by Carey Gillam
Cancer statistics show that non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the type of cancer with the strongest link to glyphosate, is the eleventh most common cancer in Europe, with approximately 93,500 new cases diagnosed in 2012. And incidence rates of the cancer in men are higher in Italy than in all the rest of Europe.36
Italy’s Ministry of Health placed several restrictions on the use of glyphosate in the late summer of 2016, banning it in areas frequented by the public, especially places where children or elderly people might gather. In addition to parks and gardens and areas around schools, the chemical was banned along roads and railways and in areas adjacent to health-care facilities. The Ministry of Health also said the preharvest use of glyphosate would not be allowed. Even though Canadian and U.S. farmers had made the practice common—on wheat, for instance, or on oats in Canada—spraying crops with glyphosate shortly before they are harvested was deemed too risky for consumers in Italy because of the residues that remain on finished foods. The package of restrictions marked one of the widest bans on both consumer and agricultural use of the controversial chemical.
Andrea Ferrante, a leader within the Italian organic farming movement and former head of the Italian Association for Organic Agriculture (Associazione Italiana per l’agricoltura biologica), said organic farming enthusiasts are encouraged to see the tide turning against glyphosate. Even many conventional farmers who have been using glyphosate are trying to move away from it, including winemakers in Tuscany, a region famed for production of top wines. “There is quite a movement giving evidence on how harmful glyphosate can be,” Ferrante said. “We have so much scientific data, so much research about its cancer origin activity, that it’s also easy for us to explain to the rest of the world why it is so harmful for the environment and human health.”37
CHAPTER 10
When Weeds Don’t Die, But Butterflies Do
History has shown that proving a specific chemical causes cancer is a long road that can leave countless lives in limbo for decades while the science is sorted out. But when it comes to the impact a certain chemical can have on the environment, often the evidence is easier to see. In fact, sometimes it is impossible to miss.
I encountered my first superweed in 2011 and was both impressed and a bit horrified by the stature and strength of the towering stalks. I had been hearing farmers complain about weed problems, but I didn’t truly appreciate the magnitude of the concern until that hot August afternoon when a group of Kansas farmers gave me a tour of their troubles. These were no pesky annoyances that one could easily yank out by hand or kill with a quick dousing of herbicide. The weeds I saw were almost taller than I was. Once wiped out with a few shots of Roundup or other glyphosate product, many types of weeds by that time had become impervious to the pesticide. Thwarting ever-higher doses of the weed killer, they just kept on growing, sinking roots deep down into farm fields, stealing nutrients and moisture from corn, cotton, soy, or other crops a farmer might try to grow.
One of the worst to emerge has been a weed called Palmer amaranth, a particularly stout variety that can grow three inches per day and rob farmers of about two-thirds of their corn and soybean yields. The Palmer amaranth, part of a family known as pigweed, has developed resistance to many other types of herbicides as well, making it a significant threat to crop production. It can grow eight feet tall, with a stem so tough that it can damage farm machinery. Another rapidly spreading weed, known as water hemp, has similarly become a bane to farmers. Water hemp can grow an inch per day and stretch as tall as twelve feet. Each plant generates 250,000 seeds, or more, that can hide in the soil for as long as four years before emerging to ruin a farmer’s production hopes. The weeds are much more than an annoyance; they spell real economic harm to farmers and others up the food chain.
The world has long dealt with resistance problems—the rise of antibiotic resistance in medicine has become a global public health concern, making it difficult to treat illnesses and infections. Several different weeds have developed resistance to other herbicides over the decades. But the rise of glyphosate-resistant weeds happened with such speed and intensity after Monsanto Company’s introduction of genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops that many farmers and others in the agricultural community were caught by surprise.
“Monsanto told them that it would never happen, despite all the academics trying to raise concerns about it,” said agronomist Bill Johnson, a professor of weed science at Purdue University. “When the first cases of resistance popped up, Monsanto fought that tooth and nail. You had a huge industry pushback on the whole diagnosis.”1
Before the introduction of the genetically modified crops, farmers had to carefully select and time the use of various herbicides to manage weeds without harming their crops. Many also frequently rotated the types of crops they planted from season to season and year to year, alternating corn with wheat, soy, oats, or other crops as a time-tested way to maintain the health of the soil and naturally reduce insect pests and weed development. A row crop such as corn tends to bring higher prices for farmers but is known for depleting the soil of needed nutrients, while legumes such as alfalfa and clover actually store nitrogen in their root systems, which then break down after harvest and help fertilize and restore soil health. They also are known to help the soil better absorb water. Cereals such as oats also have dense root systems that feed the soil organic matter. Sunflowers, sorghum, canola, mustard, and snap beans are among the crops that once were favored in the U.S. Heartland as players in healthy crop rotations. It’s been accepted almost as agricultural gospel for generations—the more diverse the cropping system, the fewer problems overall, including weeds. That message began to get lost, however, as the number of small family farms in America declined, evolving into fewer but larger operations. Between 1935 and 2012, the number of U.S. farms fell from more than 6 million to roughly 2 million, though farming acreage remained fairly stable.2
The evolution saw farmers focus on growing fewer crops that produced higher profits. Diverse rotations that included three or four different crops were starting to become a thing of the past, and farmers were relying more on an array of chemicals to fight weeds even before the introduction of genetically engineered crops. Weed specialists such as Johnson would commonly write prescriptions for farmers, detailing for them exactly which herbicides to use, how much to use, and when to apply the various chemicals to their fields to tackle different types of weeds.
