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posted by janrinok on Friday August 15 2014, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the nature,-the-true-survivor dept.

It's partly a game of catch-up for the agriculture industry, as many farmers are dealing with weeds that have become resistant to glyphosate, (Roundup) an herbicide commonly used on corn and soybeans. The glyphosate game isn't over, but it is already clear the weeds are beginning to win as they are increasingly becoming resistant to Roundup just like the GM seed crops designed for Roundup tolerance.

An AP story reports that a new line of GM seeds, designed to tolerate a modified version of an old herbicide, 2,4-D, is being considered by the Environmental Protection Agency. The Agency is expected to rule this fall on Dow AgroSciences' application to market Enlist, the new version of the 2,4-D herbicide that's been around since the 1940s. The Agriculture Department has already recommended the EPA approve the new combination.

The agency said that if both the seeds and herbicide are approved, the use of 2,4-D could increase by an estimated 200 to 600 percent by the year 2020. While the USDA only oversees the safety of the plants, the EPA oversees the safety of the herbicide for human and environmental health.

Since the 2,4-D will be used in combination with glyphosate, any weeds building resistance to the combination will likely be even harder to kill, resulting in what one farmer called a "Pesticide Treadmill".

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TK on Friday August 15 2014, @06:15PM

    by TK (2760) on Friday August 15 2014, @06:15PM (#81817)

    Talk about a money maker. The weeds evolve a tolerance to your herbicide of choice at just about the time when the patent expires on the GMO seed. Rise, repeat, reap in the cash.

    <tinfoil>
    Of course, this could be a phenomenon that's been gradually increasing during the entire time Glyphosate has been used, it's only getting attention now because the patent on RoundUp Ready seeds expires this year.
    </tinfoil>

    --
    The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @06:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @06:36PM (#81821)

      Or some activists are creating Roundup tolerant weeds by selective breeding. Who knows, it wouldn't even surprise me.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Friday August 15 2014, @06:41PM

        by Dunbal (3515) on Friday August 15 2014, @06:41PM (#81825)

        It would surprise the hell out of me. Evolution works just fine without any and sometimes despite any human interference at all. No activists needed. A single "weed" plant that survives a spraying with herbicide X is enough to create an entire population of resistant organisms. The more plants you spray, the greater the possibility of running into a mutant and doing it a favor by killing all its competition.

    • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Friday August 15 2014, @06:43PM

      by Dunbal (3515) on Friday August 15 2014, @06:43PM (#81826)

      Yeah at some point someone is going to realize that diminishing returns makes the whole thing futile and he'd be better off farming the way people have been doing it for thousands upon thousands of years. You will never get 100% yield. Never. But people can't stop believing in snake oil and magic.

      • (Score: 2) by strattitarius on Friday August 15 2014, @09:16PM

        by strattitarius (3191) on Friday August 15 2014, @09:16PM (#81866) Journal
        When they can get 250 bushels per acre, at record prices, the farmers are not facing diminishing returns. Corn has made a lot of farmers wealthy over the past decade.
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        • (Score: 2) by ilPapa on Friday August 15 2014, @09:29PM

          by ilPapa (2366) on Friday August 15 2014, @09:29PM (#81870) Journal

          Corn has made a lot of farmers wealthy over the past decade.

          Fewer and fewer every year.

          --
          You are still welcome on my lawn.
        • (Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Friday August 15 2014, @11:11PM

          by Hawkwind (3531) on Friday August 15 2014, @11:11PM (#81915)

          Corn has made a lot of farmers wealthy over the past decade.

          Any chance you can point to a citation? I've been wondering about this as not too long ago the price of patented seed was high enough that many farmers were actually doing better by bucking the trend and going with lower yielding seed. But it's been ... eight or ten years since I read that? Now that we're closer to the end of the patents on some of these I've been wondering if it's impacted what goes to the grower versus the seed provider.

