Photo credit: Gil Gullickson Two years ago, Bruce Stripling sat in FMC’s booth at the Commodity Classic trade show, viewing companies pitching the latest agricultural technology. “All this technology, and here we are, still pulling pigweeds,” says the regional technical service manager for FMC. Stripling hails from Georgia, where Palmer amaranth started to devastate soybean and cotton fields in the mid-2000s. At that time, glyphosate-tolerant Roundup Ready technology still worked well in the Midwest. Before Roundup Ready, Georgia farmers managed weeds in cotton and soybeans with a mix of tillage and overlapping residual herbicides. “Roundup Ready was one of the biggest technologies since the Green Revolution, but it did have one bad side effect,” says Stripling. “It made us lazy.”
âBuy it or elseâ: Inside Monsanto and BASFâs Moves to Force Dicamba on Farmers
âBuy it or elseâ: Inside Monsanto and BASFâs Moves to Force Dicamba on Farmers
Internal company records show the companies knew crop damage from their weed killer would be extensive. They sold it anyway. Share this story Published December 10th, 2020 at 6:00 AM Above image credit: Will Glazik with his organic corn at his farm near Paxton, Illinois, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (Darrell Hoemann | The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting)
Get poisoned or get on board.
Thatâs the choice soybean farmers such as Will Glazik face. The past few summers, farmers near Glazikâs central Illinois farm have sprayed so much of the weed killer dicamba at the same time that it has polluted the air for hours and sometimes days.