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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.
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"
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.
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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
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.