10 ms·

Monsanto’s Weed Killer, Dicamba, Divides Farmers

149 points by Futurebot 9y ago

caf 9y ago
But weeds are becoming more resistant to Roundup, so the industry is developing seeds that are tolerant to more herbicides. Isn't this a classic Red Queen's Race?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I don't think so. Each herbicide innovation may have a shelf life, but in the mean time it provides a lot of utility to farmers (they buy into seed+herbicide systems because the systems make for more reliable harvests).
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    With antibiotics, we find that the good ones with easy synthesis and low toxicity tend to be low-hanging fruit, leaving the new developments to be expensive and deadly. A similar arms-race in agriculture is the last thing we want. It's like all of our big inventions are being rolled back against us, starting with modern medicine, passing through agriculture and eventually taking fire away as we have to shut down the power plants to stop global warming. Give it a few years and we'll probably discover something horribly wrong with the wheel.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      We can do modern agriculture without Roundup.
      - whatshisface 9y ago
        Back in 2007, this paper reported that about 20% of US crop production was owed to herbicides: https://croplifefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/weed-technology-article-2007.pdf https://croplifefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/we... We probably won't get to multiple-resistant weeds in a day, or even a decade, but the path towards stronger weed control measures is going to be a very painful one.
        lovich 9y ago
        We feed a ton of grain to livestock which, while delicious, is not an efficient use of land to get calories. We also lose a bunch of food to inefficiencies in the food chain because it's not worth fixing precisely because techologies like pesticides let us produce so much
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- searine 9y ago
  Yes. The only way off the treadmill is to stack as many traits as possible so that evolution doesn't have time to adapt. This was the key to effective treatment of HIV for example. Anti-retroviral cocktails of 3-5 drugs, each with a different mode of action. We're lucky though, plants evolve slow, so we only need a few different traits to slow/stop evolution.
  - viggity 9y ago
    furthermore, farmers are forced to plant "refuge" plots - plots that do not get GMO seeds, nor get herbicide/pesticide treatments. This ensures that there is plenty of resistance-less plants/insects left in the gene pool to cross breed with any plants/insects that have developed a resistance - there by preventing the resistant plants/insects from taking over and becoming dominant. Quite brilliant when you think about it.
    - caf 9y ago
      Given that the dispute that is the subject of the original article here is about dicamba drifting onto non-sprayed fields in the local area, some scepticism is warranted as to how well those refuge plots would work.
jMyles 9y ago
> Environmentalists and some weed scientists worry that making seeds resistant to more weed killers will increase the use of pesticides. The NYT has some strangely poor writing sometimes. This whole article is about GMO seeds designed specifically to allow application of pesticides. Nobody disputes that it will increase the use of pesticides - that's the whole point, as explained the rest of this article other than this paragraph.
- spaceseaman 9y ago
  How is pointing out that fact poor writing? It's a fact. Environmentalists and weed scientists are worried that it will increase the use of pesticides... The article then goes on to do just as you say, which allows the reader to make the conclusion about whether those environmentalists concerns are valid. Since this is a newspaper article, it would be improper style to directly make the implication on the part of the author over whether those concerns are valid. It's simply their job to report such concerns exist. Some people just love to criticize the NYT.
  - sampo 9y ago
    > How is pointing out that fact poor writing? While it is a fact that some vaccines contain tiny amounts of mercury [1], when anti-vaxxers try to make a sensation of "vaccines contain poisonous mercury!", it is nothing but misleading with ill intentions. Although that sentence is also true and fact, that doesn't make its writer's intentions any less sinister. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/downloads/vacsafe-thimerosal-color-office.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/do...
    - spaceseaman 9y ago
      So? An equivalent line in such an article might say "Anti-vaxxers claim that vaccines contain poisonous amounts of the chemical mercury" then if we continue analogizing it to the article at hand, the NYT would go on to show how the amount is in fact not dangerous (like they've actually done). It doesn't change the fact that they said it. You have to report on the facts, and the fact is they said it contains a dangerous amount. The report can then go on to show how that's a false premise, but newspaper writing purposely doesn't make bold claims like "ANTI-VAXXERS LIE ABOUT POISONOUS AMOUNTS OF MERCURY IN VACCINES" because people call that sensationalist and biased. They assume their readers are smart enough to connect the dots. If the writer's intentions were truly "sinister" as you say, then they would manipulate the facts into an argument that supported the idea that vaccines have a dangerous amount. The analogy also fails because it truly is a fact that this would increase the amount of pesticides used. Whether that is a bad thing or not is entirely up to the readers to decide. Again you just seem to be spinning some narrative about the NYT having malicious intent here (especially by analogizing it to vaccines) without anything but a sly deferral to "poor writing". It's just an excuse for you and others to confirm your dislike of the NYT when they're writing in the same style every newspaper reporter is taught.
mi100hael 9y ago
