7 ms·
The Weeds Are Winning
- krunck 2y agohttps://archive.ph/Euc4P https://archive.ph/Euc4P
- jtbayly 2y agoThis is just a link to the actual article here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-climate-change-genetic-engineering-superweeds-food/?src=longreads https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-cl...
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- dang 2y agoThanks! We've switched to that from https://longreads.com/2024/11/07/the-weeds-are-winning/ https://longreads.com/2024/11/07/the-weeds-are-winning/ above.
- OmarShehata 2y ago> Monsanto claimed it was “highly unlikely” that glyphosate-resistant weeds would become a problem. There were, of course, those who correctly predicted that such a thing was inevitable I've started noticing that this happens all the time, across all fields. Experts disagree, the expert with the most positive outlook is the one whose opinion wins out, and we find ourselves in trouble years/decades later. I've adopted a "treat every expert as a lawyer" mindset now that has helped illuminate some of this for me. I prefer to listen to podcasts where people in the field talk to each other, rather than someone presenting the information to the layperson. There's a lot of jargon but you can very easily get a sense of (1) what issues does everyone agree on (2) what issues are they bickering on, and what their reasons are
- kylebenzle 2y agoThere has not been a single plant/weed agricultural expert in the field in the last 20+ years who has said our overuse of herbicides is not a bad thing and will result in ever more resistant weeds. I think the confusion is always the same, laymen listening to industry or company spokesmen who have a profit motives, the scientist have no such confusion.
- QuasiGiani 2y agoProfit motives... the very sickening sickness of The System.
- cyberax 2y agoWhy?
- voxic11 2y ago> First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted -- soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project." > Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, "the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant" to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for Monsanto's efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/03/11/148290731/why-monsanto-thought-weeds-would-never-defeat-roundup https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/03/11/148290731/wh...
- banannaise 2y agoOf course it's easier for it to happen in nature than for them to do it in a lab. The way nature does this is that when you kill untold numbers of the ones that aren't resistant, you're left with the ones that are. If you used that method with our actual crops, you would nearly wipe out the crops and cause massive food crises.
- kickout 2y agoWonder if Laundando and associates lurk HN. Surely they are comments about carbon robotics.
- skeltoac 2y agoWondering whether glyphosate-resistant plants will keep their resistance after glyphosate is no longer being used. Will that vestigial trait become a liability due to some extra energy costs, and eventually fall back out of the gene pool?
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- bell-cot 2y agoYes - eventually. The selective pressure to acquire resistance to a widely used herbicide is enormous. The "takes tiny a bit more energy" pressure to lose a useless trait is minimal.
- dasil003 2y agoAssuming the tradeoff is even energy related. Seems like the tradeoff could be against a whole slew of subtle things that apply in a diverse, natural environment, but may be less important in a monoculture.
- bell-cot 2y agoTrue. Though given enough time, simple entropy tends to remove useless genetic traits - because there is no selection against mutations which damage the genes for them.
- yxhuvud 2y agoIf nothing else random mutations will likely break it. But it would reaquire it pretty fast given selection pressure again.
- metalman 2y agoThere is no such thing as "herbicides" they are semi targeted biocides and are not maintaing there effectivness or targeted enough to prevent unacceptable "collateral" damage. Biology supports this as there are very few parallels to be found in nature for this kind of defence/offencive use of chemicals in multi cellular life.Which is a great big hint as to the true cost benifit equation over, reproductive time scales Many single celled life does of course use chemical deffensive/offensive products, yeast and various algae capable of powerfull effects on many life forms. Then there are venoms,but those are mechanicaly targeted. Nature evrn invented the "tazzer" as a weapon/deffence,in electric eals. Ignoring the vast and tested data set that is present in nature is dumb.
- azeirah 2y agoPeople would take you more seriously here if you made fewer spelling and grammatical mistakes.
- jamiek88 2y agoIt’s extremely arrogant actually to post that incoherence and put the work on to us to make sense of.
