More reasons to grow your own produce

There's so much that scares me about this article. I'm pasting the paragraphs that bother me most.

Full article: Farmers cope with Roundup-resistant weeds

Excerpts:

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

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Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

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Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.

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“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

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Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.

Re: More reasons to grow your own produce

I heard a news piece on the radio about this. Very disturbing. It's one of the reasons we joined a CSA this year.

Re: More reasons to grow your own produce

we used roundup on our hostas and guess what - it didn't work! We went back to the old fashion way of digging the bastards out.

First and now the last time we used a chemical weed killer.

Re: More reasons to grow your own produce

Food, Inc. talked about this a lot - very scary! ETA: Keep in mind the corn & soybeans are also used in the foods you eat - not just produce. Corn Syrup, Soybean Oil, etc.

Re: More reasons to grow your own produce

dh is designing and creating my veggie garden in the next few weeks. our seedlings need to be transfered soon. so happy we started this.