Mulberry, ragweed and other monster weeds have begun to outsmart the advanced pest control methods that protect the most profitable crops in the United States
Central Indiana in the second week of November looks like a patchwork of yellow-brown and black: here a field covered with drying corn and soybeans, and a little further away bare soil after a farmer plowed it on top of last year's crop residue. This is a soil that wants to grow everything, and if you look closely you can already see the sprouts of autumn wild herbs: star, rashad and purple nettle. Chad Brabham, a soft-spoken graduate student, selects two potted plants in a greenhouse on Purdue University's campus. In each of them stands a plant that is 45 centimeters tall and has a rough stem and bears jagged three-lobed leaves. Residents of the United States are very familiar with these plants, growing in vacant lots or roadsides all over the country. These are ragweed plants Ambrosia trifida)), called in English giant ragweed or "giant ragweed" - an ugly plant, as its name indicates, and useless like its common ambrosia family member, Ambrosia artemisiifolia. Both plants are incredibly effective in sucking water from the ground and spreading highly allergenic pollen. If farmers stop tilling the land, it will only be a few years before this entire stretch of Indiana land will justify the moniker that agronomists jokingly propose to be engraved on the license plates of cars in the area: the Giant Ragweed National Forest.
For the last 50 years or so, this fate has been avoided mainly through chemical herbicides. One of the most commonly used substances is glyphosate, known among other things as the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. Brabham puts the two pots in a spray booth and fills a small container with the potassium salt solution of glyphosate. A portable spray head moves quickly along the cell and wets the green and shriveled leaves with a dose that by all accounts should be lethal. Brabham takes the pots out and puts them back on the grow table. What happens to these weeds in the next 24 hours will demonstrate, on a small scale, what is in store for farmers across the US Midwest this coming farming season.
Credit: Cherie Sinnen
The herbicide glyphosate was the main player in the unfolding drama. "I don't want to use the word 'catastrophe,' but some say it could bring the greatest disaster to the cotton growers since the weevil plague [a beetle that damaged the cotton crops in America in the 20s - the editors]." This is what Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant disease expert and senior scientist at the "Union of Concerned Scientists" (UCS), said when discussing the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds, also known as superweeds. In the last ten years, these weeds have expanded their distribution in the USA from a few scattered centers to more than 44 million dunams. Although this area is only a tiny fraction of the 1.6 billion cultivated dunams in the US, it is five times larger than the area where these weeds grew in 2007. "This is a huge jump in the distribution of these plants, and I don't think anyone expected it," says David Mortensen, a weed ecologist at Pennsylvania State University. In the summer of 2010, Mortensen testified at a hearing in the American Congress and said that "there is no reason to assume that this trend will not continue." The hearing was convened by Ohio's representative in Congress, Dennis J. Kosinich, to investigate how the USDA oversees genetically engineered seeds. If the superweeds spread and bring about a disaster, it will not only be a disaster that could have been foreseen, but also a disaster that could have been prevented. Like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which cause infectious disease experts to fear the worst, we brought this problem upon ourselves, a reminder of the folly of trying to defeat evolution. And more weeds are the last thing we need in a world already pushed to the limits of technology in an attempt to expand food production.
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Part of the genetic engineering deals with the resistance of the cultivated plant to pesticides, so that the spraying work can be done by an airplane, for example, on top of the sown field. A pesticide cocktail can interfere with or prevent such treatment.
the other me
If it was that simple don't you think farmers would stop spending money on sprays? After all, the chemical companies cannot impose themselves. It is simply a need of the farmers, otherwise they will lose more due to pests and diseases.
Nature will always find a way to multiply and survive, evolution is a law, just like the laws of physics, those who ignore it will crash.
Very annoying article. They are the ones who created the monster and now Malin and are looking for an even stronger poison to destroy it.
Industrial agriculture has brought this disaster and others upon itself in moncultural crops on vast areas, the destruction of the soil and the destruction of the environment, water pollution and contribution to the development of super weeds and super insects, not to mention the destruction of beneficial insects and microorganisms. And I will not go into the systematic destruction of the genetic pool and its distortion by genetic engineering that weakens the breed more and more and makes it more vulnerable and more dependent on spraying and fertilizing.
Money gentlemen, only money.
The only solution is agriculture using intensive natural methods (permaculture, biofalha and others), which enable life for grasses, insects, microorganisms and other life cycles in nature while providing a tremendous yield that is in no way inferior to the industrial yield.
The difference is that there is no need to spray poisons and chemical fertilization, which drops the soil from greedy corporations like Monsanto and Israel Chemicals (and many others). If we could get rid of them, it would be possible to develop the methods and tools to turn this agriculture into a leading agriculture whose contribution to the environment and our health is enormous.
What do cows think of the plant?
or goats?
First, I'm a little surprised that no one has said that they are still waiting to see what the results of the experiment Brabham did with the sprayed pots were.
This is not the full article and the printed Scientific American says what you probably thought happened - that the plants survived the attack.
They found a way to leave the poison in the leaves (which dropped as a result) without allowing it to reach the roots.
There is indeed a problem on the subject because seemingly - what would help us not to use pesticides or antibiotics?
After all, if we hadn't done this we would have encountered exactly the same problem as the one we are encountering today - only sooner because the weeds/bacteria could have caused their damage even without learning to deal with the pesticides or antibiotics.
One of the strategies proposed in the article is actually opposite in spirit to some of the things said in it and to some of the responses:
Using a cocktail of many pesticides/antibiotics at the same time - as was done in dealing with HIV, to prevent a mutation that confers resistance to one of the toxins from giving its carriers a survival advantage.
Beth-ya and Kamila,
What do you offer? Instead of lamenting the follies of modern agriculture and pest control, they offered solutions
applicable that can feed the billions of people in the world.
swh
There is a close connection between the last paragraph and what was written before.
That sentence was said in light of the fact that humans, by exerting a strong selection pressure on these plants (due to the increased use of various herbicides for example) interfered in the normal course of evolution and gave a huge advantage to especially resistant strains that under normal conditions probably would not have been able to compete with the "natural" wild strains . A similar thing happens to this very day regarding the treatment of bacterial infections through the increased use of antibiotics. This creates tremendous selection pressure on the bacteria and gives a significant advantage to bacteria that are resistant to many types of antibiotics, strains that apparently would not have survived the competition with the "natural" strains at all. If a solution is not found soon (in all these areas) a real catastrophe may occur. It is very unfortunate that the government is not educated to use evolutionary scientific knowledge to better plan agricultural policy and pharmaceutical treatment, to significantly reduce the risks arising from severe selection in favor of resistant varieties.
How did they come to the conclusion "we also brought this problem on ourselves" or is the last paragraph disconnected from any logic related to the data presented before it
They will find a solution for this as well. Monsanto as well as other companies in the field (perhaps even Makhteshim Agan) are surely already looking for solutions. They will get a lot of money for the solutions they will come up with. The question is how much time and how much financial resources will be required for this.
Weeds ?! Humans are the fools! Almost every herb that is called "fool" for some reason is an edible herb, which is much more nutritious than any crop we know. What else? These weeds do interfere with growing cotton or other crops that humans choose, and spray them, and then cry about disappearing bees, and other obscure diseases and the like.