Herbicide-resistant superweeds overpowering crops | Hacker News Reader

Herbicide-resistant superweeds overpowering crops

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23 pointscodedivine7 comments

You mean the company that patents crops(1), locks them away from farmers(2), and then files drive-by lawsuits wherever their seed drifts(3) is having trouble with mutant weeds? Say it ain't so.

Looks like mother nature had prior art, and boy is she pissed.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

(2) http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/saved-seed-farmer-la...

(3) http://current.com/technology/89264825_california-legislatur...

Very snippy and all quite possibly true. Nevertheless, Monsanto has had a huge positive impact on agriculture all across the world. Nobody puts a gun to the head of the farmers. They choose to buy Monsanto because of higher yields. Higher yields bring in more revenue to the farmers and reduce prices worldwide, at the same time. Lower prices = fewer people starving.

I spent twenty years as an agronomist. Herbicide resistant weeds are not new, we had them before Roundup was as widely used. Most university scientists predicted Roundup resistant weeds before Roundup resistant crops were grown outside the lab.

Monsanto isn't the only company to sell GM seed resistant to herbicides. But they were the first and are still by far the largest. There is a hatred of them similar to how the software industry feels about say Microsoft.

Genetically modified seed is the single biggest advance in agriculture in the past fifty years. Do you have any idea of how many millions of pounds of insecticides aren't sprayed anymore? Roundup is also both cheaper and safer than a lot of the previous alternatives. Yet there is still strong opposition to GM seed and Monsanto, especially in the press.

Farmers and the fertilizer people who do a lot of the spraying live in the community. Having been a part of that fraternity I can guarantee you they aren't going to do anything to pollute their world or ship a product they wouldn't let their own family consume. But I guess you're going to have to take my word on that one.

There is seed ready to be marketed that is resistant not only to Roundup but two other herbicides with different modes of action. That is a fact the article does not mention. It won't solve the problem entirely, but will make Mother Nature work a lot harder to defeat it.

>Farmers and the fertilizer people who do a lot of the spraying live in the community. Having been a part of that fraternity I can guarantee you they aren't going to do anything to pollute their world or ship a product they wouldn't let their own family consume.

how idyllic. I guess it is some other, bad-bad-bad, farmers and fertilizer people who did all this agricultural damage to the nature.

Following on to that, farm runoff is a widely known source of contaminates to rivers and lakes. It's a non-point-source pollution, and the EPA says "agriculture, including crop production, animal operations, pastures, and rangeland, impacts 18% of the total river and stream miles assessed, or 48% of the river and streams identified as impaired". Agribusiness has generally been against increased restrictions on non-point source pollution.

There are solutions, but most are expensive and with no immediate local gain. Farmers, like everyone, balance risk, time, and money. In this case the risk is literally downstream and several years or decades in the future. To follow the original metaphor, it's someone else's problem in a different world.

It's easy to see how a distant risk might not be considered worth minimizing.

The common solutions to that are laws and financial incentives, both of which bring either the risk or reward closer to hand.

Therefore, to say that "they aren't going to do anything to pollute their world" reflects a simplification of the issue. If there's no longer EQIP, CRP, CREP, or any of a large number of other programs to encourage good land management practices, then do you think the farmers will continue to do so?

If so, then let's cut that funding since obviously it's not needed.

Well, that's what happens when you don't rotate your herbicides every season like all the agriculture experts always told you to. Good luck with the next business model, Monsanto.

There was an article about this a month ago, i think here. Saying that ALL of monsanto's competitors are swooping in and seeing this as a golden opportunity to shill their own seeds and herbicides as well. monsanto needs to adapt quick. They've had quite some time to figure this out.

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