Union of Concerned Scientists
http://www.ucsusa.org/...
12/05/2013
The Rise of Superweeds—and What to Do About It
It sounds like a sci-fi movie: American farmers fighting desperately to hold back an onslaught of herbicide-defying "superweeds."
Roundup: the cure that super-sized the disease
The superweed problem began as a promised solution.
In the 1990s, Monsanto introduced a new line of seeds called "Roundup Ready," which were genetically engineered to be immune to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the company’s patented herbicide, Roundup.
Roundup Ready seeds were expensive, but they were widely adopted because they made weed control easier. And because glyphosate is less toxic than other common herbicides, the Roundup Ready system was hailed as an environmental breakthrough.
http://www.ahri.uwa.edu.au/...
March 1, 2012
Australian Herbicide Resistance Initiative (AHRI)
Leading crop scientist warns against herbicide overuse
Overuse of the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) has caused US crops to become infested with glyphosate-resistant weeds – and a world-leading researcher at The University of Western Australia is fighting to prevent similar outcomes here.
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http://news.agropages.com/...
Feb. 24, 2011
Scientists Warning Against Effects Of Glyphosate Overuse
Today Glyphosate is the primary ingredient to Monsanto's best selling herbicide, RoundUp. Conveniently and somehow without status of a monopoly, Monsanto also manufactures its genetically modified line of RoundUp Ready (RR) products, which are exactly what they sound like: ready for RoundUp.
Monsanto has conveniently positioned itself as both the problem and the solution: RoundUp can be sprayed liberally on any plant embedded with RR technology and survive. In other words, any plant that is not RoundUp Ready, dies.
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http://grist.org/...
14 Oct 2013
The GM crops increased the evolutionary selection pressure on weeds, Benbrook said, because people started using gylphosate more regularly and during the cropping season, instead of just before or after harvest. Any weed that could survive gained an enormous competitive advantage and spread its seeds.
Why did GM lead to greater herbicide use? Bill Freese, at the Center for Food Safety, says it’s simple economics.
“If you are planting Roundup Ready seeds, there’s a strong incentive to only use Roundup,” Freese said. “The farmers say, ‘look, I’m paying extra for this trait — there’s a real financial incentive to make use of this trait.’”
And spraying glyphosate in conjunction with GM herbicide-tolerant crops was so easy and effective that agronomists started referring to it as “agricultural heroin.” It worked so much better than anything else that farmers became addicted. For farmers rotating between planting glyphosate-resistant soy and glyphosate-resistant corn, it was hard not to use glyphosate year in and year out as their primary form of weed control. When this happens, the National Research Council concluded, “strong selection pressure exists for the evolution of glyphosate-resistant weeds because the management tactics vary so little between the two crops.”
This wasn’t just irresponsible behavior by farmers, however: Monsanto encouraged these reckless practices, assuring farmers in advertisements that it was absolutely fine to use glyphosate every year. And this, of course, was a textbook method for breeding glyphosate-resistant weeds.
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http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/...
April 28, 2006
Too much of good herbicide bad for weed control
"Glyphosate controls nearly all weeds. That's why it is such a great product," Stachler said. "But because of its effectiveness, growers are overusing glyphosate, which is actually having a detrimental effect on controlling weeds.
"If you don't properly manage glyphosate, you are at a greater risk for poorer weed control, which can result in lower yields, and you are at a greater risk for increased pressure of glyphosate-resistant weeds," he said. "Proper glyphosate management will not solve the problems associated with glyphosate overuse, but it will greatly improve its negative impacts."
Improper management practices with glyphosate that growers tend to fall victim to include not using the correct rate, applying at the wrong weed size and weed age, applying during the wrong time of the day, using improper boom height, not maximizing rain fastness after an application, not choosing the best additives, paying little attention to environmental conditions and applying during dusty conditions.
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http://www.nytimes.com/...
April 13, 2010
Study Says Overuse Threatens Gains From Modified Crops
But Dr. Ervin, a professor of environmental management and economics at Portland State University in Oregon, warned that farmers were jeopardizing the benefits by planting too many so-called Roundup Ready crops. These crops are genetically engineered to be impervious to the herbicide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray the chemical to kill weeds while leaving the crops unscathed.
Overuse of this seductively simple approach to weed control is starting to backfire. Use of Roundup, or its generic equivalent, glyphosate, has skyrocketed to the point that weeds are rapidly becoming resistant to the chemical. That is rendering the technology less useful, requiring farmers to start using additional herbicides, some of them more toxic than glyphosate.
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http://www.nytimes.com/...
May 3, 2010
Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.
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.”
Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/...
May 3, 2010
Where Weedkiller Won’t Work
Farmers’ wide use of Roundup, also known as glyphosate, a popular herbicide, has led to the spread of Roundup-resistant weeds across the country. At least 10 species of Roundup-resistant weeds have infested millions of acres in 22 states since 2000.
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http://www.motherjones.com/...
Oct. 3, 2012
How GMOs Unleashed a Pesticide Gusher
For years, proponents of genetically modified crops have hailed them as a critical tool for weaning farmers from reliance on toxic pesticides. On its website, the GMO-seed-and-agrichemical giant Monsanto makes the green case for its Roundup Ready crops, engineered to withstand the company's own blockbuster herbicide, Roundup:
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If you ban roundup / glyphosate , you are in effect banning roundup ready seeds and crops . Without roundup / glyphosate no farmer would spend the money to buy the roundup ready seeds , there would be no advantage to the GMO roundup ready seeds without the roundup / glyphosate to use . The roundup ready GMOs are the vast majority of the GMOs grown in this world , if you ban roundup / glyphosate , you will be causing the vast majority GMOs to go away / not be grown .
