Super-Weeds and Sub-Par Sollutions: The Case for More Labour in the Fields.

There has been a recent development within agriculture causing a bit of a stir: super-weeds. Super-weeds, "arewild plant that have become a virulent weed as a result of acquiring resistance to herbicides through pollination with a genetically modified plant". Much like the "use of of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant super-germs", American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup--a product of Monsanto Company--has led to the rapid growth of a tenacious new super-weeds. That become harder to kill-off and require an increasingly potent and increasing amount of pesticide. Now, many environmentalists and environmental groups have been warning about this development (which is more accurately described as a counter-to-development) since Monsanto Corporation's introduced the genetic modified roundup-ready-seeds and Roundup Herbicide in 1979 ( as well as Monsanto's AgentOrangein 1969 and rBGH in 1994).

The complaint from many farmers to the super-weeds is of economic concern, strong weeds means weaker crops and less money."To fight them, farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, a farmer who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

I am not sure if the "problem" is being properly defined. For one, perhaps it is not the super-weed that is the troubling factor, but rather industrial agriculture, as a total system failure. It is not sustainable, in most understandings of the concept, and any use of herbicide is a temporal solution. I am not sure what makes any chemical company think that the next line of more toxic herbicides and more genetically altered seeds will render a future without a subsequent generation of customized super-weeds? However, the lack of foresight and sustainability in this particular philosophy and practice of agriculture is not the purpose of this writing, nor is it the logic in creationing a solution that is very similar to the problem in the first hand. I feel these topics are fairly well laid out by people, much more articulate and informed than I, I also feel that a bit of  personal reflection and reading could convince someone of these points quite easily. Now that I have avoided "beating a dead horse", I wonder why more labour is a bad thing. For one the population of our earth is increasing, despite what Garrett Hardin concludes, we can sustain an earth population with some changes. But, with more people we may need more jobs, if we didn't use Chemical poisons to kills seeds and instead used, fair, labor in the fields that could be a solution, in a holistic sense, to two problems. And on top of the climate of today's recession economy, and the double digit unemployment rate, as high as 20% in some states, more labor many not be a bad things. Less environmental destruction, pollution and consumption and more work, more jobs and better standards of living (if done fairly, of course).

“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington."

Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.