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Monsanto Superweeds Choke Midwest – Won’t Die
Monsanto used its wiles for over 15 years to make sure that its seeds and products are the ones that farmers use exclusively. Monstrosity made sure that it appeared to be a bargain – farmers couldn’t resist the “innovation” of RoundUp resistant crops.
Farmers now know they reaped a raw deal. They were promised less weeds with the use of more RoundUp chemicals, but this summer have witnessed the worst weeds ever known. Thick stemmed, relentless and some with four-inch thick stems. The super weeds laugh in the face of herbicides as they are so resistant, the sopping chemical cocktails do nothing. The upkeep is costing farmers more than pre-Monsanto days and more hired help is needed to hack through the mess. Just like agrarian times.
Innovation makes full circle.
~Health Freedoms
Monsanto’s “Superweeds” Gallop Through Midwest
Back in the mid-’90s, Monsanto rolled out seeds genetically engineered to withstand its Roundup herbicide. To ensure huge growth potential, the company shrewdly chose the most widely planted, highly subsidized US crops to grace with its new “Roundup Ready” technology: corn, soy, and cotton.
The pitch was simple and powerful: No longer would large-scale farmers need to worry about weeds. All they would have to do was douse their fields with Roundup, which would wipe out all plant life except the desired crop. Farmers leapt at the technology. It represented a fantastic labor-saving opportunity, allowing them to manage ever-larger swaths of land without having to pay more workers.
Today, Roundup Ready crops blanket US farmland. According to USDA figures, 94 percent of soybeans and more than 70 percent of corn and cotton planted in the US contain the Roundup-resistant gene. Back-of-the envelope calculations tell me that nearly 200,000 square miles of prime farmland—a land mass about two-thirds the size of Texas—now grow crops rigged to flourish amid an annual monsoon of Roundup.
Well, in what is surely the least surprising, most-anticipated major development in the history of US agriculture, farmers are discovering that when you spend years dousing land a single herbicide, ecosystems adapt. Roundup Ready crops, meet Roundup-defying weeds.
Such “superweeds” have been vexing farmers for several years now, but this season, according to a stark report in Monsanto’s home-town paper The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the problem is galloping out of control. In recent years, farmers have had to supplement Roundup with other, harsher herbicides, subjecting their land to highly toxic chemical cocktails. But now, weeds are developing resistance to the cocktails, too. The Post-Dispatch reports that “in some areas of the state, certain weeds have become resistant to three herbicides. In Illinois, some weeds have become resistant to four.”
The problem is accelerating, because the resistant weeds are driving out their non-resistant counterparts, and also cross-pollinating them with the resistant gene, spreading it far and wide:
These weeds adapt faster and more vigorously than their weed cousins, choking fields and clogging irrigation ditches so badly water can’t pass through. “Pollen can transfer the resistant trait; that’s the problem,” said Kevin Bradley, a weed scientist with the University of Missouri. “There’s not much we can do about pollen flying through the air, and that’s why we see such rapid spread of resistance.”
Now, as I reported recently, the USDA openly acknowledges the superweed problem and even delivered a pretty good explainer on it in its environmental impact statement (PDF) on Roundup Ready alfalfa. Yet it keeps deregulating or choosing not to regulate at all new Roundup Ready crops, all of them quite widely planted. This year alone, the agency has green-lighted Roundup Ready versions of alfalfa (a major cow feed); sugar beets (source of half of US sugar), and most recently, Kentucky bluegrass (popular lawn turf). These dubious USDA decisions will likely bring millions more acres—including lawns, parks, and golf courses near you—under the Roundup Ready domain. From the USDA’s perspective, superweeds—and the toxic cocktails they call forth upon the to land—are simply something we have to live with.
As for farmers, crop prices are high enough—thanks, ethanol!—that they’re still eking out a profit despite having to buy and spray the extra herbicides, the Post-Dispatch reports. And in many cases, Monsanto’s market dominance is so complete that farmers literally have no other alternative than to buy Roundup Ready seeds. For example, it’s virtually impossible to buy non-Roundup Ready sugar beet seeds.
As for Monsanto, well, as I reported Tuesday, Roundup sales are booming. The company expects to clock $700 million in profit from that product alone this year. And it has a plan for complaints about Roundup resistance. It will develop crops resistant to other poisons, creating whole new cycles of profit and ecological destruction. The Post-Dispatch reports:
There is, however, some hope in the pipeline. Monsanto is working on developing soybeans and cotton that are resistant to the chemical dicamba. The cotton could be on the market within three years.
Dicamba is a truly nasty poison—it makes the Pesticide Action Network’s “bad actor” list, and is classified as a “developmental or reproductive toxin.
