Superweeds — the “weeds that man can no longer kill!” — have been in the news for several years. All across the Midwest and Southeast farmers have been photographed and filmed standing in fields surrounded by the giant plants. They bemoan the cost of pesticides and point to industrial rows of crops that don’t have a chance when up against feisty weeds that grow up to three inches a day.

Superweeds have been especially likely to appear alongside genetically engineered (GE) crops, which are engineered to withstand large amounts of pesticide and herbicide use. And these weeds show no sign of going away any time soon.

That’s why scientists and researchers from land-grant universities, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and representatives from several industry and trade groups met at last week’s summit to strategize about the problem.

A few speakers boasted about the efficiency of modern-day farming and the fact that today’s agriculture requires fewer farmers on more acres. But missing from their analysis was the long list of consequences: from degradation of the environment, to health risks from increased chemical use and, ironically, superweeds themselves.

Those who did address the weeds tended not to see them as a result of that impressive modern agriculture. Take Michael Owen, an agronomist from Iowa State University, for instance. In his talk, he contended that superweeds are neither an herbicide problem nor a GE crop problem, per se, but a behavioral problem. This analysis puts the blame on farmers for overusing herbicides. Yet the resistance situation first arose when biotechnology companies pushed herbicides like glyphosate (or Roundup) on farmers as the silver bullet to weed management without educating them on the ramifications of their ubiquitous use. And the practice of using just one herbicide year after year would not have occurred if it weren’t for the aggressive promotion of the Roundup Ready line of GE crops (engineered to tolerate Roundup).

There was some talk of non-chemical solutions by Michael Walsh from the University of Western Australia, who spoke about that country’s serious problem with a weed that has developed resistance to several herbicides. Australian researchers designed a few different weed seed control methods that destroy the seed reserves, eliminating upwards of 95 percent of the seed before it is able to germinate. But it was made very clear by the U.S. farmers attending the summit that going back to traditional methods, like cultivation, would be tough. There was little mention of organic weed management techniques such as crop rotation or the use of cover crops.

But exhausting chemical tool after chemical tool in an arms race against herbicide resistant weeds is not only not sustainable, it’s not working. And despite the fact that chemical solutions are the cause of cross-resistance and multiple resistance in weeds, the need for more chemical solutions was still at the forefront of the discussion.

Strikingly missing from the conversation that day was any talk of the next round of GE crops now in the pipeline, like Dow’s 2,4-D corn and Monsanto’s dicamba soybean, which have both been designed to be resistant to more than one herbicide at once. A full 13 out of 20 crops in the queue awaiting USDA’s approval have what are called “stacked herbicide resistance traits.”

These crops, once approved, will likely result in the use of many more gallons of herbicides and the evolution of even more powerful superweeds that will be resistant to many different herbicides — making them harder and harder to manage. Formulating new varieties of crops to withstand applications of harsher chemicals may be business as usual for these scientists and the companies they work for, but it’s an approach that ignores the underlying issue.

The final speaker at the summit was Iowa State University President Steven Leath, who said he believed that using a “land-grant approach” involving public-private partnerships will help solve this complex problem. This approach is not surprising coming from Leath; Iowa State is known for its relationships with corporations (especially Monsanto), and its agronomy department received around half of its funding from private-sector donors from 2006 to 2010. Iowa State’s campus is even home to a Monsanto Student Services Wing in the main agriculture building.

The superweed problem is one that should be attacked with preventative strategies based in weed biology and independent, interdisciplinary creativity. But partnering with biotechnology companies will likely only result in biotech solutions.

We have the opportunity to see superweeds as a wake-up call and a strong argument for pulling agriculture off the chemical treadmill to which it is bound. But to do that, public research — free of private sector influence — must be funded in order to give farmers better alternatives and to shift the focus away from the current chemical arms race against weeds.

March has already blown through its typical allotment of tornadoes.

