The Ever-darkening Shadow of Monsanto-fueled Superweeds

Drifting herbicides can be deadly

Leaves of Bader Farms’ peach trees bear holes and discoloration that owner Bill Bader believes is the result of drift from illegal applications of the herbicide, dicamba, on area farms. Other trees throughout the orchard have branches that are almost entirely denuded. Photo by Bryce Gray, bgray@post-dispatch.com

Reprint of op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Long before a dispute over illegal herbicide drift left an Arkansas farmer dead of a gunshot wound in November, a growing sense of unease had spread across the Great Plains about the cornstalk-sized superweeds infesting more than 100 million acres.

The fatal dispute was among hundreds of complaints across 10 states that arose in the wake of Monsanto’s decision to release new soy and cotton seeds genetically engineered to resist the herbicide dicamba even though an updated formulation of dicamba had yet to be approved for use on the crops.

In their effort to beat back the profit-choking weed epidemic, some farmers planting the new genetically engineered seeds decided to roll the dice and illegally spray those crops with an outdated formulation of dicamba notorious for drifting onto neighboring crops.

In Missouri alone, spray drift from illegal dicamba use on soybean fields has damaged more than 40,000 acres of other crops, including peaches, tomatoes, alfalfa, cantaloupes, watermelons, rice, peas, peanuts and alfalfa.

Last month, Missouri’s largest peach producer filed a lawsuit claiming Monsanto should be held responsible for the loss of 30,000 peach trees resulting in financial losses exceeding $1 million. The producer alleges the damages were caused by illegal spraying that was a predictable consequence of Monsanto’s decision to release its dicamba-resistant seeds prior to availability of a compatible form of dicamba.

Monsanto says it was only making the new seeds available as quickly as possible and can’t be blamed for the actions of individual farmers. The chemical giant has a harder time dodging responsibility for the rise of the superweed epidemic that created the need for the new herbicides.

For years Monsanto officials assured farmers that weeds would never develop resistance to the company’s flagship herbicide, glyphosate, so farmers were urged to apply it liberally year after year because “dead weeds don’t produce seeds.”

And apply it they did, with annual U.S. glyphosate use soaring to over 300 million pounds — an escalation that quickly accelerated the evolution of glyphosate-resistant superweeds that can grow an inch a day to heights of 10 feet and break farm equipment.

Now major herbicide pushers are offering a familiar-sounding “solution”: more herbicides.

In November, Dow AgroSciences got Environmental Protection Agency approval to sell Enlist Duo, a toxic combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D, a World War II-era herbicide banned in Sweden, Denmark and Norway after it was linked to cancer and endocrine disruption. Also in November the EPA fast-tracked approval of Monsanto’s XtendiMax, a supposedly less drift-prone dicamba formulation.

But you’ll have to trust Monsanto on that, because independent scientists are not allowed to review the unpublished studies the company provided to convince the EPA to back away from its initial recommendation that farmers must leave protective 110-foot buffers on all sides of dicamba-sprayed fields. Now, apparently, that buffer is only needed on the downwind side of the field.

One thing about the “new” dicamba remains unchanged: If farmers fail to follow the label or to heed the warning not to apply within 24 hours of rainfall, or when wind speeds exceed 15 mph, only one entity will be blamed for any harm — the farmer.

And this latest weed-control remedy — which will result in tens of millions of pounds of additional herbicides being dumped on this next generation of genetically engineered crops — is sure to be a temporary fix.

Already, weeds resistant to Dow’s 2,4-D and Monsanto’s “new” dicamba are sprouting across America’s fields.

Nathan Donley is a senior scientist in the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health program.