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There 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

There 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 ago
Profit motives... the very sickening sickness of The System.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Why?
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 ago
  Of 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.
azeirah 2y ago
Weeds are just plants You can eat weeds, and they turn back into plants or crops. It's just some word trickery.
- Thrymr 2y ago
  But not productively. In monoculture agriculture, all but a single planted crop is a weed by definition, and we have no way of making use of it at scale. Sure, you can eat dandelion greens from your yard, but that does not scale. There are a lot of benefits to quality, nutrition, environment, and community to growing food at smaller scale, but it is certainly more expensive.
  - azeirah 2y ago
    You don't need to grow anything. You can just eat the plants. Just be careful in how you decide what plants to eat. My cats eat plants that somehow seem to grow out of concrete. I have no idea how a plant can even grow out of concrete at all, but it totally works. It probably has some minerals in it. Is it very nutritious? Probably not. You can also just eat stinging nettle. Make soup out of it. Free meal. One of the most nutritious plants that is available in almost all western countries, and probably grows outside of western countries too. It's... I dunno why people don't trust nature or the wisdom in their bodies anymore. Another example. Eat an apple. You're fine. Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat that paste, you will die. Yet we eat apples all day. We trust apples. If something looks, feels and smells edible? Probably fine. Maybe ask a few locals like some birds, cats and dogs because they know nature a little bit better than you do probably. If you eat in the same way that Werner Herzog makes films, you'll be invincible.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat them, you will die. Only if you eat a couple pounds of the seeds. I eat one apple's worth of seeds every time I eat an apple, it's fine.

QuasiGiani 2y ago

Profit motives... the very sickening sickness of The System.

cyberax 2y ago
Why?

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 ago
Of 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.

azeirah 2y ago

Weeds are just plants You can eat weeds, and they turn back into plants or crops. It's just some word trickery.

Thrymr 2y ago
But not productively. In monoculture agriculture, all but a single planted crop is a weed by definition, and we have no way of making use of it at scale. Sure, you can eat dandelion greens from your yard, but that does not scale. There are a lot of benefits to quality, nutrition, environment, and community to growing food at smaller scale, but it is certainly more expensive.
- azeirah 2y ago
  You don't need to grow anything. You can just eat the plants. Just be careful in how you decide what plants to eat. My cats eat plants that somehow seem to grow out of concrete. I have no idea how a plant can even grow out of concrete at all, but it totally works. It probably has some minerals in it. Is it very nutritious? Probably not. You can also just eat stinging nettle. Make soup out of it. Free meal. One of the most nutritious plants that is available in almost all western countries, and probably grows outside of western countries too. It's... I dunno why people don't trust nature or the wisdom in their bodies anymore. Another example. Eat an apple. You're fine. Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat that paste, you will die. Yet we eat apples all day. We trust apples. If something looks, feels and smells edible? Probably fine. Maybe ask a few locals like some birds, cats and dogs because they know nature a little bit better than you do probably. If you eat in the same way that Werner Herzog makes films, you'll be invincible.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >Dig seeds out of the apple, crush them and turn them into a paste. If you eat them, you will die. Only if you eat a couple pounds of the seeds. I eat one apple's worth of seeds every time I eat an apple, it's fine.