RURAL ROUTES/Margot Ford McMillen

With Herbicides, If You Catch Your Neighbor’s Drift, You’re in Trouble

Spring is here — finally — and it won’t be long until the corn is planted and it’s time to harvest wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in early summer. And, then, so that they can get two crops from the same field, farmers will spray the wheat field with weedkillers, then return to plant soybeans for harvest in late autumn.

It’s a sweet dance, and they’ll be ducking in between with hay crop and cattle, but it’s the beans and corn that make the most money and subsidies, so let’s concentrate on those. And, especially, the new dicamba-resistant Genetically Modified Organism soybeans that have come into the fields.

For the last two decades and more, the use of herbicides has risen with the introduction of herbicide-resistant crops. With genetically manipulated GMOs, farmers can spray the fields as the crop grows, to keep weeds at bay. Why do farmers want weed-free fields, you might ask? This, it seems, should be the first question. The best answer is that their planting and harvesting equipment is designed for clean fields and the weedy stems and seeds get in the way of smooth equipment operation. Another answer is that some weed seeds are the same size as crop seeds and can’t be sifted out. So when it’s time to take the crop to market, there are penalties for “dirty” loads of product. But, for the most part, crops are easily cleaned with modern screening techniques and so, mostly, clean fields are a source of pride, bragging rights. In the case of truly organic farmers, who don’t use herbicides or genetically-resistant crops, weeds can be eliminated in a few years as fields are tended with cover crops and seeds are carefully screened to eliminate weed seeds.

But, back to the farmer who depends on herbicides for clean fields. The first herbicide-resistant crop was soybeans, manipulated to survive the herbicide Roundup, made mostly of glyphosate. Those soybeans were changed by adding genes from plants that naturally survive a dousing with Roundup which, back in 1996 when all this started, killed almost every green thing on the planet. Roundup-ready soybeans were so popular that Roundup-ready cotton and corn quickly followed. Then came Roundup-ready canola, sorghum, alfalfa. Roundup-ready wheat, which is useful mostly to protect the wheat from sprays being applied to neighboring fields, has been developed but resisted by consumers and, hallelujah, by wheat farmers.

All that spray ends up in many of the foods we eat. It’s in our water. Repeatedly, studies have shown that glyphosate shows up in beloved American Cheerios, Doritos, Goldfish, baby foods, Ritz crackers and (stifling a sob) Oreos. And more. When somebody tests for glyphosate in urine, they find that almost everyone carries some.

For farmers, the news goes beyond the human body. Today, there are Roundup-resistant weeds in every ecosystem. In much of America’s heartland, Palmer Amaranth is the enemy. That’s a weed that produces 3,500 to 140,000 seeds per plant, and it makes sense for nature to equip many of those seeds to resist the herbicide. So, to kill the weeds, farmers sprayed their fields several times in a growing season. And, after each spray event, some more seeds resist.

Which brings us to dicamba.

The latest weedkiller to be employed in the GMO world, dicamba-resistant soybeans were released in 2016 and widely sold and planted in 2017. Dicamba drift, the innocently-named phenomenon for dicamba moving as a cloud or a vapor across one field and onto the field next door, created a lot of trouble last year. It can occur after a spraying or much later if circumstances like hot, wet weather create the right conditions for vaporizing. In Missouri and Arkansas, applications of dicamba were banned for short times due to the number of complaints from farmers that had planted non-resistant crops that were ruined by clouds of dicamba. The defense, from makers of dicamba, is that the newer varieties do not drift like the old ones did. The newer ones, however, are more expensive and their non-driftiness hasn’t been completely proven.

A reaction from many farm advisors is to rush dicamba-resistant crops into production, following the pattern of Roundup-Ready crops. If everyone’s crops are resistant, they argue, all the crops will survive. There are some trade barriers — some importing nations don’t want new GMO crops — but, as we know, POTUS loves to negotiate around trade barriers.

For locavores, the problem is more difficult. Quite often, the damaged crops are fruits and vegetables that we don’t want genetically changed. In Missouri, the Bader family has been known for peaches all over the state. Dicamba knocked the Bader orchard back in 2015 and, $200,000 later, he’s still fighting it.

My little farm suffered a complete loss of tomatoes, grapes, peppers — our entire summer crop — a couple of years ago, so I’m approaching 2018 nervously. The neighbor most likely to have sprayed the killing spray said to me, “It’s getting where I’m really worried about how I’ll stay in business over here.”

Really? You’re worried? Ha!

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2018

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