The funny thing is we have less herbicides because of Roundup. The option is we starve the world, because we will not be able to product enough wheat etc. or we use stronger herbicides.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/organic-farming-y...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/organic-farming-y...
Wheat is currently $4.35 a bushel. A bushel of wheat is about 60 lbs. So, we're paying just over 7 cents a pound for wheat.
Fix the distribution side, not the production side. There's a lot more fat there. And in the mean time, research ways of reducing labour on physical methods of weed control.
My friend had 4.5 squares. That is a square equals 1 square mile. How would we increase labor for weed control?
I also lived in Imperial Valley, California. The back breaking work that the migrant workers did was amazing difficult. It would take double or triple the workers to pick through and weed a farm then pick fruits and vegetables. I don't think Kansas nor Manitoba have the population to do that seasonal work.
It's all good until they get a taste for blood.
In North America, we build these huge farms because it's the only way to eke out a profit. You need serious capital to get started and you have a single person looking after land from one horizon to the other. This happens because the price of wheat is $4 and change a bushel.
And although milk production is often below cost, because of regulatory pressures distribution costs are kept low. Compared to wheat, milk is dramatically more difficult to process and distribute, and yet the markup is many times less. If you look at the difference, you can see where all the money is going.
I suggest that you can increase the cost of production of wheat 8-10 times without significantly affecting the final price. This would allow you to have 5 times as many farmers. It would allow them to use smaller, less expensive equipment. It would allow them to reduce their reliance on loans and insurance, further reducing their costs.
And, yes, we have more than enough labour as long as we pay people a reasonable wage. In my father's generation, university students all used to work on the farms for their summer jobs. Now? Pizza Pizza. The whole reason we have "summer vacation" is so that students could work on the farms.
I live in rural Japan now. I literally live smack dab in the middle of rice fields. Because of the protectionist policies for the last 60 years (installed by the Americans, BTW), farming here is dramatically different. A farm here can be about the size of a residential lot in North America. And... guess what? None of my neighbours use herbicide on their fields. 2 applications of pesticide a year (once in the spring for slugs/snails, once a few weeks before harvesting for grasshoppers -- some of the farmers have been growing an early variety lately and so are able to get the rice off the field before the grasshoppers emerge, so they skip the second application. Some skip the first application by over-planting and then thinning -- by hand!).
And for those interested, they do have amazing planters and harvesters. A couple of guys use traditional tractors, but they make an absolute mess of the fields. Most people use these tiny go-cart like devices. You can plant a field in less than an hour and it barely disturbs the soil at all. It's amazing. They have another device that cuts and bundles the rice stalks, but everybody hangs and dries their rice by hand. Then they load it up into pickup trucks and thresh it at a central location.
Is my hope that we can fix the distribution system, inject cash back into farms, reduce farm size and increase the number of people working on farms realistic? I seriously doubt it. But I still think that it's important to understand that this is a problem of our own making. This is about money, not about science.
There is also some research for devices that will work. One way is to disc the cover crop. This is reasonably effective, apparently. Another thing I've seen is a device that kind of rakes the cover crop without disturbing it -- a bit like the manual method.
Finally, you don't necessarily have to kill the cover crop, depending on what it is (and depending on your crop). You can disc where you intend to plant, or you can even just drill to plan the seeds. The is apparently very effective in dry soil rice production in the southern US, but I haven't really been following it.
Finally, one of the techniques that's popular here in Japan is to grow a clover cover crop in the winter, but then cover it with the stalks of last year's rice. Then when you harvest the rice, you move the decomposing stalks back where you intend to plan and resow clover again. This has the advantage of reducing fertilisation use.
I love the environment and nature but sometimes we cause bigger problems trying to solve smaller problems. And pay extra to do so.
Wouldn't organic herbicides containing Nonanoic (Pelargonic) acid [1], vinegar [2] or salt [3] also be options?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonanoic_acid
Just because things are natural or traditional doesn't make them necessarily better than the chemicals we are dealing with now, even with their present downsides.
[1]http://weedcontrolfreaks.com/2014/06/salt-vinegar-and-glypho... [2] http://weedicide.co.uk/salt-kill-weeds-herbicide/
a) cyanide is 100% natural so is snake venom so is that better then you?
b) Everything is a chemical. Salt is Sodium chloride (NaCl) has it certainly does destroy the soil. If you don't like someone try dumping some salt into their garden. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/plant-problems/environmenta...