"Field of weeds: Could agriculture crisis crop up from herbicide resistance?" PBS NewsHour 11/15/2014
Excerpt
MEGAN THOMPSON (NewsHour): Autumn means it’s harvest time in Iowa, the heart of America’s Heartland. Farmer Jeff Jorgenson is busy harvesting soybeans. He also grows corn on about 2,000 acres in the southwest corner of the state.
Farming is big business here in Iowa. This state is the biggest producer of corn in the country. And it’s second only to Illinois in the production of soybeans.
For Jorgenson – whose family’s been farming for four generations – it’s all about keeping his yields as high as he can.
JEFF JORGENSON, farmer: Yield monitor’s here.
MEGAN THOMPSON: And one of the biggest battles he fights is against weeds.
JEFF JORGENSON: A weed in the field’s going to take moisture, going to take sunlight, nutrients away from the plants surrounding it. And that’s why we have to keep clean fields.
MEGAN THOMPSON: But Jorgenson says, keeping “clean” fields has been getting harder and harder. Like many farmers, he relied for years mainly on an herbicide called “Roundup” that’s manufactured by Monsanto.
Roundup use exploded in the mid-90’s with the introduction of new genetically modified crops that dominate the market today. The crops were engineered to withstand Roundup. So farmers could just spray an entire field, and the herbicide would kill the weeds, but not the crops.
JEFF JORGENSON: Any weed you had in the field, Roundup took care of. Roundup revolutionized weed management for farmers.
MEGAN THOMPSON: Jorgenson says it all worked great, for awhile. He no longer had to spend lots of time plowing to kill weeds. But over time, Roundup and its generic versions – all of which contain a chemical called glyphosate – stopped working so well.
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