The Truth About Roundup Herbicide

Jim Goodman

February 27, 2026

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Photograph Source: Aqua Mechanical – CC BY 2.0

Mark Twain supposedly once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, but there is a difference between a good story told in fun and a story (supposedly backed by independent scientific research) that people are led to believe because, well, science is supposed to be true. And so we come to the story of Roundup, the herbicide developed by Monsanto that swept the world because it worked and was the “safe” alternative to widely used weedkillers like Dicamba and 2,4-D,– it was said to be safer than table salt!

Roundup was developed in the 1970s as a non-selective herbicide, meaning it would kill almost any growing plant it touched. It was an effective burn-down herbicide farmers could apply prior to planting and it assured an almost weed-free field at the beginning of the growing season. Roundup could be used in non-agricultural situations as well, to kill weeds and grass growing in sidewalk and patio cracks, around buildings etc, but care was needed because, as noted, it was non-target and could kill whatever plant it touched.

For farmers, it worked well, except while it did kill growing weeds, buried weed seeds were not harmed, so a weed-free field at planting time did not ensure a weed-free field throughout the growing season. Weeds would continue to sprout and more herbicide applications would be needed during the growing season.

Then Monsanto developed their big fix released in 1996, genetically engineered (GE) soybeans resistant to Roundup, followed by GE versions of other commodity crops, corn, cotton, sugar beet and canola. Over the top spraying of these GE crops would kill everything but the crop and Roundup became one of the most widely used herbicides in the world and GE crops came to dominate world commodity crop production.

While Monsanto sold Roundup with the slogan “one spray is all you’ll ever need”, in time, it became clear that some weeds were developing resistance to Roundup and farmers were right back where they started, looking for herbicides that worked consistently. More genetic modifications were made to commodity crops, making them resistant to other herbicides, like Dicamba and 2,4-D, the herbicides Roundup was supposed to have replaced. These multiple GE or “stacked” crops could be sprayed with a cocktail of herbicides, hopefully ensuring weed-free fields for the entire growing season.

Farmers are using more herbicide, even on the GE crops, and costs for GE seed have risen much faster than non-GE seed. Of course, the motive was never to reduce the farmer’s production costs or agricultural herbicide use but to increase it– that’s where the profit is.

For farmers who didn’t jump on the GE bandwagon, finding non-GE seed is often difficult. Even more onerous, some farmers have found it necessary to plant GE seed as a preventative measure because non-GE crops can be damaged by chemical drift from neighboring GE fields.

So much for effectiveness, what about the safety of Roundup? In 2000 a study was published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology that deemed the active ingredient in Roundup (glyphosate) was safe and not a human health risk. Since then, that study has been cited consistently as proof of Roundup’s safety. Numerous other studies have shown that glyphosate could cause cancer and that the inert ingredients that are part of the patented Roundup formulation increase the toxicity of glyphosate. Further, the practice of using Roundup as a desiccant on small grain crops (oats, wheat and barley) prior to harvest, puts Roundup directly on grain that enters the human food chain.

Since acquiring Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has paid out about $11 billion to settle almost 100,000 cancer-related lawsuits, with approximately 61,000 still pending. In December of 2025, another blow to the claimed safety of Roundup when the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal withdrew the 2000 article that had touted Roundup’s safety. While the study claimed to be independent and peer reviewed, it has come to light that Monsanto’s scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the article. Oops.

For decades, Roundup has been sold as an effective herbicide, one that was safe to humans and the environment and without it, “consequences would be dire”. Companies like Bayer have to protect their product and their profit even if they have to tell a few lies to do so. They claim to produce safe products that help farmers thrive— real independent research refutes that. Bayer and the agribusiness industry may be thriving, but farmers are not and in these times, too few people seem to care that lies are accepted as truth.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc, Wisconsin.

 

Plant hormone therapy could improve global food security

Colorado State University

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By genetically manipulating the hormonal response of a commonly studied plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, scientists have harnessed the best of both worlds – immunity and productivity – and they believe this can be reproduced in crops. Credit: Colorado State University

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Credit: Colorado State University

Plants have an immune system, like people, and when it is triggered by threats like disease or pests, a plant's defenses are activated. But there’s a downside to this protective mechanism: The plant’s growth is suppressed when its immune system is turned on.

