Weeds increasingly immune to herbicides
Agriculture’s most effective pesticides are rapidly losing their punch as weeds evolve resistance to the chemicals. With no game-changing alternatives in the pipeline, researchers warn that farmers could soon see crop yields drop and production prices climb.
“It’s what Chuck Darwin talked about back in 1850. Organisms evolve in response to selection pressures in their environment,” says Micheal Owen, an extension weed scientist at Iowa State University in Ames. “In essence, the better we get at controlling weeds, the more likely those efforts will select for survivors that do not respond to controls.”
In the June 8 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Owen and other researchers describe a rapid rise of herbicide-resistant weeds and a particularly threatening trend: an increasing number of weeds that are simultaneously immune to multiple herbicides.
Weeds are thieves. They rob crops of moisture, nutrients, sunlight — and eventually yield. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers and weeds have waged a nonstop battle. But their arms race changed overnight with a rollout of crops, beginning in 1996, possessing a genetically engineered immunity to glyphosate, the active ingredient in a broad-spectrum weed killer known as Roundup. Growers could now use glyphosate repeatedly, all season long, without fear of killing their crops.
“No herbicide has ever been used to the extent glyphosate has,” says Stephen Duke of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service in University, Miss. One price has been a rapid evolution of weeds resistant to it. And their proliferation “has been fairly dramatic in the last two to three years,” he says.
“Today, 98 percent of U.S. soybeans, 88 percent or so of U.S. cotton and more than 70 percent of U.S. corn come from cultivars resistant to glyphosate,” Owen reports. Reliance on these crops — and an accompanying weed-control strategy that employs glyphosate to the exclusion of other herbicides — “created the ‘perfect storm’ for weeds to evolve resistance,” Owen and Jerry Green of Pioneer Hi-Bred International in Newark, Del., argue in their new analysis.
But the only thing unique to glyphosate — in terms of breeding weed resistance — is the extent of its use.
In an article in the same issue of the journal, Carol Mallory-Smith of Oregon State University in Corvallis chronicles the emergence of a noxious weed, jointed goatgrass. Its resistance to the herbicide imazamox is evolving in fields planted with wheat conventionally bred to be immune to imazamox. Here, the weed scientist explains, resistance traces not to herbicide overuse, but to the spread of resistant genes in the pollen of wheat, the weed’s distant cousin, through interbreeding.
The irony, Mallory-Smith says, is that farmers have found the imazamox-resistant wheat such a high performer that many actually apply little or none of the herbicide to which it’s immune.
If growers had, the weed killer would have knocked out much of the goatgrass invading their fields. But because it’s left untreated, the goatgrass survives to accept pollen from the wheat — and in so doing, incorporates its cousin’s resistance to the weed killer. Although farmers can target the goatgrass with other herbicides, doing so would also risk killing the wheat.
Weeds immune to one herbicide will generally also prove insensitive to others employing the same mode of action — usually the chemical’s disruption of an essential enzyme function in the plant. For some major crops, weeds have already countered most common modes of poisoning, notes Patrick Tranel of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Common waterhemp has risen to become one of the most serious weeds in Midwest corn and soy. In a study also appearing in the June 8 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Tranel’s team reports finding waterhemp simultaneously immune to as many as four functional classes of herbicides — including glyphosate. In March in Pest Management Science, the team reported waterhemp’s resistance to yet a fifth herbicide family.
Waterhemp already exhibits immunity to three of the four functional classes of herbicides federally permitted for use on emerging weeds in soy, Tranel notes. The remaining one doesn’t work well on weeds six or more inches high — and is toxic to glyphosate-resistant soy. “So,” he says, “I’m not exaggerating when I say, at least for soybeans, we’re on the verge of running out of options.”
And Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia, in Perth, notes that in his country, some weedy ryegrass species “can be resistant to seven different herbicide types, meaning there are almost no herbicides which still work.”
