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First Superbugs, Now Superweeds
Finxray writes "Years of heavy use of the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup has led to the rapid growth of superweeds. They are spreading throughout North America, creating headaches for farmers and posing 'the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,' according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts. From the article: 'The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn. The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds."
Yes. Death.
""Years of heavy use of the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup has led to the rapid growth of superweeds".
Quick..someone mix this "Superweed" with normal weed! They wont be able to make that illegal! We can't be stopped!
Generally, we just don't understand all the externalities involved.
Hopefully, they don't lead to catastrophic circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_welfare_and_ecological_footprint_sustainability.jpg
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm sure it doesn't help that the plants that are resistant to roundup will cross-pollinate with the weeds that are supposed to be killed with roundup, thereby making everything resistant. I remember people saying a long time ago that this would happen, and here we are!
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
Monsanto is probably best known amongst the slashdot crowd for their patent litigation regarding gene patents
As for the weeds that show resistance, they've been known to exist for quite some time. Some weeds naturally react weakly to Round Up, and it's been common practice to include a quart/acre of Pursuit or some other chemical. It's a pain to deal with, but it's not impossible.
When Monsanto can successfully sue you for patent infringement when a neighbor's seeds blow onto your land, then yes, Monsanto needs to die. If "Roundup Ready" weeds are part of it, bring them on.
Computer vision is more than adequate to have robots roll around a field, identify weeds, and use either thermal disruption, plucking, or extremely localized weedkiller injection (mLs) right at the base of the weed. All of these approaches are working at the research scale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSxNBwegfo8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMF7EuCAVbI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtgMNj6xCkk and for harvesting: http://www.optoiq.com/index/display/article-display/303062/articles/vision-systems-design/volume-12/issue-8/features/profile-in-industry-solutions/vision-system-simplifies-robotic-fruit-picking.html but with below-minimum-wage foreign labor and generic Roundup too cheap to bother, it will take legislative action to make the switch. Write your congressman.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
Just as the patent on Roundup Ready soybeans is about to run out, the Roundup Ready weeds come out. Coincidence?
They are spreading throughout North America, creating headaches for farmers and posing 'the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,' according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
Hooray! This isn't really true, though. It's the single largest threat to so-called "green revolution" production agriculture that we have ever seen — and good riddance. Production agriculture simply means the production of food (including animal products) for sale, and hopefully, profit. The only type of agriculture threatened by pesticide-resistant weeds is that which is dependent on pesticides. This development will not affect permaculture and organic farmers, the former of which can produce more food per acre than factory farming. It requires substantially more manpower to grow crops in guilds, which essentially eliminates the opportunity for mechanical cultivation, but at a time when unemployment is at an all-time high, it seems reasonable to use manpower to solve problems. Meanwhile, the contradictorily named "green revolution" methods of using machines and chemicals to grow plants is harmful to soil, and leads to less-nutritious food overall.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds."
Am I the only one that read this as a good thing? Prior to Roundup farmers cross pollinated more resistant plants in order to improve them, this slow and gradual process never generated insane weeds. Monsanto has been known for a lot of shady practices anyway. Anything to discourage farmers from using their products is great.
This was predictable for anyone who believes in evolution. We've known since the early '70s that bacteria can pass genes back and forth. We've known for a while that plants can pass genes on to animals (http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/05/02/2215251/Aphids-Color-Comes-From-a-Fungus-Gene?from=rss). A combination of natural selection and gene transfer makes this not only expected, but inevitable.
Franken-weeds.
I guess we'll have to stop managing by chemistry alone and use some of the old methods again. Renaissance time for small farmers?
Can they sue mother nature, she obliviously infringes some Monsanto patents with her round up ready weed?
Examples like this show natural selection in practice. You don't have to wait thousands of years to see Evolution. It is happening all around you everyday. Superweeds are a predictable outcome of pesticide usage.
We're seeing the same thing starting around here in subtle ways. Our neighbour uses various things to cull the 'weeds' (grass damnit!) on his farm plot, however every season the tough stuff comes back faster (thorns, prickles, even Parthenium now is coming back) and he's spraying more frequently to try compensate. What's more annoying is that we're trying to run an organic system here and his washoff and overspray tends to drift into our property, causing our natural grasses to die back a fair distance into our property as well as tainting the orchard crop closest to the boundary.
