I live in the breadbasket of the USA. I have deep farming roots. All of my neighbors and the majority of my friends are farmers.
It’s ridiculous the amount of chemical sprayed on the crops. They spray in the spring before planting, in the summer for weed/pest control and in the late summer or early fall to kill the crops so they can harvest. They spray after the harvest too.
Not coincidentally, there’s a plethora of cancer where I live. Breast cancer in the farm wives and prostate cancer in the farmers.
Farming is BIG business. Big and profitable. It wasn’t that way when I was growing up.
Farming has to be big business, when the equipment needed to have an economically viable farm can easily run well over a million dollars. Support structures (shop, grain bins. equipment storage, etc. are an add-on).
It's hard, with the exception of a few niche crops, to make a decent living and maintain/replace the means of production on a mere 160 acres...which is why so many farmers out this way (Northern Plains) measure the size of their farm in square miles ('sections', 640 acres +/-).
It isn't like tobacco farming was where I grew up, when 50 acres was considered a
huge tobacco farm, and kids had their college paid for and families were supported by 10 acre or smaller spreads.
That said, GPS systems are reducing the amount of chemicals applied, by reducing double application along the fringes of a pass with that same equipment.
It also enters my mind that some things have been widely distributed in the general population which may well lead to infertility also, (a claimed possible side effect of the jabs), and this may be a well coordinated squirrel to place the blame on the farmers and the pesticides used on widely consumed crops as a cover for that effect. Soy comes to mind also, as it has been put in virtually everything, and has known pseudoestrogenic properties.
As for added pesticides, I also have to ask if anyone recalls Starlink? That was a GMO corn variety, which was included in some crops by accident, products were made and released to market, and my mother had a severe reaction to taco shells made with it. Has the GMO industry produced oat varieties with similar attributes, that make their own pesticides?
I also question how much was detected, and where that falls in the spectrum of 'safe' or 'allowable' limits, and how much oat based food one would have to eat to surpass those limits.
Finally, the greatest hazard I see with handling chemicals, wherever you are, is that if you are handling them in the same area, they will accumulate in that area (in the soil) over time. That includes getting into the water table, and most farms are getting their water from wells. It may be the wells are carrying the seeds of destruction that lead to cancer, and those accumulations may go back decades.
If you aren't wearing the correct PPE, or even sometimes if you are in the windy plains, it's entirely possible that clothing is becoming contaminated, and most farm wives will be the ones washing those clothes after their husbands have been wearing them all day. Where does that water go, if not a septic system which will eventually release those chemicals into the soil in the subsurface?
Just a fine mist, over years of exposure might account for the apparently higher incidence of cancer. Residues on machinery might have the same vector for contaminating people and causing ill effects.
Decades of observing Derrick Hands on oil Rigs, who mix the drilling mud components, come out of the hopper house coated with fine dust (often nothing more vicious than starch or ground barite) tells me that even working in enclosures is not enough to prevent all exposure, and pesticides and herbicides are a problem at much smaller levels than drilling mud components, especially if they are not inhaled (prolonged skin contact).
I'm not denying that this may be a problem as simple as you state, and even suspect that is often the case, but just pointing out the various possible vectors for problems that might not otherwise be present or obvious to most folks.
For consumers, far from the farm, unless you are eating massive quantities of oats, or critters that are, chances are you are so removed from primary contamination sources your dosage is off-the-charts minimal, and likely well below harmful thresholds.