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday August 16 2014, @12:38AM

            by frojack (1554) on Saturday August 16 2014, @12:38AM (#81941) Journal

            With the ramp up of ethanol fuel from corn, the presence or absence of patented seed makes less and less difference.
            Ethanol corn is the same corn as cattle feed corn, and the farmers have dual markets to sell into with the
            same product.

            So I could see that farmers might be doing well enough that patented seed might not be a significant cost
            issue to them.

            There are some historical numbers here: http://www.farmdoc.illinois.edu/manage/uspricehistory/us_price_history.html [illinois.edu]
            Year Corn ( $/bushel )
            2004 2.47
            2005 1.96
            2006 2.28
            2007 3.39
            2008 4.78
            2009 3.75
            2010 3.83
            2011 6.01
            2012 6.67
            2013 6.15

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 16 2014, @02:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 16 2014, @02:23AM (#81963)

      Running an economically competitive farm is not easy. It looks easy, because farmers buy the equivalent of tanks to kill enemy plants (plowing under). You can concede territory to enemy plants and insects, Fight them mechanically, or use chemical weapons. The enemy is always coming up with new strategies, and counters for chemical weapons. Chemical weapons work great. Just ask Saddam, or an average farmer on the midwest.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by art guerrilla on Saturday August 16 2014, @03:56AM

        by art guerrilla (3082) on Saturday August 16 2014, @03:56AM (#81983)

        the major problem is taking a sustainable system of 'holistic', local, small-scale, closed-cycle farming (livestock poop to soil to crops to livestock to livestock poop, ad infinitum), and turning it into massive monoculture plots which are BEGGING for specific pests and disease to wipe them out...
        (not to mention the large scale machinery, fuel, pesticide, synthetic fertilizer, over-watering, bank-dependent, Big Agri dominated system which results from this practice...)

        diversity, inter-planting, crop rotation, soil husbandry, and general common sense old-timey agricultural and livestock practices basically perfected such systems worldwide for hundreds of thousands of years and they worked excellently...
        but us genius nekkid apes think we have beat the system and can get away with it indefinitely...

        destroying the soil, destroying our seed bank genetic heritage, destroying microbial communities, destroying whole ecosystems of bugs, destroying the water basins, destroying the aquifers, destroying the agricultural communities; but they will dog damn sure wring out the last bushel of production out of an acre of depleted soil, and someone somewhere will make a lot of money, but WE ALL will be poorer for it, and the planet destroyed...

        unrestrained rapacious capitalist imperialism anyone ? ? ?
        damn, i keep forgetting when we voted for that...

        • (Score: 1) by germanbird on Saturday August 16 2014, @06:06AM

          by germanbird (2619) on Saturday August 16 2014, @06:06AM (#82006)

          I find it somewhat interesting (or maybe the better word is disturbing) at how short-sighted capitalism has become. Big corporations cut and slash product quality and employees in order to maximize quarterly earnings (and appeal to the stock market). Farmers burn out their soil and risk long-term environmental issues with their land looking for that big yield. (I'm exaggerating here, but hopefully you get the point.) Can't anybody think long term?

          In my mind, capitalism should result in a company that takes care of its customers, puts together a quality product, and treats its employees well. Why? Well, if you take care of your customers and your employees, they are much more likely to stick with your company and make it profitable in the long term.

          Similarly, if farmers take care of their land and soil, they are more likely to see a good yield from that same soil in the long term.

          Unfortunately, so many companies are looking for that quick profit that can be had by cutting and slashing and burning rather than investing in their product and their people (or in the farmer's case their land). Sure it may make them massive amounts of money in the short term, but you quickly run the thing into the ground. And that to me is capitalism -- you screw things up and your company fails and you end up not making money. You take care of your product and your people and your company should still be up and running and making lots of money when the short-term-thinkers fail.