All that's happened with agriculture is that we've traded the future for short term gains. Time to put away the toxic stuff and start living with less than perfect harvests, at least it's better than -no- harvest (also, stop trying to grow stuff where it really doesn't belong damnit!)
...it's called "evolution".
It's only natural that the weeds that have been surviving all the herbicide just come up stronger and stronger after each generation, to the point were the herbicide doesn't kill them anymore.
It's the way that living things behave: the stronger (or better adapted) survive, and the obstacles are slowly but steadily surpassed.
This is specially noticeable on living beings with a very low generation time (like bugs, plants, some small animals, etc), as the adaptations and mutations crop up relatively fast.
It's the way biology works, although some people like to have a "meddling god" to explain this all...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
The early stages of his Deathworld series. Native life adapts to fight the aggressor.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
If they're going to be called super bugs and super weeds, then we should be called super mammals! I hate this idea they have that the entire world around us should remain static, and this utter surprise whenever our actions have some kind of effect on that world. Holy shit! Stuff evolves and adapts? What!? Nobody told me that weeds and bugs would be adapting! I'm suing!
First, release a product, intended for wide or universal application, with little or no thought to how the larger ecosystem will subvert it. Next, release an infinite number of patches, fixes, and new products to try to put the genie back in the bottle while millions of users continue to shell out money to you and curse your very existence on the planet.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I know a guy who works for an agribusiness. I asked him about this last summer. He shrugged and said that for every Roundup product out there, there was another waiting for the first to become ineffective. In fact, it almost makes business sense, that once the patents start expiring, the weeds become resistant and it doesn't matter anymore anyway. Cue the next product in the queue of products, Profit!
He mentioned that certain common weeds would "die-back" to the ground - so they looked dead, but they would spring up later with several stalks, much thicker in the base each time. He and several others would then go back to monsanto, who said it was impossible - until shown the weeds. Monstanto would pay to spray again, and then brought out again to redo the spraying. Roundup, hopefully, will become a
The funny thing is that a local guy I know has an organic farm, with very few problems due to his use of teenagers working in the fields - once taught to recognize the plants from the weeds, they do a great job.
meh
It's a weak analogy to compare super weeds to superbugs. In the case of bugs we have a huge limit. There is only one species we are defending (us) and we can't just arbitrarily medicate ourselves. With the plants we a defending, they are replanted every year, we can treat the soils and the plants arbitrarily, and even genetically modify the plants if crop rotation itself is not sufficient. For example plant corn to share them for several years.
So I think we do understand a lot of the externalities as far as the battle between wanted and unwanted plants goes.
The place where we don't understant the externalities is in the consequences outside that battle. Will BT plants also kill good bugs or bugs that birds like to eat? Will pesticide runoff get in the fish we eat or water we drink? Will putting animal proteins in plants someday create prions?
Why does slashdot make my comments formatted in courier font?
We'll just send in Chinese Needle Snakes which will exterminate the weeds.
Roundup has been in use for as long as I can remember, 40+ years. It's great due to it's ability to kill a plant completely and then breakdown in the soil to inert ingredients. But I have to wonder if part of the problem with the weeds becoming resistant is due to the bacteria used to make the roundup ready crops. Seems that it's more possible for a bacteria to be passed from one plant to another, and since the first resistant strain was found in 2000, there has been ten years for the bacteria to spread to other weeds.
Perhaps it's time to not create crops that are safe to spray with herbicides and just find a better way to weed the farm by machine. Perhaps after harvest and just before planting a farmer could spray the fields with roundup and kill any weeds. Then after a couple of weeks, plant the seed and while waiting for the crops to grow, a new line of machine could be built that would make it possible to weed out any non-crop plants. In the long run it would be cheaper for the farmer since a machine would be cheaper to reuse than the high cost of roundup ready seeds, and the cost of spraying once the crop is growing.
It's a great product and I've used it myself for home use for over 35 years.
Just wish I could get my wife on board with its use. She feels I have a heavy hand with it.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I do wish you hadn't used the example where the end result is the "EOL" for breeding.
Pick the example of Transposons a.k.a. "jumping genes" instead.
