This makes Monsanto’s GMO Roundup Ready crops virtually useless. Monsanto has, in effect, created monsters. And dented their own business badly as well. Why should farmers spend money on expensive GMO seeds that allow the crops to be sprayed with Roundup when weeds are now resistant.
Obviously weeds would evolve and become resistant, like the fearsome Palmer Amaranth, also known as pigweed.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming.
Image from North Carolina State University, who says “It came up out of the cotton fields, the soybean fields and the cornfields. It grew tall, gobbling up field after field. It was unbeatable; nothing could stop it. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was ”¦ glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth.
Pigweed is a generic term for a number of amaranth-related weeds. I don’t know if the pigweed we get is Roundup resistant it not– we don’t use herbicides. I DO know that it’s nutiritious (and young shoots can be added to a salad) and goats love it. Cut it below the soil line and toss it to your livestock.
Oh, wait– mega-farms don’t mix crops and livestock, hence their reliance on fossil fuel fertilizers.