and is harming us all.

Read the full story at Common Dreams.

TAKE ACTION: Tell your state legislators to ban PFAS pesticides before the next approval lands!

Organic Farming Leads Evidence Base on Biodiversity and Soil Health The science keeps stacking up. A new body of research confirms what organic farmers have known for decades, that farming without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers builds richer soil, supports more species, and creates more resilient land over time. Worth a read for anyone who needs the data to back up the conversation. Read the full story at Farming UK.

Why Shared Moments Matter: The World Cup, Community and Well-Being With the World Cup underway, Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health takes a thoughtful look at how shared sporting events affect us psychologically. The risks, from gambling to binge drinking, are real. But so is the genuine mental health benefit of collective joy, shared identity, and feeling part of something bigger than yourself. Read the full story at CAMH.

Scientists Unlock Gut-Healing Power of Fruits and Nuts Paired With the Right Gut Microbes Not all fiber works the same way for everyone. New research shows that the gut-healing benefits of fruits and nuts depend heavily on which microbes are already living in your gut. The right microbial community can unlock powerful anti-inflammatory compounds from the same foods that might do very little for someone with a different microbiome makeup. Learn more at Medical Xpress.

Gut Microbiome Could Remain Disrupted For Over a Decade After Polyp Removal Colonoscopies save lives, but a new study suggests the bowel prep process may do longer lasting damage to the gut microbiome than previously understood. Researchers found disruption persisting for more than ten years after polyp removal, which could help explain why some cancer prevention techniques aren’t as effective as expected. Read the full story at Science Alert.

Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir A new book from Chelsea Green explores the living world behind great cheese, the specific fungi, bacteria, landscapes, and centuries of human knowledge that make a real Roquefort or an aged Gruyère unrepeatable anywhere else. A beautiful read for anyone who thinks about food as culture, place, and ecology all at once. Learn more at Chelsea Green Publishing.

Scoop: Trump Backs MAHA in Heated, “Shocking” Oval Office Fight on Pesticides Axios reports on a heated confrontation inside the Oval Office over pesticides and the Make America Healthy Again agenda, with Trump ultimately siding with MAHA advocates in what insiders called a shocking outcome given the administration’s record. A fascinating window into the real tensions between the chemical industry’s grip on this White House and the health politics Trump is trying to straddle. Read the full story at Axios.

Does Cooperation Beat Cheating After All? A new take on the classic prisoner’s dilemma suggests that cooperation may be more evolutionarily stable than previously thought. Nautilus digs into the game theory and biology behind why working together sometimes beats defection, and what that means for how we understand human and animal behavior. Learn more at Nautilus.

California’s Landmark Anti-Plastics Law Sparks Anger as 17 States Move To Sue California’s sweeping single-use plastics law is drawing fire from 17 other states who are threatening legal action, setting up what could be a major battle over whether states can set their own standards on plastic packaging. Sound familiar? It’s the same fight playing out in pesticides, GMOs, and animal welfare all at once. Read the full story at The Guardian.

How to Feel at Home in the Modern World Nautilus takes on one of the quieter but more persistent anxieties of contemporary life, the feeling of not quite belonging anywhere, in a world that moves faster than our ability to put down roots. Thoughtful reading for anyone who has ever felt that the pace of change has outrun their sense of home. Learn more at Nautilus.

Ovaries Appear to Develop an Incredible Second Role After Menopause For a long time, the prevailing assumption was that ovaries essentially retire after menopause, their reproductive job done. New research suggests that is far from the whole story. Scientists have found evidence that post-menopausal ovaries may take on a significant new biological role, one that could reshape how we understand women’s health in the second half of life. The human body continues to surprise us. Read the full story at Science Alert.

UCL Study Highlights Potential Underdiagnosis of ADHD Among Adults in England A new University College London study suggests that ADHD is being significantly underdiagnosed in adults in England, with many people going decades without understanding why they struggle with focus, organization, and emotional regulation. The findings have broad implications for how health systems recognize and support neurodivergent adults. Read the full story at Noclor NHS.

The Case Against Fireworks As the Fourth of July approaches, Time makes the case that our annual tradition of exploding things in the sky deserves a second look. From air and water pollution to wildfire risk, noise trauma for veterans and pets, and injuries, the costs are worth weighing against the spectacle. Learn more at Time.

Chris Jones, Democratic Nominee for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Iowa water quality scientist and author Chris Jones is running for Secretary of Agriculture in one of the most important farm states in the country, bringing a background in nutrient pollution research and a willingness to say out loud what most Iowa politicians won’t about industrial agriculture’s impact on the state’s waterways. Read the full story at Robert Leonard’s Substack.

Real Organic Project Podcast Interview with Chuck Benbrook: The Supreme Court’s Big Win for Bayer-Monsanto Pesticide researcher Chuck Benbrook joins the Real Organic Podcast for an urgent conversation about what the Supreme Court’s Monsanto v. Durnell ruling actually means, not just for Roundup victims but for everyone harmed by any of the 57,000 EPA-regulated pesticides. He also gets into how the same political forces reshaping pesticide regulation are quietly trying to redefine “regenerative” agriculture in ways that could end up strengthening the industrial system rather than replacing it. Essential listening this week. Learn more at Real Organic Project.

Mouthwash, Supplements and GLP-1s – The Surprising Things Messing With Your Microbiome According to Mr. Gut Health The gut health conversation is getting more nuanced. A leading microbiome researcher walks through some unexpected disruptors including daily mouthwash, greens powders, and the rising class of GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, which appear to significantly alter the gut microbiome in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Learn more at The Independent.

Inside Chernobyl, a Fungus Has Been Quietly Feasting on Radiation The Chernobyl exclusion zone is off limits to most life, but a remarkable black fungus called Cladosporium sphaerospermum has not just survived there, it has thrived. Researchers believe the fungus uses melanin to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy, essentially doing for radiation what plants do with sunlight. This is one of the stranger and more wonderful stories in biology right now. Read the full story at Science Alert.