[uuilly]

GMO + broadcast applied herbicides is a long term loser. For years cotton growers in the South Eastern US applied Round Up from planes. The chemical would dissipate on its way down and apply half doses to weeds. Some of these weeds could metabolize the Round Up while others would die. But the next year all that was left were the weeds that had some resistance. They bred w/ e/o and on it went. The annual selective pressure has created some pretty impressive weeds, most notably Palmer Amaranth. Growers I've talked to say, "Round up just pisses it off." It can grow over an inch a day, it has over a million seeds in its bud and once it has grown past 4 inches, no selective chemical can kill it. You can kill 98% of it one year and its population will be bigger the next year. Once you get an Amaranth population, you more or less can't get rid of it. It's a one way ratchet. As such, Palmer Amaranth is spreading.

The Dicamba story is quite interesting. Monsanto is selling Dicamba resistant seeds even though the chemical is not approved for use on those crops. As Dicamba is approved for other uses, growers can buy the Dicamba ready seeds and illegally apply it. Dicamba is finicky. In many weather conditions it volatilizes and drifts to a neighboring farm. If the neighbor doesn't have Dicamba ready seeds, he could lose his crop and have very little legal recourse. Today two growers got in a dispute about Dicamba drift and one shot and killed the other. The drift problem is forcing growers that don't use Dicamba to buy Dicamba resistant seeds as a defense mechanism. It's pretty nuts. I feel like the herbicide resistant weed problem is like a "Global Warming that nobody knows about."

More interesting is the fact that it takes decades to produce a gene / chemical pairing and get it approved for use. The weeds evolve faster than the GMO / chemical companies' ability to deliver new products.

The startup I work for, Blue River Technology, is going after this problem. We make machines that detect the crop, detect the weeds and apply non-selective chemicals to just the weeds. Because we target selectively we can use non-systemic, contact herbicides will kill resistant weeds no matter what. The grower saves on chemicals, put orders of magnitude less poison in the ground and gets better weed control.

The problems w/ this article are numerous. The guy clearly spent more time looking at UN stats than he did walking the fields and talking w/ growers. Somehow he missed the rather obvious fact that GMO + roundup is more cost effective regardless of yield. Regardless, he brought up some interesting points and I'd rather be talking about it than not.

-- Disclaimer -- The company I work for is partially funded by both Monsanto and Syngenta. Not that anything I said is defending the status quo :)

[mrfusion]

Why use chemicals at all in your robots? Why not mechanical means like punching them into the soil?

Microwaves might also be an interesting approach. We should chat.

[uuilly]

The main reason to avoid any sort of mechanical kill is time. Even if you could deploy and retract a puncher in 100 ms, you'd travel 10 inches during that time. The slowest operation in row crops is about 6mph. Same principle applies to microwaves & lasers. All require time over the target. Chemicals are nice b/c they do their work after your machine leaves and its easy to get a solenoid that opens and closes in 5ms.

There are other issues w/ exploding seed head making the problem worse and w/ making reliable complex moving parts in the horrible ag environment.

Happy to chat. Contact in profile.