GreenWatch

B. McPherson Superweeds are a new reality for N. American farmers. Weeds capable of resisting the herbicide glyphosate are sprouting in all the wrong places after years of inadvertent selection by farmers depending on chemicals to keep weeds down. Since the ‘70s when Roundup was introduced, farmers and homeowners alike have used the liquid to kill plants that they didn’t like. Mother Nature has surprises for the unwary. What seemed like a quick, cost effective solution to elimination of weeds in soy and corn fields has turned out superweeds instead. Iowa is finding more and more Palmer amaranth(pig weed)  infestations. This weed is capable of putting out half a million seeds for each plant. And it’s only one of a plethora of superweeds washing back over croplands that have been sprayed with glyphosate . Glyphosate(Roundup Ready) resistant crops are genetically modified(GM) to not die when sprayed with the chemical. Palmer pigweeds can produce up to half a million se...

B. McPherson There’s an arms race going on in N. America’s cornfields. The race is developing genetically modified crops to resist ever more lavish spraying of herbicides. An early winner in the weed race was Monsanto, a corporation that developed seeds containing weed genes that could resist the spraying of that other Monsanto product, Roundup. Roundup was an effective weed/plant killer for many years, but gradually as Nature will do, some weeds survived Roundup to reproduce. So farmers sprayed Roundup(or the generic glyphosate) in ever heavier doses. The effect has been to breed a wide number of SuperWeeds that will not die when sprayed with the herbicide. Now rival Agro company Dow AgroSciences has developed a GM corn that carries a gene resistant to Dow Chemical’s herbicide 2,4-D. It is seeking to be allowed to start widespread planting of the genetically altered seeds in time for the 2013 crop year. Fields planted with the new corn, dubbed Enlist, could be ...