Europe
June 16, 2016
Source: Monsanto Europe blog
By Brandon Mitchener and Jaden Elsasser
The current political debate around the use of glyphosate in agriculture in Europe is permeated with the simple notions that weed control is optional and that if glyphosate were banned, farmers would just let the weeds grow, because who do they really harm anyway?
Any farmer knows the proper reseponse to that question: Weeds are the enemy! They compete with crops for light and water. Some of them are highly invasive and spread much faster than what the farmer is trying to grow. They can clog up machinery. Some of them are even highly toxic to people and farm animals; if too much of them end up in the harvest, the crop is unusable and might even have to be condemned. Weeds need to be controlled one way or another, and Roundup is the most effective and environmentally friend way to do it because it kills not just the top of the plant but also the roots, preventing it from growing back.
Weeds are also the enemy for gardeners as well as people who manage railways, rural road intersections, historical monuments and city sidewalks. But whereas we might consider weeds in a private garden or sidewalk a mere nuisance, for farmers they can be devastating.
How so? A picture speaks a 1,000 words, so we’ll not just tell you but show you.
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be teaching Weeds 101 in a series of short blog posts and related Tweets and Instagram pictures.
The first weed in our Rogues Gallery of Weeds: Sorghum halepense, also known as Johnson grass. A member of the grass family, it is spreading primarily in Hungary, and it is considered a question of time until it begins to cause problems in Romania, Italy and the Balkans, where the weed is also widespread.
Sorghum halepense threatens profitable maize production because it is a direct competitor to maize. It can totally suppress crops, resulting in significant hit to a farmer’s yield.
Due to its high level of green mass, sorghum halepense can also block combine harvesters. The green weed mass harvested together with maize or sunflowers will block the sieves and increases losses at harvest.
The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way!
If farmers spray Monsanto’s Roundup or other glyphosate-based weedkillers to the stubble in the field the year before (after harvest), the perennial Sorghum halepense can be fully eliminated to allow healthy maize development and the full achievement of a farm’s theoretical yield potential. Roundup can also be used to prevent resistance to other herbicides that have a different mode of action.
For more information, see:
- Monsanto Europe Media Bank’s Rogues gallery of weeds
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_grass
- http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G4872
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