Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWeed wisdom: What to do when nature outfoxes herbicides
http://grist.org/food/weed-wisdom-what-to-do-when-nature-outfoxes-herbicides/?w=470&h=264
A field dominated by palmer amaranth, or pigweed, one of the plants that has gained glyphosate resistance
Theres a clear scientific consensus that heavy use of glyphosate the active ingredient in Roundup and other brands of herbicide has sped up the evolution of glyphosate-resistant weeds. And its reasonable to assume that crops genetically engineered to work hand in glove with glyphosate (like Roundup-resistant soy) are part of the problem, contributing to the popularity of the weed killer.
Now crops genetically engineered to work with other herbicides such as dicamba and 2,4-D look like they will soon come on line. The seed companies answer to the Roundup-resistance problem is: lets just fall back on older herbicides. An editorial published by the journal Nature recently criticized this plan. If we do the same thing with dicamba and 2,4-D that we did with glyphosate, the editorial argued, history is likely to repeat itself.
This got me wondering what we should do, then, so I started calling weed scientists. I ended up talking with three from around the country. They all agreed on the basic premise.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Basic premise:
There is no basic premise in the article...
Demeter's Basic premise: learn to live with Nature! Stop trying to turn farms into factories. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)madokie
(51,076 posts)of one gallon of cleaning vinegar (6% acid,) two cups Epsom salt and 1/2 cup dishwashing soap (Dawn.)
its doing a number on the dandelions in our yard. Works better than digging them up and better than round up ever did. Plus its rather environmentally friendly to boot.
In two days the dandelions I spray it on are all but gone, dead as a door knob
WhiteTara
(29,729 posts)and come back and do it again and again and again. Use weed suppression, ie, mulch.
NickB79
(19,277 posts)It works great for the home gardener, where you're working a few hundred square feet, but when the typical Iowa cornfield may be 1000 acres or more, that's a lot of mulch to be applied.
Of course, we could always rotate our crops between different grains and greens and switch to no-till agriculture that leaves crop residue on the ground to create a naturally occurring mulching system, but the latest push in the biofuels business is to treat this valuable residue material as a "waste product" that can also be harvested, baled up and fermented into ethanol
Ultimately, it seems that the solution to this problem will be ending massive farming systems and going back to smaller, more diversified holdings that are owned and operated by families (as farming used to be) rather than owned by industries and farmed by employees.
pscot
(21,024 posts)Or find a deadlier, more toxic alternative.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Spark up another blunt. Nothing outfoxes good weed.
And then relax. It will all be over soon.