The Round-Up Reality: Mother Nature Always Wins Out

Monsanto has made a killing patenting and forcibly selling their Round-Up resistant seeds to farmers across the country and around the world. In an effort to get more crops out of an acre, the Monsanto GMOs promised to relieve farmers from tilling their crops and saying goodbye to weeds forever. The only problem was that engineers and executives at Monsanto and other GMO companies forgot that as much as they wanted to play god, it was never going to work out that way in the end. All it did was make mother nature mad.

From The NY Times:

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.

These developments have irritated our nations farmers to say the least. What that means to companies like Monsanto is that prices are going to come down, way down. Sadly though in the decade or two that it took the genetic engineering company to dominate the market, agriculture has rapidly devolved into producing just a few crops, primarily corn and soybeans. Even worse, the profits Monsanto made were mostly hoisted on the backs of farmers from Iowa to Bangalore.

Where Have All The (Bees For The) Flowers Gone?

This isn't about an anti-war song from the 60s, it is an important issue that is beginning to seriously affect the agriculture industry from the small farmers all the way up to the big corporations. The fact is, most of our produce comes from flowering plants that need bees to pollinate them in order for everything to work out so we can keep munching and the same goes for the diets of livestock. The problem is, the bees are starting to disappear all over the country, even here in New York City.

From The New York Daily News:

Scientists are baffled by a mysterious plague called Colony Collapse Disorder that has been blamed for wiping out beehives across the country, and now it's stinging some city beekeepers.

"I'm waiting for bees to come through the mail. I've lost quite a few hives," said David Graves, a 57-year-old beekeeper from Massachusetts who keeps hives on the roofs of buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Ninety percent of his hives were wiped out last year, forcing Graves to raise the price of his boutique brand NYC Rooftop Honey he sells at the Union Square Greenmarket from $12 to $15 per half pound.

That rooftop honey is some good stuff and the rising price of local honey products is the least of our problems. Many beekeepers are reporting losses ranging from 30 to 90 percent of their hives. Commercial beekeepers livelihoods depend on being able to pollinate huge swaths of farmland all over the country and if they don't have the bees, there is no business to be had.

The causes for the epidemic are purely speculative at this point. Experts believe that pesticides are the most probable suspect, but no one knows for sure. No matter what the reason, the problem has become a huge cause for beekeepers, farmers and sooner or later more and more consumers will start to feel the effect at their local grocery store.