What a tangled web Monsanto has woven with its wonder-drug, Round-Up. While the agri-giant has spent decades touting its job of improving crops and saving farmland from erosion with its ubiquitous pesticide, danger lurked in the shadows. Round-Up resistant weeds sprung up in the void left by the pesticide, and now, Monsanto must back peddle.Unfortunately, a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable path is not what they have in mind. Instead, they are offering soybean and cotton farmers who use Round-Up seeds a rebate of up to $6 per acre for applying two other herbicides to try to kill the Round-Up resistant weeds. Ironically, the same argument that Monsanto used to sell their brand originally -- increased yield and decreased erosion -- is being used for this latest mission, even though the additional herbicides can be from their competitors.
Read Tom Philpott's piece about it on Grist, and the Des Moines Register's original piece about it here.
Image courtesy of Dropstone Farms
The same thing has happened with weeds as happened with humans and their over medication. And now they try to correct it with even more chemicals (aka medicine). When will companies learn?
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