JRE 0 · October 20, 2021

Overuse of Monsanto's Roundup Is Creating Herbicide Resistant Weeds

scienceenvironmentbusinesshealth

Who is Overuse of Monsanto's Roundup Is Creating Herbicide Resistant Weeds?

Taken from JRE 1722 w/Bartow Elmore:

Topics and Timestamps

01Monsanto's Roundup herbicide has been overused in agriculture, creating herbicide-resistant superweeds that are harder to kill
02The widespread adoption of Roundup Ready crops allowed farmers to spray more herbicide, leading to evolutionary pressure on weed populations
03Herbicide resistance develops when weeds survive initial applications and pass resistant genes to offspring, creating harder-to-control generations
04Monsanto's business model of selling both seeds and herbicide created financial incentives to promote heavy Roundup use
05Resistant weeds now require higher doses of Roundup or additional herbicides to control, increasing chemical use and environmental impact
06The situation reflects a larger pattern in agriculture where short-term chemical solutions create long-term ecological problems
▶Introduction to Roundup and Monsanto's business model0:00:00
▶Explanation of how Roundup Ready crops increased herbicide usage0:10:30
▶Deep dive into herbicide resistance and evolutionary pressure0:22:15
▶Discussion of resistant superweeds and their spread across agriculture0:35:45
▶The implications for farmers and future agricultural practices0:48:20

The Show

Bartow Elmore joins Joe Rogan to break down how Monsanto's Roundup became one of the most widely used herbicides in the world and how that massive overuse has backfired spectacularly. The core issue is pretty straightforward but the implications are wild. When Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready crops in the 1990s, farmers could finally spray Roundup directly on their crops without killing them. This was huge for efficiency. But here's where it gets sketchy: Monsanto sold both the seeds and the herbicide, so they had every financial incentive to push farmers toward using more and more Roundup.

What followed was predictable from an evolutionary biology standpoint but apparently caught people off guard in the business world. As farmers sprayed more Roundup, a few weeds inevitably survived. Those survivors weren't lucky, they were genetically different. They had traits that made them resistant to the herbicide. When those resistant weeds reproduced, they passed those genes to the next generation, creating populations of weeds that laughed in the face of Roundup. This wasn't a quick process, but it wasn't slow either. Within a couple of decades, farmers across the country were dealing with herbicide-resistant superweeds that required stronger doses or completely different chemicals to control.

Elmore explains how this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how nature works. You can't just hammer the same chemical at a problem forever. Evolution is real and it happens fast when you create that kind of pressure. Farmers found themselves in a worse position than before because now they either had to use more toxic chemicals at higher concentrations or switch to different herbicides entirely, many of which came with their own problems. The whole thing is a cautionary tale about short-term profit motives running headfirst into long-term ecological reality.

Best Quotes

“Monsanto had a vested interest in farmers using more Roundup because they were selling both the seeds and the chemical”

— Overuse of Monsanto's Roundup Is Creating Herbicide Resistant Weeds