“I was excited to see it,” he said, referring to the moment his team discovered the new resistance.Īt the farm, Nicolet, clad in faded jeans and a sweat-soaked baseball cap, bent down at a spot where the weeds looked brown and wilted. Though this development was certainly bad news for farmers, Kumar seemed unable to suppress his awe for the plant’s evolutionary capabilities.
The plant in his hands was a Palmer amaranth descendant that had demonstrated resistance to 2,4-D, one of two active ingredients in compounds used to defoliate forests during the Vietnam War. Earlier, in the squat concrete greenhouse that functions as his research laboratory, Kumar held in front of me an arm-length seed pod on a top-heavy Palmer amaranth plant, one of many among rows and rows of tall, thin seedlings that shot up from small plastic trays designed to support just a few inches of growth, arcing past light fixtures and fans as they stretched toward the window-paneled ceiling. I was tagging along with Vipan Kumar, a weed scientist from Kansas State University, and two of his graduate students as they checked in with local growers. Already, Palmer amaranth plants outnumbered them, their narrow, rough-edged leaves intermittently flecked with purple, filling spaces between the rows and wedging themselves between the young soybean plants. When I visited Nicolet’s farm, south of Great Bend, in July 2019, his soybeans were just a few weeks old. “But you know, you have 100 weeds out there, the next year you’ll have a million.” “It’s not really enough to hurt yield this year,” he said. Nicolet couldn’t weed the 96 affected acres by hand, so he decided to let them grow. This summer, a handful of pigweeds sprouted in a field that had recently been sprayed. Whether that day is 10 years in the future or three, he has no idea, but the Palmer amaranth continues to gain ground all the while. Still, Nicolet says the weed killer will eventually stop working on his land, another management tool rendered useless by the pigweed’s remarkable onslaught. He used it this year too: The Trump administration issued new approvals for some formulations containing dicamba just a week before the presidential election. Nicolet was ultimately allowed to spray dicamba last summer because he purchased it before restrictions took effect.
Unchecked, Palmer amaranth can suppress soybean yields by nearly 80 percent and corn yields by about 90 percent. And it has evolved resistance to many of the most common weed killers, continuing to reproduce in what ought to be the worst of circumstances: A three-day-old, herbicide-injured seedling, for example, can expend its last bit of energy to produce seeds before it withers up and dies. This pigweed (a catchall term that includes some plants in the amaranth family) can re-root itself after being yanked from the ground. If there’s a plant perfectly suited to outcompete the farmers, researchers and chemical companies that collectively define industrial American agriculture, it’s Palmer amaranth. “There was a little bit of a moment of panic there for a few hours,” Nicolet said he was worried that a season without dicamba would mean devastation for his farm. He was well aware of dicamba’s tendency to vaporize and drift from field to field, causing damage to crops and threatening nearby wildlife and trees, but he didn’t feel as if he had much of a choice: Dicamba was one of the last tools that provided some control over Palmer amaranth, an aggressive weed that would quickly go on to choke out his sorghum crop - and that threatened to overtake his soybeans too. A farmer in Kansas, Nicolet had planned his season around the herbicide, planting his fields with soybeans that were genetically modified to survive being showered with the chemical. approval of three products containing dicamba, a controversial but widely used weed killer. It was already too late for Darren Nicolet to reverse course last June when he heard that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned E.P.A.
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