The problem in AR & MO essentially stems from Monsanto's new version of dicamba that's supposed to reduce a lot of this overspray damage not yet being approved by the EPA, so growers have decided to just spray the old stuff that's known to cause this kind of damage despite being told not to. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/crime-in-the-fields-how-monsanto-and-scofflaw-farmers-hurt-soybeans-in-arkansas http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/cri...
- tjdalaska 9y ago
  AK = Alaska. AR = Arkansas, which is what I think you meant.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    Whoops yep, thanks
- plandis 9y ago
  I believe that NPRs Planet Money did an episode on this a few months ago.
  - pjl 9y ago
    It was a great listen! “The conflict was no longer farmer versus weed, but also farmer versus farmer. When his neighbors illegally sprayed the pesticide, Wallace reported it. After harvest, Wallace was shot and killed. On today's show, a murder mystery – about how a weed divided neighbors and led to Mike Wallace's death.” Here’s a link to the episode: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episode-775-the-pigweed-killer http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episo...
sdfgelgh43oito3 9y ago
Monsanto is such scum. Selling the poison and the antidote... Forcing the antidote onto those that might come in contact with the poison; Unethical, cartel behavior that makes us all unhealthy.
- bhouston 9y ago
  There is a lot of evidence of Monsanto pushing their agenda behind the scenes: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-over-research-is-seen-in-disclosed-emails.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-o... And it seems like their stuff is truly dangerous: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup-safety-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup...
exabrial 9y ago
How come when it comes to the environment/global warming, the predominant approach is "we believe in science", but when it comes to organic foods, GMOs, and vaccines the "science is questionable"?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  The answer is: they don't care about science in either situation, and to think otherwise is probably to kid yourself. That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test. None of the topics you listed have equivalent conclusive evidence to eachother. For example, the evidence to support the safety of contemporary versions of common vaccines is overwhelming; but when it comes to "organic foods", it depends entirely on the exact specifics of any individual product, from the shape and surface area of the plant, washing practices, specific tendency to absorb or repel specific chemicals (naturally or artificially present) which may not have even been applied to the land for decades (for example, arsenic-based pesticides from old cotton crops leeching into rice crops), the qualities of the soil. Science isn't a belief, it's a method, and not all conclusions are equally conclusive.
  - jerf 9y ago
    "That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test." There's a handful of times where my opinion on something has been flipped by a single argument that fits into a single paragraph or even sentence, and my opinion on GMOs is one of them. Nassim Taleb argues that while any given GMO product may be in fact entirely safe, that as you consider the whole line of GMOs that will be created over the next decades at an accelerating pace, the odds that at least one of them turn out to be catastrophically bad enough to entirely erase the benefits of everything else done with them goes up quite distressingly. This makes sense of the idea that A: all current GMO foods are actually quite safe but B: it may still be a bad idea in the long run. Given that things will be GMO'd on an increasing curve as it becomes easier and easier, we've seen only a very small fraction of what will ultimately be done with the technology.
searine 9y ago
Speaking as a geneticist, these GM traits are the most important tool in our toolbox, and it needs to be rolled out as fast a possible. It's a matter of evolution, and stopping resistance. Like HIV, cancer, antibiotics, or any other biologic system, there is a necessity for multiple modes of action. Plants evolve very slowly. This is good. It means they adapt to things like roundup very slowly. It took decades to adapt to glyphosate, and even today it is still widely effective. However, since it is a single mode of action, resistance is inevitable. The trick is that if you increase modes of action, you raise the cost of natural selection to the point that the species simply cannot adapt. Ever. We need glyphosate, 2,4-D AND dicamba resistance, all together so that we can stop any one chemical from being resistant. Stopping resistance means having a full toolbox, and a full effective toolbox means less overall chemicals on fields.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Um, I distinctly remember reading about insects evolving to adapt to changes brought about by humanity in one generation and just quickly did a search and found a study that showed significant plant adaptations within four generations to insect infestations (and immediate changes within one generation) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141745.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141745.h... So what is the difference between this reported study and what a geneticist means by plants evolve slowly?
  - searine 9y ago
    >Um, I distinctly remember reading about insects evolving to adapt to changes brought about by humanity in one generation Literally impossible. Mutations can't magically move to high frequency in one generation. The article you said this 'Plant populations began to diverge significantly in response to insect attack in as few as three to four generations'. Not one. Yes intense single mode-of-action selection can change allele frequencies in a short period of time, but that is much different than adapting to novel challenges. The types of adaptations you are talking about are likely what we call "standing variation". Dormant mutations at intermediate frequency that become fit during intermittent circumstances. Like a stressful year, or a certain predator that comes every decade. In the case of chemicals however, we are dealing with an entirely novel mechanism, with little to no standing variation to draw upon. Thus evolution in this circumstance is slow.
