With GM crops come herbicides, which breed resistant weeds.
This has happened in about a decade for the worse mutants.
We can reverse the problem by reversing the spraying,
using plowing, cultivation, and crop rotation instead.
Mark Jeschke wrote for Pioneer Dupont, Crop Insights: Weed Management in the Era of Glyphosate Resistance, Continue reading
Nishika Patel blogged 11 May 2011 in The Guardian, Organic farming – India’s future perfect?
How did this happen?India’s struggling farmers are starting to profit from a budding interest in organic living. Not only are the incomes of organic farmers soaring – by 30% to 200%, according to organic experts – but their yields are rising as the pesticide-poisoned land is repaired through natural farming methods.
Organic farming only took off in the country about seven years ago. Farmers are turning back to traditional farming methods for a number of reasons.Continue readingFirst, there’s a 10% to 20% premium
Some people didn’t like the source of a recent post about
the toxic effects of agrochemicals and GM plants on the environment,
plants, animals, and people.
There are plenty of other sources, including:
Dr. Stanley Culpepper of UGA Tifton says 52 counties have the mutant pigweed.
He says they’re looking at cover crops and deep turning.
(You may know that as plowing.)
He hastily adds that they’re looking at other herbicides.
But he wraps up by saying we have to look at other methods
than herbicides: tillage and cover crops.
He frames it as diversity and integration.
What it really means is spraying poisons eventually
breeds weeds that refuse to be poisoned.
People, of course,
are not so lucky.
This is the same Dr. Culpepper whose extensive slides on this subject I reviewed last summer.
-jsq
The promise of Roundup:
“No tilling, just seed, spray, and harvest.”Adriana Alvarez, who lives next door to an Argentinia GM soy field, says:
“They came from this side and sprayed the entire field. Here he turns, spraying all the time.”The farmer was wearing a mask. That’s more than no-till farmers around here do.
Interesting statistic that in Argentina
soy production increased
35-fold between
1996 and 2003
while Roundup use increased
56 times.
And eventually it doesn’t work at all, because it breeds resistant weeds.
In Georgia it took only ten years to produce
mutant pigweed
that not just Roundup but not even paraquat can kill.
Many farmers are realizing that
it’s cheaper, more effective, and more profitable to plow the weed under
in the fall and plant a winter cover crop.
Even mutant weeds are not resistant to cold steel.
The documentary points out many products in German stores that include GM soy. In Argentina, it’s even worse, with increasing numbers of birth defects.
They interview
Prof. Andrés Carrasco about his research on amphibians:
“The hemispheres do not separate, like you can see here. If you look closely you can see one brain. Glyphosate can cause this kind of mechanisms, for it is an enzymatic toxin.”
Monsanto refused an interview, responding in writing:
As Dr. Carrasco has been known to say:“Monsanto is convinced of the safety and usefullness of its products and its contribution to efficacious agriculture.”
“Son hipócritas, cipayos de las corporaciones, pero tienen miedo. Saben que no pueden tapar el sol con la mano.”“They are hypocrites, those corporate lackeys, but they are afraid. They know they can’t cover the sun with their hand.”
The documentarians interviewed
Gilles-Eric Seralini in Caen, France.
“To human cells glyphosate is already toxic in a very low dose. A farmer uses a much higher dose on the field. Roundup is even more toxic than glysophate, for that is only one of the ingredients in Roundup.”Roundup says none of this applies to humans and Roundup is safe. Seralini says:
“Transgenics are toxic for human health.”
This is the same Monsanto that
made Fox rewrite 80 times about RBGH in Florida cows.
The same Monsanto that
was convicted by the French Supreme Court of lying about leaving the soil clean.
The same Monsanto that
was fined $2.5 million by the U.S. EPA for
selling genetically modified cotton seeds without labeling them as such.
Who should you believe? A corporation repeatedly convicted of deception, or scientists who say that GM crops cause liver and kidney damage in animals, according to research using Monsanto’s own data.
The Roundup-spraying farmer said:
Roundup, mas algo! mas algo!It’s time to say:Roundup, more and more!
