Are Biopesticides Safe or NOT?

Biopesticides are considered safer than chemical pesticides. They mainly target the organic farming sector. As a former employee of a biopesticide company who worked in the Research and Development department, I am not sure if biopesticides are safer than chemical pesticides.

I used to work for a biopesticide company for years before I decided to quit because of new management who were incompetent. That is besides the point. The point is the company was a mess. We had a sketchy executive vice president, who will always do unethical things to get these biopesticides approve. He didn't care about the consequences or the safety of the employees. We could have gotten in trouble legally! We avoided that by using the executive vice president's name in everything. Hahaha.

One example will be testing batches of a biopesticide product for human pathogen contamination. The test results will come back with high levels of human pathogen contamination. These human pathogens we tested for were E. coli, Salmonella, etc. I remember my former boss who was a Director of Research and Development at the time refused to let the project go any further because of this issue. 

Guess what the executive vice president ordered? He ordered us to eliminate certain tests so that it passes contamination. These tests were important because they were needed for regulatory purposes to get products approved through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the like in other countries for sale.

If a company is doing sneaky things like this to get products approved for sale in the market, do you think this is actually safer than the chemicals? I mean, organic farmers use biopesticides thinking it's safer and healthier. Is it? You have human pathogens in the products that you are applying to your crops! I know some people don't wash their fruits and vegetables. If this is ingested, some people can get seriously ill. 

I know that this company sends out contaminated products to customers, especially their liquid formulas. The bottles are always bloated. Sometimes, the customer return the products. Under the new management, they had the nerve to tell the customer that nothing was wrong with the product and that the customer did not store or use the product correctly! If it were me, I would not have questioned the customer if they returned a product knowing how messy the company is. Upper management has no clue!!!!

Contamination is a huge issue for biopesticides. The production site is chaotic. Upper management literally has to go there and watch them make the products. If no one cares or watches them, they always destroy the product. The products are bacteria, fungi, etc. They can easily be contaminated with something else. You also have to follow a specific set of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to produce them right or else you will have a product that won't work. The previous CEO and upper management will visit the production site once a month. The new CEO and new management rarely visits the production site, and they have no clue what is going on over there. I know for a fact the products were always contaminated with another microbe. It's never a clean product.

There are more sketchy things which I will talk about in my next post.