whalesalad 9y ago
Dicamba is horrible stuff. The drift is a serious issue and is only going to get worse. Obviously Monsanto is gonna cry fowl here and act like they aren’t to blame – but the fact of the matter is that they are a giant in a small pool of seed and chemical companies. Farmers are stuck using this stuff if they want to keep their yields up. Unfortunately the surrounding ecosystem will suffer and the vicious cycle towards the mono crop continues. All of this stems from our insane deep-rooted dependence on corn and soybeans.
- snarf21 9y ago
  Similar but different problems in India and around the world. The only way to keep yields up to feed their population is to continue to ramp the fertilizer which continues to destroy the soil requiring ever increasing fertilizer. We need to fix this and soon but it is "someone else's problem".
Kyragem 9y ago
Monsanto needs to do a 180 and develop & research low cost weeding robots. GMO engineering solutions are only a stopgap measure
- mnw21cam 9y ago
  Agreed. Plants can develop resistance to herbicides, but they can't really develop resistance to being dug up. Although the dandelions and bindweed in my garden would be prominent counter-examples.
  - topspin 9y ago
    I suspect that 10 years from now the notion of carpet bombing a field with anti-weed chemicals will seem stupid as simple weed hunting robots deal with the problem automatically. Dandelions need sunlight too. Assuming your weed bot keeps the plant reduced to a leafless stub the roots will die eventually.
eksemplar 9y ago
Farmers need to decide if they want a future or not. Milking the earth for profit while poisoning the world is a crime against humanity.
- spraak 9y ago
  Definitely farmers, but not only they, but everyone.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  Farmers decide if they want a future or not every time they pencil out the profits for the coming crop year. Its a commodity business. Grain farmers have zero pricing power. They can increase their top line by increasing yield. They can reduce costs to increase margins. It's not a simple problem to solve. Moralizing about someone else's business without understanding the fundamental economics isn't going to solve it. It's a public policy question in the end. I have skin in the game. I own row crop land in Iowa and Minnesota that is operated by local farmers. My leases require good land stewardship and I only lease to farmer/operators that are willing to meet the conditions. For the majority of farmers, good stewardship of the land and environment is part of their ethos. There are obvious exceptions. We should do something about the exceptions, and that is where it becomes a public policy question. IMHO, herbacide drift is fundamentally a form of trespass when it drifts out of your own field. Let's start with treating drift as trespass. Cattle breaking the fence is treated that way, the maintainer of the fence is liable for damages. Keep your chemicals behind your own property line.
mikehain 9y ago
I've been recently enjoying a YouTube channel by a guy who turned his yard into a sustainable "food forest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM That is the video that led me to it, but after I saw it I went back through his video history to see how he got the whole project started and to see his progress over the years. He has a video in there where he recommends a series of books that he learned from, like Albert Howard's "An Agricultural Testament," Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture," and Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution." I've gotten started reading the first two and they're really great books.
- nunodonato 9y ago
  that is the way forward, for a healthier future in our food and our planet. Unfortunately, the masses are still oblivious about those sort of techniques, and the big corps obviously don't want you to try it out. Lets hope it wont be too late
  - eutectic 9y ago
    With 7.5 billion people and counting, we have to be realistic about what it takes to feed everyone.
    - rockinghigh 9y ago
      This is a myth. There is already enough food for everyone on Earth.
      - justin--sane 9y ago
        You might as well say climate change is a myth. We're out of agricultural space. Everything that means decreasing yields is a bad idea. The population growths, however land does not - it might even shrink due to climate change. While the high food waste is usually named as THE problem, it is only part of it and a wasteless utopia is far, far away - and stopping waste in place A doesn't really help people in place B.
drawkbox 9y ago
People are scared that AI will take us out, but in actuality it will probably be a company that has a monopoly that gets too boisterous and does us all in. That might be combined with AI sentient beings, but ultimately they will be doing it just for that monopolistic corporation's mission statement to eliminate all competitive threats.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  How can a company's monopoly destroy humanity without the protection of an AI police force? Are you expecting the population to go along with it?
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
I am a small grape grower, and on various mailing lists on this topic. People who grow grapes (or tomatoes, or anything but soy/corn for that matter) are really upset and angry about the growth in the use of Dicamba. It's already very frustrating each year to find your plants damaged from drift from rampant glyphosate use. But the degree of damage from dicamba is just off the charts. This article spends a lot of time talking about Dicamba's effects on other cash crop farmers. But it doesn't talk about those who choose to grow other things. The agriculture industry already acts like the only thing that matters is cash crop corn/soy rotation farmers. Drift reports basically amount to a shrug. That's very very frustrating.
- Chris_Jay 9y ago
  Has anyone tried to sue for lost profits over Dicamba use?
MentallyRetired 9y ago
It divides farmers and they wanna put it in our food? Jesus H!

