Down on the Farm

When I was a kid, summers on the family farm in downstate Illinois meant bailing hay and picking weeds. Weeding was the worst. Walking up and down endless rows of soybeans, bending over, pulling the tough little buggers out of the ground. I guess nobody's figured out how to mechanize picking weeds, perhaps because a machine would spread weed seeds — and that can be up to thousands per plant, depending upon the weed — all over the place. Whatever. But no wonder farmers flocked to Monsanto's Roundup ready crops: they could saturate their fields with herbicide and presto, no more weeds. Less back-breaking work. For many reasons I've never liked genetically modified seeds and I suspect that previous generations of the family's farmers would have been skeptical too, but the current generation are a greedy bunch for whom higher yields with less work was too great a temptation. Unfortunately I'm implicated as well as it makes no sense to take my share, the size of a postage stamp, out of production. But here's an "I told you so": Roundup resistant pigweed — a truly terrifying superweed — is starting to spread. Monsanto's advice? Mix Roundup with 2,4-D (a component of the infamous Agent Orange used in Vietnam, both also Monsanto products). Fortunately I'm too old now to be drafted again into picking weeds, but I doubt that my cousins' kids and grandkids, if and when they're introduced to weeding on a magnificent scale, will like it much.