. . . The leaves are gone from the . . . peach trees on Bill Bader’s orchard . . ., and soy fields . . . are curling up and dying.
A lot of the blame falls on Monsanto’s new genetically engineered soybean, Xtend. . .
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. . . . [Xtend] resists both dicamba and glyphosate, which works fine for farmers with the new soybean — not so much for anyone else.
Dicamba easily turns into vapor, so it can blow onto neighbors’ crops, which is exactly what happened to Bill Bader’s peach trees.
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The EPA anticipated . . . this . . .so it told farmers they had to use a new mixture of dicamba on Xtend — one that wouldn’t blow on the wind. But the EPA hasn’t yet approved that safer dicamba. So when unethical farmers started seeing weeds on their Xtend fields they decided to illicitly spray the conventional dicamba. . .
If everyone followed the rules, the new GMOs wouldn’t have caused any problems. But there have always been unethical . . . people and dicamba has been around for decades, so there is something else going on.
. . . . If the company — or the government — had delayed the rollout until its new herbicide was ready, it would have prevented a lot of heartache.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Monsanto’s new GMO soybeans are making a hot mess for farmers