Ya basta!Enough already!
-jsq
PS: Credits to the German TV consumer series ‘plus minus’:
GM toxic soy in animal feed broadcast (© WDR) by Detlef Flintz and Mathias Rauck. Translation and highlighting provided by TraceConsult. Broadcast Tue, 08 Feb. 2011 | 9:50 PM.Bericht
D. Flintz
M. Rauck
Kamera
J. Fenske
C. Kültür
J. Midú
Schnitt
H. Bischoff
E. Elsner
Tom Philpott asks in Grist about
Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides
…Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.Roundup, trade name for glysophate, doesn’t work anymore because the weeds mutated: Continue readingIf you tend large plantings of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company’s Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds — supposedly — but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.
The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto’s longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way.
Sarah Uttech writes that
Cover crops reduce erosion, runoff:
Cover crops may be more effective at reducing soil erosion and runoff after maize harvest than rough tillage, according to scientists from the Université Catholique de Louvain, in collaboration with the Independent Center for the Promotion of Forage (CIPF).This study was done in Belgium, but Tifton A soil we have around here is a sandy loamy soil. And as we know from research done in Georgia, around here we also need to manage the mutant pigweed, and for that a combination of plowing and winter cover crops works best.The three-year study, supervised by Charles Bielders and conducted by Eric Laloy, measured erosion and runoff losses from silt loam and sandy loam soils in continuous silage maize cropping. The research revealed that cover crops reduced erosion by more than 94% compared to bare soil during the intercropping period. Cover crops and reduced tillage appeared equally effective in reducing runoff and soil loss between cropping cycles, despite the fact that the cover crop development was very poor.
The results were reported in the May/June 2010 edition of the Journal of Environmental Quality, a publication of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America.
-jsq
About pigweed, Georgia Extension weed scientist Dr. Stanley Culpepper says:
Economic survival will depend on managing the seedbank!!!!That’s on page 30 of a 46 page presentation at the 2010 Beltwide – Consultants Conference, after discussing how rapidly Roundup-Ready seeds have been adopted:
And how the value of advice on weed control during that period rapidly decreased as a direct correlation: Continue reading
So is it just a few people’s opinion that
plowing works much better than herbicides to control mutant pigweed?
Henry Gantz writes in Don’t Give Pigweed The Light Of Day, If it doesn’t come up, you don’t have to kill it that farmers were depending mostly on Roundup, but that no longer works, due to multiple mutant weeds, including pigweed and marestail. He quotes Dr. Larry Steckle, Extension weed specialist at the University of Tennessee:
Steckle said we’ve now reached the point where we have to begin thinking in terms of controlling “resistant weeds” instead of “resistant marestail” or “resistant Palmer pigweed” because they are both beginning to show up in the same field.So, what’s the solution: Continue reading“We have to manage them both,” he said. “There’s a new product from BASF called Sharpen that I’ve been looking at for five years and I’ve been very impressed with the marestail control. I still like dicamba, Roundup and Gramoxone.
“But if you have Palmer pigweed, too, then you’re going to have to overlap with residuals ― Cotoran, Caparol, Prowl ― to have any chance to do a good job of controlling them.”
Roy Roberson writes in Farm Press about
http://southeastfarmpress.com/cotton/herbicide-resistance-0525/:
Deep tilling of crop land pocked and rutted by heavy equipment used on rain and snow soaked, often frozen farm land may not only clean up the land, but may have a significant positive effect on managing herbicide resistant weeds, especially Palmer pigweed.Back to the future! “Deep tilling” is the current buzzword for plowing. That’s how my father farmed, with a bottom plow, a subsoiler, a harrow, and a cultivator.
The same article continues to defend no-till:
There is no doubt about the many benefits of minimum or no-till cropping systems. Reduced-tillage saves farmers money in equipment, improves soil quality, improves the environment by making the soil more porous and produces better drainage. The list of benefits goes on and on.Promotes more erosion, is my observation. And how does no-till save farmers money if they have to pay for increasing amounts of pesticides to try to deal with mutant weeds like pigweed? Continue reading