12 ms·

A backlash against the herbicide Dicamba

91 points by a_w 9y ago

watertorock 9y ago
I hate headlines like this. Remember when headlines used to be informative rather than trying to get you to click?
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  What's dishonest about it?
  - ec109685 9y ago
    It is also saving farms too: 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"
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      The primary focus of the post is the negative effects of the pesticide that was allowed through _because_ it was able to be pushed through the typical protocols. It's a breakdown of the very regulation meant to protect people. > 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?
    - adsfqwop 9y ago
      I think what you mean is "The miracle weed killer is saving the chemical pesticide executive's pensions, while often devastating neighboring farms". That's the real honest headline.
- leoh 9y ago
  There is nothing misleading about this headline
- ams6110 9y ago
  Not really. Headlines have always been written to be eye catching and to entice one to buy/read the publication.
- GalacticDomin8r 9y ago
  Are you suggesting Yellow journalism is some new phenomena? It seems quite a stretch to associate this article for some cheap readership trick.
- mholt 9y ago
  I thought there was a time like that too, but then I found chapter titles in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" like "A Formula That Will Work Wonders for You" (published 1936).
ars 9y ago
Summary: The herbicide dicamba can evaporate from where it was applied and drift to nearby fields harming plants that are not resistant to it. 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).
- hedora 9y ago
  20M acres of dicamba soybeans have been planted, and it is well documented that drift damaged at least 4M acres of non-dicamba soybeans. 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?
mjevans 9y ago
The best way to avoid weeds... 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.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Robot weed-pullers might be OK at some point. Any chemical approach is just going to select for resistance sooner or later (often sooner than expected).
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Inter-row hoeing is enough to get good yield for crops that have good row spacing.
  - RandomInteger4 9y ago
    This seems relevant: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rorymackean/tertill-the-solar-powered-weeding-robot-for-home-g 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.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  I'd rebuff your hydroponics idea, and add that it's worth considering aquaponics. You drastically reduce the amount of growth and nutrient additives, as the system becomes effectively a closed-loop with fish (and aerobic bacteria in the growing medium) creating the nutrients required. Setup costs are generally large, but aquaponics scale very well.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    And they don't have that fucking oily taste that hydroponically grown stuff does. Plus you get to eat lots of tilapia.
flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
This situation is a result of small farm consolidation and commoditization imho. 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 ;)
- ajross 9y ago
  The techniques your grandfather was using would have (and likely did) leave him at a terrible competitive disadvantage when trying to compete with those megafarms growing the same crops. 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.
  - chillacy 9y ago
    Yet there are questions about the sustainability of some modern techniques: > 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.
DrScump 9y ago
This new dicamba formulation was quietly approved by the Obama administration right after the election. https://www.rt.com/usa/366812-epa-monsanto-dicamba-herbicide/ https://www.rt.com/usa/366812-epa-monsanto-dicamba-herbicide...
rmason 9y ago
A lot of you on here from previous comments know that I spent 20+ years as a fertilizer agronomist before changing careers. 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.
iamnotlarry 9y ago
Monsanto has waged war against independent farmers for years. If your neighbor planted Monsanto seeds and they germinated into your crop, Monsanto sues you for stealing their IP. They now own your crops because your crops contain their intellectual property. 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.
- MichaelBurge 9y ago
  Wouldn't the most natural liable party be the farmer who bought Monsanto seeds and planted them in a careless manner? 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.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    No. Monsanto reps went to great lengths to tell their seed buyers that their crops would be safe to spray off-label/illegally. On the regulator end they did what they could to look like they were compliant and then encouraged the farmers to do the spraying that caused this.
    - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      In case anyone thinks this is just conspiracy-mongering about "big bad Monsanto", drug companies are routinely smacked for doing roughly the same thing in the form of promoting off-label uses for their drugs (prescribing them for conditions that they're not approved to treat, which is legal for doctors to do but not for drug companies to promote). It's not that any one company is bad, it's that the incentive is just too strong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_off-label_promotion_pharmaceutical_settlements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_off-label_promotion_ph...
Khol 9y ago
Related story: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=531272125 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
When Wall St buys farm land to bet on food prices.. This is more likely to happen. Wall st.. continuing to ruin everything and its only 2017.
vollmarj 9y ago
Like most problems at this scale, this is a complex issue with many causes. 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).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- hedora 9y ago
  I wonder if removing patent protection for herbicide resistance genes would slow this cycle down. At the very least, it would make it more difficult for monsanto to sue organic farmers because monsanto gmos contaminated the organic crop.