          The problem as I see it is that we keep getting in the way of capitalism. In the last decade, the US government has handed out a ton of money to companies that have made short-sighted decisions rather than letting them suffer the consequences of those decisions (I'm thinking of the banking and auto industries). We got to get out of the way and let the market do its thing so that companies that are making smart decisions and investing in the long term can reap the rewards of their behavior. Letting them fail also opens up the market to new talent who can bring innovation to the table (and hopefully avoid the poor choices of those that came before them).

          I realize I'm something of a dreamer and that there are lots of complicated variables at play here, but we can't blame all our problems on capitalism when we aren't actually letting it prune bad behavior from the market.

          Sorry for the rant. I've been around big business just long enough to see this play out in person (but I'll leave that story for another day).

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 15 2014, @07:03PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 15 2014, @07:03PM (#81835)

    It's a catchy title, but how do we know that it's actually "halftime" ?
    Pulling weeds while farming is thousands of years old, GMOs are a couple decades old but a majority of the seeds in many areas, what does the title-writer believe will happen when $referee blows the final whistle?

    • (Score: 1) by iWantToKeepAnon on Friday August 15 2014, @07:17PM

      by iWantToKeepAnon (686) on Friday August 15 2014, @07:17PM (#81840) Homepage Journal

      Armageddon? Zombie apocalypse? Utopia?

      I vote for the last one! (... we do get a vote, don't we?)

      --
      "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
      • (Score: 2) by mrider on Friday August 15 2014, @08:51PM

        by mrider (3252) on Friday August 15 2014, @08:51PM (#81858)

        Ragnarok.

        --

        Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"

        Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."

  • (Score: 1) by SrLnclt on Friday August 15 2014, @07:13PM

    by SrLnclt (1473) on Friday August 15 2014, @07:13PM (#81838)

    Sounds almost like the the FDA discussion from a few months back about antibacterial soap.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @07:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @07:38PM (#81841)

    Thought-out engineering is no match for mutation that don't give a fuck.

  • (Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday August 15 2014, @07:45PM

    by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Friday August 15 2014, @07:45PM (#81842) Journal

    I once read a science fiction story where a farm of some kind (actually a vineyard, I think) was using telepresence rigs to do their weeding and/or harvesting; with the operators being Indian or Chinese sweatshop "laborers". You know what - fuck, let's do this. We can get our urban lifestyles and our weed-free monoculture farmlands freed from using pesticides at the same time.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TK on Friday August 15 2014, @08:47PM

      by TK (2760) on Friday August 15 2014, @08:47PM (#81857)

      This seems like a great application for robotics. If you can write software to visually determine the difference between your crop and known weeds in the area, maybe with downloadable photos and location data for indeterminate plants, you can let a couple bots wander your fields and do the job gradually without too much investment. I wonder how quickly...

      <trigger_warning="English Units">
      1 acre = 4.4x10^4 feet^2
      1 corn row distance = 2 feet
      Distance per acre = 4.4x10^4 ft^2 / 2 ft = 2.2x10^4 ft
      Hours of sunshine = 8pm - 6am = 14 hrs
      2.2x10^4 ft / 14 hrs = 1.6x10^3 ft/hr = 0.28 mph = 0.45 km/hr
      </trigger_warning>

      So for every robot/acre/day, your bot needs to be able to travel at 0.28 mph (0.45 km/hr), a little faster to give time to stop and take pictures or dispose of a sprouting weed. It doesn't seem impossible to be able to get 3+ acres weeded per day per robot this way.

      I can imagine a swarm of WALL-E styled robots (solar powered, of course) with treads and grasping claws to do the weeding. You may even be able to get away with snipping weeds at the base instead of pulling them out as long as you get them before they start to seed.

      If you're really feeling clever, you can attach a laser pointer to every robot, and lead vermin out of your field by passing off the critter to another robot progressively until the bot nearest to a trap leads the varmint into a conveniently placed trap.

      --
      The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 17 2014, @07:37PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 17 2014, @07:37PM (#82357)

        given an infinitely smart and flexible and tireless robot you could "fix" the problems of industrial era monocultural production, but it seems a heck of a lot more productive to eliminate the root cause of the problems, that being industrial era monoculture.

