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I love this dedication, but as someone who works in hazardous materials and workplace safety, he sounds rather naive in some areas.
I can only conclude he doesn't know many farmers. I don't visit farms very often, because there aren't a lot of safety or materials certificates farmers need to have, but I've still seen some shit you wouldn't believe
Mixing things in water by sticking your arms in to the shoulder and swirling them around, working in the dust without PPE when that dust contains known heavy metals from the streams they dredged themselves, working downwind of pesticide spray... And those aren't even uncommon.
I fully agree a lot of safety are stupid, either because they're too lax, or unworkably strict and unneeded, but there are FAR more issues that arise from people ignoring the rules that come out of the rules being too lenient. And when it IS the latter, it's mostly because we just don't know stuff.
When is the last time you followed the instructions on your cleaning spray to the letter? Or paint? Never? Yeah, exactly.
And how would that work? How can you show a chemical is safe, ever? How can you test for interactions you don't know about, or chronic effects that probably won't even show up in animals?
And even if you DID show it was safe under circumstances, how can you make sure people handling it will stick to those circumstances? This shit is hard, and people suck at risk assessment, so they'll fuck up even if they know better.
My grandad, who was a farmer, used to say that the sellers of Roundup (the weed killer from roundup.com) would drink it during sales pitches to prove it wasn’t toxic to humans. So it wasn’t just farmers making questionable decisions—some of the misinformation came from the sellers themselves.
These days, it's labeled as unsafe to use without gloves, and the high-concentration version sold to farmers isn't even available to the general public anymore, at least where I live.
It just gives some context on why certain practices exist—bad or misleading information played a big role in shaping them and it is or was not always just the farmers alone.
I wonder if he's just being careful politically. Farmers are a polarised topic in the Netherlands.
Yeah, if you speak the truth, soon you'll have 20 tractors in your street
As someone who grew up in the countryside, I can very much confirm that the guy clearly does not know farmers, and have not been to any that aren't over-the-top modernized and/or given weeks of notice of his arrival.
And it should be noted that the symptoms have been vaguely descibred for around three thousand years, and more accurately for four hundred years. If you combine that information with the fact that he clearly doesn't understand how farms work, I'm going to assume that he's fearmongering.
And the examples I listed ARE from places that had advanced notice. It's why most auditors get pretty anal about small stuff, we know it's 10 times worse when we're not there.