Agricultural News
Weed Resistance Getting Worse Because of the Success of the Best Herbicide in Our Lifetime- Roundup
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:34:38 CST
In the war between ag chemicals and the weeds- the weeds will win- eventually. That's one of the conclusions from the opening plenary session keynoter, Dr. Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia, at the first ever Pan America Weed Resistance Conference. Dr. Powles is a huge fan of Glyphosate, but offered a gloomy outlook regarding its eventual fate as a useful herbicide. Powles told the gathering that it is unlikely that most people in the room will ever see as good of a herbicide as Glyphosate again in their lifetime- it truly is a "one year in a hundred years" kind of a product.
In his written presentation handed out to paricipants at the conference being held in Miami Beach, Dr. Powles says that "Herbicide resistance in plants is a stark example of rapid evolution occuring in large weed populations under persistent herbicide selection. In the 1970's the first wave of resistance evolution was widespread triazine herbicide resistance in maize growing regions of USA and Western Europe repeatedly treated with atrazine.."
The Australian educator added that "The current global wave is resistance to glyphosate, the world's most widely used and important herbicide. Glyphosate resistance evolution will be a major issue in the coming decade because of massive glyphosate selection pressure in the large areas devoted to transgenic glyphosate resistant crops, particularly in the Americas."
In our conversation with him, he said that it's actually far worst to use only one herbicide over and over as opposed to planting the same crop on the same ground year after year. He mentioned that one farmer in the US had proudly told him that he rotated Roundup Ready Corn, Roundup Ready Soybeans and then Roundup Ready cotton in his southern farm operation. The farmer was proud of his diversity and Dr. Powles says that's the tragedy- we have not educated that farmer and many others of the disaster that is building on his farm because of continuous use of Glyphosate.
We had the chance after his presentation to talk with him one on one about what the present looks like with so much reliance on Glyphosate- and what the future holds because of that reliance.
Click on the Listen Bar below for his thoughts on this issue of Weed Resistance- direct from the Bayer Crop Science Pan America Weed Resistance Conference.
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