- cyberax 2y ago[flagged]
- jyounker 2y agoI'm not really sure what argument you're trying to make here. Plants regularly use toxins to kill off competitors. We even know how at least on of them works now: https://www.mpg.de/9731123/plants-allelochemicals-competition https://www.mpg.de/9731123/plants-allelochemicals-competitio...
- eykanal 2y agoCan we just link directly to the story rather than through longreads? https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-climate-change-genetic-engineering-superweeds-food/?src=longreads https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/10/1105034/weeds-cl...
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- photochemsyn 2y agoThe weeds discussed in this article, Amaranthus tuberculatus and Amaranthus palmeri, are exactly the kind of plants that early human cultivators would have selected as a seed crop - fast-growing robust plants that could be continually selected for maximal seed size and minimal toxin production generation after generation (which is how crops like maize were developed). Indeed members of this genus were used by Aztecs and others for just that purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_grain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_grain As far as maintaining fields, area spraying of pesticides and herbicides will be replaced with robots wielding lasers and using AI image recognition to catch pest infestations before they take over entire fields.
- staunton 2y ago> will be replaced with robots wielding lasers That's a very confident prediction for something that sounds quite unlikely to me. How about biologically engineered insects/bacteria that destroy weeds and pests? How about pesticides which don't have the downsides of what's currently used?
- moritonal 2y agoWe're pretty confidently letting AI drive 2 ton metal vehicles on the road, and letting them fly around in the sky with grenades. A farmer-bot with a laser sounds pretty tame to me.
- shagie 2y ago12 years ago: Our Tractor Literally Drives Itself! (GPS Auto Steering Technology) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStRc1fCj38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStRc1fCj38 It has a guidance system that is connected to a wheel that is friction attached to the steering wheel and turns it on an old tractor. A newer system with an old tractor - https://youtu.be/t0uIYjOds_o https://youtu.be/t0uIYjOds_o Newer tractors have this built in. The modern tractor cab is a mini data center. https://youtu.be/ZhOvchjeqgM https://youtu.be/ZhOvchjeqgM (and you can see that he's not touching the wheel most of the time)
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- buildsjets 2y agoI've been using strong vinegar for weed control on my property for a few years now. You do have to be careful about applying it and watch the over-spray because it is not a targeted herbicide like Roundup, it's going to kill grass and broadleaf plants alike. Sometimes I lay down a tarp to mask off the grass border, for example. But if you have a general weedy area that just needs to be knocked down, or a gravel path/driveway to keep clear, I have found it is just as effective, quick-acting, and long-lasting as the synthetic herbicides, with the side effect of smelling like salad dressing, instead of smelling like cancer. I buy 30-45% concentrate depending on what is on sale, and dilute to around 10% for new weeds and 20% for full grown weeds. A little dish soap in there helps it wet down the leaves. For lawn weeds, once they are under control, I've been able to keep up with a 1/4 acre lawn with just manual weeding. Good tools help, I have tried a lot of weed pulling gadgets. Using a push mower means I go slow enough to spot them, and if they get too big they jam the mower so I am motivated to pull them while they are still small.
- singleshot_ 2y agoCurious person here with a warning: don’t smell 30% vinegar. You are missing nothing gods by skipping this. I promise.
- yumraj 2y agoI hope you know that this’ll make more people want to smell it, not less. ;) At least I’m curious now..
- ridgeguy 2y agoAn olfactory Streisand Effect!
- marcosdumay 2y agoIt's ok to be curious. Just don't do it. People have been avoiding learning the smell and taste of several kinds of poison with a great amount of success for thousands of years. Be one of the successful ones.