149 points by Futurebot 9y ago

caf 9y ago

But weeds are becoming more resistant to Roundup, so the industry is developing seeds that are tolerant to more herbicides. Isn't this a classic Red Queen's Race?

maxerickson 9y ago
I don't think so. Each herbicide innovation may have a shelf life, but in the mean time it provides a lot of utility to farmers (they buy into seed+herbicide systems because the systems make for more reliable harvests).
- whatshisface 9y ago
  With antibiotics, we find that the good ones with easy synthesis and low toxicity tend to be low-hanging fruit, leaving the new developments to be expensive and deadly. A similar arms-race in agriculture is the last thing we want. It's like all of our big inventions are being rolled back against us, starting with modern medicine, passing through agriculture and eventually taking fire away as we have to shut down the power plants to stop global warming. Give it a few years and we'll probably discover something horribly wrong with the wheel.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    We can do modern agriculture without Roundup.
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      Back in 2007, this paper reported that about 20% of US crop production was owed to herbicides: https://croplifefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/weed-technology-article-2007.pdf https://croplifefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/we... We probably won't get to multiple-resistant weeds in a day, or even a decade, but the path towards stronger weed control measures is going to be a very painful one.
      - lovich 9y ago
        We feed a ton of grain to livestock which, while delicious, is not an efficient use of land to get calories. We also lose a bunch of food to inefficiencies in the food chain because it's not worth fixing precisely because techologies like pesticides let us produce so much
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
searine 9y ago
Yes. The only way off the treadmill is to stack as many traits as possible so that evolution doesn't have time to adapt. This was the key to effective treatment of HIV for example. Anti-retroviral cocktails of 3-5 drugs, each with a different mode of action. We're lucky though, plants evolve slow, so we only need a few different traits to slow/stop evolution.
- viggity 9y ago
  furthermore, farmers are forced to plant "refuge" plots - plots that do not get GMO seeds, nor get herbicide/pesticide treatments. This ensures that there is plenty of resistance-less plants/insects left in the gene pool to cross breed with any plants/insects that have developed a resistance - there by preventing the resistant plants/insects from taking over and becoming dominant. Quite brilliant when you think about it.
  - caf 9y ago
    Given that the dispute that is the subject of the original article here is about dicamba drifting onto non-sprayed fields in the local area, some scepticism is warranted as to how well those refuge plots would work.

