A backlash against the herbicide Dicamba
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
My grandfather was a small farmer.
He farmed about 120 acres in his retirement when I knew him and it was enough to keep his family well fed and well funded until the day he died.
He knew everybody in town. He went to all the farm shows. He bought the best animal breeds he could find and had a whole host of different animals, fruits, vegetables and legumes living happily on his farm at any given time.
Cows, chickens, ducks, wheat, peaches, onions, etc.
I remember he used to feed ground up eggshells to his chickens because he swore it made the strongest egg shells which could be shipped into town unscathed.
He fertilized his fields with manure.
And when a crop was lost to locusts... he didn't spray the entire field with insecticide.
He invited me out into the crops with a torch and we burnt it all down to the ground in order to kill off their eggs.
He lived where he farmed.
I couldn't imagine him ever agreeing to use the world's most dangerous herbicide in order to grow a crop that did not want to be grown where his farm was located.
What would his neighbours think? Where would his livelihood come from if he somehow poisoned his land?
Nowadays when most farms are 10,000+ acres in size and overseen by absentee landlords... I'm not surprised in the slightest that they are tossing around dangerous chemicals like candy without a care in the world.
Shame on them. And RIP Grandpa ;)
It's good to remember the past, but don't sugarcoat things either. Modern techniques grow more food, more cheaply, with lower economic footprint, less land used per output, less energy spent per calorie, etc...
And sometimes they mess up and poison soybeans, which sucks. But feeding chickens eggshells isn't the fix you want.
> Such weeds have grown stronger and more numerous over the past 20 years — a result of herbicide overuse. By spraying so much glyphosate, farmers inadvertently caused weeds to evolve resistant traits more quickly.
Alongside rampant antibiotic use for livestock which leads to antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and monocrops leading to poor nutrients in the soil, some things which can increase output in the short run and lead to disaster in the long run.
That is my main concern, personally.
Why fight nature? It's futile. You can't win in the long run.
What are farmers going to do when dicamba stops working? Or it's offspring?
What does that even really mean? Are modern childbirth techniques "fighting nature"? What about using soap? I challenge anyone to come up with a meaningful notion of "fighting nature".
Is it futile? Why? What's the justification for that claim?
My apologies, I should have specified.
By "fighting nature" I was referring to creating the worlds most powerful herbicide (that will become powerless in a few years because nature will force it to).
I was referring to spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the Asian Flying Carp species that literally are decimating our waterways in terms of enjoyment.
Stuff like that.
Everybody hates weeds, and nobody likes getting their neck broken when they are on a powerboat racing down the river because a fish flew up and hit them.
But we can't really stop the weeds from growing of the fish from spreading in the long run. So why bother?
It just seems like such a wasted effort.
But this isn't quite the big deal that it's made out to be. Mineral phosphorous mining is cheaper than other sources, but phosphate isn't rare or going away. It's literally present in all biomass by definition: phosphate groups are the bonds that tie the links together in RNA and DNA, and it can be extracted from biomass trivially (i.e. composting, or even incineration), albeit at somewhat higher cost. Given that agricultural output is currently almost free, that's hardly going to break society.
Right now, that is true.
But what happens when Dicamba stops working?
What happens when the next Dicamba stops working?
We will be forced to return to the old ways of farming eventually whether we like it or not.
And by old ways I'm talking about polyculture and basically just growing what's right for your region.
It isn't though.
> lower economic footprint, less land used per output, less energy spent per calorie
Small farms are actually a lot more efficient than large farms in everything but man-hours.
Think about it like this: If you had a 10 meters by 10 meters garden vs someone who had a 1km x 1km field. You would make sure every square cm in your garden is irrigated properly, that no insects are munching on your plants and each plant has the right amount of space and correct soil treatment for maximum yield. On a large farm, you cannot possibly do that. The total yield is a lot higher but the plants are not as healthy and are not living under optimal conditions.