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http://www.reuters.com/...
Wed Aug 6, 2014
USDA leaning toward approval of Monsanto's new GMO beans, cotton
Monsanto developed the new soybeans and cotton to resist a new herbicide that combines dicamba and glyphosate and which Monsanto is branding as Roundup Xtend. The "Roundup Ready Xtend crop system" is aimed at combating the millions of acres of weeds that have grown resistant to Monsanto's glyphosate-based Roundup, which has been used extensively on the company's biotech corn, soybeans and cotton.
APHIS also on Tuesday issued a final EIS for genetically altered corn and soybean plants developed by Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical. That EIS also states that the agency intends to approve the products. APHIS has already said in January that it was leaning toward approval for Dow's products.
Dow has developed what it calls Enlist corn and soybeans that resist a new herbicide developed by Dow that includes both glyphosate and 2,4-D.
Dicamba
Chemical Compound
Dicamba is an herbicide. Brand names for formulations of this herbicide include Banvel, Diablo, Oracle and Vanquish. This chemical compound is an organochloride and a derivative of benzoic acid.
2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid
2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid is a common systemic herbicide used in the control of broadleaf weeds. It is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and is the third most commonly used herbicide in North America.
Moreover, dicamba and 2,4-D pose additional risks to people and nearby crops. These herbicides have been linked to increased rates of certain diseases, including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, in farmers and farm workers. They are prone to drifting on the wind and dispersing into the air after application, and consequently, the herbicides can settle far from where they were applied. These herbicides are extremely toxic to many of the most common fruit and vegetable crops, as well as to plants that provide food and habitat for pollinators and other beneficial insects.
https://www.extension.purdue.edu/...
www.ag.purdue.edu/HLA
2,4-D- and Dicamba-tolerant Crops
— Some Facts to Consider
The impending approval and use of soybean varieties that are tolerant of the herbicides 2,4-D and dicamba has been generating some conversation and debate.
Many groups and individuals — including weed scientists, agronomic crop growers,
and specialty crop growers — are concerned about 2,4-D- and dicamba-resistant crops.
They say such crops are unnecessary, will make farmers more dependent on
the intellectual property held by large corporations, will injure nontarget crops
sensitive to 2,4-D and dicamba, and will accelerate the evolution of herbicide resistance in weeds.
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http://www.motherjones.com/...
Aug. 7, 2014
Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown (UPDATED)
Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce "an exciting video series" on the "topics of food, food chains and sustainability."
Marion Nestle was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon.
Since then, I've learned that Condé Nast's Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate.
This is going on right now , Aug. 7, 2014 , so be careful about the things people say and want you to believe , they might just be "funny", iykwim .
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http://www.ucsusa.org/...
Union of Concerned Scientists
12/05/2013
There is a better way to help farmers combat superweeds, through public policies that provide incentives for "healthy farming" practices based on the science of agroecology. These practices include rotating crops and planting cover crops. If implemented, such practices could reduce herbicides use by more than 90 percent, while keeping weeds in check and even increasing farmers' profits.
UCS recommends increased funding for the USDA's Conservation Stewardship Program, which offers financial incentives for farmers using sustainable weed control methods. More resources should also be directed toward multidisciplinary research on integrated weed management strategies, and technical assistance to help farmers adopt them. The new generation of herbicide resistant crops should not be approved without adequate safeguards to protect the public and reduce the possibility of more resistant weeds.
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http://www.reuters.com/...
Aug 6 2014 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators on Tuesday said they are leaning toward approval of a new line of herbicide-tolerant crops developed by Monsanto Co even though they could increase problematic weed resistance for farmers.
A final decision is expected after a 30-day public review period, the agency said.
http://organicconnectmag.com/...
Last Chance to Stop New GMO Crops
Today, August 7, 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and proposed approval for new corn and soybean varieties genetically engineered (GE) to be resistant to the toxic herbicide 2,4-D. There will now be a 30-day public comment period before USDA is expected to grant final approval of the controversial new crops. USDA also released a draft Environmental Impact Statement and proposed approval for crops resistant to Monsanto’s dicamba, with a 45-day comment period. The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a concurrent review of Enlist Duo, Dow’s proprietary mix of 2,4-D and glyphosate, for use on Dow’s corn and soybeans. If given final approval, these GE crops will be sold with additional resistance to other herbicides, including glyphosate, and they are among the first wave of the biotechnology industry’s efforts to increase the pesticide intensity of U.S agriculture.
“USDA’s decision represents a huge setback for farmers and sustainable agriculture. Independent scientists have linked 2,4-D to cancer, Parkinson’s disease and other maladies. Introduction of 2,4-D resistant corn and soybeans will dramatically increase use of this toxic herbicide, leading to more disease, environmental harm, and increasingly intractable weeds for farmers,” said Bill Freese, Science Policy Analyst at Center for Food Safety.
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20250
http://www.usda.gov/...
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/...
Contact:
R. Andre Bell (301) 851- 4059
Richard.a.bell@aphis.usda.gov
Lyndsay Cole (970) 494-7410
Lyndsay.M.Cole@aphis.usda.gov
USDA Seeks Public Review and Comment on Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Herbicide-Resistant Corn and Soybeans
WASHINGTON, Jan. 03, 2014--The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) released today its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) as part of its review to determine whether to deregulate genetically engineered (GE) corn and soybean plants that are resistant to several herbicides, including one known as 2,4-D. APHIS is performing an assessment of these GE plants, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is conducting a concurrent review of the related herbicides. APHIS’ DEIS will be available for public review and comment for 45 days from the date of publication in the Federal Register.
http://www.regulations.gov/...