When the weed killer Roundup was launched in the seventies, it proved it could kill almost any plant yet still be less dangerous than a number of other herbicides, and it helped farmers to give up harsher chemical compounds and lower tilling which could promote erosion. But 24 years later, a couple of sturdy types of weed immune to Roundup have developed, driving farmers to go back to a number of the less environmentally safe methods they left behind many years ago. The situation is the most severe within the South, in which a number of farmers now walk fields using hoes, eliminating weeds in ways their great-grandfathers were happy to leave behind.

St. Louis-based Monsanto maintains the resistance is frequently overstated, observing that a lot of weeds show no indication of immunity. “We think that glyphosate will continue to be an essential tool within the farmers’ collection,” Monsanto spokesman John Combest mentioned. The corporation has began paying out cotton farmers $12 an acre to pay for the cost of other herbicides to use alongside Roundup to improve its usefulness. The trend has verified some food protection groups’ belief that biotechnology will not decrease the use of chemicals over time.

“That’s being reversed,” said Bill Freese, a chemist with the Washington, D.C.-based Center For Food Safety, which endorses organic farming. “They are going to significantly maximize utilization of those chemicals, and that’s bad news.” The first weeds inside the U.S. which lived through Roundup were discovered about 10 years ago in Delaware. Farming experts said the usage of other chemicals has already been sneaking up. Monsanto and other companies are developing new seeds designed to withstand older herbicides such as dicamba and 2,4-D, a weed killer formulated in the second world war and an element in Agent Orange, that was used to destroy rainforest foliage in the course of the Vietnam War and is blamed for health issues among veterans.

Penn State University grass scientist David Mortensen estimates that in three or four years, farmers’ usage of dicamba and 2,4-D can increase by 55.1 million lbs a year because of resistance to Roundup. That could drive both far up the listing of herbicides intensely utilized by farmers. Dicamba and 2,4-D both easily flow past the places that they are dispersed, making them a menace to neighboring crops and wild plants, Mortensen said. That, consequently, may also endanger wildlife. “We are discovering that the (wild) vegetation that grow around the field edges essentially support beneficial insects, such as bees,” he said.

In Australia, weed scientist Stephen Powles is a kind of evangelist for preserving Roundup, calling it a near-miraculous farming device. Australia has been managing Roundup-resistant weeds ever since the mid 1990s, but adjustments to farming procedures have helped keep it efficient, Powers said. That has included using a wider variety of herbicides to kill off Roundup resistant weeds and utilizing other methods of weed control. Those alternative methods, such as planting so-called cover crops like rye to hold back weeds throughout the winter as well as other times when fields are not grown with corn, soybeans or cotton, would be the key, said Freese, the Center For Food Safety chemist. Otherwise, he said, “We’re talking a pesticide treadmill here. It is simply coming back to kick us in the bottom now with resilient weeds.

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