        OK. Using industrial large scale monoculture, the "best" yields are endless rows of grain. You're proposing that in a radically post-industrial agricultural system, we'll still do everything else the same.

        Given "universal super robots" the best land use strategy is probably the worlds largest vegetable garden or a mixed fruit/nut orchard. Perhaps something even weirder like the permaculture gardens with 5 different physical layers of different crops at different heights and the harvesting robot can sort it out.

        Sort of like thinking the best mechanized transportation solution would look like a steam powered robot horse you'd hitch up to your existing covered wagon. Well... we ended up with cars instead. Or the "artists impression" from 1950 of a really fast computer in 2000 probably has a very fast and advanced punchcard reader as its primary UI. Revolutionary changes in tech have revolutionary changes in tangentially related topics, not mere evolutionary changes.

        Without the technological need to plant endless rows of grain, given more advanced technology you'd likely not end up with endless rows of grain once the restrictive constraint is lifted.

        I'm not saying no one will ever grow grains, obviously, but I am thinking that without the technological "need" to only grow rows of corn, the distribution of crops might change quite a bit.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ilPapa on Friday August 15 2014, @09:32PM

    by ilPapa (2366) on Friday August 15 2014, @09:32PM (#81872) Journal

    I guess Soylent News hasn't gotten on the radar of the small but committed army of GMO apologists who mobilize at every possibly negative mention of GMOs.

    My guess is they'll get here sooner or later. You'll know them because they have unlimited amounts of time to tell you how great Monsanto and Dow are and how anyone who wants to know the provenance of their food is ten times worse than a radioactive Hitler.

    --
    You are still welcome on my lawn.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @11:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @11:01PM (#81911)

      They are more subtle than that.
      They say things like people have been doing genetic engineering for millenia, its called selective breeding.
      Never mind that you can't cross-breed two completely different species, but you can transfer genes between them.

  • (Score: 1) by Username on Friday August 15 2014, @11:49PM

    by Username (4557) on Friday August 15 2014, @11:49PM (#81925)

    So basically they are saying these weeds are also now genetically modified.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by geoff_smith82 on Saturday August 16 2014, @01:56AM

    by geoff_smith82 (1699) on Saturday August 16 2014, @01:56AM (#81954)

    Some farmers here in Australia are now trying towing a machine behind the harvester that crushes all the waste that comes out the back. This helps kill the seeds that survived the herbicide application and prevent resistant strains appearing!

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Saturday August 16 2014, @02:06AM

    by Hartree (195) on Saturday August 16 2014, @02:06AM (#81959)

    "just like the GM seed crops "

    No. The resistance methods they develop are different than the gene that the round-up ready crops use. And, it's a number of different adaptations in different resistant weeds.

    Our local nightmare weed of the moment in East Central Illinois is the Palmer amaranth. Basically a type of pigweed that in some cases shrugs off Round-Up. The glyphosate resistant ones showed up here recently.

    The reason it surprised people as to how fast the weeds developed resistance is that the genetic modification was chosen to be unlikely to be easily duplicated under natural conditions.

    The problem is, Mom Nature doesn't work like our laboratories. We do one experiment at a time and it takes a long time. For Mom, every weed in a field is an experiment to see if it's resistant. 1000 weeds, that's 1000 experiments. If the weed dies, it's a failure. If it lives, its kids will be back next year. And it's probably a different method of resistance than the one 3 that develops in a different species 3 fields over.

    Now, multiply this by all of the fields that are sprayed with Round-Up. Each weed is yet another experiment. You begin to see why such large numbers add up fast.

    As to the GMOs: You can worry about the genetics work in the labs if you want to, but Mother Nature is just so much better than we are at it. And sometimes, what she produces are evolved specifically to screw us up. Take Ebola virus for a timely example.