You can certainly farm in other ways, but it's a question of yield. High yield requires removing any competition to the plants you're cultivating - including milkweed. The fact that it's done with glyphosate is an implementation detail. If you want to produce the same amount of food with lower yield techniques you need more land - so more deforestation and destruction of natural habitats, which is hardly an improvement.
There are more expensive ways, but the world's population – even the moderately rich segment of that population – cry that they can barely afford the food as-is. Feeding the world's population requires more than the capability to produce food.
It's almost like there is more involved in a successful migration to a less synthetic approach to agriculture than simply stopping using fertilizers and pesticides.
Not at all. I am implying that if you know how to farm in a different manner than the current widely used methods and deliver enough food at an acceptable price to the population, then you should do it.
But I suspect that people around the world who have decades of farming experience are paying for glyphosate for a reason.
Just so you know that kind of reasoning is flawed.
Farmers are perfectly capable of using less glyphosphate, but the problem is that their buyers pay them so little that it isn't cost effective to do anything other than spray glypho everywhere.
With the health risks associated with glyphosphate, I assume a lot of farmers actually would love to stop using that shit.
My comments were not intended to insinuate that farmers were not physically capable of producing food without glyphosate.
Clearly, a farmer is not going to work for a loss, so the context of what is possible (from the farmer’s perspective) is assumed to be within the existing business and political environment.
Which is obviously that not using glyphosate makes your product priced too high.
Citation very much needed.
This sounds like it was written by a member of the Monsanto PR team.
There are.. other ways, than indiscriminately spraying plant poison everywhere.