Arkansas Bans Herbicide as Farmers Blame Neighbors for Crop Damage
Source: WSJ
Hundreds of farms in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri and Mississippi have reported crops shriveled by dicamba. For farmers, lower crop yields due to herbicide damage could add to financial pressures after several years of low crop prices.
Long used to kill weeds, new formulations of the potent chemical are being widely deployed this year as more farmers plant soybean and cotton seeds engineered by Monsanto Co. to withstand dicamba. The St. Louis company estimated in June that about 20 million acres of its new biotech soybeans had been sold to farmers this year, up from about 1 million sold in a limited release last year.
The U.S. agriculture industry is betting heavily on new combinations of biotech seeds and chemicals like dicamba to combat weeds that have grown resistant to glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide. Glyphosate use has proliferated over the last 20 years as Monsanto, DuPont Co. and Syngenta AG have rolled out seeds engineered to survive that spray. That has contributed to resistant weeds, which can choke out crops and damage farm equipment if left unchecked—further eroding already-slim profit margins for farmers.
But affected farmers say that when neighbors spray dicamba onto the new biotech crops, some of the herbicide is drifting onto adjacent fields that aren’t planted with resistant varieties, sometimes severely damaging them.
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Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/arkansas-bans-herbicide-as-farmers-blame-neighbors-for-crop-damage-1499765401
= new reply since forum marked as read
that this is taking place in red state AR shows that there is a serious problem.
Humans successfully conducted agriculture for thousands of years without GMOs and large-scale pesticide and herbicide applications. Yes, there is a time and place for them but indiscriminate use to boost yields appears to be excessive. The need to do so to feed growing populations is open to debate.
