All weeds could become herbicide resistant

Weeds work hard to develop resistance to specific herbicides and cultural practices, and they will ultimately become resistant unless a diverse weed management program is put in place, said Mike Owen, Ph.D., Iowa State University, weed scientist. He made a presentation in the Monsanto pavilion at Farm Progress Show.

Owen provided a short summary of a couple key points about weeds potentially winning against farmers.

“Without a diverse weed management program, anything that you do, whether it be a tillage system or specific herbicide or the combination of a herbicide resistant trait in the crop in combination with a herbicide, anything you do will inevitably fail simply because Mother Nature lets weeds adapt to anything we do in an agronomic system.

“This was proven, I think, many, many years ago by Charles Darwin when he was talking about origin of a species, selective pressure and how various species adapt to that selective pressure. In our case, we are spraying a specific herbicide repeatedly and that is all we are doing, and as predicted, the weeds will ultimately evolve resistance to that herbicide.

“Essentially what I was saying is that you need to diversify your weed management program. You need to use different herbicide mechanisms of action, you need to use different cultural practices, you need to consider how tillage and mechanical weed control fits into that program and try to come up with a best management practice that will keep the herbicide resistant weeds or weed population off balance, so that they are not able to adapt as Charles Darwin predicted.

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Everything that Dr. Owen said I strongly agree with but it is surreal that it is being said at the Monsanto Pavilion. A company that for 20 years did everything in their power to not promote a "diverse weed management program". Monsanto promoted no need for a pre-down, no need for an early post application, and all you need is roundup. Makes me think of the Beatles song all you need is love, love, love. Now after we are experiencing mutiple weed species resistance to Glyphosates does Monsanto get off of the horse they beat to death by saying over and over again all you need is Roundup do they take up the battle cry that you need a "diverse weed management program". Just how pathetically common in our society today to let a company promote ruination and then turn around and allow them to make out that they are the hero's promoting "diverse weed management programs" when they themselves single handedly did as much as all the other crop protection companies put together to promote NOT to use "diverse weed management programs". . . .

Herbicide Resistance: ALS-43 biotypes, Triazines-24 biotypes, ACCase-14 biotypes and in last place Glyphosate-14 biotypes. Herbicide resistance is nothing new and glyphosate is low on the totem pole. Anyone with the slightest bit of herbicide understanding knew that resistance would develop if you just applied glyphosate over and over. Don't blame the companies, blame yourselves for not doing your homework.

FYI. Those figures I quoted were for the USA only. There are over 100 biotypes worlwide that are resistant to ALS MOA. Just for reference the first case of resistance in the US was common groundsel resistant to triazines in 1960!