jMyles 9y ago

> Environmentalists and some weed scientists worry that making seeds resistant to more weed killers will increase the use of pesticides. The NYT has some strangely poor writing sometimes. This whole article is about GMO seeds designed specifically to allow application of pesticides. Nobody disputes that it will increase the use of pesticides - that's the whole point, as explained the rest of this article other than this paragraph.

spaceseaman 9y ago
How is pointing out that fact poor writing? It's a fact. Environmentalists and weed scientists are worried that it will increase the use of pesticides... The article then goes on to do just as you say, which allows the reader to make the conclusion about whether those environmentalists concerns are valid. Since this is a newspaper article, it would be improper style to directly make the implication on the part of the author over whether those concerns are valid. It's simply their job to report such concerns exist. Some people just love to criticize the NYT.
- sampo 9y ago
  > How is pointing out that fact poor writing? While it is a fact that some vaccines contain tiny amounts of mercury [1], when anti-vaxxers try to make a sensation of "vaccines contain poisonous mercury!", it is nothing but misleading with ill intentions. Although that sentence is also true and fact, that doesn't make its writer's intentions any less sinister. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/downloads/vacsafe-thimerosal-color-office.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/do...
  - spaceseaman 9y ago
    So? An equivalent line in such an article might say "Anti-vaxxers claim that vaccines contain poisonous amounts of the chemical mercury" then if we continue analogizing it to the article at hand, the NYT would go on to show how the amount is in fact not dangerous (like they've actually done). It doesn't change the fact that they said it. You have to report on the facts, and the fact is they said it contains a dangerous amount. The report can then go on to show how that's a false premise, but newspaper writing purposely doesn't make bold claims like "ANTI-VAXXERS LIE ABOUT POISONOUS AMOUNTS OF MERCURY IN VACCINES" because people call that sensationalist and biased. They assume their readers are smart enough to connect the dots. If the writer's intentions were truly "sinister" as you say, then they would manipulate the facts into an argument that supported the idea that vaccines have a dangerous amount. The analogy also fails because it truly is a fact that this would increase the amount of pesticides used. Whether that is a bad thing or not is entirely up to the readers to decide. Again you just seem to be spinning some narrative about the NYT having malicious intent here (especially by analogizing it to vaccines) without anything but a sly deferral to "poor writing". It's just an excuse for you and others to confirm your dislike of the NYT when they're writing in the same style every newspaper reporter is taught.

mi100hael 9y ago

The problem in AR & MO essentially stems from Monsanto's new version of dicamba that's supposed to reduce a lot of this overspray damage not yet being approved by the EPA, so growers have decided to just spray the old stuff that's known to cause this kind of damage despite being told not to. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/crime-in-the-fields-how-monsanto-and-scofflaw-farmers-hurt-soybeans-in-arkansas http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487809643/cri...

tjdalaska 9y ago
AK = Alaska. AR = Arkansas, which is what I think you meant.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  Whoops yep, thanks
plandis 9y ago
I believe that NPRs Planet Money did an episode on this a few months ago.
- pjl 9y ago
  It was a great listen! “The conflict was no longer farmer versus weed, but also farmer versus farmer. When his neighbors illegally sprayed the pesticide, Wallace reported it. After harvest, Wallace was shot and killed. On today's show, a murder mystery – about how a weed divided neighbors and led to Mike Wallace's death.” Here’s a link to the episode: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episode-775-the-pigweed-killer http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/02/531272125/episo...

sdfgelgh43oito3 9y ago

Monsanto is such scum. Selling the poison and the antidote... Forcing the antidote onto those that might come in contact with the poison; Unethical, cartel behavior that makes us all unhealthy.

bhouston 9y ago
There is a lot of evidence of Monsanto pushing their agenda behind the scenes: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-over-research-is-seen-in-disclosed-emails.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-o... And it seems like their stuff is truly dangerous: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup-safety-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup...

