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What would you do?

K

Kato

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 10, 2005
Messages
2,679
Location
Manitoba - At the end of the road
We planted our roundup ready corn as usual this year. Then we got it sprayed as usual, with roundup of course. Then a week later we saw yellow in the field, so went to see why the mustard didn't die.

It didn't die because it wasn't mustard! It was roundup ready canola. What makes this so aggravating is that we do not grow rr canola, we have never grown rr canola, and it's all over the field. It's too late to kill it with spray, and if you just look at the thick parts, it's one heck of a crop! Trouble is that next year it is also going to be one heck of a crop and so on and so on. The railway track runs through our home half section, and this is where it is the thickest. Then it spread all over the field when it was harrowed and seeded. It's a good thing we've got a fence down the middle of the field, or our entire corn crop would be over run.

We have now got ourselves one h%$# of a weed on our hands. Now the question is what to do about it. Someone needs a kick in the bum, but we need to figure out who needs it the most, Monsanto or CPR Railway.


Elsa's there to show the scale of it. This is where it's thickest.

IMG_0247.jpg


If you look carefully you can see corn

IMG_0246.jpg


As you can see by the ruts the sprayer left, we've had a bit of rain.

IMG_0243.jpg


And it spreads out all over the place.

IMG_0240.jpg


What a mess!
 
Apparently the cows can eat it, but our spraying costs are going to go up for more than a few years down the road. We're thinking it blew out of a railway car.

Or maybe the suits from Monsanto will show up and try and take us to court for growing their canola without a permit... :roll: :roll: :roll: They do it to grain farmers all the time, and say it's impossible for their canola to get into a field accidentally.

Ya right.....
 
WE wintered on baled Canola in '96 and '02 it's pretty good feed. I never did hear how that Sask. farmer ended up that they took to court over growing RR without a license.
 
Kato said:
Or maybe the suits from Monsanto will show up and try and take us to court for growing their canola without a permit... :roll: :roll: :roll: They do it to grain farmers all the time, and say it's impossible for their canola to get into a field accidentally.

Ya right.....
Click to expand...

Sounds like a very likely visit! :shock: :mad: :roll: :roll:
 
Those Monsanto boys need to be taken to the woodshed in a bad way. I doubt that they will take responsibility for "your" problem.

Someone needs to sue them for damages for a case just like yours. Like for mega hundreds of millions of dollars to teach those bullying b-s a lesson.

But who has the bucks to sue Monsanto?

Apparently they are wanting to charge the tech fees for anyone who tries to harvest volunteer rr canola on acres that farmers can't seed due to the wet conditions.

I don't know what your options might be.

I won't grow rr anything because I refuse to support their empire. When rr soybeans were first coming out, I won some free rr seed as a door prize at a farm meeting and left it on the dealer's dock.
 
add a broadleaf herbicide to the cost...
We are trying 20 acres of RR corn this summer and we have had a lot of animated conversations about where it is going and if we will ever do it again.
While it does look like a nice canola crop, it would be very beneficial for the bad neighbour (Monsanto) to have to pay to clean up their mess. It is the biological equivalent of BP. Wait for RR alfalfa...
On the bright side I did see in the Seducer this week that Monsanto has gone from $35/litre down to $8 since glyphosate came off patent. I sure feel sorry for them, since it probably cost about $0.08 a liter to make...
 
You might want to seek a few opinions on this, legal and otherwise. You have the Keystone producer group? there I think. They might have some advise. As far as the canola goes it is good feed and the cows like it. I'm not sure how it will graze standing and whether the canola will be viable when it shells out on you. I met the Monsanto cops several years ago. Kind of reminded me of my perception of the gestapo. Just as a personal aside, I would not graze any RR anything.
 
The only reason we have used rr corn is because we don't have tillage equipment for cultivating standing regular corn, and also because of the cost of conventional chemicals for regular corn. Not sure what the answer is in the long run. We are going to investigate other options for next year, that's for sure, since now we've got to use more chemicals than roundup anyway. So we may as well grow someone else's corn. This little episode has canceled out the cost advantages of roundup ready.

The stuff gives me the creeps anyway. :roll:

The next great debate is rr wheat, and I can't imagine a more dangerous thing for a country like ours that is so dependent on exports.
 
We tilled RR Canola under this year - again. It was seeded in 2008, so this was the 3rd year it's grown there. I spoke with several seed/spray reps, people from Alberta Agric. and had word from Viterra's head of bio support or some damn thing. They all said the same thing - Monsanto has a big problem on their hands, they have openly admitted that they do, and have not come up with a way to control RR Canola. Hence it's moving up the list in Alberta to the #7 spot for noxious weeds.

Just think what RR Alfalfa will do? RR Canola is unwanted a year after it's seeded, so people try to get rid of it. RR Alfalfa in hay and pasture land will go unrecognized and propogate itself all over.

Genetic modification in general is bad news for agriculture.
 
RR Canola is unwanted a year after it's seeded,
Click to expand...

