WINNIPEG – Monsanto and the federal government are investigating a small number of complaints about poor germination in wheat and barley seed treated with preharvest Roundup.
Harvey Glick, product development director with Monsanto, said the number of complaints is less than one percent of sales of the herbicide, a complaint rate he said is typical of other Monsanto products.
Charles Smith of Agriculture Canada said the department is surveying seed labs and producers to determine the scope of the problem.
“Right now, all we have are a lot of people saying, ‘There’s trouble out there.’ Now what we’re trying to do is to find out how much trouble there is, if it is in fact the use that is the problem, and whether it’s being used properly,” Smith said.
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Preharvest Roundup has been approved for this treatment for the past two growing seasons. Before it was approved, it passed tests to ensure it wouldn’t harm seed.
“We didn’t just throw on wheat and barley (on the label) because they’re the biggest crops out there,” said Smith. “There was scientifically valid information that was used to support the registration in Canada.”
But Peter Marshall, Monsanto’s director of regulatory affairs, said aberrations in how the chemical works can appear in practical use in fields, where farmers use it in numerous conditions and with various application methods that couldn’t all be simulated in tests.
To try to determine whether damage was caused by the chemical, Marshall said the company has ensured that seed labs were doing the right kind of germination tests on seed treated with pre-harvest Roundup. The chemical coats the seed and is inactivated by soil. If a seed lab does a standard blotter test for germination, water on the blotter will dissolve the residue on the coat, meaning the seeds germinate in a diluted herbicide solution and are injured.
“What we found in an awful lot of the cases is when people have now gone and taken their samples with the soil germination test, the germination has come right back up,” Marshall said.
The company then interviewed the farmers to confirm they applied the herbicide according to instructions.
Elimination test
Marshall said the last step was analyzing the seed for Roundup residues. He knows of less than a dozen samples that passed all the elimination tests. These samples will be grown out this summer.
At issue is how closely seed lab test results correlate with what happens in the field.
“That’s the number one question that the farmers are asking,” Glick said.
“If I get an 85 percent germination result in the seed test, what am I going to get if I plant it back in the field? I think there’s a general agreement that that’s not well known.”
For now, Glick said Roundup will continue to carry pre-harvest use on its label.
“I don’t think there’s any conclusive data one way or the other that the poor germination that we saw in a very small number of samples was linked to Roundup use.”
