Shocked, Shocked - In SE Missouri, Farmers Hire Hoe Crews To Chop Roundup-Resistant Weeds - SLPD

[hatrack]

Farmers in the state's south are resorting to some old-fashioned tactics. Weeds in cotton fields have gotten so tenacious — some with stems 4-inches around — that farmers are paying itinerant crews to chop them down by hand. "In the Bootheel they're hiring people to go out there with hoes," said Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau. "I swung a hoe for 15 years, and I fail to see the romance in it."

The problem, farmers and weed scientists say, is getting worse: Weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to Monsanto's Roundup, sold generically as glyphosate, forcing farmers to use other herbicides or "multiple modes of action." But during this season especially farmers are finding that these other modes of action aren't working either — and there appears to be little relief on the horizon. In Missouri, herbicide dealers have sold out of Cobra, one of the herbicides most widely used in tandem with glyphosate. "Are they running out of options?" asked Aaron Hager, a weed scientist with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The simple answer is yes."

Farmers across the Midwest and South are, increasingly, using herbicide cocktails to combat weeds in cotton, corn and soybean fields. "They're using about every bullet they have in their gun," said Derek Samples, a dealer with Agro Distribution in Portageville, about 150 miles south of St. Louis. "It's just been a nasty year."

That worries environmental scientists who say these combinations employ older, more toxic herbicides that glyphosate was marketed to replace. In some areas of the state, certain weeds have become resistant to three herbicides. In Illinois, some weeds have become resistant to four.

EDIT

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_f01139be-ace0-502b-944a-0c534b70511c.html

[phantom power]

1. MRW

Multiply-Resistant-Weeds

:woohoo:

[Ikonoklast]

2. I, for one, welcome our new chemically altered Weedy Overlords!

You other jerks better get in line, genetically resisitant mutant weeds are nothing to ignore.

[midnight]

3. Facinating.... Sounds like a profit creating system...

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. I’ve read this all before

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up

… Writer William Gibson made a similar remark in a 2007 interview: No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel "The Sheep Look Up," has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.

[bahrbearian]

5. Old fashion weed control, 'don't let them see Sunday'

[phantom power]

6. wait for it....

You can't do it my friends!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=844692&mesg_id=844692

[jpak]

7. Evolution in action

yup