Colorado State University researchers have found a way to boost a plant’s growth while maintaining its immunity through a hormone treatment that shows promise for food production.

A plant threatened by disease will defend itself by producing hormones that can keep the plant alive but also stunt its growth – which is a problem if the plant is needed for food. By genetically manipulating the hormonal response of a commonly studied plant, scientists have harnessed the best of both worlds – immunity and productivity – and they believe this can be reproduced in crops. Their findings were published Feb. 23 in Current Biology.

"Only time will tell once it's integrated into crops what effect this will have, but it does have the potential to be as big of a breakthrough as the Green Revolution 60 years ago in terms of food security,” said Cris Argueso, an associate professor in CSU’s Department of Agricultural Biology and senior author of the study.

During the Green Revolution, geneticist and plant pathologist Norman Borlaug identified a wheat mutation that dramatically increased yield. He developed cultivars that were grown around the world, preventing famine. Borlaug is credited with saving a billion people from starvation and received a Nobel Peace Prize for his discovery. Downsides of the Green Revolution included widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and environmental degradation.

If the CSU researchers are successful in genetically altering crops to be more productive and disease resistant, the crops will need less fertilizer to grow and fewer chemicals to prevent disease, making this revolution “greener.” Of course, adding fertilizer will always enhance growth, even in plants that are naturally productive; but for now, the researchers are focused on integrating these beneficial traits into important food crops – wheat, corn and soybeans.

“We want to create crop plants that can defend really well against pathogens but don't have a yield penalty, which is the dream for farmers,” Argueso said. "We joke that this is the ‘green’ Green Revolution.”

The plant’s ‘chemical brain’

One similarity between Borlaug’s work and Argueso’s is that her lab is also working with a hormone mutant. The researchers studied a model plant species called Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale cress, a well-known plant in the mustard family. They selected plants of this species that had an autoimmune mutation that prevents them from thriving – like having an autoimmune disorder. 

Plants react to the constantly changing conditions surrounding them through plant-specific hormones called phytohormones. Argueso calls this the plant’s “chemical brain.” When plants are stressed by pests or disease, cytokinin hormones, which are responsible for cell division, are suppressed in a growth-defense tradeoff. By understanding phytohormone interactions and restoring cytokinin levels in the plants with overactive immune systems, the scientists were able to restart growth without negatively impacting the plant’s defenses. In fact, the plants they designed were even more resistant to disease.

While the researchers’ approach relies on genetic manipulation to change a plant’s chemical signals, it is much faster and easier than identifying and altering the specific gene responsible by mapping the plant’s entire genome, as is standard practice for modifying crop traits. Argueso likens their simpler solution to how a doctor might prescribe a pill to correct a chemical imbalance. She expects the mutations they’ve developed to be useful for agriculture for decades.

“We are exploring collaborations with breeding programs across the world, so this can be tested in different regions with all sorts of crops,” Argueso said. "If these mutations have the potential that we think they do, we would like them to be used everywhere.”

Student research

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and led by Grace Johnston, who conducted the research as a student. Johnston was recruited into Argueso’s lab as an undergraduate biology student and wrote the paper as her master’s thesis. She is now a research associate in the lab.

"I did not know I wanted to do plant science,” said Johnston, who credits Argueso’s mentoring for her achievement and love of plant biology. "By the time I was done with my undergrad degree, we still didn't know enough about these plants, and I just couldn't let it go.”

Johnston received prestigious fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the American Society of Plant Biologists to support her work while earning her undergraduate and graduate degrees.

"This is a CSU research success story,” Johnston said. "Cris took me on when I didn’t know anything about science, and here we are eight years later, and we have the opportunity to actually impact food security.”

Argueso is passionate about inspiring young researchers like Johnston. Students from her lab have gone on to receive important national and international awards, and currently three undergraduate researchers are part of her team.

Second author Hannah Berry was a CSU Cell and Molecular Biology graduate student in Argueso’s lab; she is now a scientist at Pairwise, a plant biotechnology and gene-editing company. Co-author Hitoshi Sakakibara, a plant science professor at Nagoya University and the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science in Japan, is one of the top plant hormone quantification experts in the world. Mikiko Kojima, a scientist at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, also contributed to the study.

