Farmers across the Midwest and South — those whose crops are not under water or blowing away in a hot, dry wind — are besieged by an enemy straight out of a stupid horror movie: an army of undead weeds that cannot be killed by chemicals. It’s as if you shot the heart out of an attacking enemy soldier and he just kept on coming. Cotton producers in the South have deployed armies with hoes to chop down weeds with stems up to four inches in diameter that shrug off the best herbicides that money can buy.Industrial agriculture is all about chemicals, and genetically mutilated plants. For decades, it has been all about Monsanto’s Roundup — a glyphosate herbicide that used to kill every plant it touched except those that were genetically engineered to be resistant to it, which are available, at a premium price, from the aforementioned Monsanto. So industrial agriculture has been reduced to soaking the landscape with Roundup, planting it with Frankenfoods that can’t be killed by Roundup, and turning most of the profits over to Monsanto.
But when you drench the landscape with any poison, there are always a few mutants in the population you’re trying to kill that by some accident are immune to its effects. Now that you’ve killed their competition and provided them with an endless cornucopia of their favorite food, they go forth, and multiply. Now who you gonna call? (more)