exabrial 9y ago

How come when it comes to the environment/global warming, the predominant approach is "we believe in science", but when it comes to organic foods, GMOs, and vaccines the "science is questionable"?

microcolonel 9y ago
The answer is: they don't care about science in either situation, and to think otherwise is probably to kid yourself. That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test. None of the topics you listed have equivalent conclusive evidence to eachother. For example, the evidence to support the safety of contemporary versions of common vaccines is overwhelming; but when it comes to "organic foods", it depends entirely on the exact specifics of any individual product, from the shape and surface area of the plant, washing practices, specific tendency to absorb or repel specific chemicals (naturally or artificially present) which may not have even been applied to the land for decades (for example, arsenic-based pesticides from old cotton crops leeching into rice crops), the qualities of the soil. Science isn't a belief, it's a method, and not all conclusions are equally conclusive.
- jerf 9y ago
  "That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test." There's a handful of times where my opinion on something has been flipped by a single argument that fits into a single paragraph or even sentence, and my opinion on GMOs is one of them. Nassim Taleb argues that while any given GMO product may be in fact entirely safe, that as you consider the whole line of GMOs that will be created over the next decades at an accelerating pace, the odds that at least one of them turn out to be catastrophically bad enough to entirely erase the benefits of everything else done with them goes up quite distressingly. This makes sense of the idea that A: all current GMO foods are actually quite safe but B: it may still be a bad idea in the long run. Given that things will be GMO'd on an increasing curve as it becomes easier and easier, we've seen only a very small fraction of what will ultimately be done with the technology.

searine 9y ago

Speaking as a geneticist, these GM traits are the most important tool in our toolbox, and it needs to be rolled out as fast a possible. It's a matter of evolution, and stopping resistance. Like HIV, cancer, antibiotics, or any other biologic system, there is a necessity for multiple modes of action. Plants evolve very slowly. This is good. It means they adapt to things like roundup very slowly. It took decades to adapt to glyphosate, and even today it is still widely effective. However, since it is a single mode of action, resistance is inevitable. The trick is that if you increase modes of action, you raise the cost of natural selection to the point that the species simply cannot adapt. Ever. We need glyphosate, 2,4-D AND dicamba resistance, all together so that we can stop any one chemical from being resistant. Stopping resistance means having a full toolbox, and a full effective toolbox means less overall chemicals on fields.

stevenwoo 9y ago
Um, I distinctly remember reading about insects evolving to adapt to changes brought about by humanity in one generation and just quickly did a search and found a study that showed significant plant adaptations within four generations to insect infestations (and immediate changes within one generation) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141745.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141745.h... So what is the difference between this reported study and what a geneticist means by plants evolve slowly?
- searine 9y ago
  >Um, I distinctly remember reading about insects evolving to adapt to changes brought about by humanity in one generation Literally impossible. Mutations can't magically move to high frequency in one generation. The article you said this 'Plant populations began to diverge significantly in response to insect attack in as few as three to four generations'. Not one. Yes intense single mode-of-action selection can change allele frequencies in a short period of time, but that is much different than adapting to novel challenges. The types of adaptations you are talking about are likely what we call "standing variation". Dormant mutations at intermediate frequency that become fit during intermittent circumstances. Like a stressful year, or a certain predator that comes every decade. In the case of chemicals however, we are dealing with an entirely novel mechanism, with little to no standing variation to draw upon. Thus evolution in this circumstance is slow.

whalesalad 9y ago

Dicamba is horrible stuff. The drift is a serious issue and is only going to get worse. Obviously Monsanto is gonna cry fowl here and act like they aren’t to blame – but the fact of the matter is that they are a giant in a small pool of seed and chemical companies. Farmers are stuck using this stuff if they want to keep their yields up. Unfortunately the surrounding ecosystem will suffer and the vicious cycle towards the mono crop continues. All of this stems from our insane deep-rooted dependence on corn and soybeans.

snarf21 9y ago
Similar but different problems in India and around the world. The only way to keep yields up to feed their population is to continue to ramp the fertilizer which continues to destroy the soil requiring ever increasing fertilizer. We need to fix this and soon but it is "someone else's problem".