Herbicide makers have encouraged farmers to embrace the mantra KISS — for keep it simple, stupid, says Jonathan Gressel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. He and other weed scientists now argue that only the opposite approach will stall the growing evolution of herbicide resistance in weeds. Scientists advocate rotating crops on a given field, applying several different herbicides and considering use of additional physical treatments (such as burning or minimum tillage). Gressel would also go so far as to recommend quarantining fields where resistant weeds initially turn up.
Unfortunately, Owen says, farmers think they can continue using simpler herbicide-centered strategies “as they wait for industry’s next silver bullet.” But novel herbicides are not on the horizon, he says, so diversity of weed management must be.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/330904/title/Weeds_increasingly_immune_to_herbicides_
USDA fines family $90,000 for selling rabbits as hobby - if not paid by today May 23, fine balloons to $4M.
FTA:"When the Dollarhite family of Nixa, Mo., first started raising and selling bunnies as part of a lesson to teach their teenage son about responsibility and hard work, they had no idea they would eventually meet the heavy hand of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to a recent article covered in Breitbart's Big Government, the USDA recently ordered the Dollarhite family to pay more than $90,000 in fines because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a year -- and if they fail to pay the fine by Monday, May 23, the fine will multiply to nearly $4 million.
It all started back in 2006 when John Dollarhite and his wife Judy rescued two rabbits that ended up breeding. The family cared for and raised the new rabbits, and eventually began to sell them to neighbors, friends, and others for $10 or $15 each. Having started by first selling the animals for meat, and later for show, the Dollarhites carefully and humanely raised the small creatures on their three-acre homestead, all while teaching their son honest values in a business environment similar to running a small lemonade stand.
Eventually, the Dollarhites developed such a highly-respected reputation across Missouri that the popular Branson, Mo., theme park Silver Dollar City, and even a local pet store, Petland, began purchasing bunnies from the family in 2009. And according to John, individuals from both Silver Dollar City and Petland, as well as a rabbit competition judge, told him that the family's bunnies were among the best they had ever seen -- healthy, beautiful, and very well-cared for.
All seemed well until a USDA inspector showed up at the family's home in the fall of 2009, and asked to do a "spot inspection" of the rabbitry. The inspector made no indication that anything was amiss, but only that she wished to see the facility. After meandering the premises, the inspector claimed that a few very insignificant aspects of the raising facility were in violation of USDA standards, even though the Dollarhites were not USDA certified, nor were they required to be. She then asked if the Dollarhites wished to be part of the voluntary USDA certification system, upon which they told her they would look into it.
After the inspector left, the Dollarhites heard nothing more from the USDA until January 2010 when a Kansas City-based USDA inspector called the family and said he needed to have a meeting with them because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a single year. When the Dollarhites asked why this was a problem and what law this violated, the man refused to offer an explanation over the phone.
Upon meeting in person, the inspector said he was only there to investigate the rabbitry and take notes for a report, upon which he instructed the family to contact another USDA office if they failed to hear anything further from the USDA after six weeks. As the eighth week arrived without any communication, John called the office and was redirected to the Washington, DC, office where a lady shockingly and bluntly explained to him that she had his report, and that the USDA planned to prosecute him and his family "to the maximum that we can" in order to "make an example" out of him.
Shortly thereafter, the Dollarhites received a letter from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) ordering them to pay a fine of $90,643 for supposedly violating a mystery law that prohibits the selling of more then $500 in rabbits within a year, even though the Dollarhites were in full accordance with Missouri state law, did not sell their rabbits across state lines, and raised their rabbits humanely and in excess of minimum requirements. The letter outlined that the Dollarhites had until May 23 to pay the exorbitant fine, or else face additional fines totaling nearly $4 million -- all for selling about $4,600 worth of rabbits that netted the family a mere $200 in profits.
