Green Revolution
September 25, 2020
Processed Food
October 15, 2020
Food Chain Radio Show #1249
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
The Dicamba War: Farmer v Farmer
Guest: Terry Fuller, Farmer & Chair of the Arkansas State Plant
Chemical weed-killers make it possible for farmers to kill weeds without having to use a hoe. That makes farmers happy, because hoeing weeds under the hot summer sun is not a pleasant thing to do. Having been a teenage herbicide in Montana’s Yellowstone River Valley, I am fully qualified to make that unequivocal assertion!
Food Chain Radio – Dicamba War – Farmer v Farmer – Dicamba can lift up – off a farmer’s field and drift downwind and settle on another farmer’s field – and destroy the farmer’s non dicamba-resistant crops.
In recent years, the use of chemical weedkillers has been industrialized by technologies that manipulate the genes of plants, making it possible for farmers to grow crops resistant to weedkillers. Now farmers can spray herbicides on their entire crop and kill the weeds without killing their crops. That has made farmers very happy indeed.
The weed-killer resistant genes, and the weed-killers, also make it possible for a very few, very big companies– like Bayer AG– to control a very big percentage of the world’s crop lands. That made a very few, very savvy business people very rich and very very happy.
But… Weeds are very clever and very adaptable. Having been sprayed with the weed-killer glyphosate for many years, some weeds developed a resistance to the glyphosate and became “superweeds,” and they make farmers very unhappy.
To combat the superweeds, companies like Bayer AG have turned to the weed-killer dicamba, and developed dicamba-resistant crops for farmers to plant. That has made some farmers happy– but not all farmers!
Dicamba has a very interesting characterisitic: When conditions are right, dicamba will, like some perverse technological ghost, pick itself up off an upwind farmer’s field and drift off downwind, only to settle on another farmer’s field, where it destroys that farmer’s non dicamba-resistant crops. That makes the downwind farmer very unhappy.
We now have a “Dicamba War” between upwind farmers and downwind farmers. That this war is getting very hot and very personal, leads us to ask:
Leave a comment below: Which do you think will win the Dicamba War: upwind farmers or downwind farmers?
Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
2 Comments
No farmers, no humans, no insects, no animals and no birds or fish win the war. Application is just as grievous an error as application of Round Up. Some farmers never learn.
Farmers lose and the multinational corporations that knew better win. I hope your show covers the backstory – From the Guardian,”The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show. Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.”
source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/monsanto-crop-system-damage-us-farms-documents
I look forward to listening in