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http://www.africanagricultureblog.com/2011/01/new-way-to-control-superweed-developed.html
New way to control ‘superweed’ developed
They pop up in farm fields across 22 states, and they’ve been called the single largest threat to production agriculture that farmers have ever seen. They are “superweeds” – undesirable plants that can tolerate multiple herbicides, including the popular gylphosate, also known as RoundUp – and they cost time and money because the only real solution is for farmers to plow them out of the field before they suffocate corn, soybeans or cotton.
Now, thanks to the work of researchers at Dow AgroSciences, who have been collaborating with a University of Missouri researcher, a new weapon may be on the horizon to eliminate superweeds.
Zhanyuan Zhang, a research associate professor of plant sciences and director of the MU Plant Transformation Core facility, partnered with research scientists at Dow AgroSciences to engineer soybean plants that can tolerate an alternative herbicide that may help slow the spread of superweeds, such as tall waterhemp.
According to an article in the May 3 2010 edition of the New York Times, farmers considered RoundUp a “miracle chemical” when it was introduced because it killed a wide variety of weeds, is safe to work with, and broke down quickly, reducing environmental impact. However, weeds quickly evolved to survive gylphosate, and that threatened to reverse an agricultural advance known as minimum-till farming. As the superweeds survive in the fields, farmers must spend more time to get rid of them, even going so far as pulling the weeds by hand. The Times noted that there were 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres of farmland.
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