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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Weeds take over U.S. cotton fields

Farmers resort to hand-picking

By: Georgina Gustin

Posted: 07/22/2011 3:19 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

ST. LOUIS -- Farmers in Missouri's south are resorting to some old-fashioned tactics.

Weeds in cotton fields have gotten so tenacious -- some with stems 10 centimeters around -- farmers are now paying itinerant crews to chop them down by hand.

"In the Bootheel, they're hiring people to go out there with hoes," said Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau. "I swung a hoe for 15 years, and I fail to see the romance in it."

The problem, farmers and weed scientists say, is getting worse; weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to Monsanto Co.'s Roundup, sold generically as glyphosate, forcing farmers to use other herbicides or "multiple modes of action." But during this season especially, farmers are finding that these other modes of action aren't working either -- and there appears to be little relief on the horizon.

In Missouri, herbicide dealers have sold out of Cobra, one of the herbicides most widely used in tandem with glyphosate.

"Are they running out of options?" asked Aaron Hager, a weed scientist with the University of Illinois. "The simple answer is yes."

Farmers across the Midwest and South are, increasingly, using herbicide cocktails to combat weeds in cotton, corn and soybean fields.

"They're using about every bullet they have in their gun," said Derek Samples, a dealer with Agro Distribution in Portageville, Mo., about 150 miles south of St. Louis. "It's just been a nasty year."

That worries environmental scientists who say these combinations employ older, more toxic herbicides that glyphosate was marketed to replace. In some areas of the state, certain weeds have become resistant to three herbicides. In Illinois, some weeds have become resistant to four.

"It's rather ironic that we were sold glyphosate as an alternative to these older pesticides, and now farmers are using them again," said Brett Lorenzen, a legal analyst with the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based environmental advocacy group. "But that's part of the pattern of the pesticide industry."

Farmers say they're frustrated, not least because these additional herbicides and strategies are costing them profits. They admit, however, that commodity prices are high enough to justify the additional expenditure.

"It's easily costing $30 an acre for the hand weeding, and the pre-emergence herbicides are costing $10 and $20 an acre," said Tom Jennings, who farms cotton, rice, soy and corn near Sikeston, Mo. "If we see the markets drop back down, the economics are going to get a lot more difficult. As high as it is, we can afford some hand labor."

In the past 15 years, glyphosate has become a ubiquitous product on American farms. Its rise has coincided with unprecedented crop yields and profits for farmers and has propeled Monsanto into the spot of world's most dominant seed maker.

But reliance on glyphosate, scientists say, has led to an explosion in weeds that are genetically adapting to withstand its application.

-- McClatchy-Tribune news service

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 22, 2011 B12

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