I wish we could at least say that, but we can't, because we didn't even seed it. :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: That's the most frustrating part of it.

I wonder how many fields of conventional canola up and down our railway track have been contaminated, and no one knows. I think I'm going to call a few neighbours and let them know about this. We're getting it documented too, because you never know what might come up in the future. We've already talked to crop insurance about it.
 
PureCountry said:
We tilled RR Canola under this year - again. It was seeded in 2008, so this was the 3rd year it's grown there. I spoke with several seed/spray reps, people from Alberta Agric. and had word from Viterra's head of bio support or some damn thing. They all said the same thing - Monsanto has a big problem on their hands, they have openly admitted that they do, and have not come up with a way to control RR Canola. Hence it's moving up the list in Alberta to the #7 spot for noxious weeds.

Just think what RR Alfalfa will do? RR Canola is unwanted a year after it's seeded, so people try to get rid of it. RR Alfalfa in hay and pasture land will go unrecognized and propogate itself all over.

Genetic modification in general is bad news for agriculture.
Click to expand...


Without adding $300 to $500 an acre here alfalfa won't grow. Even the guy's who invest the money Alfalfa will only last 5 years at best.

As far as RR corn goes it's cheaper to plant paying $150 per bag for seed vs conventional corn. You could get the conventional corn for $45 a bag and still end up with more $$$ per acre. I've done both and the weed kill on Conventional will cost $30 to $40 and acre for chemical and you won't get a very good kill in my opinion.We spent $8 a gallon for a genaric Roundup at a quart to the acre spray cost $2 an acre with a total burndown.

I don't think a hungry world can afford to keep raiseing subpar crops.The yields we got 10 years ago here were in the 60 to 80 buschel range on corn and no way would it be dry enough to harvest without drying cost's. Now there's guys getting 175 to 200 buschel corn here and alot comes out of the fields at 13 to 18% moisture.I chop all of mine for silage we got 15 ton to the acre last fall on dryland corn.

To me the benifits of Roundup Ready far outweigh the negatives but with anything there's two sides to the subject.I like corn fed beef and Roundup ready corn. Many like grassfed beef and conventional crops. To each their own I say.
 
Denny said:
To me the benifits of Roundup Ready far outweigh the negatives but with anything there's two sides to the subject.I like corn fed beef and Roundup ready corn. Many like grassfed beef and conventional crops. To each their own I say.
Click to expand...

The problem is you - nor I, nor Monsanto - KNOW what all the negatives are yet to GM crops. It's only been the last couple of years that they are BEGINNING to realize how invasive it is and how difficult to control it can be. What else are we going to find out in time with RR Canola and other GM species?

Oh wait, now you'll tell me I'm fear-mongering, right? Before you do, stop and think that maybe we all could use a little fear in our judgement of what to seed. As for feeding a hungry world, the world population and it's growth are not sustainable anyway. Something has to change, and at a lot bigger level than you and I on a chat room.

Sorry Kato for getting off topic, had to add my 2 cents worth.
 
Cost is the reason we grow rr corn. But I'm thinking that if we had grown conventional corn, we very likely would have sprayed the canola out without ever knowing it was there. So how much of it is out there that no one knows about? Scarey thought, isn't it? And don't even think about what would happen if it crossbred with wild mustard, which is possible...

I think a lesson should be learned by the flax fiasco of the past several months in this country. At one time there was a gm flax variety grown here, which was taken off the market due to our export customers not wanting to buy gm crops. Guess what? Somehow a bit of it found it's way into the general flax population, and no one knows how. The result was an instant shut down of markets, and a lot of money has been lost.

This is why gm wheat should never see the light of day. Alfalfa too. With the kind of root system an alfalfa plant has, I bet it's not easy to kill with anything but roundup. I've got a couple of alfalfa plants in my garden, and they are one brute of a weed.
 
This GM business is one big experiment with an outcome that won't be fully realized in terms of environmental and financial costs for years to come.
 
The only farming done on our place in a very long time has been for hay for our own cattle. So, I'm not really up on farming.

I do know that anti-corporate activists are not allowing many facts to stand in the way of their scare tactics......just as they do against conventionally produced beef versus 'grass-fed' and 'organic' beef.

Doesn't it seem reasonable to investigate, via talking to county agent types, USDA, the railroad company, your county week board or someone to check along other areas of that track for spilled seed or other patches of it, methods of covering the grain in cars and such, even (horrors!!!) Monsanto rep to track down the origin of that canola before condemning anyone?

Re. population explosions, feeding the world, genetic experimentation, engineering and other means to produce bigger, better, more nutritious food crops.......has anyone considered the hand of our Creator in people who are working these wonders???? Surely, if we work at it and ask for it, He will enable us to work it out according to His will in His time.

At the least, we might consider that there may be more good than bad IF we will be fair, especially since obviously NONE of us truly KNOWS if statements already made here and elsewhere about the amount of testing, safety of these foods, and more, is even factual.

mrj
 

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