"I think the future of cheap food is strongly related to the availability and effectiveness of existing herbicides," says Adam Davis, ecologist in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and USDA Agricultural Research Service. That is, without working herbicides, food could get a lot more expensive....
If you're not in the farming industry, you might not be aware that weeds like common waterhemp and Palmer amaranth can reduce corn and soybean yields anywhere from 30 to 80 percent, and that those weeds are developing resistance to available herbicides. Like antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," resistant weeds simply can't be killed by herbicides.
and don't say "organic": we grow organic rice, and the dirty little secret is that growing it organically means a lot more work.
Also, the traditional "weed control" is by flooding the rice paddy, planting seedlings of rice (which have their heads above water) while the weeds, well, get drowned.
Bad news? This is a major source of methane, a green house gas.
So China, for example, lowered their "carbon" output by using drier methods, i.e. flooding less by doing a "dry/wet" cycle, but to do that you have to use herbicides, or spend a lot of money to pay folks to pull out weeds.
Technical article on how to control weeds in rice paddies. more here.
Why Use Herbicides to Control Weeds?
- Less labor (0.5 person-day per ha per application) and less drudgery
- Cost-effective, if practiced properly
- No need to wait for weeds to grow bigger for hand weeding
- Herbicides can differentitate between rice and weeds, even at seedling stage where it is very difficult for people to see the difference
technical article here about using plastic mulch with less flooding.
here in the Philippines, we grow organic veggies in hot houses. Alas, the typhoon took out our hot houses (along with our chicken raising farm) a couple years ago.
we still grow organic rice, but the price is higher than ordinary rice, a lot of which is imported from VietNam or other countries where they can grow it cheaper than we do, because people are paid less and more chemicals are used, and because they manage three crops a year instead of the two crops a year we have here.
Right now it is rice harvest season. We are hoping the rains stay away, but we are having evening showers, which complicate things a bit. We still use the sun to dry our rice: if it rains we have to pay the rice mill to dry it in an electric drier, since ours has been broken for two years and non one will fix it.
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and if you want to read about what happened in the past and could happen again:
Mike Duncan Revolutions has a podcast on the famines of the 1840's, which included not just the potato crop but grain shortages due to bad weather, causing an increase of price and a domino effect that ended up crashing the economy.
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