![](\"http:\/\/www.grist.org\/phpThumb\/phpThumb.php?src=http:\/\/www.grist.org\/i\/assets\/tractorspraying_biggreymare_flickr.jpg&w=615\")
<\/a>\nTom Philpott asks in Grist about\n<\/a>\nTom Philpott asks in Grist about\n\nWhy Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals\u2019 herbicides<\/a>\n\n…Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to\npay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.\n\nIf you tend large plantings of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soy or cotton,\ngenetically engineered to withstand application of the company’s Roundup\nherbicide (which will kill the weeds — supposedly — but not the crops),\nMonsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at\nleast two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as\nliterally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with\nMonsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.\n
\nThe move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto’s longtime\nclaim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds\nin an ecologically benign way.\n<\/blockquote>\nRoundup, trade name for glysophate, doesn’t work anymore because\nthe weeds mutated:\n\n\n
\nThere was just one problem, which the Union of Concerned Scientists\npointed out as early as 1993, New York University nutritionist and\nfood-politics author Marion Nestle recently reminded us. When farmers\ndouse the same field year after year with the same herbicide, certain\nweeds will develop resistance. When they do, it will take ever-larger\ndoses of that herbicide to kill them — making the survivors even\nhardier. Eventually, it will be time to bring in in the older, harsher\nherbicides to do the trick, UCS predicted.\n<\/blockquote>\nYeah, but that doesn’t work either.\n\n<\/a>\nNot even paraquat kills Roundup-mutated pigweed.\nGoing back to 2,4-D<\/a> won’t, either.\nThe only thing that does is pulling up the weeds,\nplowing them under, or cutting them off with cultivators.\n
\nAnd remember this:\n
\nMoreover, Monsanto promised, Roundup was less toxic to humans and\nwildlife than the herbicides then in use; and it allowed farmers to\ndecrease erosion by dramatically reducing tillage — a common method of\nweed control.\n<\/blockquote>\nWell, it’s just not true:\n\nMeanwhile, the endlessly repeated claim that Roundup Ready technology\nsaves “millions of tons” of soil from erosion, by allowing farmers to\navoid tilling to kill weeds, appears to be wildly trumped up. According\nto Environmental Working Group’s reading of the USDA’s 2007 National\nResource Inventory, “there has been no progress in reducing soil erosion\nin the Corn Belt since 1997.” (The Corn Belt is the section of the Midwest\nwhere the great bulk of Roundup Ready corn and soy are planted.) “The\nNRI shows that an average-sized Iowa farm loses five tons of high quality\ntopsoil per acre each year,” EWG writes.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n
<\/a>\nThere is an answer, cleverly code-named “deep-till”.\nWhat’s that?\n\nPlowing, planting winter cover crops, and cultivating.<\/a>\n
\nBut what does Monsanto continue to promote instead?\n
\n…we have the spectacle of Monsanto paying farmers to dump vast chemical\ncocktails onto land that not only feeds us, but also drains into our\nstreams and rivers.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnd the farmers doing that aren’t even making money off of it;\nnot compared to the more profitable path of not growing Monsanto’s seeds.<\/a>\n\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Philpott asks in Grist about Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals\u2019 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 […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,8,834,40,42,174,44,373,384,60,374],"tags":[1130,1131,1129,1127,2763,839,15,377,2822,620,376,179,1128],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-agrochemicals","category-deep-till","category-economy","category-food-and-drink","category-glyphosate","category-health","category-no-till","category-paraquat","category-plants","category-plowing","tag-1130","tag-4-d","tag-amaranth","tag-erosion","tag-glysophate","tag-herbicides","tag-monsanto","tag-mutant","tag-no-till","tag-pesticides","tag-pigweed","tag-roundup","tag-weeds"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-5W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}