Soybean farmers in Missouri and Tennessee have been planting a newly engineered soybean. This soybean seed is resistant to a weed-killing chemical called dicamba. This may be a big breakthrough for farmers. However, as NPR reporter Dan Charles explains, this is not legal yet.
Well, the chemical's called dicamba. This is a new twist in the long-running war on weeds. Farmers have had a really successful strategy, crops that have been genetically modified to tolerate the weed killer Roundup. That way, farmers could spray their fields with Roundup. The crops would live. The weeds would die. Problem is Roundup is not working so well anymore. Some weeds have now evolved resistance to it, especially one really awful weed called pigweed.
So this new soybean was supposed to solve the problem. It's resistant to Roundup but also resistant to this other weed killer called dicamba. And the idea was farmers could spray Roundup and dicamba. And if a weed didn't die from one chemical, it would die from the other one. Monsanto is working on a new version of dicamba to go with these seeds, but the Environmental Protection Agency has not yet approved it for use on soybeans.
Dicamba is a problematic chemical and while Monsanto didn’t exactly break the law, they clearly seemed to expect people to break the law since the product they supplied was only worthwhile if you could break the law.
Monsanto says it put those seeds out on the market because farmers wanted the newest varieties for other reasons, too, because they - the seeds offered higher yields. But Monsanto by doing that was giving farmers a weed-killing tool that farmers could not legally use, at least not yet. It was telling farmers, here are these dicamba-resistant soybeans, but don't you dare go out and buy dicamba to spray on those crops.
Well, evidently, farmers did exactly that. They sprayed dicamba illegally, maybe because they were having such, you know, terrible problems with weeds. But dicamba is a chemical that really blows easily in the wind. And it is really toxic to regular old soybeans. So there are now tens of thousands of acres of soybeans in Arkansas and Missouri and Tennessee that are damaged.
This has been quite a disaster in the area and complaints are being filed. The best part of all of this?
But there's one last twist to this, Renee. Scientists have been doing experiments in the greenhouse with pigweed and dicamba. And in their experiments, pigweed that's been sprayed with dicamba over a few generations has been able to develop resistance to the chemical. So if farmers start using dicamba a lot, it may not actually work for very long.
At least snake-oil salesman were selling you something that might give you tummy troubles.