Its closer to the actual mechanism anyway.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If there's a more heavily, multi-chemical-sprayed crop than cotton I don't know what it is.
I think there's a growing issue with red rice (a weed) that is "solved" by the use of a specific rice variety that is resistant to the herbicide used to kill the red rice. The two rices are close enough genetically that what kills the red rice also kills the crop rice. Unless you buy the specific (perhaps naturally) modified crop rice. Yee Haw! Create the problem and then sell the solution. Better living through "Big Farma" capitalism!
That's why I stick with land race chiles.
Karma's a bitch, hey Monsanto?
traded the future for short term gains.
Isn't that the way that most publicly traded companies are run these days as well?
Use a gun.
If that doesn't work,
use more guns.
and there is no RISK of robot revolution
When I was in Business School, about 5 years ago, I wrote about South America and its addiction to Round-Up Ready crops. Monsanto was trying to get money out of them because they refused to pay for the seeds. Instead the farmers were keeping seeds from year to year. Eventually, Monsanto came to an agreement with the governments to collect licensing fees for their seeds.
Since Round-Up was working so well and they were keeping the seeds around from year to year and sharing with their neighbors. At the time, certain crops in Brazil and Argentina were 90% Round-Up Ready. It would not surprise me if that were true for the rest of South America.
I think that this is a good thing. A lack of diversity in plant life is going to harmful at some point. Hell, look at your supermarket. You have plants in the store that look great, and taste like nothing(strawberries are great example).
Doesn't work in all situations, but green manure cover crops, then using a mechanical "knife roller" (just google that) before planting your real crop, (that device squishes and kills the cover crop, it turns it into a green surface mulch and eventually naturally rots to fertilizer, lather, rinse, repeat every season) appears to be a completely viable method for tons of farming purposes that can help eliminate herbicide use. From what I have read it is in semi widespread use in Brazil so far, and a lot of independents and ag colleges in the states here are working on different designs of them.
* Monsanto produced Roundup (a herbicide) and crops resistant to Roundup. Farmers would spray Roundup everywhere and kill everything but the crops.
* Weeds are now becoming resistant to Roundup. Roundup may therefore stop being effective in controlling weeds. So far, 10 out of 170m acres are affected.
* Weeds becoming resistant to Roundup does not make them resistant to other herbicides. Resistance is narrow. They do not evolve into "supermutant" weeds that grow at 3x the rate to 2x the size and cannot be killed by any herbicide.
* Roundup, if its resistance spreads to the other 90% of land, has therefore not "caused" anything more than a return to a pre-Roundup state.
* Farmers are upset about this because Roundup helped them produce massive amounts of food.
* It is extremely ironic to speak first about how callous, greedy and money-obsessed capitalist factory farmers are, and then say that an alternative system of principles could produce enormously much greater food yields than the strongest pesticide. If farmers are so greedy that means they adopt the system that produces the most yield. You are contradicting yourself.
Funny how the anti-GM crowd seems to distort facts and spread FUD as eagerly as what they accuse climate-skeptic crowd of doing.
There were plenty of other herbicides that were used before roundup. When only roundup resistant weeds remain, it becomes economically feasible to switch back to these older more expensive herbicides.
Yes, some of the chemicals are nastier to handle, and some are more labor intensive to spray, but it is not the end of the world.
My concern is, that even if they wanted to Monsanto has sued the seed cleaners, and public seed stores into the ground. Farmers used to plant hundreds of varieties of Corn and Soy and then keep and wash the seeds to plant them next year. But we are loosing the technology and the strains of plants to be able to do that. This could just be the beginning. Thank goodness it's only weeds that are resistant. Once it's a pest to the crop, which will come soon enough all the corn is vulnerable, all the Soy is vulnerable because they are all the same strain now across the whole country. What I have done, and what I encourage others to do. Boycott Monsanto, don't buy their roundup products. Buy Organic, you'd be amazed what your purchasing decisions tells the agribusiness. You CAN make them change. Great movie FOOD INC. just came out recently watch it and see where your food is coming from.
