Name: Overuse of Monsanto's Roundup Is Creating Herbicide Resistant Weeds
Uploaded: 2021-10-20T17:07:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Overuse of Monsanto's Roundup Is Creating Herbicide Resistant Weeds' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Overuse of Monsanto's Roundup Is Creating Herbicide Resistant Weeds' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-20. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- He doesn't look happy.
- Wow, he's living in 1901, like fuck.
- Yeah, average life expectancy, he's 40 years old,
average life expectancy like 44, 45.
- Really?
- At that time.
I mean, but if you make it past childbirth, of course,
you have a much better chance of surviving.
But anyway, yeah, he does name his company after his wife.
What's interesting is,
you wonder whether that was like,
whether she'd be happy about that, right?
It becomes this hated name in so many ways years later.
But he's scrapping by.
He actually had tried to start a chemical industry
in the late 19th century.
It had burned down and he didn't have any money.
He's got these kids, he's got this family.
So like to your point, I'm kind of, when I'm reading this,
I'm trying to understand how is this company starting?
What's the human story here?
How do we get into this mess, you know?
- Money.
- And then, you know, when you get, as you said,
to the '50s and '60s, these agricultural chemicals
become a huge part of their business.
But kind of back to Roundup,
70, okay?
Two, four, five T, now the lid's off.
You know, the government's starting to find out about it.
People are raising alarms.
Scientists are talking about how toxic this stuff is.
And, you know, they're looking for an alternative,
something that's not as toxic as this stuff.
And that's when John Franz finds glyphosate.
Interestingly, you know, all, like the detergent, all?
- Yes.
- That was a Monsanto product.
- Of course it was.
- But it had, it had a phosphate-based ingredient in it
that helped it clean clothes.
But in the '60s, phosphate-based detergents
were ending up in waterways and contributing
to like algae blooms and fish death.
- Yeah.
- And so they had to get rid of that phosphate detergent
and they had all this phosphate.
And they're like, what do we do with all this phosphate?
Boom, all detergent, you know, and all that phosphate
ends up becoming the building blocks of Roundup.
Roundup is ultimately coming from elemental phosphorus.
- Wow.
- It's crazy.
But it was all designed to be healthy.
- I know a guy who lived in a community
that was connected to a golf course.
And he grew up drinking water from a well.
And him and a large number of people
in the community got cancer.
And they firmly believed that it was because
of whatever pesticides that they were using
or herbicides that they were using on the golf course
so that it leaked into the wells.
- Can I show you what Roundup looks like nowadays?
- Sure, yeah.
- Jamie, there's a map in there
that's like a map of the country.
And it's kind of brown.
And it shows you kind of Roundup.
- It's probably most of the country, right?
- It says glyphosate 'cause that's the active ingredient.
But I just wanna show you the change
that's happened over the last several years with glyphosate.
So like, that's glyphosate.
This comes from the USGS Pesticide
National Synthesis Program.
This is what happened with Roundup Ready technology.
Like we were, this is '92.
So remember I said Roundup was created in the '70s.
But it's not really used that much, you know,
throughout the growing season.
- It's interesting how it's used so much in California.
- Yeah, the Central Valley.
- It's like the primary application of it.
- Look at that.
- The weird farmland on the way up to San Francisco.
If you're driving from LA and you see, you know,
like fuck Joe Biden signs, that's where they are.
- Exactly.
Yep, that's also, you know,
the land of like 90% of our almonds.
Like, you know, salad, everything comes from there.
Yeah, and so much pesticide use in that valley.
- Wow.
- But look at the Midwest.
I mean, it goes from like, you know.
- Almost none.
- Almost none.
- It goes to swarms.
- To swarms.
- By 2017.
- And that's because you've made crops
that are now resistant to glyphosate.
So you can spray it all, you know,
as much as you need to kill your weeds.
But, and Jamie, there's a,
you had that weed resistance graph going up.
But a fifth grader can tell you, well.
- Wow.
- When you spray that much Roundup on something
or glyphosate on something,
you're gonna start seeing resistance.
- Adaptation.
- Exactly, like it's nature of fighting back.
- Like what's happening with antibiotics
where you're seeing these like MRSA,
like these medication resistant staph infections
that are insanely difficult to treat.
- Just like it.
- Yeah.
- Just like it.
You know, in fact, some of the weed scientists I talked to,
I'll be honest, when I first was going to a talk
at Ohio State that they said,
the weed scientists are talking, I thought, oh.
I thought it's slightly different.
- So it's weed, marijuana?
- I was like, oh, this is cool too, you know?
- Yeah, I want to find out how to make the shit stronger.
- So, but these weed scientists at Ohio State
who are great and helped out with the book,
fantastic folks, you know, some of those, you know,
they're like glyphosate was like penicillin, man.
It was, it was so powerful.
It was so effective at killing weeds that like,
and we burned through it
because these weeds became resistant to it.
And so, and that's where we're at now,
kind of going back to your point about chemicals
and exposures, like Roundup was introduced
because it was seen as an environmentally,
more friendly herbicide at the time in the 70s.
- Then Agent R.
- Then, yeah, I mean, yeah.
You're comparing it against some pretty bad--
- It's like, would you like to get punched
or I'll shoot you?
- And, you know, it had to do with, you know,
the way it worked and the mechanisms there.
But what's happening now because of that resistance,
and Jamie, I hate to bring it up again
because it's actually kind of cool.
You get to see this, this first time we've put it together.
But when that weed resistance takes off,
I think it's the next graph after that,
what happens is, check this out.
Okay, this is what's happening.
I put this together with a friend of mine
who's a data scientist.
- Try to remember that a lot of people are just listening.
- They're just listening. - Probably a huge percentage.
- Fair enough.
So I'll try and describe it.
So what we're looking at is pounds of herbicide
per acre of soybeans.
So this is just looking at soybeans as a case study.
And we're looking at the amount of herbicides
that's being used on farms per acre in the U.S.
in specific states just because they had data for this,
for us to compare.
And what we're seeing is this like explosion in Roundup,
glyphosate, that big dark line going up like that.
And notice, look, we started seeing the decline
in all these other herbicides that are really toxic stuff,
like chlorinated compounds and things like that.
They're going down and down and down,
but check out weed resistance, 2004, 2005, 2006.
Boom, all those herbicides that were really toxic,
including by the way, the other half of Agent Orange,
2,4-D is now being used to try and beat back
Roundup resistant weeds.
- Wow. - And so last.
- What a fucking mess. - It's crazy.
- Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.