alt Hacker NewsI think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
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I have no idea why this is downvoted because it's exactly right. Unlike antibiotic resistance where the consequences can be measured in human lives, it just doesn't matter for weed killers: and the iteration time on new compounds is much faster.
It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)
Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.
It's a matter of when, not if, and that _when_ was more than a decade ago. Round-up resistant Kochia (a weed) has spread across Western Canada and was first observed in 2011. Pretty difficult stuff to get out of your field once it takes root.
As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).
https://saskpulse.com/resources/kochia-resistance-update-res...