Meanwhile, Roundup’s status as a relatively benign agrichemical poison is coming under withering attack. The latest: in a report last month (PDF) the European NGO Earth Open Source delivered an impressive body of evidence that Monsanto’s flagship herbicide causes “endocrine disruption, damage to DNA, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, and cancer, as well as birth defects.” Those are explosive claims, given that Roundup and other forms of glyphosate are now the most-used herbicide in the world. I’ll be digging into the report over the next couple of weeks.
Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones.
Sources:
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/07/monsanto-superweeds-roundup
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/biotechcrops/
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-20-farmers-battle-weeds-chemical-treadmill-speeds
http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_f01139be-ace0-502b-944a-0c534b70511c.html
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I’m curious, can anyone tell us what the superweeds are? I read about them but don’t know them. I ask for a reason. In my own garden, I have vast amounts of thistle, big, thorny, etc. I can not get rid of them and I have sprayed. Is this one of them?
This is a serious environmental problem if they continue to use Roundup. I do not recommend using any herbicides to my clients.
Guess they will have to hire people to pull the Super Weeds like they used to pull regular weeds by hand in the old days. That is how they got rid of weeds in a garden. This should help the unemployment problem by giving people jobs.
I am sickened by the damages that Monsanto has done to farmers, human and animal health and the ecosystem, yet, they escape prosecution and continue unabated their evil plans. Why don’t these farmers wise up and rebel against Monsanto, STOP using their toxic products and SUE Monsanto! Once pristine farm fields across the USA have now been planted with GMO alfalfa, and those farmers will find their fields full of superweeds also. I wish more farmers were smart enough to understand the dangers of using GMO seeds and Round-Up; the information is availabe to anyone with enough common sense to learn how to plant food without using DNA modifying seeds laced with toxic chemicals. We will continue to reap what they sow for generations—higher cancer rates,food shortages due to barren farm lands, and decreased population due to sterility caused by GMO seeds. Jeffrey Smith is an expert on GMO’s and has written some excellent books on the topic.
Super weeds are weeds that cannot be killed with traditional weed killer, like Round-Up. Thistle is AMAZING….look it up on line, you can eat it, it is VERY healthy….all of the so called “weeds” that everyone tries so desparately to get rid of our SO GOOD for us, especially Dandelions – God knows what he is doing
Let me guess, they’ll do the same thing that was done when NPK fertilizers weren’t producing the same effect… tell them to double the amount they dump on.
Let me guess, they’ll do the same thing that was reported (Tompkins, intro to “Secrets of the Soil”) to have been done back in the day when NPK fertilizers weren’t producing the same effect… tell them to double the amount they dump on.
Nature is a system, yet they do not see this. “An integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system.” – Fritjof Capra. Try saying this to any agribusiness scientist and watch their faces go blank. It is the same approach as attacking bacteria with antibiotics, which then creates superbugs. Ever heard of the ancient Greek myth of the Hydra? It was a multi-headed mythological beast that could not be killed with a sword, because whenever one of its heads was severed, two more would spring up in their place. It’s the same with the standard approach to natural populations, be they bacteria or weeds. You kill the weak ones, effectively accelerating the natural selection of the strong ones.
It is all ass backwards, but then what do you expect from a corporate system that places a higher value on dollar bills than on soil health? NATURE IS A SYSTEM!!! If you want stronger plants, support the natural selectivity processes of the plants themselves i.e. by collecting the seeds from the specimens that proved most disease resistant and successful in a given location. People were doing this for thousands of years before Monsanto and their ilk came along and messed it all up.
Let me guess, they’ll do the same thing that was reported (Tompkins, intro to “Secrets of the Soil”) to have been done back in the day when NPK fertilizers weren’t producing the same effect… tell them to double the amount they dump on.
Nature is a system, yet they do not see this. “An integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system.” – Fritjof Capra. Try saying this to any agribusiness scientist and watch their faces go blank. It is the same approach as attacking bacteria with antibiotics, which then creates superbugs. Ever heard of the ancient Greek myth of the Hydra? It was a multi-headed mythological beast that could not be killed with a sword, because whenever one of its heads was severed, two more would spring up in their place. It’s the same with the standard approach to natural populations, be they bacteria or weeds. You kill the weak ones, effectively accelerating the natural selection of the strong ones.
It is all ass backwards, but then what do you expect from a corporate system that places a higher value on dollar bills than on soil health? NATURE IS A SYSTEM!!! If you want stronger plants, support the natural selectivity processes of the plants themselves i.e. by collecting the seeds from the specimens that proved most disease resistant and successful in a given location. People were doing this for thousands of years before Monsanto and their ilk came along and messed it all up. Am I wrong?
Another example of our good govt corruption, insiders like the new food czar of course appointed by our good president, who worked for monsanto… of course all working in the their own, I mean public interest as long as its $$$ and the heck with our health from eating this corrupt food – it all makes me real sick.