Re:Bayer to retire Monsanto name
by yumyumyumyumyum on Monday June 04, 2018 @01:21PM
(#17229978)
One or a few strains per region isn't exactly what I'd call a healthy amount of biodiversity.
I don't know much about the Dicamba topic, but it looks like a nasty herbicide and Monsanto is producing GM seeds that are resistant to that, probably to overcome the natural resistance to glyphosate that pigweed developed. It seems like there is a lot of controversy around it. Care to comment more on that topic? I think there are some interested readers that you won't bore.
Now, one has to be quite incompetent at spraying glyphosate to have significant blow over across the edges of fields: it's a very well behaved chemical in that regard. If you wanted to both make Monsanto look bad in this topic, you should forget about glyposate and think Dicamba. I won't bore HN with all the details, but even in Monsanto's new formulation, which supposedly makes the risk of hitting neighboring fields far lower, just picking a day where the weather isn't exactly right for the spray, or poor technique application, will lead to major damage in neighboring fields: The results might have been good in the lab, but they are not great in practice. It's arguably Monsanto's biggest piece of existential risk.