Editors' Notebook

It's. About. Dang. Time.

Greg D Horstmeier
By  Greg D Horstmeier , DTN Editor-in-Chief
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I read the words and sat stunned. EPA and USDA are actually going to take the issue of weed resistance seriously and stop being passive bystanders in what's become a too-familiar story: The uncontrolled use of a product to the point that it's no longer effective.

If you saw our coverage on the registration of the new Enlist Duo herbicide, and a following piece about new USDA rules around weed resistance, you hopefully picked up on the significance of the events this week.

Farmers and applicators will have to pick from a list of resistance-management strategies, or risk losing the new herbicide. EPA set a six-year limit on Enlist Duo's registration and it will examine how effective the chemical companies are in getting everyone to play by those rules before reregistering the product.

The agency said this will be the way all new products will be handled.

Now before you start sending hate mail about how DTN has become a proponent of increasingly restrictive government regulation, hear me out.

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I'm no fan of regulations. Ask anyone who's been my boss, or a teacher, or my auto insurance agent, even my mother, and they'll agree there are few rules I have not at least put some effort in to bending, twisting or otherwise finding a way to ignore. Anyone who's ridden a mountain bike with me knows my ongoing efforts to repeal the law of gravity, to my continued discomfort and to others' amusement.

My take on these new herbicide rules, though, is based on reality and necessity. As someone who's covered agriculture for 30 years, and been actively involved in it for, well 54 come December, I've also watched product after product, technology after technology, be used to the point of being useless.

From pink bollworms, to corn rootworms, to Palmer amaranth, we've taken to high art the ability to help Mother Nature sift through her genetic chaff, find the real tough guys of a pest species, and inadvertently set them loose on subsequent years' crops.

More than four years ago I interviewed the then head of pesticide programs at EPA, a string of ag scientists plus some knowledgeable folks I admire at chemical companies and, among other things, snuck in one common question: Isn't it time we use what we've learned about controlling resistance in Bt corn -- that requiring refuges or some similar species diversity tactic will help slow resistance -- and apply it to other areas of agriculture?

The story I was hoping to pull together based on that sneaky question was never written. I couldn't find one person who would shoulder the "yes" side of that debate. Couldn't even get a "well, maybe," stance. Why? No one, not even the rule makers, wanted to come out on the side of more rules.

Seems something has changed folks' minds. I suspect one of those things is the growing crowd of individuals fighting genetically engineered seeds and any other modern farm pest technology. A lot of what those groups keep dragging out -- the rats with baseball sized tumors, the dousing of our children with Agent Orange -- isn't taken too seriously by those who really understand these things.

The "superweeds" argument, though? Kind of tough to talk our way out of that one, looking at some of the soybean fields I saw this year. And saw 20 years ago when the SU's and Imi's fell apart.

Who knows whether these new tactics will be successful in keeping weeds from developing resistance to 2,4-D--and dicamba, if/when those new trait-herbicide packages finally reach the field -- as they have to glyphosate and the sulfonylureas and the "imis" and the rest.

There isn't much teeth in the rules in the short run, which is probably good or they would have never been allowed to see the light of day. There wasn't any real teeth in the refuge rules either, but despite that many of us "forgot" to dump the nonBt seed into the planter boxes each spring, enough "remembered" so that we haven't seen a disastrous failure there, yet.

We can only hope that, teeth or no, the new rules work. The quiver's getting pretty empty on alternatives, and even tillage, with $4 diesel, sure doesn't seem like something we want to rely on.

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