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Flame retardants, which are in tons of kids’ products, are also linked with learning disorders. Basically, the only way to keep a kid safe from chemicals is to wrap her up in organically grown moss and send her into the woods to be raised by wolves.

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More than 90 colleges are banning bottled water.

What should farmers do to kill Roundup-resistant weeds?

Organic agriculture is a fine luxury for the rich, but it could never feed the world as global population moves to 9 billion.

That’s what a lot of powerful people — including the editors of The Economist — insist. But the truth could well be the opposite: It might be chemical-intensive agriculture that’s the frivolous luxury, and organic that offers us the right technologies in a resource-constrained, ever-warmer near future.

That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest data of the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (FST), which Rodale calls “America’s longest running, side-by-side comparison of conventional and organic agriculture.” Now, Rodale promotes organic ag, so industrial-minded critics will be tempted to dismiss its data. But that would be wrong — its test plots have an excellent reputation in the ag research community, and the Institute often collaborates with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

Housed on Rodale’s 330 acre farm, the FST compares three systems for growing corn and soy, the first two organic and the third conventional: 1) one based on rotating feed crops with perennial forage crops for cows, and fertilizing with manure; 2) another based on rotating grains with cover crops, with fertility coming from nitrogen-fixing legumes; and 3) a system reliant on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Rodale’s researchers have been comparing crop yields and taking soil samples on these test plots for 27 years. Their latest findings? The three systems have produced equivalent corn yields over the years, while “soybean yields were the same for the manure and conventional system and only slightly lower for the legume system.”

So the old canard about how organic ag produces dramatically less food than chemical ag has been debunked, yet again.

Corn in the organic-legume (left) and conventional (right) system during the dry summer of 1995. Both were planted on the same day, with the same variety but only the conventional corn is showing signs of water stress. Organic corn yields that year were 29 percent higher than those of the conventional corn.Photo and caption: Rodale InstituteBut it gets more interesting. As the globe warms up, increased droughts are likely to reduce global crop yields. The ag-biotech industry is scrambling to come out with “drought-resistant” GMO crops. But organic ag might already have that covered: “In 4 out of 5 years of moderate drought, the organic systems had significantly higher corn yields (31 percent higher) than the conventional system.”

Moreover, while conventional ag struggles with the “superweed” problem, brought on by Monsanto’s herbicide-tolerant GMO crops, organic ag is showing it can coexist with weed pressure without sacrificing yield: “Corn and soybean crops in the organic systems tolerated much higher levels of weed competition than their conventional counterparts, while producing equivalent yields.” Meanwhile, herbicide use in the conventionally managed plot fouled groundwater:

Herbicides were only detected in water samples collected from the conventional system. In years when the conventional rotation had corn following corn, during which atrazine was applied two years in a row, atrazine levels in the leachate sometimes exceeded 3 ppb, the maximum contaminant level set by EPA for drinking water. Atrazine concentrations in all conventional samples exceeded 0.1 ppb, a concentration that has been shown to produce deformities in frogs.

In terms of building robust ag systems in an era of climate change, the results related to soil are probably the most interesting. It turns out, the organic outperformed conventional in both building organic matter and retaining soil nitrogen. In the past 15 years of the study, the organic systems have continued building soil carbon, while the conventional system actually lost carbon. (For more on the question of soil carbon and soil, see my piece from last year’s special series on nitrogen.)

The soil-carbon factor probably explains why organic outperforms conventional in drought years: carbon-rich soil tends to retain water better. And indeed, the results bear that out:

Water volumes percolating through each system were 15-20% higher in the organic systems than the conventional system, indicating increased groundwater recharge and reduced runoff under organic management.

Inevitably in the comments section below, someone will ask about the manure. How much land does it take to support sufficient cows to produce enough manure to replenish organic fields? But the Rodale results show that nitrogen-fixing legume crops can greatly reduce the contribution needed from livestock.

