FYI—PFI member Craig Fleishman and Dr. Mike Owen, ISU Extension Weed Specialist will speak about this topic at PFI’s Annual Conference on January 14, 2012 in Ames, IA. Plan to attend!

Growers grapple with resistant superweeds

(cbc.ca) – Farming costs, food prices and agricultural pollution may rise as a result of nature’s strike back against a biotechnology that has revolutionized modern farming.

“Superweeds” resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, also known by the trade name Roundup, have infested millions of hectares of cropland through much of the U.S. and areas of southwestern Ontario.

That means farmers may no longer be able to reap the benefits of Roundup Ready crops, which are genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, allowing farmers to control weeds with the herbicide without harming the crops themselves.

Bill Johnson, a weed scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., told CBC’s The Current that the development of Roundup crops was among agriculture’s top one or two most important in the past 60 or 70 years because it allowed farmers to control weeds that had become resistant to a variety of other herbicides. That resistance had been forcing farmers to use complicated mixtures of chemicals to control weeds.

It also meant farmers no longer had to till their fields to control weeds, Johnson said.

“It greatly reduced soil erosion. It allowed farm sizes to expand,” he said, noting that tillage is time-consuming and expensive because it uses lots of fuel. Forgoing tillage has also reduced the amount of polluting agricultural run-off into waterways, he said.

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