Overuse of herbicides has left farmers searching for alternatives to kill monster weeds

Farmers' frustrations over herbicide-resistant weeds are rising as they look for other options to remove weeds. In April we reported that glyphosate-resistant weeds have infested close to 11 million acres, threatening crop production. Now farmers are resorting to costly manual weeding or use of chemical combinations to control weeds, Georgina Gustin of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. (Commercial Appeal photo by Brad Luttrell: Workers hoe pigweed in Arkansas)

"In the [Missouri] Bootheel they're hiring people to go out there with hoes," Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, told Gustin. "I swung a hoe for 15 years, and I fail to see the romance in it."

In parts of the Midwest and South farmers are mixing herbicides, leaving some environmental scientists worried that weeds will become resistant to more formulations. In parts of Missouri some weeds are already resistant to three herbicides and in Illinois some are resistant to four, Gusin reports.

Farmers are not happy about the added costs to treat weeds, but with high commodity prices, finding a solution is important, and tolerable. "It's easily costing $30 an acre for hand weeding, and the pre-emergence herbicides are costing $10 and $20 an acre," multi-crop farmer Tom Jennings of Sikeston, Mo., told Gustin. "If we see the markets drop back down, the economics are going to get a lot more difficult. As high as it is, we can afford some hand labor."

Monsanto and some farmers have accepted partial blame in creating herbicide-resistant weeds through overuse of Roundup. "It was so effective and so cheap compared to everything else, that's all you used," Jennings told Gustin. "Now we have problems out here and we don't have new herbicides. Before Roundup you had a new product every two or three years. Almost all the new products are just combinations of old products. There's no new chemistry." (Read more)