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I don't think so. Each herbicide innovation may have a shelf life, but in the mean time it provides a lot of utility to farmers (they buy into seed+herbicide systems because the systems make for more reliable harvests).


With antibiotics, we find that the good ones with easy synthesis and low toxicity tend to be low-hanging fruit, leaving the new developments to be expensive and deadly.

A similar arms-race in agriculture is the last thing we want. It's like all of our big inventions are being rolled back against us, starting with modern medicine, passing through agriculture and eventually taking fire away as we have to shut down the power plants to stop global warming. Give it a few years and we'll probably discover something horribly wrong with the wheel.


We can do modern agriculture without Roundup.


Back in 2007, this paper reported that about 20% of US crop production was owed to herbicides: https://croplifefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/we...

We probably won't get to multiple-resistant weeds in a day, or even a decade, but the path towards stronger weed control measures is going to be a very painful one.


We feed a ton of grain to livestock which, while delicious, is not an efficient use of land to get calories. We also lose a bunch of food to inefficiencies in the food chain because it's not worth fixing precisely because techologies like pesticides let us produce so much




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