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Organic Lawn Fertilizer: Great Reason Not To Use Roundup Weed Killer

July 16th, 2010

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, noting that a lot of weeds present no indication of defense. “We think that glyphosate will continue to be an important tool inside the farmers’ arsenal,” Monsanto spokesperson John Combest stated. The corporation has started paying cotton farmers $12 an acre to cover the price of other herbicides to work with along with Roundup to enhance its usefulness. The trend has confirmed some food safety groups’ notion that biotechnology won’t lessen the use of chemicals over time.

“That’s being reversed,” said Bill Freese, a chemist from the Washington, D.C.-based Center For Food Safety, that endorses organic agriculture. “They’re likely to considerably enhance use of those chemical substances, and that is not so great.” The very first weeds within the U.S. that survived Roundup were observed about a decade ago in Delaware. Farming experts said the use of other chemicals is already coming up. Monsanto and other companies are developing new seeds made to withstand older herbicides such as dicamba and 2,4-D, a weed killer created during the second world war as well as an ingredient in Agent Orange, that was utilized to destroy jungle foliage during the Vietnam War and is attributed for health conditions amongst veterans. Penn State University grass researcher David Mortensen states that in three or four years, farmers’ usage of dicamba and 2,4-D will increase by 55.1 million lbs annually due to resistance to Roundup. That would push both far up the list of herbicides heavily employed by farmers.

Dicamba and 2,4-D both easily flow past the places that they are dispersed, making them a menace to nearby vegetation and wild plants, Mortensen said. That, in turn, may also threaten wildlife. “We’re discovering that the (wild) crops which grow on the field edges actually support beneficial insects, just like bees,” he stated. In Australia, weed scientist Stephen Powles is a kind of evangelist for preserving Roundup, calling it a near-miraculous farming tool.

Australia has been coping with Roundup-resistant weeds ever since the mid 1990s, but changes in farming practices have helped ensure that it stays successful, Powers said. That has included by using a broader array of herbicides to kill off Roundup resistant weeds and employing other ways 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 instances when fields are not grown with corn, soybeans or cotton, would be the key, said Freese, the Center For Food Safety chemist. Or else, he said, “We’re talking a pesticide treadmill here. It’s only finding its way back to kick us in the butt now with resilient weeds.

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