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Journal

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2026.01.060 

Article Title

IMMUNE ACTIVATION SUPPRESSES REPRODUCTIVE GROWTH IN ARABIDOPSIS THROUGH CYTOKININ SIGNALING

Article Publication Date

23-Feb-2026

 

Barge Defaced at Cargill Terminal in Protests Over Amazon River Dredging

Apoema Cultural Collective / Amazon Watch press handout

Published Feb 22, 2026 6:49 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

Indigenous protesters and environmental activists in Brazil are showing resolve in their push to stop government projects which they believe will destroy Amazonian rivers and the rainforest, with U.S grain-trading giant Cargill caught in the middle of the controversy.

On February 19, about 400 activists in four boats intercepted a grain barge that was docked at Cargill’s terminal in Santarém. The protesters approached the barge on the urban stretch of the river while it was docked at the terminal, with the police moving in to impede their boats prompting many to jump into the river and managed to board the barge and inscribe the words “The Tapajós River isn’t for sale” and “Revoke the Decree of Death.”

The defacing of the barge, which is part of the soy supply chain operating through the Northern Arc logistics corridor, came on the day when a Brazilian court issued a second order to the government to remove protesters who have been staging a blockade at Cargill’s terminal over the past two weeks. 

The indigenous protesters have vowed not to relent in the push to demand the repeal of a decree by the federal government last year that saw the Madeira, Tapajós, and Tocantins Rivers included in Brazil’s National Privatization Program. The protestors are also demanding the immediate annulment of plans to dredge the Tapajós River, which they reckon will have adverse impacts on the Amazonian rivers and the rainforest ecosystem.

According to the protesters - led by non-governmental organization Amazon Watch - the government is using the Tapajós River dredging project as a central piece of a much larger project that is being pushed by agribusiness and global commodity traders, whose aim is to transform Amazonian rivers into industrial export corridors for soy and corn. They argue the project comes when the Northern Arc export corridor is already driving deforestation and eroding socio-biodiversity.

“It is essential to take a critical look at the cumulative impacts of the Northern Arc project. Ferrogrão, the expansion of private grain ports, and the Tapajós waterway together could increase soy volumes by five to seven times, intensifying pressure on traditional territories,” said Renata Utsunomiya, transportation policy analyst at GT Infraestrutura, a coalition of civil society organizations.

Utsunomiya added that the consequences of the project go beyond impacts on the Tapajós River because it will likely accelerate deforestation and threaten Brazil’s own climate commitments to reduce forest loss. The project could instigate land speculation and grabbing, soy expansion deeper into the Amazon, water contamination, changes in river flow dynamics and escalating violence along the soy transport routes, Utsunomiya warned.

Brazil remains as the world’s largest soybean exporter with record-breaking shipments in 2025 totaling 109 million tonnes, a 12 percent increase from 2024. China remains the dominant buyer, purchasing nearly 70 percent of the country’s total exports.

 

Protecting turfgrass from fungal foes

University of Delaware researchers report new understandings in how microbes protect plants

University of Delaware

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Charanpreet Kaur, a research associate at the University of Delaware, is lead author of a new paper that found a UD-developed beneficial bacterium has intriguing implications for manufacturing of biological treatments for fungal disease known as dollar spot.

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Credit: Evan Krape/ University of Delaware

As any plant lover knows, fungal infections can be a harbinger of doom for vegetation.

One day your cherry tomatoes are going gangbusters in the garden and, seemingly overnight, sunken brown spots appear on the plant’s leaves, withering the foliage and the fruit ripening on its vines. Thanks, tomato blight fungus.

In blade grasses, such as turfgrass found on golf courses, athletic fields and lawns, dollar spot disease presents a similar challenge. The fungal disease is characterized by the appearance of circular spots of dead turf about the size of a silver dollar, hence the name dollar spot. It is a costly problem that can run upwards of $35,000 per year to manage at an average U.S. golf course. Multiplied across an approximately $40 billion turfgrass industry, mitigation measures are much needed. Therapeutic treatments made from biological materials, such as bacteria or microbes, are a promising solution for such situations.