- danielodievich 2y agoMy long-departed grandmother lived her entire life in Grodno, a city in western Belarus on Nieman river. It is a lovely and fertile region with well defined seasons of the year. All kinds of things grow there, mostly temperate weather crops, potatoes, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, cabbages, apples, pears etc. Grandmother was a big believer in child labor so my summer was spent weeding every day. Her herbicide/pesticide were little children hands. I think vinegar was involved too. I think though if she could afford chemicals she would have. Ugh, if I never have to squish colorado potato beetle larvae from the potato leaf, I'll be happy.
- navark 2y agoI have an acre of forest and I spend time removing invasive species like buckthorn and wild mustard to keep the forest healthy. It can be really challenging to discriminate between native and invasive plants without a lot of experience and plant identifying apps like iNaturalist. I would love to be able to sweep my phone around and have it highlight invasive plants live. Is anyone working on something like this? The technology already works in images of a single plant, I just need to identify multiple plants in one frame, and ideally live video.
- jamiek88 2y agoWhat a brilliant idea! To Xcode i go! And I now have an excuse for a new M4 Mac mini. You’re a genius Navark!
- jihadjihad 2y agoHaha I hope you're serious. Looking forward to the Show HN soon.
- jamiek88 2y agoI already have a path forward, boy some of these ML and vision apis are incredible. What a force multiplier it is being able to piggy back on a multi trillion dollar corps work! :)
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- r14c 2y agoWeeds have a function which does run opposite to the objectives of monoculture, but I'd probably put my money on millions of years of evolution over the needs of industrial farmers. Permaculture and "food forest" methodologies are not as good for anyone's profit margin, but they are more resilient and lean on natural processes of ecological niche development instead of fighting them.
- kreyenborgi 2y ago> As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no “high-minded orientation,” no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper. — R. L. Carson
- molave 2y agoLife finds a way
- binrec 2y ago> Populations of the weeds have been found that are impervious to nine different classes of herbicides. The plant can grow more than two inches a day to reach eight feet in height and dominate entire fields. Originally from the desert Southwest, it boasts a sturdy root system and can withstand droughts. Well, I'm sold. Where do I buy Palmer amaranth? What about water hemp - is it edible?
- jaggederest 2y ago> The leaves, stems and seeds of Palmer amaranth, like those of other amaranths, are edible and highly nutritious. Waterhemp is also an Amaranthus species and thus most probably highly edible, though I have no idea if it's palatable.
- pvaldes 2y agoPeople will need to accept that the idea of feeding humans with an endless soy field does not lead to a stable system and that the cycle of poison is a dead end. Weeds are creatures more misunderstood than evil. We should be able to find an use for something that grows fast, digs deep breaking the soil, moves nutrients from deep layers and can live without water. Seems created to feed it to cattle and make humans happy.
- mschild 2y agoI agree. We've recently purchased a house with a sizeable garden. Our plan is to let it run itself for the most part. We did remove invasive or too aggressive plants though.
- adam_arthur 2y agoI think the future of pesticides and weed control in food production will be robots manually removing pests. No chemicals required. The technology we have today isn't too far off from this... weeds are certainly easier than bugs, but both should be feasible.
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- shellfishgene 2y agoThe weeds will adapt to that, too, over time. Some of the weeds you get in pavement cracks have strong roots and the top part breaks of easily to be quickly regenerated.
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- dskrvk 2y agoBruce Sterling’s “Heavy Weather” describes (offhandedly) a post-agricultural ecosystem where only herbicide/cold/heat-resistant weeds remain. People then breed genetically-engineered livestock that can convert the weeds into more useful substances.
- ricc 2y agoI seriously thought that that headline was a euphemism for the current state of the world...
- abrookewood 2y agoThis is amazing! "Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method. In a classic example from China, a weed called barnyard grass evolved over centuries to resemble rice and thus evade hand weeding".
- zahlman 2y agoI don't think that's any more impressive than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution . The pseudo-natural selection force in both cases is fairly obvious.
- jyounker 2y agoIt's worth noting that the worst weeds in this story are all traditional native american crops. We are investing huge amounts of money to kill food.