And anyway, let me turn that question around. Where do industrial agriculturalists intend on getting the synthetic nitrogen for their system — from what energy source? The main feedstock is natural gas; but the easy natural gas has been tapped in the United States. That leaves us reliant on geopolitically unstable foreign suppliers — or on domestic shale gas, which relies on the water-fouling process of hydrofracturing. And where do they plan on getting phosphorous?

In the end, organic ag looks like the robust and wise approach to responding to population growth and climate change, and chemical ag looks like the gambler’s approach — a luxury for the well-heeled folks who own shares in the agribiz industry.

It’s always blue skies for the agrichemical industry

Back-of-the envelope calculations tell me that total land devoted to Roundup Ready crops equals nearly 200,000 square miles — about two-thirds the size of Texas.

Roundup Ready’s conquest of U.S. farmland has been an unmitigated boon for Monsanto shareholders. Not only could the company charge a fat premium for its biotech seeds, but sales of the Roundup herbicide surged. By 2008, Monsanto was clocking more than $1 billion annually in profit from Roundup sales alone.

For years, Monsanto presented its economic triumph as an environmental gift to humanity. According to company talking points, the sudden ubiquity of Roundup, whose active ingredient is a chemical called glyphosate, eliminated the need to use other, more toxic herbicides. Moreover, Roundup Ready technology allows farmers to control weeds without having to till, dramatically reducing soil erosion.

Now, however, the Roundup juggernaut has run off course. Roundup’s status as ecologically benign is turning to dust. A study by France’s University of Caen last year found that the herbicide’s allegedly “inert” ingredients magnify glyphosate’s toxic effects. According to the study, “the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death” at levels commonly used on farm fields.

The annual cascade of Roundup on vast swaths of prime farmland also appears to be undermining soil health and productivity, as this startling recent report cited by Tom Laskawy shows.

Meanwhile, the endlessly repeated claim that Roundup Ready technology saves “millions of tons” of soil” from erosion appears to be wildly trumped up. According to Environmental Working Group’s  reading of the USDA’s 2007 National Resource Inventory, “there has been no progress in reducing soil erosion in the Corn Belt since 1997.” (The Corn Belt is the section of the Midwest where the great bulk of Roundup Ready corn and soy are planted.) “The NRI shows that an average-sized Iowa farm loses five tons of high quality topsoil per acre each year,” EWG writes.

Finally, there’s the ecological liability that will likely doom Roundup Ready’s dominance of U.S. farmland. It’s perhaps the least surprising, most-anticipated major development in the history of U.S. agriculture: After years of annually dousing millions of acres of farmland with a single herbicide, farmers are finding that certain weeds have developed resistance to that herbicide.

Reports of Roundup-defying “superweeds” have circulated for years. The Union of Concerned Scientists has has been expressing concern about them since 2001 if not before. By last summer, the issue was causing serious consternation among large-scale farmers, especially in southern cotton country. In late 2009, a report from the Organic Center (PDF) showed that farmers were dramatically boosting Roundup application rates in a desperate attempt to control ever-hardier weeds.

“The average annual increase in the pounds of glyphosate applied to cotton, soybeans, and corn has been 18.2%, 9.8%, and 4.3%, respectively, since HT [herbicide-tolerant] crops were introduced,” the report showed.

As application rates have ramped up, the superweed menace has become so obvious the mainstream press has taken notice. “Superweeds Hit Farm Belt, Triggering New Arms Race,” declares a Wall Street Journal headline from last week. The article documents a trend I’ve been writing about since last year: Rather than spark a reassessment of the wisdom of relying on toxic chemicals, the failure of Roundup Ready has the U.S. agricultural establishment scrambling to intensify chemical use.