The whole scenario proves, once again, that the USDA is nothing more than a tag-team terrorist duo with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both agencies' insatiable lust for power and control over private affairs is never satisfied, as they continue to prowl around like bloodthirsty predators seeking whoever and whatever they can devour. When will Americans finally stand up to their tyranny and say enough is enough?
http://www.gridirondigest.net/index.php?/topic/40409-usda-fines-family-90000-for-selling-rabbits-as-hobby-if-not-paid-by-today-may-23-fine-balloons-to-4m/
“It’s what Chuck Darwin talked about back in 1850. Organisms evolve in response to selection pressures in their environment,” says Micheal Owen, an extension weed scientist at Iowa State University in Ames. “In essence, the better we get at controlling weeds, the more likely those efforts will select for survivors that do not respond to controls.”
In the June 8 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Owen and other researchers describe a rapid rise of herbicide-resistant weeds and a particularly threatening trend: an increasing number of weeds that are simultaneously immune to multiple herbicides.
Weeds are thieves. They rob crops of moisture, nutrients, sunlight — and eventually yield. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers and weeds have waged a nonstop battle. But their arms race changed overnight with a rollout of crops, beginning in 1996, possessing a genetically engineered immunity to glyphosate, the active ingredient in a broad-spectrum weed killer known as Roundup. Growers could now use glyphosate repeatedly, all season long, without fear of killing their crops.
“No herbicide has ever been used to the extent glyphosate has,” says Stephen Duke of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service in University, Miss. One price has been a rapid evolution of weeds resistant to it. And their proliferation “has been fairly dramatic in the last two to three years,” he says.
“Today, 98 percent of U.S. soybeans, 88 percent or so of U.S. cotton and more than 70 percent of U.S. corn come from cultivars resistant to glyphosate,” Owen reports. Reliance on these crops — and an accompanying weed-control strategy that employs glyphosate to the exclusion of other herbicides — “created the ‘perfect storm’ for weeds to evolve resistance,” Owen and Jerry Green of Pioneer Hi-Bred International in Newark, Del., argue in their new analysis.
But the only thing unique to glyphosate — in terms of breeding weed resistance — is the extent of its use.
In an article in the same issue of the journal, Carol Mallory-Smith of Oregon State University in Corvallis chronicles the emergence of a noxious weed, jointed goatgrass. Its resistance to the herbicide imazamox is evolving in fields planted with wheat conventionally bred to be immune to imazamox. Here, the weed scientist explains, resistance traces not to herbicide overuse, but to the spread of resistant genes in the pollen of wheat, the weed’s distant cousin, through interbreeding.
The irony, Mallory-Smith says, is that farmers have found the imazamox-resistant wheat such a high performer that many actually apply little or none of the herbicide to which it’s immune.
If growers had, the weed killer would have knocked out much of the goatgrass invading their fields. But because it’s left untreated, the goatgrass survives to accept pollen from the wheat — and in so doing, incorporates its cousin’s resistance to the weed killer. Although farmers can target the goatgrass with other herbicides, doing so would also risk killing the wheat.
Weeds immune to one herbicide will generally also prove insensitive to others employing the same mode of action — usually the chemical’s disruption of an essential enzyme function in the plant. For some major crops, weeds have already countered most common modes of poisoning, notes Patrick Tranel of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Common waterhemp has risen to become one of the most serious weeds in Midwest corn and soy. In a study also appearing in the June 8 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Tranel’s team reports finding waterhemp simultaneously immune to as many as four functional classes of herbicides — including glyphosate. In March in Pest Management Science, the team reported waterhemp’s resistance to yet a fifth herbicide family.
Waterhemp already exhibits immunity to three of the four functional classes of herbicides federally permitted for use on emerging weeds in soy, Tranel notes. The remaining one doesn’t work well on weeds six or more inches high — and is toxic to glyphosate-resistant soy. “So,” he says, “I’m not exaggerating when I say, at least for soybeans, we’re on the verge of running out of options.”
And Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia, in Perth, notes that in his country, some weedy ryegrass species “can be resistant to seven different herbicide types, meaning there are almost no herbicides which still work.”
Herbicide makers have encouraged farmers to embrace the mantra KISS — for keep it simple, stupid, says Jonathan Gressel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. He and other weed scientists now argue that only the opposite approach will stall the growing evolution of herbicide resistance in weeds. Scientists advocate rotating crops on a given field, applying several different herbicides and considering use of additional physical treatments (such as burning or minimum tillage). Gressel would also go so far as to recommend quarantining fields where resistant weeds initially turn up.