But when farmers were handed the magic of glyphosate-tolerant corn, soybeans, and other crops, the cautious prescriptive approach faded fast. Farmers didn’t need multiple herbicides and didn’t need to carefully time their use. They also didn’t need to worry about rotation. Farmers could plant the same few GMO crops year after year, spray them all directly with glyphosate, and then sit back, relax, and tally up their projected profits. They still had to contend with the whims of Mother Nature and commodity markets, of course, but weeds were taken care of. When Monsanto’s patent on glyphosate expired in 2000, prices fell as generics came to market, making it even more appealing for farmers to rely on glyphosate.
It was easy and effective, no doubt about it, but it also was a practice that prioritized short-term profits over long-term environmental sustainability. Many environmental scientists warned that the path was a dangerous one to follow, and they were proven right when, less than a decade into the advent of genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops, farmers found themselves caught in a vicious cycle. As farmers used more glyphosate to kill the resistant weeds, the weeds became more resistant. And so on.
By 2010, researchers estimated that these superweeds infested close to 33 million U.S. farm acres.3 The following year, in the summer of 2011, the federal government was so worried that representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Weed Science Society of America took a tour of the Midwest crop belt to see for themselves the impact of rising weed resistance. By 2013, researchers rep
orted the problem had nearly doubled, with more than 61 million acres infested with glyphosate-resistant weeds. Researchers at Kansas State University, who were scrambling to assess the depth of the problem, found that even spraying weeds with up to four times the typical application of glyphosate failed to kill them. By 2014, agricultural experts were recommending that farmers resort to deep tillage to destroy the weeds, a practice that churns up the earth to remove weeds but can also lead to soil erosion, chemical runoff, and other environmental problems. And by 2016, more than 70 million acres were infested.
“Herbicide resistance can increase pretty rapidly, once you have a few resistant plants survive,” said Dallas Peterson, a weed specialist and professor in the Department of Agronomy at Kansas State University, who has been tracking the resistance problem. “It can kind of explode on a farmer in a given field. The first year, there’s a few scattered plants, but it’s not too bad. The next year there’s a few more, and by the third year, it’s kind of a disaster if the farmer hasn’t made any adjustments to his weed management program.”
Peterson visits regularly with farmers to advise them on how best to tackle weeds. And he had been among those who warned many years ago that relying too much on glyphosate would bring problems. He’s not happy to have been so right.
“To be honest with you, the effectiveness of Roundup kind of spoiled us,” he said. “It was very easy. We got away from some good, sound weed management practices and just relied on another glyphosate application. Eventually it caught up with us.”4
Researchers first started documenting a significant rise in glyphosate-resistant weeds around 2001 in the United States and have shown the plague spreading with each passing year. Glyphosate-resistant weeds are also documented in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Canada, Mexico, and several European countries—almost anywhere glyphosate has been used, weeds have been fighting back. But the bulk of the problems with resistant weeds have been seen in the United States, where glyphosate-tolerant crops have been widely used. Resistant Palmer amaranth spread from California to North Carolina, alongside more than a dozen other resistant weed types. Farmers in key crop-producing states such as Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Georgia, and Mississippi have become unhappily accustomed to seeing their fields invaded by the almost unstoppable weeds.5
The southeastern United States has been hardest hit, with more than 90 percent of cotton and soybean fields infested. Cotton farmers in the South have been forced to hire crews to walk through fields and attack each weed by hand, obviously an expensive approach. In Georgia alone, farmers have been spending roughly $15 million per year on hand-weeding rows of cotton, and their annual herbicide costs have jumped from $25 million per year to approximately $100 million per year as they pour on more chemicals to try to combat the weeds.6 Overall, agriculture experts estimated that by 2016, U.S. farmers were losing an estimated $2 billion annually as a result of added costs and diminished yields.
The problems are quite personal for Illinois wheat, corn, and soybean grower Dean Campbell, a fifth-generation farmer working land that has been in his family’s hands for 170 years. Campbell was one of the first farmers in rural southern Illinois to start using Roundup Ready soybeans when they came on the market in 1996. He remembers neighbors coming to marvel at his fields covered in gorgeous “clean” beans—not a weed in sight. “We had swallowed the pill as far as soybeans go. Plant them and spray them with Roundup and go on,” he recalls. But within just about five years, Campbell started noticing that not all the weeds in his fields would die after he applied a typical treatment of glyphosate. “I knew right away there was something wrong,” he said. Within a decade of using the glyphosate on his soybean fields, Campbell was fighting “monster” weeds with every tool he could think of. “You hang them, you stab them, you poison them, you shoot them, you do everything you can to stop them,” the sixty-four-year-old farmer said, only half in jest. “We’re running out of tools.”7
He remembers with particular bitterness one season that brought a “beautiful” crop of beans but also weeds that sprouted and grew so quickly that they towered over the baby bean plants before Campbell could intervene. Glyphosate would not kill the weeds because of the resistance, and he couldn’t spray any other herbicides because those would have also killed the beans. Campbell had no choice but to plow the field and start over.