I'd like the evolution deniers to come explain this. Yes, it only takes two successive reproductions for the resistance mutation to be successful. And pretty soon it's spreading all over the land mass. Billions and billions of chances for the right mutation to have occurred since the resistant crops and Roundup spraying combination was introduced. Roundup takes care of all the competition in the gene pool pretty efficiently! I just pray that the evolution deniers that couldn't forsee this don't conclude that an engineered virus is the best way to dispatch weeds next. Yeah, those never evolve and cross-over to species. Say corn and wheat? Oh, they'll just "patch that" with new virus-resistant corn and wheat? Sure. Because corporate profits should surely trump biodiversity in crops. Perhaps a little legislation and regulation to make sure we don't make the planet die?
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
I don't believe in evolution but natural selection absolutely.
Every single case where evolution is cited ends up being natural selection. This is an important difference. Natural selection is simply allowing those best fit to survive.
Evolution is too broad a term to apply to what's happening here. Most, having been taught evolution, will think there is some progressive genetic changes going on here enabling a survival trait that did not previously exist. That is never the case. This is a case of the common weed being killed out and the only one left being the one that could survive all along and, having no competition, it can thrive.
And, really, natural selection is inspired. It seems elegant at its scale and therefore brilliant.
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
That's the way our (the US's) entire society is being run. Give tax cuts so people can buy yet another HDTV, and meanwhile sit around watching our infrastructure crumble. Spend $10 on a blender that will break in a year rather than spending $30 on a blender that will last 10 years. Reward CEOs who can get big returns for next quarter, even if it means sacrificing the long-term viability of the company.
In the 50's, my mom was a nurse, and the most powerful weapon the hospital had at the time were the penicillins. It was a miracle, and it saved hundreds of people in the hospital she worked in.
But mom saw the danger. She warned the doctors, "Don't overuse them, the bugs will get used to it." She used to pester the doctors about it non-stop, but she was a woman and a nurse. What did she know? She also warned them that using too much would wipe out all the good bugs and make things worse for the patient.
Sure enough, one patient got overdosed and their gut flora were wiped out. After trying to figure out what to do with a patient that was dying of starvation and dehydration from the lack of good gut bugs, they gave them "shit soup" through a nasal tube. The doctors were "amazed" at their recovery. Duh?!
Mom watched the doctors start prescribing antibiotics for everything. By the time she left in the late sixties, she was already seeing antibiotic resistant staph that plowed through penicillin like it was candy.
Dad was a landscaper, and he saw the same thing with weed killers, fertilizers and bug spray. Sure, it killed the weeds one year, but they always came back, stronger than before. It used to be you could wipe out all the Japanese beetles in the cherry tree with half an ounce of Malathion in two gallons of water, and the stench wasn't so bad. Now you have to use two, sometimes three ounces, since only a half ounce made the bugs stoned, but little else. And lemme tell you, Southampton mosquitoes are among some of the most heavily sprayed, since the rich people don't like getting bitten.
Now they're impossible to kill.
We've known about this for at least 75 years or more, we've just chosen to ignore it because it's easier and more profitable to think in the short term, and hope the bill never comes.
Well guess what. The bill is on the table, and now we gotta cough up.
[End Of Line]
If a country that has been ruled by a single-party dictatorship for the last 50 years has such a high HDI, then that index is highly suspect. Even more so considering that all statistical data about the standard of living of the Cuban population is collected by the Cuban government itself.
If no independent journalists are allowed in the country, how can one be so sure about the true illiteracy rate, infant mortality, etc.
Well, by definition of "species" not everything can cross-pollinate with everything. Not any more than one could make a minotaur by screwing a cow ;)
But in practice it doesn't need to. These guys use agrobacteria to transfer those genes to plants in the first place. It's a genre of bacteria which can actually transfer genes between its own genome and a plant, e.g., to cause a tumour in which to reproduce. Incidentally, you can also load it with whatever genetic payload you wish to transfer, to create GM plant. But it can also transfer genes between wildly different species of plants on its own. And it's not like the GM guys invented it, it exists in nature around.
So I'm sure you can see how Monsanto's patented herbicide resistance genes can end up in a seed of some weed or another, transferred from their grain. So, yeah, eventually everything around might end up resistant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nah, Monsanto will just announce their new business plan: sue every farmer who has these weeds on his field for patent infringement. That should keep 'em going for another 20 years or so :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sorry, I thought it was a game. Never mind.
