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It's not nice to fool Mother Nature, and it seems Dow can't

By Carl Heintze

You can't fool Mother Nature. That's what farmers in the Midwest have discovered. Their tale revolves around an herbicide called Roundup, a product of the Dow Chemical Company.

You may have used Roundup yourself this spring to lay low the weeds in your back or front yard. Roundup is effective against some 30 different species of weeds, a good thing for farmers who grow soybeans as they do in the Midwest. Without it, weeds and soybeans compete for sun and water. The more weeds there are, the poorer the performance by soybeans.

You might think Roundup would also kill the soybeans when the fields are sprayed to get rid of the weeds. But the clever folks at Dow have managed to genetically alter the soybean that's planted in the Midwest so the plants resist being wilted by the herbicide, even if the weeds do not.

So for the past decade or so, soybean farmers have diligently sprayed their growing crops with Roundup and have not had to hire laborers to come in and pull the weeds around the soybean plants. Or at least not as many laborers as they once had to hire.

Not so with some other crops, alas, although Dow presumably is working on the problem.

So everything looked rosy or at least weedless for a while. The farmer and the soybean (aided by Roundup) had put weeds in their place (which is dead).

But in the last couple of years farmers have, alas, noted a change. Weeds gradually have altered their genes to get around the genes altered by the Dow folks. They are not about to die. They have, in a sense, just begun to fight. They have become sort of super weeds.

Environmentalists, who don't like playing around with any genes of any plants, are ecstatic. They think Mother Nature has triumphed again, just as she is supposed to do. Farmers are downcast. Not only will they have to hire weeders, they are going to have to find them even as the Immigration and Naturalization Service has stepped up its raids on illegal farm labor.

This year and last, fewer and fewer farm workers ready to weed and prune and do similar jobs no one else wants to do have come over the border from Mexico. Farmers tried using legal workers only to get bogged down in governmental red tape. They also have had to pay higher wages.

"Domestic" farm labor doesn't seem to exist. No one wants to weed fields, even at $8 an hour. So some farmers have gotten around both problems by not planting anything. That way it doesn't matter if the weeds show up. All you have to do is plow them under.

Of course, that also means you don't have crops to sell, but some farmers say that's better than trying to raise crops they can't harvest.

Whether Dow will be able to solve the genetic weed problem and alter a few more genes by the time next spring rolls around and the weeds start to push their nasty little heads above the ground is anybody's guess.

Altering genes in a crop has to be tested by planting and watching a plant grow and it is hard to see how the problem could be solved in a single season.

Of course, Congress could finally pass an immigration bill of some kind, too, opening the way for the importation of more farm workers from Mexico. But, with an election looming in 2008, that doesn't seem very likely either.

So at least for the moment the weeds have won the day, or the field, and the score seems to be weeds 1, soybeans 0.

But don't count Dow and Roundup out yet. Rather, think of it as another round (up) in the never-ending struggle we have with Mother Nature.