Campbell now tries a variety of strategies: he’s rotating wheat with his beans, making sure he does a thorough “burn down” of his fields before planting—meaning he coats the soil with weed killer a few weeks before planting—and he scours his fields daily as the new crops start to grow, catching and killing or pulling weeds while they are still small. If they get taller than an inch or two, “there is no stopping them,” Campbell says of the weeds.
Part of what makes it all so frustrating for agricultural scientists is that there were plenty of predictions of the problems to come when Monsanto introduced its glyphosate-tolerant crops in the mid-1990s. Glyphosate had been on the market for twenty years before the GMOs were rolled out, and no significant problems with glyphosate-resistant weeds were noted. But environmental scientists knew that the system Monsanto was promoting was a perfect incubator for resistance. They were proven right when more than a dozen weed species quickly evolved to resist the herbicide. Weed scientists from academic institutions around the country rang the alarm bell as long ago as 2004, forming a group called the National Glyphosate Stewardship Forum (NGSF) to try to warn farmers about the risks they faced as they cast aside traditional cropping practices for reliance on glyphosate. The group reached out to commodity organizations as well as the EPA and conservation groups to alert them to the impending calamity and to urge more restrained use of glyphosate. But many farmers were unconvinced. If they had not yet dealt with the superweeds in their own fields, they had little incentive to alter their practices. Monsanto balked as well, rejecting calls for regulatory or other limits and downplaying the problem. The company assured farmers that some weeds reported as resistant really weren’t and that strategies for dealing with the weeds should be developed on a case-by-case basis and not be imposed on farmers. “Regulations are not necessary. Once regulations start, they do not stop,” the company said in a presentation made to the first meeting of the stewardship forum. The meeting, conveniently, was held in a hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, not far from Monsanto’s headquarters.8
Three years later, the frustrated consortium of weed scientists met again in St. Louis to renew their plea to be heard and to discuss why the warnings they had issued in 2004 fell on deaf ears. The group’s report did not use the words “we told you so,” but the message was clear: “We expected that grower and staff leaders from the commodity organizations would express concerns about potential resistance, request further information, and ultimately support or propose additional steps for action. However, the participants were uniformly unconvinced that glyphosate resistance in weeds was a significant threat at that time. The participants reached consensus that any glyphosate stewardship efforts should be voluntary and without governmental intervention.” Since then, the task force said, “numerous additional cases of glyphosate-resistant weed populations have evolved and several weed species with glyphosate-resistant populations have become difficult and expensive to manage…. It is time for action.”9
Bryan Young, a weed scientist who grew up on a farm in Michigan taking prize sugar beets to the county fair, understood why farmers ignored the warnings. Glyphosate made everything so simple. Rotating crops and varying herbicides was complicated, and farmers preferred the easy answer. “We were kind of spinning our wheels telling growers about resistant management,” Young said of the period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. “At that time there wasn’t a lot of evidence that this could be a problem.”
The EPA was of no help. Young, who now works at Purdue University as a professor of botany and plant pathology, was among a group of worried scientists who met with agency officials, asking them to help ale
rt growers and possibly require more sustainable practices in order to keep glyphosate effective and protect both the environment and long-term productivity on American farms. But the EPA also turned a deaf ear to the warnings in those early years, Young recalled. “I think they’ve changed their minds now. But it could be too little, too late.”10
One of the most troubling impacts of the glyphosate-resistant weed problem has been a resurgence in use of other herbicides, many of which are much more directly toxic than glyphosate. Farmer Campbell has resumed use of paraquat, for instance, the deadly chemical linked to Parkinson’s disease, which is known to be so dangerous that a skull and crossbones symbol is shown on labels for paraquat products. Inhaling or ingesting it causes almost certain death. He can’t spray it on his crops or they will die, but it works well on bare ground before crops are planted. Later, he’ll spray the same fields with glyphosate.
The use of other chemicals is also on the rise because the chemical industry’s answer to the weed resistance problem has been simple—more chemicals, mixed together. Farmers are being more careful to “clean” their fields before planting with herbicides, and they are mixing glyphosate with other weed-killing chemicals in the spray tanks they drive into their fields.
And now a whole new generation of herbicide-tolerant crops, designed to be used with new herbicide mixtures, is coming to the market. Just as with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready system, farmers can spray the new weed-killing chemical combinations directly on their new genetically engineered crops. And just as in the Roundup Ready system, glyphosate remains key.