91 points by a_w 9y ago

watertorock 9y ago

I hate headlines like this. Remember when headlines used to be informative rather than trying to get you to click?

nickysielicki 9y ago
What's dishonest about it?
- ec109685 9y ago
  It is also saving farms too: 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"
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    The primary focus of the post is the negative effects of the pesticide that was allowed through _because_ it was able to be pushed through the typical protocols. It's a breakdown of the very regulation meant to protect people. > 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?
  - adsfqwop 9y ago
    I think what you mean is "The miracle weed killer is saving the chemical pesticide executive's pensions, while often devastating neighboring farms". That's the real honest headline.
leoh 9y ago
There is nothing misleading about this headline
ams6110 9y ago
Not really. Headlines have always been written to be eye catching and to entice one to buy/read the publication.
GalacticDomin8r 9y ago
Are you suggesting Yellow journalism is some new phenomena? It seems quite a stretch to associate this article for some cheap readership trick.
mholt 9y ago
I thought there was a time like that too, but then I found chapter titles in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" like "A Formula That Will Work Wonders for You" (published 1936).

ars 9y ago

Summary: The herbicide dicamba can evaporate from where it was applied and drift to nearby fields harming plants that are not resistant to it. 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).

hedora 9y ago
20M acres of dicamba soybeans have been planted, and it is well documented that drift damaged at least 4M acres of non-dicamba soybeans. 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?

mjevans 9y ago

The best way to avoid weeds... 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.

ams6110 9y ago
Robot weed-pullers might be OK at some point. Any chemical approach is just going to select for resistance sooner or later (often sooner than expected).
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Inter-row hoeing is enough to get good yield for crops that have good row spacing.
- RandomInteger4 9y ago
  This seems relevant: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rorymackean/tertill-the-solar-powered-weeding-robot-for-home-g 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.
King-Aaron 9y ago
I'd rebuff your hydroponics idea, and add that it's worth considering aquaponics. You drastically reduce the amount of growth and nutrient additives, as the system becomes effectively a closed-loop with fish (and aerobic bacteria in the growing medium) creating the nutrients required. Setup costs are generally large, but aquaponics scale very well.
- busterarm 9y ago
  And they don't have that fucking oily taste that hydroponically grown stuff does. Plus you get to eat lots of tilapia.

flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago

This situation is a result of small farm consolidation and commoditization imho. 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 ;)

ajross 9y ago
The techniques your grandfather was using would have (and likely did) leave him at a terrible competitive disadvantage when trying to compete with those megafarms growing the same crops. 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.
- chillacy 9y ago
  Yet there are questions about the sustainability of some modern techniques: > 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.

DrScump 9y ago

This new dicamba formulation was quietly approved by the Obama administration right after the election. https://www.rt.com/usa/366812-epa-monsanto-dicamba-herbicide/ https://www.rt.com/usa/366812-epa-monsanto-dicamba-herbicide...

rmason 9y ago

A lot of you on here from previous comments know that I spent 20+ years as a fertilizer agronomist before changing careers. 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.

iamnotlarry 9y ago

Monsanto has waged war against independent farmers for years. If your neighbor planted Monsanto seeds and they germinated into your crop, Monsanto sues you for stealing their IP. They now own your crops because your crops contain their intellectual property. 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.

MichaelBurge 9y ago
Wouldn't the most natural liable party be the farmer who bought Monsanto seeds and planted them in a careless manner? 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.
- busterarm 9y ago
  No. Monsanto reps went to great lengths to tell their seed buyers that their crops would be safe to spray off-label/illegally. On the regulator end they did what they could to look like they were compliant and then encouraged the farmers to do the spraying that caused this.
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    In case anyone thinks this is just conspiracy-mongering about "big bad Monsanto", drug companies are routinely smacked for doing roughly the same thing in the form of promoting off-label uses for their drugs (prescribing them for conditions that they're not approved to treat, which is legal for doctors to do but not for drug companies to promote). It's not that any one company is bad, it's that the incentive is just too strong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_off-label_promotion_pharmaceutical_settlements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_off-label_promotion_ph...

Khol 9y ago

Related story: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=531272125 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

When Wall St buys farm land to bet on food prices.. This is more likely to happen. Wall st.. continuing to ruin everything and its only 2017.

vollmarj 9y ago

Like most problems at this scale, this is a complex issue with many causes. 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).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hedora 9y ago
I wonder if removing patent protection for herbicide resistance genes would slow this cycle down. At the very least, it would make it more difficult for monsanto to sue organic farmers because monsanto gmos contaminated the organic crop.