Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today is an excellent set of links.  I'm going to highlight two, because they are both significant agriculturally, but there are excellent links to an awesome sky survey, an investigation of corruption in Southern Illinois courts, concern that Fukushima is as bad as, or worse than Chernobyl, a report on Bahrain's Sunni government demolishing Shiite mosques, an interesting history of the removal of the gold indexation clause in debt contracts in the Great Depression, and several other interesting stories.

The first link I'll highlight is Unnatural Selection: Wily Weeds outwit herbicides, at New Scientist:

The weedkillers atrazine and simazine were introduced in 1958. Ten years later, a plant nursery in the US that had been regularly using the pesticides reported that they were no longer effective against a plant called common groundsel – the first confirmed case of herbicide resistance.

Half a century on, the number of known strains of resistant weeds stands at 357 and counting. "Herbicide resistance is a fantastic example of evolution in response to human-induced selection pressure," says Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia in Perth, who studies the problem.

Because of its huge commercial importance, a lot of money is spent studying the problem and in many cases we know exactly how plants are evolving resistance. The mechanisms range from changes in leaf shape or waxiness to reduce herbicide uptake, to mutations that prevent herbicides binding to the proteins they target.

Strategies such as alternating the type of herbicide used can slow the evolution of resistance, but it is not foolproof. Many weeds have developed resistance to more than one herbicide. In some cases, this is due to plants evolving resistance mechanisms that are effective against more than one pesticide. For instance, many break down pesticides using new variants or higher levels of enzymes of a kind called P450s. These enzymes often protect against a range of different herbicides. In the 1980s, two weeds were found to be resistant to weedkillers that had never been used in the field. In other words, says Powles, weeds can evolve resistance to herbicides that have not even been developed yet.

The second story is Farm Antibiotics: 'Pig Staph' in a Daycare Worker, at Wired:

It’s been just about seven years since an alert epidemiologist in the Dutch town of Nijmegen identified an aberrant strain of MRSA, drug-resistant staph, in a toddler who was going in for surgery to fix a hole in her heart. The strain was odd because it didn’t behave normally on the standard identifying tests, and because it had an unusual resistance factor — to tetracycline, a drug that it should not have been resistant to, because the Netherlands had such low rates of MRSA that tetracycline wasn’t being used against the bacterium there.

Pursuing the source of the strain, researchers at Radboud University found it in the toddler’s parents and sister, and in the family’s friends. Not knowing where else to look, they asked what the parents and their friends did for a living; discovered they were all pig farmers; and went to their farms, and checked the pigs, and found it being carried by them, too. Suddenly, that strange resistance pattern made sense: The Netherlands uses more antibiotics in pig agriculture than any other country in the European Union, and the drug that it uses the most is tetracycline. Clearly, the aberrant strain — known as MRSA ST398 for its performance on a particular identifying test — at some point had wandered into pigs, become resistant to the drugs being given to the pigs, and then crossed back to humans, carrying that new resistance factor as it went.

From that first discovery unrolled the microbiological equivalent of a car-chase scene, complete with unpredictable turns, skids around corners, and unexpected dead ends. Researchers have identified ST398 in animals, people and retail meat in most of the EU; in pigs, farmers and hospital patients in Canada, and in pigs and a few farm workers, and most recently supermarket meat, in the United States. (You’ll find a long archive of posts on ST398, and more here.)

Both of these stories raise significant concerns about how we raise our foods.  They each also indicate that things may become more challenging in the near future, as we deal with glyphosate resistance and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  Without even throwing in peak oil, I believe there will be no shortage of challenges in the future.