Why not engineer better crops through selective breeding in this manner, rather than breed better weeds?
Find stuff that kills crops and keep killing them until only the strong survive.
It seems like what they know about this process is that they're doing it backwards and they don't realize it.
So smart they're stupid.
Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. Sure Bermuda Grass instead of weed, super-fertilizer instead of super-herbicide.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
There are quite a few comment being posted by people who clearly aren't farmers and don't have a real clue as to where their food comes from. In fact several folks express a deep ignorance, which I could excuse, but then they go on to make claims and call for action. As a medium-scale farmer myself, I feel like I know enough about the issues to reply accurately. In no particular order, I state a few points.
1. Farmers are price takers. In other words, if you want to change agriculture, you have to do it on the demand side of the equation. If you think that raising costs for farmers will change behavior, you are wrong; that will merely drive farmers out of business. Instead maybe try to figure out why the price of food in the supermarket seems to have no relation to the commodity prices farmers are paid. Near as I can tell, the amount of wheat in a loaf of bread is pennies. Yet a loaf of bread is running at $3 in some places. If the current food prices trickled down to farmers, they could more easily absorb the increased cost of certain herbicide regulations, etc.
2. Unless you want to condemn billions of people to death, world food production has to double over the next 15 years, according to most forecasters. The only way I can see to do this is by trying to develop more environmentally sustainable methods of high-intensity farming that reduce our reliance on herbicides. As well I agree with Louise Fresco who thinks that agriculture can and should be done on rooftops and balconies in cities everywhere. Or maybe even city parks. Get city folks more involved with the food production process.
3. Permaculture and other similar ideas are good ones, but they don't scale very well in our economy, and forcing it through regulation won't work either (see #1). Currently just a few percent of the world's population now provide food for the rest and this number is dropping because of tremendous economic pressures placed on farmers. In other words farm life is a lot more strenuous that city life, and commodity prices have been pushed (by you, the city folk) to historic lows. Only the largest operators now remain. If you are willing to pay between even more for your food, perhaps more small permaculture farms would pop up.
4. Contributing to #2, European and American subsidies are having a tremendous negative impact on food production around the world. These subsidies keep the prices artificially low, effectively eliminating all but subsistence agriculture in Africa, and promoting the use of herbicides on a mass scale across the developed world. At the same time the subsides are promoting the practices that bring about the problems mentioned in the article. Indeed write your congressmen or EU parliamentarian on this one and demand that subsidies be removed.
5. Computer vision and herbicides only really work well in the practice of fallowing. It's easy to spot something green amongst a fallow field that's all brown, and spray it. And even there the cost of such a system is quite prohibitive still, so it hasn't reached the actual market yet. Computer vision in the fruit industry has little bearing on the issues of roundup resistant weeds in the article. The main food crops are cereals, legumes, and oilseeds. In these cases, weed control by vision is a lot harder as at the early stages it is hard even for a human to discern between a weed and a crop plant. It's not at all like an orchard. Crops are seeded in narrow rows, but the rows themselves are not little lines; we try to spread the seed out get get better germination and better growth. Thus weed and crop plants can be anywhere in 6-inch wide strips, the average distance between each strip's center is between 6 and 10", typically (we're not talking about row crops here).
I am a CS major and follow computer vision developments. We're just not there yet. So there's nothing to write Congress about yet. Hopefully that will change in the future.
6. Tillage is the number one reason we now have the overall weed proble
the idea that penicillin, malathion, roundup, etc., are permanent tools against mother nature is a false one. but it is a false idea whether we used the products never, sparingly, intelligent, or stupidly. simple use of these tools will induce resistance. the arms race goes on forever, and the only thing we have to learn is to lose the naivete that these chemicals would be useful forever
we need to cook up more antibiotics, weed killers, and bug killers. but this is true no matter how we used the first generation of chemicals. we haven't learned anything, nor did we have anything to learn, unless it is the more eternal lesson that some people are naive
every advance is only a temporary advance, and the arms race exists, forever. we had a brief period when our weapons were effective, and now we have to find new weapons, and this is simply inevitable, unless you choose not to use any chemical weapons at all
in other words, i'm not quite sure what you think we are supposed to learn. don't fight?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but why hasn't Superman appeared yet!?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Wait a second - if I am accidentally tossing my iPhone onto people's lawns on a routine basis, then it's arguable that I am soliciting trouble. Did Monsanto perform due diligence in ensuring that its seeds did not trespass onto the neighboring farmer's lawn? Otherwise, to me it sounds like entrapment.
