Editors' Notebook

I read with disappointment the statements that soybean and corn farmers, or at least those represented by national commodity and farm leadership groups, were "disappointed" in the announcement that USDA will seek new environmental impact statements on the coming 2,4-D and dicamba-resistant crops that Dow AgroSciences and Monsanto are working to commercialize.

On May 10, USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said it would call for separate environmental impact statements for the seeds that are part of the Dow Enlist Weed Control System that is based on 2,4-D resistance and for crops in Monsanto's Roundup Ready 2 Xtend and Bollgard II XtendFlex systems that are based on dicamba resistance.

The leading soy and corn organizations and others sent out almost identical press releases condemning the APHIS action as being detrimental to agriculture and contributing to global starvation.

Such groups have a legitimate right to complain when they feel ag policies are unworkable. They should fight back when new technologies are held hostage to lawsuits or to fear-mongering public demonstrations.

Crying foul when the government agency charged with testing and regulating new products is actually going to do its job, however, sounds out of step and unwise.

A constant theme in many criticisms of modern crop technologies is that USDA and other federal agencies don't take a hard enough look at the consequences of biotech products and pesticides. USDA is routinely called a rubber stamp -- and far worse -- for the biotech and chemical companies creating these technologies. The Roundup Ready alfalfa and sugar beet crops were tied up for years by lawsuits essentially charging such rubber stamping.

There also is considerable criticism that the commodity groups are in the pocket of major crop technology companies and simply parrot whatever the companies tell them. After reading the press statements released last week, you can begin to understand that criticism.

One of the common threads of their complaints, though, is that glyphosate-resistant weeds pose a threat to the U.S. farm system and farmers need these new 2,4-D and dicamba technologies ASAP to combat those weeds.

The obvious question to be begged here, of course, is how we got into this glyphosate-resistant weed mess to start with. Not, as some biotech-phobes would like to think, that genetically engineered crops somehow led to plant mutations and spawned otherwise unknown weeds. Most of us know that's ridiculous.

No, we in agriculture created these weed problems, or rather we created the conditions for them to flourish, all by ourselves. We did it by over-using glyphosate, by frankly not considering the "full environmental impact" of taking a product that originally had limited uses and then creating a system that allowed its use almost any time, over and over again. Glyphosate overuse has corrupted the most revolutionary weed technology since a compound called 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, created during research on new chemical warfare potions, was accidentally found to kill broadleaf weeds in the 1940s.

As I often argue, every piece of technology, from the taming of fire for heat through cell phones to nanoparticles, has an "impact" on the environment. To take the current European view -- that is the so-called precautionary principle -- in which regulators shouldn't allow the use of new technologies until they have proven there is absolutely NO environmental impact, is stifling and can border on being irresponsible.

That's not what APHIS is doing. Herbicides such as 2,4-D and dicamba are not now used heavily during the growing season because they can't be. At some point in the annual growth cycle these herbicides damage the crop they are intended to protect. They also tend to drift and even more so as the season gets hotter. So to take them, create a change which solves the crop-damage issue to allow applying more of the herbicide on more acres more often and later into the summer, and not evaluate the consequences said higher volumes of use might have on non-crop flora and fauna is likewise irresponsible.

There's a whole new stewardship question around using products like 2,4-D and dicamba in season when sensitive plants and crops are growing. Dow has been working admirably on developing a version of 2,4-D that is much less prone to drift and volatilization than older formulations. Crops Technology Editor Pam Smith has written and will continue to cover the work both companies are doing around off-target stewardship practices.

It is legitimate, though, for the agency sworn to probe the real-world effectiveness of those safeguards to actually probe them, especially to ponder the consequences should those stewardship plans prove too little when writ on a multi-million acre scale.

Beyond concerns of drift and other off-target issues, there's that very real possibility that if these new technologies are half as good as we hope they are, we'll simply create yet another round of weeds with herbicide resistance -- to 2,4-D and dicamba.

Our history almost guarantees it. Recall we couldn't wait to get the first glyphosate-resistant seeds because we'd overused the imi's and the sulfonylureas and weeds were beginning to overcome those technologies.

Here, with the APHIS decision, was a chance for ag leaders to discuss farmer responsibility and accountability. It was a chance to show the non-ag public that we don't take new crop technologies, or the environment we use them in, as some undeniable right to do with as we please and that we're serious about being the stewards we profess to be. It was a chance, if nothing else, to hold the APHIS decision up as proof the agency isn't just a rubber-stamp for biotech companies.

Instead, farm leadership snapped at the hand that up to this point has fed it, because this one time that hand chose caution over commercial expediency.

That is, well, darn disappointing.

Greg Horstmeier can be reached at greg.horstmeier@telventdtn.com

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