Pesticide Resistant Weeds On the Rise

The New York Times reported today that farmers are seeing a rise in pesticide resistant weeds. According to the article after years of spraying their fields with pesticides farmers now seeing a number of weeds that require farmers to use techniques from the past (pulling the weeds by hand and tilling the soil) to get rid of the weeds. Some fear this will cause a increase in the cost of some corps.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?hp

Pesticides kill bugs. Which have been gaining resistance to pesticides ever since we've been using them.
Plants will do the same with herbicides. Bacteria do it with antibiotics. Eventually anything designed to kill things is going to cause enough selective pressure to create resistance. Often the mutated strain isn't as fit once the pressure is removed, though. So remove the pressure to be resistant, the resistance level decreases, and the pesticide/herbicide/antibiotic/whatever becomes effective again. At least for a while.

They could be actually reporting that the weeds are resistant to pests, I think.

It's not clear from the article.

and that will increase the amount of toxic industrial ag crap flushed into the streams, to the rivers, to the Gulf of Mexico or elsewhere.

The whole GMO-herbicide-pesticide industrial ag complex -- resting precariously on the wobbly foundation of OIL -- is coming to a day of reckoning.

Eat clean. Eat organic. Every dollar you spend on food is a VOTE for the kind of agriculture we deploy in the natural world.

The farmer has over sprayed this area of my yard with Roundup for so long the grass has become immune to the effects. Doesn't even get brown any more like it did at first when he started doing it. I have to admit it is the best looking part of my yard. Not one single weed. Thick as hell. I have to cut this area twice for every time I cut the rest of the yard. Won't stop growing.

First few times he did it the grass browned out for the season and I thought I was going to have to reseed it. But I didn't and it came back stronger and greener ever spring. Started noticing a couple of years ago it doesnt even brown out any more after he sprays his field.

Don

areas(which are slowly becoming an edible landscape) for ticks.
Neither is persistent, but the best is that our neighbors have chickens and guineas..they usually pretty well eat up all the bad ticks and fleas.

For Japanese beetles we plant 4 o'clocks along the edge of the veggies, they attract the beetles off of the food plants and to themselves. The leaves are irresistible to them and they eat a few bites and die..and the flowers are pretty and smell good.
We are trying to learn to do the companion planting that attracts hummingbirds and bees and other pollinators. Planting peppers and tomatoes together seem to support each other.

We have loads of poison ivy, which we dig up, and when its a very well established tree trunk size we cut it down and spray only on the stump with round up or weed be gone.

We had considered burning the poison ivy off, but we are in the woods and I don't like the idea of me being responsible if it got away from me.

I have a gravel walkway that was originally laid after spraying the ground with some nasty chemicals and laying an "impermiable" barrier. Grasses and weeds were sprouting through it only months after it went in, and layering more RoundUp on the walkway became a regular part of my routine.

On the suggestion of a friend, we scraped all of the gravel off the walkway one weekend and turned over the top 10" of the soil with shovels, pulling all of the weeds and roots as we went. Once the soil was clean, we laid a new impermiable barrier and put the gravel back.

That was three years ago. The grasses have infringed on the edges of the walkway a bit, but there hasn't been a SINGLE weed in the middle of the walkway since we pulled everything. It was far more effective than using herbicides, and prompted me to completely eliminate herbicides from my lawn care regime. Now, it's all about the pulling (and I own a small collection of weed pulling devices that make it a fairly simple process).

She developed her own Roundup gene.