Roundup: What goes round, comes round

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Groet / Cees

May 3, 2010
Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html
By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ANDREW POLLACK

DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a
strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly
technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the
harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.

But not this year.

On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors
crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the
soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.

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.

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.

Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under
the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle
chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and
safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental
impact.

Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of
Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the
chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while
leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about
90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown
in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to
survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in
fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are
forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had
long ago abandoned.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious
species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed,
whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western
Tennessee only last year.

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more,
choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting
equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big,
Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing
herbicides into the soil.

That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by
the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and
Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to
control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into
waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.

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.

So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States
farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small —
seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of
the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed
by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million
acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.

Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries,
including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.

Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major
problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious
issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance
issues in the United States for the company.

Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less
Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.

“You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your
weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa.
“So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”

Monsanto argues that Roundup still controls hundreds of weeds. But the
company is concerned enough about the problem that it is taking the
extraordinary step of subsidizing cotton farmers’ purchases of competing
herbicides to supplement Roundup.

Monsanto and other agricultural biotech companies are also developing
genetically engineered crops resistant to other herbicides.

Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate,
another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both
glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops
resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing
soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is
developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent
Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.

Still, scientists and farmers say that glyphosate is a once-in-a-century
discovery, and steps need to be taken to preserve its effectiveness.

Glyphosate “is as important for reliable global food production as
penicillin is for battling disease,” Stephen B. Powles, an Australian
weed expert, wrote in a commentary in January in The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

The National Research Council, which advises the federal government on
scientific matters, sounded its own warning last month, saying that the
emergence of resistant weeds jeopardized the substantial benefits that
genetically engineered crops were providing to farmers and the environment.

Weed scientists are urging farmers to alternate glyphosate with other
herbicides. But the price of glyphosate has been falling as competition
increases from generic versions, encouraging farmers to keep relying on it.

Something needs to be done, said Louie Perry Jr., a cotton grower whose
great-great-grandfather started his farm in Moultrie, Ga., in 1830.

Georgia has been one of the states hit hardest by Roundup-resistant
pigweed, and Mr. Perry said the pest could pose as big a threat to
cotton farming in the South as the beetle that devastated the industry
in the early 20th century.

“If we don’t whip this thing, it’s going to be like the boll weevil did
to cotton,” said Mr. Perry, who is also chairman of the Georgia Cotton
Commission. “It will take it away.”

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