We will do what we always do and adapt and continue to make the world a better place.
The past is an awful awful place why would you ever want to go back there.
However, it is more efficient in terms of farmer-hours to have large farms and that's what really counts financially.
[1] https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/21085/1/sp06le03.pdf
What that paper says is that 'large, corporate' farms perform worse than 'small, individual' ones. And it explicitly says "The different behavior may be understood if we recall that in our samples scale is a proxy for farm type.".
What performs better are individual-run farms, i.e. not collectives (which is pertinent in the paper because that style of farming is a holdover from Communist times) and not what is called 'corporate' farming in the paper where you have a bunch of MBA's and agronomists hiring cheap labor.
Essentially (going beyond the numbers of the paper), farms that are run by individuals who have (presumably) more 'skin in the game' and who know the land, the history and local conditions better than hired guns is what makes those farms more productive. But that also puts a cap on the maximum amount of land you can manage, hence the correlation between farm organizational type and its size.
So, to tie that back to the GP - it's true that it's not necessarily the 'megafarms' that he's at a competitive disadvantage to (depending on what market you're looking at - I mean a farm as small as that isn't competing for big Cargill contracts), but his mostly tradition-based management style (looking at the description of the ground egg shells) did put him at a disadvantage to the point that such farmers can't survive today. Today's farmers are agricultural engineers (more often than not literally - many farmers, and a growing percentage, have some sort of university education). Keeping a farm profitable today is about leveraging technology, keeping data very accurately and making the most of it. That includes local-scale sensor networks, microdosage of nutrients ('fertilizers'), very fine-grained crop rotation schemes. And in lifestock and dairy farming even more so. It's all romantic that GP's grandfather had bunch of chickens and some cows that he could milk by hand if he wanted to, but the economic reality is that no dairy farmer today can survive that way, regardless of farm size.
If you actually visit the farms you can immediately tell the differences. When you visit a large farm, there is always things like tons of wasted space and water not covering some plants while others getting drowned. None of the plants are taken care of nearly as well as small farms (tomatoes usually aren't pruned for example). Overall, from what I've seen, large farms try to compensate for lack of individual plant maintenance by chemical treatments.
Here's a link to some "urban farming" that I think scales basically to other sizes: http://www.farmlandinfo.org/sites/default/files/Philadelphia...
Specifically, if you look at table 3, yield per crop area only decreases with size (1.2 for the largest farms and ~1.42 for the rest): https://seafile.entervice.com/f/175b18396c774698b6d2/
Then there is recent greenhouse indoor farming survey: http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/
Here is comparison of revenue per square foot for large and small farms from that survey: https://seafile.entervice.com/f/c0a224916e6742ef9873/
It really depends on the crop but in this case everything but cannabis had higher yields in small farms.
Finally, if you're not convinced, here's some prose from cgiar regarding farm sizes and yields: https://wle.cgiar.org/thrive/2017/03/20/precision-agricultur...
select quote from there:
"In some ways, precision agriculture takes us back to the future. In some developing countries, very small farms tend to have marginally higher yields than somewhat larger farms. This can in part be explained by the relatively higher labor input on small farms, which can rely largely on unremunerated family labor. Under these circumstances, it is possible to check on every corner of the field on a daily basis, pull out weeds individually, and fertilizer precisely."
But here they're talking about very modern high precision farming which isn't actually taking place in many large farms. When it does take places it almost matches small farms.
The measure of good farming should not be yield per acre, but nutrient density and food safety instead. It's completely upside down at the moment.
Do you think his grandfather would have cared about "competitive advantage" in favor of dropping the standard of produce quality? No. His grandfather had exactly the mentality we need in farming, which is quality before quantity.
You as a farmer are responsible for the health of the people you feed, and the health of the land and its ecosystem.
This mentality that everything has to be turned into dollars in the most efficient way, will lead farmers to sell us chemical bricks packaged as food if they just can get away with it, because..you know..it's efficient.