If the police are routinely parking expensive cars in poor neighborhoods with the door left ajar, then I would argue that they're trying to tempt someone into committing a crime. I'm not arguing whether it was wrong of the farmer to deliberately harvest the modified seeds to sell enhanced crops, I'm arguing whether it was right of Monsanto to have exposed him to those seeds to begin with. They created the situation.
That's just not true. Heavy chemical farming allows an individual farmer to grow on more acres with x amount labor, using what they call no till, but the yields are not all that impressive compared to good rich organic soil type growing. Now seed varieties make a difference, but square foot to square foot, given the same seeds, good healthy compost rich soil is outstanding. Shoot, I see that even with hay. Our fields, that get chicken litter fertilizer, consistently out perform the neighbors fields across the street, where he has the big chemical fertilizer spray truck come in. As to veggies and whatnot, I have had a good garden every year for the past..hmm..I guess 54 years now I have been gardening, and natural fertilizers work great and you get huge yields. It can be more labor intensive, but the yields are great.
Hybrid type growing can work well, too, such as the use of heavy black plastic mulch, then drip irrigation with it.
The secret to farming is healthy soil, with a rich humus layer. You are a soil farmer first, after that, the crops will "just work" mostly.
There's a push on to incorporate biochar* into soils, and I think that is something that should be done on a huge scale, using all that wood that just burns up anyway every summer in the western US. Really, I think as a massive stimulus project, looking at long term, not a this quarter megaprofits approach, but a national "commons" approach, this would be a great way to use resources that get wasted, create a lot of useful jobs, and gradually increase national food security. It should be one of our national priorities to not waste all that carbon from those huge fires (especially with all that wood being lost to the pine borer beetle and other really bad invasive or destructive species) and get it back down deep into the soil, instead of just burning up at huge expense and loss. That makes loads more sense for the environment and to help insure global food supplies and "climate change" concerns than throwing trillions of dollars at those wall street gangsters to trade "carbon credits". What a crock that is. Let's put that same trillion into improving the soils instead of improving some penthouse millionaire's ferrari budget.
*not quite biochar, but just so happens coincidently after I post this, I am on my mid day break right now, I am going out and roto-tilling in a pile of woodashes and charcoal clumps into one of my gardens.
It's actually:
sunlight + fresh water (that starts to become a problem...) + relativelly unpolluted land + some kind of fertilization (takes additional land however you approach it, but to different degrees of course) -> food (we double this step to too large degree; requires even more water, this time clean one, and energy) -> people
A lot of opportunities for being truly more efficient. And since there's lot of feedbacks involved, that's the most important step we must take - choosing to simply pump more resources into the process gets cought in a vicious cycle.
One that hath name thou can not otter
This might backfire as well, but why not engineer some insects that like to eat the weeds, and dislike wheat and corn and so forth?
Man, that is flagrant false advertising!
"...freezes them solid! Weeds in garden paths do not survive being frozen to minus 196 degrees C and then melting in the sun."
Okay, I know, targetting a single invasive plant in a sidewalk crack is completely different from large-scale methods of protecting entire fields of essential crops, but I was still reminded of this quote. It comes from possibly the oldest fossil of an ancient website on the Internet. He's sort of er, well, um. I'm not directly linking it okay, let's just put it that way.
Anyway! Ever since the first time I read that, I've fantasized about the day I have my own lawn to tenderly care for, and the cash to burn on a vacuum flask of the good stuff every week. I can see it now... I step outside, sun on my face, bare toes brushing through the soft, lush, meticulously trimmed sea of green blades waving in the gentle spring breeze.
And then I spot it. A gnarly-ass god damn thistle. It wasn't there yesterday... it must have sprung up over night. Right in the perfectly edged gap between the soil and my concrete path. Six inches tall, jagged-looking, and hundreds of little spines all over it like so many tiny middle fingers extending upwards at me as if to say, "fuck you." Ohhhhhohohohoh, but not today, my friend...