Unfortunately, Owen says, farmers think they can continue using simpler herbicide-centered strategies “as they wait for industry’s next silver bullet.” But novel herbicides are not on the horizon, he says, so diversity of weed management must be.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/330904/title/Weeds_increasingly_immune_to_herbicides_
USDA fines family $90,000 for selling rabbits as hobby - if not paid by today May 23, fine balloons to $4M.
FTA:"When the Dollarhite family of Nixa, Mo., first started raising and selling bunnies as part of a lesson to teach their teenage son about responsibility and hard work, they had no idea they would eventually meet the heavy hand of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to a recent article covered in Breitbart's Big Government, the USDA recently ordered the Dollarhite family to pay more than $90,000 in fines because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a year -- and if they fail to pay the fine by Monday, May 23, the fine will multiply to nearly $4 million.
It all started back in 2006 when John Dollarhite and his wife Judy rescued two rabbits that ended up breeding. The family cared for and raised the new rabbits, and eventually began to sell them to neighbors, friends, and others for $10 or $15 each. Having started by first selling the animals for meat, and later for show, the Dollarhites carefully and humanely raised the small creatures on their three-acre homestead, all while teaching their son honest values in a business environment similar to running a small lemonade stand.
Eventually, the Dollarhites developed such a highly-respected reputation across Missouri that the popular Branson, Mo., theme park Silver Dollar City, and even a local pet store, Petland, began purchasing bunnies from the family in 2009. And according to John, individuals from both Silver Dollar City and Petland, as well as a rabbit competition judge, told him that the family's bunnies were among the best they had ever seen -- healthy, beautiful, and very well-cared for.
All seemed well until a USDA inspector showed up at the family's home in the fall of 2009, and asked to do a "spot inspection" of the rabbitry. The inspector made no indication that anything was amiss, but only that she wished to see the facility. After meandering the premises, the inspector claimed that a few very insignificant aspects of the raising facility were in violation of USDA standards, even though the Dollarhites were not USDA certified, nor were they required to be. She then asked if the Dollarhites wished to be part of the voluntary USDA certification system, upon which they told her they would look into it.
After the inspector left, the Dollarhites heard nothing more from the USDA until January 2010 when a Kansas City-based USDA inspector called the family and said he needed to have a meeting with them because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a single year. When the Dollarhites asked why this was a problem and what law this violated, the man refused to offer an explanation over the phone.
Upon meeting in person, the inspector said he was only there to investigate the rabbitry and take notes for a report, upon which he instructed the family to contact another USDA office if they failed to hear anything further from the USDA after six weeks. As the eighth week arrived without any communication, John called the office and was redirected to the Washington, DC, office where a lady shockingly and bluntly explained to him that she had his report, and that the USDA planned to prosecute him and his family "to the maximum that we can" in order to "make an example" out of him.
Shortly thereafter, the Dollarhites received a letter from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) ordering them to pay a fine of $90,643 for supposedly violating a mystery law that prohibits the selling of more then $500 in rabbits within a year, even though the Dollarhites were in full accordance with Missouri state law, did not sell their rabbits across state lines, and raised their rabbits humanely and in excess of minimum requirements. The letter outlined that the Dollarhites had until May 23 to pay the exorbitant fine, or else face additional fines totaling nearly $4 million -- all for selling about $4,600 worth of rabbits that netted the family a mere $200 in profits.
The whole scenario proves, once again, that the USDA is nothing more than a tag-team terrorist duo with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both agencies' insatiable lust for power and control over private affairs is never satisfied, as they continue to prowl around like bloodthirsty predators seeking whoever and whatever they can devour. When will Americans finally stand up to their tyranny and say enough is enough?
http://www.gridirondigest.net/index.php?/topic/40409-usda-fines-family-90000-for-selling-rabbits-as-hobby-if-not-paid-by-today-may-23-fine-balloons-to-4m/
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