Think about that for a moment. When the only measure is dollars, you sacrifice everything that is important for humans and the planet in favor of profits.
When you make a folksy appeal to natural farming, imply that you don't have to assign utility to things, and then conclude by criticizing capitalism it... falls flat.
It's far more powerful to say that we are failing to price in the cost of monoculture farming, given the catastrophic effects it can have. But to say that you should measure yield based on nutrition per acre rather than dollars per acre? that just implies that you know better than the individuals who are making their own choices about what to consume (cheap food that you call non-nutritious, vs. expensive, organic-whatever that appeals to us emotionally).
with all due respect, I don't want someone else making my consumption choices. Let's just all agree to price it at the market.
And if you think that consumers are making the wrong choices, then the solution is to educate them. If you make your best case and fail, then you should consider whether your opinion should be changed, instead.
How do you price in dicamba use? It shouldn't quite be banned, but—silence isn't enough.
and yet it's legal, and few argue for lotto prohibition
in the words of the initial reply:
> Do you think his grandfather would have cared about "competitive advantage" in favor of dropping the > standard of produce quality? No. His grandfather had exactly the mentality we need in farming, which is > quality before quantity.
...
> Think about that for a moment. When the only measure is dollars, you sacrifice everything that is > important for humans and the planet in favor of profits.
the best solution would be to internalize the costs: dicambia is going to cost the economy 5 billion dollars; therefore dicambia-based sales need to recoup that. And if they can't, then the companies should be fined if there is evidence they either knew, or fell short of their regulatory duty to look.
My point isn't that unfettered capitalism is good (it's not: it's terrible). My point is that the opposite extreme and emotional appeal is also not ideal: "when you only measure dollars..!" Well; there is nothing more appropriate to measure in. So let's just make sure everything is on the scale.
Organic practices use tillage for weed control rather than pesticide. That would have liberated the moisture from the snow melt leaving nothing for the wheat.
A bushel of wheat is more than a month of calories, so that's 10000 of the world's 7+ billion that my father in law is feeding single handedly with his 2500 acre farm.
Farmers can't make money when corn is down at $3.50 a bushel (futures). And local prices are much, much lower because the elevators are full from back to back record crops. We have a $.60 basis in my area, which is historically very high.
What's good for farming is no longer good for farmers. Their best recent year was 2012, a 100 year drought when corn prices went north of $8. We had 120bu corn in 2012, which is $960/ac revenue. This year even at 200bu corn we'd be looking at about $600/ac revenue. Good luck with that. You're just farming for insurance payments at that point.
And I forgot to mention that about 40% of all corn use goes to gas tanks as ethanol (the rest is about 40% livestock feed and 15% exports). So even with that demand source, which is itself a dumb idea, we can't clear the market at a price farmers can live on.
I think his spirit and mindset is being lost in to the lust and herd mentality stemming from capitalism. Who would care throwing unknown molecules on your crop.
I'd like to point out that this is not true. When I first moved from the rural Midwest to Silicon Valley, I quickly discovered this as a common misconception. The average farm is actually closer to 800 acres and still farmed by (in most cases) a single an owner/operator maybe with a brother or an uncle helping.
It is true that a lot of farmland is rented and nearly all of it is owned by someone like your grandpa that is a retired farmer now living off the rent of their land. I've found that this older generation is often the pickiest about how their land gets farmed and they often enforce practices that they prefer to keep their ground in good healthy condition.
About me: My family has been farming for 6 generations, my dad, uncle, and brother all actively farm and I am the founder of FarmLogs (YCW12).
Drift is the scariest thing out there to a commercial applicator. We had well trained drivers, took them out of the field when the winds came up. But there's pressure to spray all the fields in a 4-5 week window and you'd always lose days to rain. We didn't have drift cases every year but it was impossible to avoid.
I got burned early with Dicamba and refused to spray it under any conditions when soybeans or other susceptible crops were out of the ground nearby.