Kyragem 9y ago

Monsanto needs to do a 180 and develop & research low cost weeding robots. GMO engineering solutions are only a stopgap measure

mnw21cam 9y ago
Agreed. Plants can develop resistance to herbicides, but they can't really develop resistance to being dug up. Although the dandelions and bindweed in my garden would be prominent counter-examples.
- topspin 9y ago
  I suspect that 10 years from now the notion of carpet bombing a field with anti-weed chemicals will seem stupid as simple weed hunting robots deal with the problem automatically. Dandelions need sunlight too. Assuming your weed bot keeps the plant reduced to a leafless stub the roots will die eventually.

eksemplar 9y ago

Farmers need to decide if they want a future or not. Milking the earth for profit while poisoning the world is a crime against humanity.

spraak 9y ago
Definitely farmers, but not only they, but everyone.
dbcurtis 9y ago
Farmers decide if they want a future or not every time they pencil out the profits for the coming crop year. Its a commodity business. Grain farmers have zero pricing power. They can increase their top line by increasing yield. They can reduce costs to increase margins. It's not a simple problem to solve. Moralizing about someone else's business without understanding the fundamental economics isn't going to solve it. It's a public policy question in the end. I have skin in the game. I own row crop land in Iowa and Minnesota that is operated by local farmers. My leases require good land stewardship and I only lease to farmer/operators that are willing to meet the conditions. For the majority of farmers, good stewardship of the land and environment is part of their ethos. There are obvious exceptions. We should do something about the exceptions, and that is where it becomes a public policy question. IMHO, herbacide drift is fundamentally a form of trespass when it drifts out of your own field. Let's start with treating drift as trespass. Cattle breaking the fence is treated that way, the maintainer of the fence is liable for damages. Keep your chemicals behind your own property line.

mikehain 9y ago

I've been recently enjoying a YouTube channel by a guy who turned his yard into a sustainable "food forest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM That is the video that led me to it, but after I saw it I went back through his video history to see how he got the whole project started and to see his progress over the years. He has a video in there where he recommends a series of books that he learned from, like Albert Howard's "An Agricultural Testament," Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture," and Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution." I've gotten started reading the first two and they're really great books.

nunodonato 9y ago
that is the way forward, for a healthier future in our food and our planet. Unfortunately, the masses are still oblivious about those sort of techniques, and the big corps obviously don't want you to try it out. Lets hope it wont be too late
- eutectic 9y ago
  With 7.5 billion people and counting, we have to be realistic about what it takes to feed everyone.
  - rockinghigh 9y ago
    This is a myth. There is already enough food for everyone on Earth.
    - justin--sane 9y ago
      You might as well say climate change is a myth. We're out of agricultural space. Everything that means decreasing yields is a bad idea. The population growths, however land does not - it might even shrink due to climate change. While the high food waste is usually named as THE problem, it is only part of it and a wasteless utopia is far, far away - and stopping waste in place A doesn't really help people in place B.

drawkbox 9y ago

People are scared that AI will take us out, but in actuality it will probably be a company that has a monopoly that gets too boisterous and does us all in. That might be combined with AI sentient beings, but ultimately they will be doing it just for that monopolistic corporation's mission statement to eliminate all competitive threats.

marcosdumay 9y ago
How can a company's monopoly destroy humanity without the protection of an AI police force? Are you expecting the population to go along with it?

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

I am a small grape grower, and on various mailing lists on this topic. People who grow grapes (or tomatoes, or anything but soy/corn for that matter) are really upset and angry about the growth in the use of Dicamba. It's already very frustrating each year to find your plants damaged from drift from rampant glyphosate use. But the degree of damage from dicamba is just off the charts. This article spends a lot of time talking about Dicamba's effects on other cash crop farmers. But it doesn't talk about those who choose to grow other things. The agriculture industry already acts like the only thing that matters is cash crop corn/soy rotation farmers. Drift reports basically amount to a shrug. That's very very frustrating.

Chris_Jay 9y ago
Has anyone tried to sue for lost profits over Dicamba use?

MentallyRetired 9y ago

It divides farmers and they wanna put it in our food? Jesus H!