Category Archives: Plowing

Roundup bred mutant pigweed

With GM crops come herbicides, which breed resistant weeds. This has happened in about a decade for the worse mutants. We can reverse the problem by reversing the spraying, using plowing, cultivation, and crop rotation instead.

Mark Jeschke wrote for Pioneer Dupont, Crop Insights: Weed Management in the Era of Glyphosate Resistance, Continue reading

Want some 2,4-D with that drifting Roundup and Paraquat?

Got enough Roundup and Paraquat drifting onto you? Want some 2,4-D with that? If not, you can send your comments to USDA now. Hey, what if we all plowed under the mutant pigweed instead of breeding more with poison soup!

Tom Philpott wrote for Mother Jones 18 July 2012, USDA Prepares To Greenlight Gnarliest GMO Soy Yet,

In early July, on the sleepy Friday after Independence Day, the USDA quietly signaled its intention to greenlight a new genetically engineered soybean seed from Dow AgroSciences. The product is designed to produce soy plants that withstand 2,4-D, a highly toxic herbicide (and, famously, the less toxic component in the notorious Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange).

Readers may remember that during an even-sleepier period—the week between Christmas and the New Year—the USDA made a similar move on Dow’s 2,4-D-ready corn.

If the USDA deregulates the two products—as it has telegraphed its intention to do—Dow will enjoy a massive profit opportunity. Every year, about half of all US farmland is planted in corn and soy. Currently, Dow’s rival Monsanto has a tight grip on weed management in corn-and-soy country. Upwards of 90 percent of soy and 70 percent of corn is engineered to withstand another herbicide called glyphosate through highly profitable Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seed lines. And after so many years of lashing so much land with the same herbicide, glyphosate-resistant superweeds are now vexing farmers and “alarming” weed-control experts throughout the midwest.

And that’s where Dow’s 2,4-D-ready corn and soy seeds come in. Dow’s novel products will be engineered to withstand glyphosate and 2,4-D, so farmers can douse their fields with both herbicides; the 2,4-D will kill the weeds that glyphosate no longer can. That’s the marketing pitch, anyway.

There’s more in the article.

It can also get into your well water, and then, according to EPA:

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A day at the market: Valdosta Farm Days 7 July 2012

Terry Davis picking corn:

Terry Davis picking corn

Terry Davis picking corn
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 July 2012.

Okra, potato, pepper, plus cornbread muffins and collard seeds:

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Organic farming as productive as pesticiding (proven yet again)

Rodale Institute has been running a side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture since 1981. They report:
After an initial decline in yields during the first few years of transition, the organic system soon rebounded to match or surpass the conventional system. Over time, FST became a comparison between the long term potential of the two systems.
Year after year, Rodale found:
Organic yields match conventional yields.

As Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones 17 November 2011, Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag,

And now comes evidence from the very heart of Big Ag: rural Iowa, where Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture runs the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR), which began in 1998, which has just released its latest results.

At the LTAR fields in Adair County, the (LTAR) runs four fields: one managed with the Midwest-standard two-year corn-soy rotation featuring the full range of agrochemicals; and the other ones organically managed with three different crop-rotation systems. The chart below records the yield averages of all the systems, comparing them to the average yields achieved by actual conventional growers in Adair County:

Norman Borlaug, instigator of the “green revolution” of no-till and pesticides, when asked in 2000 whether organic agriculture could feed the world, said: Continue reading

Weeds winning against Glysophate

Chuck Darwin was right! Glysophate is losing to mutant weeds.

Gus Lubin wrote in Business Insider 9 June 2011, Dramatic Proliferation Of Herbicide-Resistant Weeds Threatens U.S. Crops

Researchers at Iowa State University warn that herbicide-resistant weeds are proliferating and may jeopardize U.S. food supply.

In an article published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, weed scientist Michael Owen said the proliferation of superweed “has been fairly dramatic in the last two to three years.”

Weeds are developing resistance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which has been used extensively since 1996.

U.S. soybean, cotton and corn production could suffer from further proliferation, according to Science News:

“Today, 98 percent of U.S. soybeans, 88 percent or so of U.S. cotton and more than 70 percent of U.S. corn come from cultivars resistant to glyphosate,” Owen reports. Reliance on these crops — and an accompanying weed-control strategy that employs glyphosate to the exclusion of other herbicides — “created the ‘perfect storm’ for weeds to evolve resistance,” Owen and Jerry Green of Pioneer Hi-Bred International in Newark, Del., argue in their new analysis.

Oh, you mean like this pigweed-infested cotton from last year? The Palmer amaranth is already just as bad this year.

It’s not like this is news. We’ve been going on about it Continue reading

More profit and higher yields through organic farming in India

Increase your income and your yields with traditional farming methods? That’s what’s happening in India.

Nishika Patel blogged 11 May 2011 in The Guardian, Organic farming – India’s future perfect?

India’s struggling farmers are starting to profit from a budding interest in organic living. Not only are the incomes of organic farmers soaring – by 30% to 200%, according to organic experts – but their yields are rising as the pesticide-poisoned land is repaired through natural farming methods.
How did this happen?
Organic farming only took off in the country about seven years ago. Farmers are turning back to traditional farming methods for a number of reasons.

First, there’s a 10% to 20% premium

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The case against agrochemicals

Some people didn’t like the source of a recent post about the toxic effects of agrochemicals and GM plants on the environment, plants, animals, and people. There are plenty of other sources, including:

How big agro causes the problem

Evidence of the ill effects

There are ways forward

What you can do

Monsanto Spraying Itself

Tom Philpott asks in Grist about Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides
…Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.

If you tend large plantings of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company’s Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds — supposedly — but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.

The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto’s longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way.

Roundup, trade name for glysophate, doesn’t work anymore because the weeds mutated: Continue reading

Monsanto Downturn

Andrew Pollack writes in the New York Times that After Growth, Fortunes Turn for Monsanto:
As recently as late December, Monsanto was named “company of the year” by Forbes magazine. Last week, the company earned a different accolade from Jim Cramer, the television stock market commentator. “This may be the worst stock of 2010,” he proclaimed.
I remember that! The month after Forbes did that, Covalence did a survey that ranked Monsanto the least ethical company in the world. Worse than Philip Morris, Chevron, or Halliburton!

About that time we discovered Monsanto Corn Causes Liver and Kidney Damage in Rats, and that Monsanto’s GM soy causes sterility and five times higher infant mortality in hamsters.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating Monsanto’s seed business. At least seven U.S. states started their own investigations, and later the U.S. EPA fined Monsanto $2.5 million for selling seeds illegally in Texas counties where they were banned.

Since then we’ve learned that Pesticides Linked to ADHD. Specifically organophosphate pesticides. Like Glysophate (RoundUp). And that indicators of pesticides, including organophosphates, are found in the urine of 95% of school children. We already knew that Glysophoate causes birth defects in humans.

Anyway, could all this bad news have some effect on Monsanto’s share price? Continue reading

Managing the Seedbank by Plowing

Roundup has bred quite a few mutant weeds, such as marestail and ragweed that haven’t yet made it to Georgia. But the king of mutant superweeds everywhere is Palmer Amaranth: pigweed.

About pigweed, Georgia Extension weed scientist Dr. Stanley Culpepper says:

Economic survival will depend on managing the seedbank!!!!
That’s on page 30 of a 46 page presentation at the 2010 Beltwide – Consultants Conference, after discussing how rapidly Roundup-Ready seeds have been adopted:

And how the value of advice on weed control during that period rapidly decreased as a direct correlation: Continue reading