Heard about its new formulation and talked with a buddy about it. He said that they'd licked the problems with drift. I said have you seen it demonstrated in fields in your area? He said no, I said have you ever had a chemical rep stretch the truth about the capabilities of a new formulation? We had a good mutual laugh about that one.
This was a preventable tragedy.
This is not a joke. Monsanto has sued hundreds and hundreds of farmers and driven them out of business.
Farmers who have worked hard to keep Monsanto's IP out of their fields are at a serious disadvantage in crop yields.
But now there's a new twist. It isn't pollen and germination agents drifting on the wind this time. It's deadly herbicide. This time, the contamination doesn't benefit the neighbors; it kills them. Well, first it kills their crops. If only those hundreds of farmers were still around to turn the tables on Monsanto. Too bad there aren't hundreds and hundreds of family farms that could each take a multi-million dollar chunk out of Monsanto.
Maybe we can take advantage of this moment to adjust the rules. If your intellectual property blows through the wind and contaminates your neighbors, you should be liable, not them. That should be true whether the IP kills their crops or whether it increases their crop yields. In all cases, they should not be liable--you should.
So perhaps Monsanto can sue all these farmers for the increase in crop yield, but they could turn around and sue their neighbor for exposing them to the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_off-label_promotion_ph...
More importantly, seeds should not be considered as intellectual property. In particular, it's ridiculous that you are not allowed to replant seeds from your harvest.
why? Most farmers do not replant their seeds (wouldn't work because the seeds are hybrids). do you oppose patenting lifeforms on principle?
And many do, for seeds where it works.
> do you oppose patenting lifeforms on principle?
I oppose applying patents in a way that violates a "first sale doctrine" kind of thing. That is, once you have sold me seeds, they should be my property, and you should not have a say in how I use them. (Edited to add: Even if, yes, in a certain deliberately technical sense, the DNA in those seeds amounts to "derivative works" or "copies" of the DNA contained in what you sold me.)
If that makes patents on lifeforms worthless, that's fine with me. But no, "no patents on lifeforms" is not the principle I start from.
The only cases I know of where Monsanto has sued involved farmers who were intentionally growing herbicide resistant crops, in many cases intentionally breeding them to express patented genes.
Can you cite a case where a farmer accidentally grew patented crops and was sued by Monsanto?
Note that winning the suit over the 1998 crop means they won a de facto ban on saving seed from one harvest to plant the next year -- it is beyond the means of independent farmers to detect contamination, or filter out contaminated seed from their own harvest. In addition to creating an economic burden (farmers must now buy seed), it also means selective breeding of crops is now extremely risky from a legal perspective.
From the Canadian supreme court's judgment:
"Thus a farmer whose field contains seed or plants originating from seed spilled into them, or blown as seed, in swaths from a neighbour's land or even growing from germination by pollen carried into his field from elsewhere by insects, birds, or by the wind, may own the seed or plants on his land even if he did not set about to plant them. He does not, however, own the right to the use of the patented gene, or of the seed or plant containing the patented gene or cell."
Here is a more recent case. Monsanto has sued 850 farmers over seed contamination: http://www.activistpost.com/2013/08/monsanto-can-sue-farmers...
Apparently 700 of them settled out of court, so documentation on that front is thin. On the other hand, the Schmeiser (from above) countersued Monsanto after the above judgement, for (among other things) libel, and monsanto eventually settled out of court.
Monsanto has promised not to sue for < 1% contamination, and the courts bound them to that standard. No one thinks it is feasible for small farmers to keep contamination levels below 1%. (Note x=>y doesnt imply y=>x, but if they aren't going to sue farmers for contamination, why not publicly document that policy instead of this 1% rule?)
Finally, organic farmers are repeatedly suing over contamination (which is at least as financially damaging as Monsanto coming after them), with mixed results.
