Researching herbicide resistance in weeds.
A decade ago, everyone said rotating applications of different herbicides was key to stopping herbicide resistance.
Then, around 2015, evidence from a large study emerged saying that this actually causes weeds to be MORE resistant, so the best thing to do is to spray a combination of multiple herbicides mixed together at once.
Now that is being called into question too. Whoda thunk it...
Herbicide resistance among weeds is only getting stronger. Recently, scientists found an annual bluegrass (Poa annua) on a golf course that was resistant to seven herbicide modes of action at once. Seven. SEVEN. Amaranth plants been found with resistance to six herbicide modes of action at once. Twenty years ago, the narrative was that resistance to glyphosate (Roundup) was unlikely to become widespread; today it's the second-most common type of resistance.
What's more, plants are developing types of herbicide resistance that are effective against multiple herbicides at once and harder to detect. Instead of changing the chemical processes within them that are affected by the herbicides so the herbicides don't work as well, they're changing the way they absorb chemicals in the first place. Resistant plants are producing enzymes that detoxify the herbicides before they even enter the plants' cells.
It took Monsanto ten years to develop crop varieties resistant to Dicamba (after weeds made 'Roundup Ready' crops pointless). Palmer amaranth evolved Dicamba resistance in five years.
So I asked, "Why are all the proposed solutions dependent on using more herbicides, when we know damn well that this is going to do nothing but make the weeds evolve faster?"
The answer is that chemical companies have the world in a death grip. They can't make money off non-chemical solutions, so chemical solutions get all the funding, research, and outreach to farmers.
But why do chemical companies have so much power?
One of the biggest reasons is the U.S. military.
In the Vietnam war, all of Vietnam was sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, which was incredibly toxic to humans and affected the Vietnamese population with horrible illnesses and birth defects. Monsanto, the company that made the herbicides, knew that it did this, but didn't tell anyone. The US government didn't admit that they'd poisoned humans on a mass scale until Vietnam veterans started dying and coming down with horrible illnesses, and even then, it took them 40 years. (My Papaw died at 60 because of that stuff.) And the soldiers weren't there for very long. As for the Vietnamese people, the soil and water where they live is contaminated.
Similarly, during the "war on drugs," the US military sprayed Roundup and other chemicals on fields to destroy coca plants and other plants used in the manufacturing of drugs. This killed a lot of crops that farmers needed to live, and caused major health problems in places such as Columbia. The US government said that people getting sick were lying and that Roundup was just as safe as table salt. (A statement that did not age well.)
So chemical companies make money off arming the USA military. The American lawn care industry, and the agricultural system, therefore originates in more than one way from the United States's war-mongering.
The other major way is described in this article (which I highly recommend), which describes how after WW2, chemical plants used for manufacturing explosives were changed into fertilizer producing plants, but chemical companies couldn't market all that fertilizer to farmers, so they invented the lawn care industry. No exaggeration, that's literally what happened.
This really changes my perspective on all the writings about fixing the agricultural system. The resources are biased towards the use of chemicals in agriculture because the companies are so powerful as to make outreach and research for non-chemical methods of agriculture really hard to fund. All the funding is in finding new ways to spray chemicals or spraying slightly different chemicals, because that's what you can actually get ahold of money to look into. It is like the research has to negotiate a truce with the chemical companies, suggesting only solutions that won't cause lower profits.
Meanwhile my respect for Amaranth is skyrocketing.
Who would win: The USA military-industrial complex or one leafy boi
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