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Meet the Weeds that Monsanto Can't Beat
Instead of the supposed revolution in agriculture that Monsato's GM seeds were meant to bring, the opposite effect has occurred – a rise in herbicide useReader's Supported News
By Tom Philpott, Mother Jones
25, December 2012
Monsanto's Roundup has created herbicide resistant
weeds. (photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)
When Monsanto revolutionised agriculture with a line of genetically engineered seeds, the promise was that the technology would lower herbicide use - because farmers would have to spray less. In fact, as Washington State University researcher Chuch Benbrook has shown, just the opposite happened.
Sixteen years on, Roundup (Monsanto's tradename for its glyphosate herbicide) has certainly killed lots of weeds. But the ones it has left standing are about as resistant to herbicide as the company's Roundup Ready crops, which are designed to survive repeated applications of the agribusiness giant's own Roundup herbicide.
For just one example, turn to Mississippi, where cotton, corn, and soy farmers have been using Roundup Ready seeds for years - and are now struggling to contain a new generation of super weeds, including a scourge of Italian ryegrass. "Fight resistant weeds with fall, spring attack," declares a headline in Delta Farm Press, a farming trade magazine serving the Mississippi river delta. The article's author, a Mississippi State University employee, lays out the challenge:
- In 2005, Italian ryegrass resistant to the commonly used herbicide glyphosate was first identified in the state. Since then, it has been found in 31 Mississippi counties and is widespread throughout the delta. This glyphosate-resistant weed emerges in the fall and grows throughout winter and early spring.
The solution: "Fall residual herbicide treatments followed by spring burn-down applications, where a non-selective herbicide is applied to fields before planting." Translation: to combat the plague of resistant Italian ryegrass, Mississippi's cotton farmers must hit their fields with a "residual" herbicide in the fall - meaning one that hangs around in soil long enough to kill ryegrass for a while, and then come back with yet another herbicide in the spring, to make sure the job has been done.
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- Better living through chemistry........ 
16 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
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...and is why it never works (except for the benefit of the at the top like any decent Ponzi scheme should). ''Progress'' (via science) rarely demonstrates its value to those of us at the end of this process through a lowering of the prices of things. It is often used as camouflage designed primarily to coverup its inherent flaws.
Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
[link:http://akamat.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/the-purpose-of-war-according-to-george-orwell-1984/\George Orwell]
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
[link:http://akamat.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/the-purpose-of-war-according-to-george-orwell-1984/\George Orwell]
It was a ''good'' thing until it became a ''bad'' thing, which was when Monsanto's profit margin required it to be.
i'm a farmer (bet you guessed)
rye grass and rye grain are for holding the soil in place, and clover, peas, beans (legumes) fix nitro
but you plant them together, too- the clover gives the rye N and the rye gives the clover shade
rye will soak up extra N if it's all by itself.
there are annual and perennial rye grass, too. perennial SUX!
...sometime ago.
- I think it happened shortly after Mr. Rogers died......
...The Law of Capitalism, chapter one, verse one.
- The other verses don't really matter after that.....
...the dandelions are mine.
- Sorry.....
I actually like them better than lawn.
