Roundup Ready Weeds?

Corn stubble and lambsquarters residue from 2010 growing season.

This post is not necessarily about gardening but what happens in this field and the other fields around my house does affect my garden yet I don’t have much say. So I will vent through this blog. My problem is “Roundup Ready Corn”! My father-in-law owns a dairy and insists on controlling what we raise in our fields.  Every six years we must rotate out of alfalfa (I don’t disagree with this) to another crop which he insists must be corn and it must be “Roundup Ready” to control weeds. My observation over the years is it doesn’t really kill the weeds.


Recently I attended a landscape and nursery conference in Reno and the Nevada Department of Agriculture conducted seminars on pest control. One of these seminars was about weed control where pictures of lambsquarters which had treated but not killed with “Roundup” were shown. Amazing! They looked just like the lambsquarters in our field last summer even weeks after they had been sprayed with “Roundup”. The instructor said just what I was suspicious of; “These plants survive to produce ‘Roundup’ resistant seed that sprout into ‘Roundup’ resistant weeds in subsequent years.”

The picture at the top of this page is a photo of the corn stubble in our field interspersed with the residue of the lambsquarters and other weeds that were not completely killed by a single application of “Roundup”. In fact if you will notice in the close up picture at the bottom of this post, some of the “Roundup” treated weeds got quite tall. The ones pictured are about 3’ tall. Unfortunately my father-in-law is not unique is his use of “Roundup Ready Corn”. Other dairymen/slash farmers in my valley do likewise with similar results; weeds that are only knocked back long enough for the corn to outgrow them. In fact local wildlife officials who have the responsibility for managing water righted land the government has purchased have repeatedly said the fields that have been in corn are the hardest to rehabilitate because of the weed problem.

One may ask why I think this problem affects my garden. Well these seeds don’t just stay in the fields where they are produced. They get caught in the coats of the wildlife that wanders through my fields and into my garden or are spread by the wind that blows over my fields and into my garden. Weed seeds respect no boundaries!

What do I want to suggest to my father-in-law but know he won’t listen? Use cultural practices that discourage weeds and find another crop that can be planted with much closer spacing that crowds out the weeds such as the Sudan grass (residue of which is pictured after the close up of the lambsquarters residue). There are other things he can do as well but that will be the subject of another post. He’s actually introducing weed seeds into my fields with another one of his practices. My father-in-law is a real agricultural menace that is impacting more than agricultural land!

This lambsquarters grew to 3' inspite of being treated with Roundup!

Residue from sudan grass that was seeded much heavier than corn, not treated with herbicide and appears virtually weed free.