Just fancy that. A survey of farmers and their weeds has come up with some fascinating results.
Bill Johnson, a Purdue University associate professor of weed science, said farmers who plant Roundup Ready crops and spray Roundup or glyphosate-based herbicides almost exclusively are finding that weeds have developed resistance. It is only a matter of time, Johnson said, before there are so many resistant weeds that the use of glyphosate products would become much less effective in some places.
“We have weeds that have developed resistance, including giant ragweed, which is one of the weeds that drove the adoption of Roundup,” Johnson said. “It’s a pretty major issue in the Eastern Corn Belt. That weed can cause up to 100 percent yield loss.”
So, let me get this straight. You repeatedly subject a living, reproducing organism to a particular environmental stress, and it evolves so as to adapt to that stress? Well, I’ll be.
The best part:
“Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, funded the survey. … [T]he next step is studying the differences among management strategies in grower fields to see which will slow the build-up of glyphosate resistance.”