The barest hint of a smirk graces my expression. I leisurely stroll over to my tool shed, humming a chipper made-up tune to myself along the way. As I gather together the necessary materials, an observer wouldn't be able to help but notice my attitude and mannerisms are roughly comparable to cooking breakfast at 11:00am on Sunday.
Polysterene foam cup in hand, I saunter back to the scene of the crime. The perpetrator made no attempt to flee, surprisingly. No matter. As I crouch down next to the bastard suburban cactus abortion, I feel overwhelmed with an impending sense of the most indescribably smug sense of satisfaction imaginable. I turn the cup over, raining liquid freezing death down on the obnoxious plant from on high. And then, I probably say it out loud because it feels like the sanctifying closing words of a religious ceremony or something to me: "Weeds in garden paths... do NOT survive... being frozen to minus 196 degrees C and then melting in the sun."
My neighbor just shakes his head and goes back inside without saying a word this whole time.
These can be used in soy fields (or corn or...), after you do an over winter cover crop.
http://www.attra.ncat.org/calendar/question.php/2006/05/08/p2221
http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/depts/notill/roller_gallery/index.shtml
It smashes and crimps the stems of the cover crop/ green manure whatever you want, then packs it down on the surface where it is a slow die off, acting as a mulch and eventually a slow release fertilizer. You plant right through it. I don't have one, we aren't big grain farmers here, we are poultry and cattle, but it sure looks interesting. No till + reduce or eliminate sprays. Seems a decent alternative.
I've got herbicide resistant Black Nightshade in my lawn. It's kept in check by a hard frost, but here in Wellington New Zealand that doesn't happen very often. It's supposedly causing a lot of problems for pea farmers.
I have a friend who has been growing Super Weed for years. Whoa, dude, awesome!
Those of us who don't use GMOs, herbicides, pesticides and feed antibiotics are benefiting from the failings of these systems. We have crops and management that already deals with weeds, pests and such. I don't feel sorry in the slightest for those who are hurt by the failure of these modern 'tools' that have turned on their creators and users.
-Another Real Farmer
Using Traditional Old Style Farming
The biggest problem of pest control is farmers planting the same crop over and over making themselves vulnerable to a single gene changing in a pest or weed to destroy it.
The best protection against pests and weeds is planting a broad diversity of species and allow the plants themselves evolve their own defenses. Yes they will produce less and lower quality crop but they will also slow down the evolution rate of pests and weeds.
The biggest mistake these biotech companies made was to underestimate living things' relentless resiliency to survive, evolve and adapt to their environment.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
"Special Seeds"?
Read it and weep. This has been going on for decades.
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/weeds-are-now-resisting-monsanto-weed#comment-1544265
~hylas
Additionally, most of these studies fall short because the numbers arrived at (say, 2.1 hectares) are not accurate, in my limited experience. I know of successful (organic) commercial ventures with only a quarter section of land (or so), as well as families (ie 4-5 people) which are largely self-sustained on 4-6 acres - in Regions 4 and 5. It's all a matter of adapting the techniques used to the environment (and not relying on the assumption that "industrial farming = higher yields/better results").
^That number (around 2.1 hectares) does not provide just the area for agriculture. This is an area which, assuming no borrowing from the past (via hectares irradiated and flourishing back then, energy and raw materials stored as fossil fuels, fresh water stored in large reservoirs) or from the future (via neglecting to conserve unspoiled enough environment, clean water, etc.), must be enough to provide all resources and energy neccessary per capita - because there is simply so little space and so many humans. And that includes also such "cheating" as nuclear or solar energy - after all, the act of building and maintaining the infrastructure also draws from that area (so it better gives more than it takes in scope of that metric)
People living from the organic ventures you mentioned, or "largely" self-sustained families, still certainly need and do use more area than their cultivated land suggests (of course that must not mean they are above the sustainable 2.1 hectares per capita total; but they certainly use more)
One that hath name thou can not otter
English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hErvV5YEHkE
German: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7781121501979693623#
French: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8723985684378254371#
Roundup should be locked into class 5 biochemical laboratories, and the Monsanto people who sell it should be round up and killed. Slowly. With a spoon.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"After loss of patent rights in 2000, the price of glyphosate decreased substantially (by 40% in the United States [US Department of Agriculture Agricultural Statistics Service, 2006]) as generic manufacturers worldwide began to produce and market glyphosate. Additionally, in order to compete with cheap glyphosate, the price of other herbicides that can be used with GR crops was reduced after the introduction of GR crops" http://www.agbioforum.org/v12n34/v12n34a10-duke.htm
Theory begins...
