True, they're also producing some vastly expensive pending problems. Monsanto's "RoundUp Ready" genes have crosspollinated both Poa annua and Conyza canadensis, a grass and an astercae, two of the most promicuous families of aggressive weeds. In this habitat restorationist's view, this is a pending disaster, particularly for farmers and ranchers because plants in these families constitute some of their most pernicious weeds.
To deliberately destroy the usefulness of glyphosate when the patent runs out and transfer "RoundUp Ready" to your hot new and far more expensive patented herbicides (which is what I have always thought Monsanto was doing with "RoundUp Ready") is an actionable cause for compensation.
"I'm not interested in farmers suing farmers...," Huffman said. "The kind of damage that can occur when cross-contamination does happen can be of a scale where you're not going to be able to make farmers whole unless they can hold the manufacturer responsible."
And the lawyers can make a ton of money bleeding the manufacturers white.
First, we need to understand something here:
There is, as of now, no "glyphosate-proof" weed out there. There are weeds that have had escapes from glyphosate applications at the labeled rate that now need increased levels.
If you dump enough glyphosate onto an actively growing plant, at the right time, with surfactant to gain translocation benefits across the outer plant membrane, the plant is going to die.
The trouble is, too many farmers have been using RoundupReady crop technology without any other backstop at the lowest possible rates and there have been escapes. They want to simply plant a RR crop, go spray the weeds once per season, and be done with it. This is simply poor (or stupid) Integrated Pest Management. A smart IPM practitioner would:
1. Spray a pre-emergent herbicide when the crop is seeded (or before).
2. Seed the crop.
3. Use glyphosate to handle escapes from the pre-plant.
Since there are a great variety of pre-emergent herbicides out there in the most common crops, the pre-plant herbicides could be rotated every year, or rotated when the crops involved are rotated. That would be good IPM. Where Monsanto is to be blamed is that their sales reps have been peddling this RR technology as a silver bullet. It isn't. It is merely one more tool in the IPM toolbox.
For example: the poa annua you speak of can be easily handled in crop areas with pre-plant grass herbicides. In grass areas (ie, poa infesting other grasses, eg, a range situation), there are some new pre-plants being developed/tested that show promise.
Roundup (glyphosate) isn't the only herbicide where poa shows resistance: Diuron has been a favorite pre-plant herbicide for years, a very useful product (and very cheap). Trouble is, too many people have been using it incorrectly, and now there are diuron-resistant strains of poa out there.
The big reason for the rapid adoption of glyphosate by farmers wasn't only marketing/price -- atrazine has been a favorite herbicide in corn for years. Trouble is, atrazine is also mobile in some soils, and is now banned or restricted in some areas. In light of this situation, there was a need for a substitute and RR Corn technology fit very well. Glyphosate is absolutely immobile in the soil, is neutralized immediately on contact with the soil, and has no effect on animals whatsoever. No record keeping necessary, no worry about drift issues aside from direct drift of the droplets themselves. For those who aren't farmers, there are some herbicides (like 2,4-D, for example) that can volatilize after application, form a cloud of active ingredient, drift on the wind and kill plants miles downwind. 2,4-D is a good product, very safe, but these kinds of drift issues make it something that has a limited window of applicability -- once the temperatures start getting hot, you don't want to use 2,4-D too much.
The single biggest mistake I think too many people make in weed control is that they only want to "kill the weeds." Well, Mother Nature abhors a vacuum, and when people persistently use these broad-spectrum contact herbicides, they're too often not giving enough thought as to how to "fill the vacuum" before Nature does. Here in Nevada, we have short growing seasons and a huge number of non-native (and noxious) weeds. #1 rule before reaching for the sprayer is to know what will be done to fill the vacuum, then spray.