First off, Dicamba is not a new herbicide. We've had it for many years and knew the challenges associated with it. Most farms didn't need to use it because glyphosate (aka Roundup) was just as effective and far easier to use thanks to Monsanto developing the compatible GMO seed over 20 years ago. Since then, two things have changed: roundup is off patent (so Monsanto's profits are being challenged) and many common weeds have developed their own resistance to the glyphosate mode of action.
This leads Monsanto searching for a new product they can sell, and farmers searching for a more effective herbicide they can use. Pressure from both sides.
Monsanto and the other chemical companies have a powerful lobby. They told the EPA that this new formulation of Dicamba was less prone to drift and somehow got that through without much field testing.
The drift issue is a great thing for the chemical/seed companies if they can keep the product approved for use. Here is why: everyone will have to buy their GMO seed. Not even because they want to use the Dicamba product, but because the need the resistant seed as insurance against damage from their neighbor. There is a LOT of profit on the line for Monsanto and Dow/Dupont and unfortunately they have the ears of the regulators and they have great influence over the "independent" farmer lobby (American Farm Bureau).
I'd like to propose that consolidation of farms is not driving this issue, but rather consolidation of seed and chemical companies. We have a massive oligopoly in the seed and chemical industry and it is only getting worse as the "Big 6" are becoming the Big 3 through M&A (Bayer/Monsanto, Dow/Dupont, Syngenta/ChemChina).
About me: My family has been farming for 6 generations, my dad, uncle, and brother all actively farm and I am the founder of FarmLogs (YCW12).
At the very least, it would make it more difficult for monsanto to sue organic farmers because monsanto gmos contaminated the organic crop.
This is causing a disaster for those farmers, and an ecological problem in general.
The manufacturer claims the new dicamba is less like to evaporate and the problems are from farmers using old stocks. Others don't agree. Lots of noise and wind, little hard data - (the lack of data it itself part of the problem).
The 4M is a lower bound. It is also known that dicamba drift is killing other crops and wild plants, but there is no tracking of acrage for that other (also definately large) die off.
Also, the scope of damage spiked with the introduction of new dicamba.
How is this not hard evidence?
https://www.rt.com/usa/366812-epa-monsanto-dicamba-herbicide...
Hydroponics inside of greenhouses farmed by robots.
Ultimately that's just costly, but the shortest path to reducing that cost is more affordable energy.
Until we get to sealed greenhouses maybe exotic solutions like poison resistant Genetically Modified (Organisms?) should be avoided as food and industrial sources.
Any chemical approach is just going to select for resistance sooner or later (often sooner than expected).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rorymackean/tertill-the...
Just saw this the other day. Not exactly for commercial farms I don't think, but not far off either.
Setup costs are generally large, but aquaponics scale very well.
Plus you get to eat lots of tilapia.
I'll tell you where all the aquaponics farms are: in bankruptcy court, because very few of them have managed to figure out how to make this system work at a scale bigger than home production, and even less how to do so while still being economically competitive. It's not a coincidence that most tilapia production is not in aquaponics farms. And it's not like it hasn't been tried; people try to do so every day and have been doing so for 30. But saying "but aquaponics scale very well." just screams 'I read some blog posts about this so now I know they scale well', because the technology simply isn't there.
Remember when headlines used to be informative rather than trying to get you to click?
Critics say that the approval process proceeded without adequate data and under enormous pressure from state agriculture departments, industry groups and farmers associations. Those groups said that farmers desperately needed the new herbicide to control glyphosate-resistant weeds, which can take over fields and deprive soybeans of sunlight and nutrients
--
So a more honest headline would be:
"This miracle weed killer is saving farms as well as sometime devastating their neighbors"
> A better title would be: "This miracle weed killer is saving farms as well as sometime devastating their neighbors"
Maybe the intent of cramming this pesticide to market was to save farms, but perhaps doing so was a bit hasty. Should we prioritize profits over healthcare and safety?