Monsanto already has a new herbicide far superior to glyphosate (roundup), but before they patent it and release it for sale..... they release RR-weeds into the environment, in a couple of years, every weed around the world is resistant to glyphosate. BAM! Monsanto announce release of new super-herbicide SquareDown. Followed immediately by SquareDown Resistant corn, wheat, canola etc. now Monsanto once again control the agri-chemical industry and a hell of a lot of food production, and make billions from their patented ludicrously expensive new chemical that everyone effectively has to use.
"Permaculture and other similar ideas are good ones, but they don't scale very well in our economy."
This is too true. We are dabbling in some permaculture at our family farm, and the labor required is pretty laughable by modern standards. The hobby-farming does go well, however, with my other hobby of eating. There is a growing trend in the area of boutique farms producing hand-grown crops for discerning (and wealthy) customers. I don't see this scaling well at all. We grew a few tons of produce for the local food bank last year, but with a lot of free labor from local Rotarians, &c. I sort of became the bean-picker, with my natural dogged perseverance and attention to detail, and I'm still outraged by the low price in the market on those. I do believe someone, somewhere, is being horribly underpaid for that job.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
What if the genes from "round-up ready" corn managed to infiltrate the weeds? Cross-species gene transfers do sometimes occur, courtesy of viruses etc. Will Monsanto sue the weeds for stealing their anti-Roundup gene?
This also shows the risk of "BT" cross-breeds, which continually produce one of the more effective natural pest controls. That amounts to a selective breeding program for BT-resistant pests. Constant use of any control agent that doesn't produce 100% kill of the target is only selective pressure that breeds a resistant population. Controls need to be used infrequently, only when truly necessary, so that they remain effective against most of the target population. Otherwise, it's the penicillin syndrome: what was once a highly effective control agent becomes essentially worthless.
Indeed "traditional" agriculture as you call it works in a lot of areas. In many areas of the west where we are dependent on irrigation, they don't work so well at all. And the very fact that commodity prices are so low pretty much prohibits more costly, organic, ways of doing things. I've been following organic farming for some time. I have yet to see how I can implement it on the scale I need to to stay in business. This is the catch-22 of modern agriculture. We need the scale we have (in fact we need to increase it dramatically), but at the same time we have to be environmentally friendly. We depend on the environment for our livelihood, indeed for our very lives.
Thank goodness Monsanto aren't in a position to introduce anything else, with reassurances of safety, that turns out years later to have been a disaster. Oh, hold on...
Of course no one talks about killing weeds with their bare hands, instead of using weed killer in the fertilizer, you have to actually use manual labor to do this...that WILL work every time, only about as good as you are competent at finding the weeds.
So we have to get the kid down the street and pay him some money to weed our garden, but technically not only does that help employ more workers, but also to make sure we help teach our kids the value of money, i started working when i was 13, and never stopped since, always had some money coming in, never been on welfare (knock on wood)...and think i am a hard worker...these are values
that may borderline on child abuse if you are forced to do it, but is really handy when you are older to make sure you understand you will never go hungry!
I'd be inclined to spend the 3X cost increase if I had a reasonable expectation of achieving the 10X lifetime increase. But I don't. The old brands have sold out, and are manufactured in China on the cheap. If they only moved their production to China but kept the more expensive production process and feedstocks, that would be tolerable, but they always not only move but also destroy their processes and use crap materials. The new brands were made that way from the get-go. The end result is poor quality across the board, and little expectation that anything will last, regardless of price. Expensive versions of the same product are almost invariably mark-ups of the same old crap, just with an expensive trademark slapped on them. It's very hard to buy quality anymore.
It's very hard to buy quality anymore.
I agree, but at least part of the problem is that we have a culture that values cheap disposable things and won't pay for high quality.
On the other hand, yes, part of it is companies simply hoping that no one will notice or care that they've skimped on quality, and instead they put their money into advertising and CEO bonuses.