Friday, January 21, 2011

Glyphosate

The notion that glyphosate changes your soil and can reek havoc on you the crops that grow in it keeps picking up a little steam.

I have friends who won't use glyphosate on their farms anymore. There are farm leases that have been written that prevent the tenant from using glyphosate on that farm so that eliminates any RoundUp Ready program which so many farmers use.

Dr. Huber, professfor Emeritus at Purdue let the cat out of the bag as soon as he retired from Purdue. Several other noted scientists like Kremer in Missouri and from all over the world have studies proving glyphosate ties up minerals in the soil which allows disease to become a bigger issue in crop reduction.

One of my colleagues showed us some of his findings from Ohio at the notill conference. Like me he is sitting on the sidelines until this gets sorted out but he showed tree after tree with bark splitting. The grower sprays round up herbicide which is a form of glyphosate and it lowers the mineral concentration around the roots so much the bark splits on the tree or bush.

There is other data coming that shows yield results compared to amount of glyphosate in the soil. The initial results don't look good for glyphosate but we may just be on the tip of the iceberg on this problem.

I never raised RoundUp Ready corn and started growing non GMO soybeans when I had all those resistant weeds round up won't kill on my farm anymore.

You can do some digging and start reading about this issue on the net. Take everything with a grain of glyphosate salt because some claims are rather bold like the anti Monsanto stuff Jeffery Smith spreads but there is something to the half life of glyphosate changing soil properties.

Ed

No comments:

Post a Comment