Take UD1022 — a unique, University of Delaware-developed beneficial bacterium proven to boost plant defenses. Discovered by UD plant biologist Harsh Bais and colleagues, this novel strain of Bacillus subtilis helps a variety of plants resist soil‑borne diseases, retain moisture and develop stronger root‑to‑shoot growth, among other benefits.

In previous work, Bais and colleagues showed in lab studies that UD1022 was effective in controlling the growth of dollar spot fungus, Clarireedia jacksonii, found on turfgrass. 

Now, further research reported in the journal Plant Stress on the effect of UD1022 on dollar spot suggests intriguing implications for manufacturing of biological treatments for the fungal disease. 

In the paper, the research team showed that when they tested whether soil treated with UD1022 would be enough to prime turfgrass plants’ innate defense response to resist dollar spot infection — the way a flu vaccine primes the body to resist the flu virus — it wasn’t. 

This was curious, as the Bais lab previously had shown UD1022 effective in priming other plants, such as tomato, Arabidopsis and rice, against various fungal and bacterial pathogens. 

“It turns out that UD1022 is good at biologically controlling the growth of dollar spot in turfgrass, but only when the bacteria (UD1022) and the fungus (dollar spot) are in front of each other,” Bais said. 

Indeed, when the research team applied UD1022 directly to leaves affected with dollar spot, the plant experienced a 43.6% reduction in disease severity. But when the researchers applied UD1022 in the soil at the root level and later introduced dollar spot fungus on the leaves, there wasn’t a huge decline in disease symptoms on the leaves. This confirmed that while applying UD1022 to the root does trigger an innate defense response in the plant, it’s just not enough to ward off infection in the leaves, far from the root system.

“It's like there's a break in the communication line, and the mechanism of how UD1022 acts against dollar spot is very different,” Bais said. “With dollar spot fungus, UD1022 has to be there directly to antagonize the fungus.”

This coincides with the research team’s findings that results waned over time, which would inform formulation and application approaches for treating the disease. And if UD1022 is present on the leaves, but not alive, no go — the dollar spot fungus grew — which showed the UD1022 must remain viable to continually antagonize the fungus.

Taken together, Bais said these findings are informing what is known about biological approaches for mitigating dollar spot disease in turfgrass. For example, while UD1022 cannot do the whole job of deterring dollar spot in turfgrass, it can offer a more sustainable disease management strategy when used as a complement to currently available approaches already in the market. In addition, it is known that UD1022 can also increase drought tolerance in turfgrass, so it is a microbe that has both positive and negative effects on living and environmental stressors a plant might encounter that would benefit from the continual presence of UD1022. 

“Biologicals like UD1022 cannot solve everything — it’s not a silver bullet. You need to keep evolving your approach,” Bais said.

Bais hopes to develop a new pipeline for biologicals like UD1022, with the potential to make greater headway against plant pathogens. Along those lines, he plans to explore the compatibility of a synthetic microbial community composed of 10-15 beneficial microbes that his laboratory has isolated over the last 21 years for use in multiple systems, during sabbatical work at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in 2027. 

According to Bais, the biggest challenge in using a microbial consortium is evaluating the level of persistence of these microbes on the root surface. Bais said this is because root colonization by benign microbes is the most important factor in triggering plant health benefits against living and environmental stressors.

“Using a champion root colonizer like UD1022 in consortium with other beneficial microbes, it will be interesting to evaluate the community for root colonization and its subsequent implications on plant and soil health,” he said. 

The future work will involve using this synthetic microbial consortium in a turfgrass system or other staple monocots (single-bladed plants) like sorghum and corn, to test UD1022’s effect and plant response under realistic environmental scenarios, such as drought and dollar spot together.

“Plants go through multiple stress at a time, they don’t grow in isolation, and the compatibility of microbes in a community is very important,” said Bais. “For example, usually when plants go through a physical stress such as drought, they're more prone to fungal infection. It’s something we’re interested in at this point in time, and this paper provides a segue to our next work.”

Co-authors on the paper include Bais, Charanpreet Kaur, the paper’s lead author and a research associate in the Bais lab, and Erik Ervin, professor of turfgrass and horticultural systems and associate dean in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

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Journal

Plant Stress

DOI

10.1016/j.stress.2025.101158