During the late-December media lull, the USDA didn’t satisfy itself with green lighting Monsanto’s useless, PR-centric “drought-tolerant” corn. It also prepped the way for approving a product from Monsanto’s rival Dow Agrosciences—one that industrial-scale corn farmers will likely find all-too useful.

Dow has engineered a corn strain that withstands lashings of its herbicide, 2,4-D. The company’s pitch to farmers is simple: Your fields are becoming choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. As soon as the USDA okays our product, all your problems will be solved. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, the product seems to me to bring mainstream US agriculture to a crossroads. If Dow’s new corn makes it past the USDA and into farm fields, it will mark the beginning of at least another decade of ramped-up chemical-intensive farming of a few chosen crops (corn, soy, cotton), beholden to a handful of large agrichemical firms working in cahoots to sell ever-larger quantities of poisons, environment be damned. If it and other new herbicide-tolerant crops can somehow be stopped, farming in the US heartland can be pushed toward a model based on biodiversity over monocropping, farmer skill in place of brute chemicals, and healthy food instead of industrial commodities.

Dow’s new herbicide-resistant product promises to bring those days back. In its petition to the USDA to approve 2,4-D-resistant corn, the company explicitly pitched it as the answer to farmers’ Roundup trouble. The 2,4-D trait will be “stacked” with Monsanto’s Roundup trait to “generate commercial hybrids with multiple herbicide tolerances,” the petition states. Note that the new product marks a point of collusion, not competition, between industry titans Dow and Monsanto—they plan to license the 2,4-D and Roundup traits to each other to form “stacked” hybrids.
And once they do, farmers can douse their fields with both 2,4-D and Roundup—and 2,4-D will kill whatever weeds Roundup can’t, and leave the crop pristine. Farmers growers will be able to “proactively manage weed populations while avoiding adverse population shifts of troublesome weeds or the development of resistance, particularly glyphosate- [Roundup-] resistance in weeds,” the petition promises.

The USDA, for its part, is buying what Dow is selling. Its Draft Environmental Assessment (PDF) offers no critique of Dow’s claims, and recommends that the product be deregulated. The agency is currently seeking public comment on the matter; the comment period ends Feb. 17. Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me that when the USDA brings a GMO product to the comment stage after having recommended deregulation, it “almost always” greenlights the product. “The only times I’ve seen the USDA hold off at this stage is when there’s a lot of public pushback,” Gurian-Sherman says. Dow’s new GM corn merits just such a public uproar, it seems to me. A just-released paper from a group of researchers led by Pennsylvania State University crop scientist David A. Mortensen makes a strong case that new herbicide-tolerant crops will lead US agriculture down a path of ever-increasing addiction to agrichemicals. (The abstract is here; I have a PDF of the full paper but can’t upload it because it’s under copyright.)

The authors note that even by Dow and Monsanto’s reckoning, a new stacked 2,4-D/Roundup-resistant product would immediately lead to an increase in herbicide use, because the companies have been advocating an herbicide program that combines current rates of Roundup use with a roughly equal amounts of 2,4-D. That’s good for sales; but not so good for the environment.

And wouldn’t such an herbicide cocktail just lead to weeds that defy both 2,4-D and Roundup? No need to worry about that; Dow and Monsanto claim that it’s extremely unlikely for weeds to survive two different herbicides that attack them simultaneously in entirely different ways.

The authors shred that argument. They retort that resistance to two or more herbicides isn’t a rare occurrence at all—globally, no fewer than 38 weed species across 12 families show resistance to two or more herbicides—”with 44% of these having appeared since 2005.”  They add that in that on millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest and South, many weeds will only need to develop a single resistance pathway, because they’re already resistant to Roundup. That is, when farmers apply 2,4-D at will to weeds that are already resistant to Roundup, they’ll essentially be selecting for weeds that can resist both.

The authors predict that glyphosate (Roundup) use will hold steady at high levels—and use of other herbicides, like 2,4-D, will soar.: From Mortensen, at al, “Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management,” BioScience, Jan. 2012
All in all, the authors conclude, chances are “actually quite high” that Dow’s new product will unleash a new generation of superweeds that resist both Roundup and 2,4-D. If 2,4-D resistance does indeed emerge, farmers will likely respond just as they responded to the advent of Roundup resistance—by applying ever higher doses.

Thus the authors project that 2,4-D use will surge for at least decade before the new seeds reach market. Their main ecological concern with an explosion in 2,4-D use is pesticide drift—they say the compound is quite volatile and prone to be carried in air, where it can do damage to non-target plants like the neighbor’s vegetable farm. “Landscapes dominated by synthetic auxin- [2,4-D]–resistant [crops] may make it challenging to cultivate tomatoes, grapes, potatoes, and other horticultural crops without the threat of yield loss from drift,” they write. They also fear that if you’re a farmer determined not to use a stacked 2,4-D/Roundup seed, you could be forced to if your neighbor’s 2,4-D spray keeps knocking down your corn.

And here’s where we get to the crossroads in our agriculture. If the agrichemical companies manage to ram through the regulatory process a bunch of patches to Roundup Ready farming, then their herbicide-drenched vision will continue dominating huge swaths of prime farmland throughout the country for the forseable future. We don’t have to go that way. It’s time to raise hell.
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