Quite some time ago, back when I used to blog for “the Fool”, I wrote a post about how farmers were going to have to dust off their Weber Weeders and start walking soybeans again. I was lambasted by people who had just stumbled out of a coffee shop. (Coffee really is the beverage of life’s losers.) They were even more outraged when I told them 2-4d quit working years ago and 2-4d ready soybeans wasn’t going to be the answer.
Lately there have been quite a few people high up in the world of Ag and/or investing research agreeing with what I said. Less obvious but more telling are the front line people who work at elevators and chemical companies beginning to admit the same thing. Once Round-Up got down to $7/acre and became useable on both corn and soybeans, it was done.
Even if you never had to watch the video in high school biology class, you have seen a snippet of it in commercials. The “it” in this case is the video of the cocaine monkey wired up in his cage slamming that button to get higher and higher. The video ends with the monkey twitching in death spasms.
Round-Up became the cocaine of Agriculture. Landlords demanding higher and higher cash rent gave their land to strip miners more interested in this year’s profit than taking care of the land. Adding insult to injury was the fact these operations would have to take some marginal land with the good. This lead to a practice which should be outlawed known as “half-rate”.
When a manufacturer puts a weed chemical on the market that chemical comes with minimum recommended rates for weed control based on what weeds one is trying to control. The problem with these rates is that they are recommended, not enforced. You’ve all heard the phrase “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” When you weaken a poison then give it to the biological entity it was supposed to kill, in effect you have given it a vaccine. It will quickly build up antibodies or some other form of resistance once it “learns” how to fight off the weakened version. “Half-rate” breeds resistant weeds like rabbits.
The big cash rent strip miners are all about turning fertile land into sand. They also generally have new equipment because they are part of the “lease no grease” single season rental group. (Never _ever_ buy used machinery less than three years old unless you physically know the previous owner and what to expect.) When they are forced to take “marginal” land with a good piece, that marginal land is in for a quick demise. To start with, instead of planting the refuge corn in the same field with the triple stack cutworm resistant corn, the refuge corn will get planted (if it gets planted) in the marginal field no matter how far away it is from the other field. The strip miners never apply more than starter fertilizer to a field, so all the land they have is going to be nutrient deficient after the first crop. The real cutback will come in the form of weed control because the field will only get half the recommended rate.
You have to understand, the high rent crowd isn’t interested in keeping the land to hand down to their children. It’s a churn and burn. Within five years or so they won’t be able to get the county average yield for crop insurance claims so they won’t be hanging onto it more than ten. After that it is somebody else’s problem. One they created, but somebody else’s problem none-the-less.
The marginal land starts off at a disadvantage. Even with excellent management, it isn’t going to produce what class A soil will produce. Every hedge fund with land to rent will tell you it is class A so they can get the highest rent imaginable, even when everyone can see it is a clay hill with rocks everywhere. The next kick to the groin comes when the big operation decides to plant all their refuge corn (corn which has not been genetically modified to kill/repel cutworms) on the marginal land. Even in perfect dirt with perfect moisture, weather, and nutrients, refuge corn won’t yield what corn with stacked traits will. Bugs or no bugs, it’s just not going to yield huge. In order to “cut costs” these operations will not only apply half rate, they will use Round-Up (generic) season after season after season applying half rate each time.
You might have guessed the problem with this little addiction. This monkey doesn’t kill itself. This monkey infects the fields around it. Seeds get carried by wind machinery, and wildlife. Pretty soon even people who did do everything right can’t kill weeds with Round-Up.
Meanwhile the monkey keeps slamming the button and world population approaches 9 billion.