The Journal reports that Dow Chemical, DuPont, Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta are “together spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop genetically modified soybean, corn, and cotton seeds that can survive a dousing by their herbicides,” most of which are “many decades old” and highly toxic. Dow AgroSciences, for example, is viewing the collapse of Roundup Ready as an opportunity to revive use of 2,4-D, which the Journal describes as a “powerful herbicide introduced nearly 65 years ago.” 2,4-D is indeed vile stuff — Pesticide Action Network lists it as a “bad actor.” But rather than phase it out, Dow “hopes by 2013 to be selling seeds for corn crops that will be unaffected if farmers splash 2,4-D on their fields,” the Journal reports.

Meanwhile, Monsanto hardly plans to surrender the lucrative GMO seed/pesticide market to its rivals. For one, it’s developing a line of GMO soybeans resistant to the highly toxic herbicide dicamba, the Journal reports. Dicamba, too, is a Pesticide Action Network “bad actor.” For another, it’s working on “next-generation” biotech seeds that can withtand other herbicides along with Roundup. I hate to imagine the “thug weeds” that will evolve to withstand such herbicide cocktails.

In another words, Roundup Ready technology didn’t bring the war between herbicides and weeds to a draw, as Monsanto claimed it would; instead, it has escalated that war. What ecologists call the pesticide treadmill has accelerated — to the delight of the agrichemical industry and the detriment of the land, farmers, and consumers.

Industry execs don’t even try to hide their glee. “The herbicide business used to be good before Roundup nearly wiped it out,” a Syngenta told the Journal. “Now it is getting fun again.”

In a better world, farmers would be looking to non-chemical methods for controlling weeds: crop rotations, mulching, cover crops, etc. The USDA’s research arm, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), would be scrambling to help farmers develop appropriate, non-toxic technologies for controlling weeds.

In reality, however, President Obama tapped agrichemical-friendly Roger Beachy to run NIFA last year. Beachy came to NIFA after years at the St. Louis-based biotech research institute the Danforth Center — which launched with Monsanto cash and has maintained a tight association with the seed/agrichemical giant. When I met Beachy at a conference in Mexico last February, he expressed open contempt for organic ag and referred to GMOs with the industry’s favored phrase: “improved crops.”

With friends like that, it’s no wonder that the agrichemical industry can spin failures like Roundup Ready into the next marketing opportunity.

“The herbicide business used to be good before Roundup nearly wiped it out. Now it is getting fun again.”
– Dan Dyer, an executive at agrichemical/GMO seed giant Syngenta, on the rise of “superweeds” engendered by the broad use of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” GMO crops.

iStockphoto

It’s a happy day when the New York Times treads some of Grist’s well-worn paths. This time, it’s about how overuse of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide has given rise to “superweeds” and an exhausting chemical treadmill:

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.

Grist coverage on the issue of superweeds can be found here, here, here, here and here. Strangely, given that the New York Times Magazine recently did a story about a pair of commodity rice growers who switched over to organic methods for some of these very reasons, the current Times piece omits discussion of any organic or agro-ecological alternatives to chemically intensive agriculture. 

For example, the Rodale Institute has for years been growing commodity crops in an organic, no-till style with the same or better yields as conventional and genetically engineered seed. Much of the problem relates to a lack of information on the benefits or techniques required to convert. The “conventional wisdom” among growers is that it’s too costly, in terms of labor and reduced yields, to convert to organic. Kurt and Karen Unkel, the farmers featured in the Times Magazine piece, used a sophisticated custom-built software application to arrive at the financial benefits to conversion.

Rodale itself supplies a conversion calculator right on its website. The costs of new, patented seeds from Monsanto, plus a whole host of new chemicals, plus the additional fuel costs from the need to abandon chemical no-till farming are high — the future of seeds genetically engineered to withstand six different pesticides is a particularly bleak one for eaters as well as farmers. Indeed, the competitive advantage for conventional ag may no longer exist, if it ever did.

We’d love to hear the thoughts of recent organic converts as well as conventional farmers facing these issues — comments welcome!

