Agriculture: Evolution strikes back
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
The NY Times is running a cover story on how crop weeds are becoming resistant to one of the most ubiquitously used herbicides—Roundup.
This is the herbicide that farmers can spray on genetically modified crops that are resistant to its damage. It’s widely used on major crops, such as soy, corn, canola, sugar beet, and cotton.
In theory, all weeds other than the GM crop succumb to the chemical. As the Times story suggests, that’s not the case anymore because weeds are evolving resistance, possibly rendering Roundup and Roundup-ready GM crops ineffective.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
…If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.
“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kankan/ / CC BY 2.0
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[...] #1: We saw a few months ago how weeds that were supposed to be eliminated by the agricultural herbicide, Roundup, are now [...]
[...] much of your landscape is Bt corn, the evolution of resistance to Bt is inevitable, as we saw in a previous post with the use of Roundup-ready crops like soybeans, which are often grown in rotation with Bt corn in these regions. Acknowledging this fact of [...]