Due in part to its reliance on genetically modified crops that are designed to be doused with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, the South has to date faced the worst of this problem. And the struggle against these new superweeds, in particular against a new resistant form of pig weed, got the attention of ABC’s World News Tonight recently. It’s a struggle, by the way, that cotton farmers down there are losing:

Across the South, there’s a weed that man can no longer kill. It’s called the pig weed, and for decades farmers controlled it by spraying their fields with herbicides.

“I’ve never seen anything that had this major an impact on our agriculture in a short period of time,” said Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas.

This past summer, Pace Hindsely of Coffee Creek Farms and other farmers started noticing the chemicals they routinely used were no longer working.

“The last three years it’s really just exploded. There is no rhyme or reason as to how we can control it,” Hindsely said. “I am worried about the future or what these fields will look like next year and the year after if we don’t control this weed.”

The weeds have adapted, and this year they’re choking more than a million acres of cotton and soybeans.

And, really for the first time, it appears that nothing in industrial ag’s chemical arsenal can stop them. Most striking, however, was the reaction by Monsanto to this rapidly spreading failure of its cash cow combo Roundup Ready seed and Roundup herbicide: It’s all the farmers fault!! Or as the news report put it, Monsanto “blame[s] their customers — the farmers — for overuse saying it was only a matter of time before Mother Nature came up with a workaround.” Oh and don’t worry. Monsanto’s chemical solution to this problem is just around the corner. A Monsanto rep promises that an super-pig weed killer will be on the market by, oh, 2015 or so.

Now, Monsanto is certainly right about the overuse part. As an excellent Rodale Institute report on superweeds observes, annual agricultural use of Roundup in the U.S. went from 7.9 million pounds in 1994, the year before Roundup Ready crops were introduced, to 119 million pounds in 2005. Given that most corn, soy, and cotton seed planted in the U.S. is herbicide-tolerant and sold by Monsanto, it’s kinda hard for them to blame the customer for this mess.

There’s another interesting angle here, though. The development of herbicide-tolerant crops has played a role in the growth of megafarms of 10,000 plus acres. That amount of land can’t be farmed unless you’re doing it from atop a sprayer and a combine. But dealing with pig weed now involves putting workers out in the fields to pull weeds by hands — pig weed is sturdy enough to “stop a combine in its track” according to the ABC News report. Handweeding isn’t feasible for these massive farms, which is why thousands of acres of land devoted to commodity crops are being abandoned in the face of the superweed onslaught.

The Rodale article observes that mechanical cultivators — once considered an old-fashioned and outmoded approach to weed control — are making a comeback in the South as “steel in the field” becomes important again. Distributors sold out of them last year and have upped their orders for this year — in fact cultivators are one of the few types of farm machinery with growing sales, due in large part to superweeds.

In the end it may not be agri-intellectuals like Michael Pollan (or Tom Philpott for that matter) who are the ones “forcing farmers to turn back the clock” as Big Ag partisans have claimed. Indeed, there’s some quote about sowing seeds of one’s own destruction that might be appropriate about now but I’ll resist. Instead, I’ll observe that the answer will, of course, require a move to the latest, most sophisticated 21st century agroecological techniques such as those pioneered by the Rodale Institute. As Rodale’s article says:

Agriculturalists around the world are looking for better answers than have come so far from herbicide-focused efforts. They seek productive systems based on evolving local farmer wisdom. These deal with all pests — weeds included — as part of an approach integrating soil health, biodiversity, advanced understandings of biological interactions, and just enough steel to give crops the edge they need.

That sounds about right.

“There is no telling how many articles I have written with the theme of ‘Roundup every Monday morning until there is nothing out there but soybeans’ or ‘the best tank mix partner with Roundup is more Roundup.’ That made soybean farming so easy that even I could probably have done it.”
–Ford L. Baldwin of Arkansas-based Practical Weed Consultants, writing about the emerging problem of “superweeds” resistant to Monsanto’s blockbuster herbicide Roundup.