Attack of the Superweed

Justin Cariker is battling a pigweed invasion on his Dundee (Miss.) farm Maude Clay for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Jack Kaskey

Justin Cariker grabs a 7-foot-tall Palmer pigweed at his farm, bending the wrist-thick stem to reveal how it has overwhelmed the cotton plant beneath it. This is no ordinary weed: Over time it has developed resistance to Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Hundreds of such “superweeds” are rising defiantly across this corner of the Mississippi Delta. “We’re not winning the battle,” Cariker, owner of Maud Farms in Dundee, Miss., says as he looks at weeds that tower over his infested cotton field like spindly green scarecrows.

Cariker’s superweeds represent a growing problem for Monsanto, whose $11 billion of annual sales are anchored in crops genetically engineered to tolerate Roundup, the world’s best-selling weedkiller. The use of Roundup Ready seeds has transformed farming in the 15 years since their debut, allowing growers to easily dispatch hundreds of types of weeds with a single herbicide while leaving crops unscathed. “When the Roundup system first came out, to a farmer this was the best thing that ever happened,” says Cariker, who used the labor-saving technology to double his planted acreage, to 5,000. “Farmers thought we had died and gone to heaven.”

Not exactly: It turns out the widespread use of Roundup has led to the evolution of far-tougher-to-eradicate strains of weeds. As a result, rivals such as Dow Chemical, DuPont, Syngenta, and Bayer see an opportunity. They hope to revive sales of older herbicides still able to kill many Roundup-resistant weeds, allowing them to challenge Monsanto’s dominance in genetically modified crops. Still, the substitutes could eventually create weeds that survive multiple chemicals, just as increased use of antibiotics in pigs and chickens has led to the evolution of bacteria that resist multiple drugs, says Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center in Troy, Ore. “It’s akin to putting gasoline on a fire to put it out,” he says. “It’s a very high-risk gamble for the U.S. biotechnology and pesticide industry to go down this road.”

Crops created to survive Roundup or generic glyphosate (its active ingredient) now comprise 94 percent of soybeans, 73 percent of cotton, and 72 percent of corn grown in the U.S. Glyphosate is applied at seven times the rate of all other herbicides combined in U.S. soybean fields and 1.6 times the rate of all others in cotton fields, according to agriculture consultant Cropnosis.

Dow Chemical, DuPont, Syngenta, and Bayer are engineering crops to withstand alternative herbicides that can kill the weeds Roundup no longer can. Dow expects to begin collecting $1.5 billion in additional profit in 2013 by selling seeds for crops that tolerate a reformulated version of 2,4-D, a herbicide the U.S. first registered for sale in 1948 and one of the chemicals used in the Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange.

Unrelenting Roundup use has caused 11 weed species to evolve glyphosate resistance in 26 U.S. states, with Palmer pigweed and horseweed the most widespread, according to the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds. They have invaded 14 million U.S. acres of cotton, soybean, and corn, and that will double by 2015, says Chuck Foresman, Syngenta’s head of corn crop protection. A Dow study this year found as many as 20 million acres of corn and soybeans may already be infested.

Monsanto Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant says competitors’ efforts to develop their own herbicide-tolerant crops isn’t a threat to the company’s flagship business. Seed companies will cross-license each others’ genetics to create crops able to withstand multiple weedkillers, he says, and spraying fields with a mix of herbicides will kill the superweeds and give Roundup Ready crops new life. Monsanto itself is adding resistance to dicamba, an older weedkiller, to Roundup Ready crops for sale by 2015. “The cavalry is coming,” Grant says.

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When Patents Attack: Could Facebook Be Next?

Illustration by Serge Bloch

By Ashlee Vance

Paul Maritz has witnessed a number of patent skirmishes. The chief executive officer of VMware spent 14 years at Microsoft, much of it during the 1990s when the company was quickly extending its dominance and threatening older technology powerhouses. He remembers visiting Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corp., and other behemoths to essentially pay obeisance, ponying up for licensing deals that gave Microsoft access to key intellectual property—and kept the Redmond (Wash.) company from prolonged legal battles. “We had to do that,” says Maritz. “We were the new kids on the block.”

He sees a similar dynamic playing out in the tech industry today. So far, Silicon Valley’s rising stars—companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, and other social media darlings—have mostly avoided becoming casualties in the ongoing patent wars, which have centered on the world of mobile devices. Yet as Maritz puts it, “When the continents shift and new players come into a space, it results in an unstable situation.” According to legal experts and technology executives, plenty more patent confrontations loom. Older technology companies such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft maintain rich patent portfolios covering essential technologies used by the Web set, especially database and file-management applications. “The new-generation companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn will eventually run afoul of the established companies,” says Timothy D. Casey, a former patent lawyer at Apple and co-founder of the SilverSky Group, an intellectual property and business strategy consultancy. “It’s a familiar pattern in the technology industry.”

Part of the risk for the new generation of Web companies comes from their weak patent portfolios. Facebook has only 12 patents to its name, while the totals for Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Groupon range from zero to two each, according to filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That puts them in a position similar to where Google was earlier this year, when it had far fewer mobile-related patents than its competitors. According to one study by the investment bank MDB Capital Group, Google had applied for or received a total of 307 mobile-related patents as of early August, compared with 3,134 for Research In Motion, 2,655 for Nokia, and 2,594 for Microsoft. That relative weakness spurred the search giant to pay $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility and its 17,000 patents on Aug. 15, its biggest acquisition ever. Newer Web companies may ultimately have to take similar steps to bolster their position. “If you want to be a permanent fixture of the landscape, you better get some defense,” says Maritz.

One possible battleground is in the data center. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, in particular, have spent decades patenting technology for managing files and storing information. Rather than pay for products offered by these companies, the trend among Facebook, Twitter, and others has been to use free, open-source software that borrows, at least conceptually, from this past work. These companies make heavy use of programs such as the MySQL and Cassandra databases, for instance, and the Hadoop file-management system. Quite often, the Web companies even build new open-source applications and release them to the public, undercutting some of the Old Guard’s most lucrative franchises.

To date, database patent holders such as Oracle and IBM have had little motivation to target the open-source products with lawsuits. Most of their largest customers, which include major Wall Street firms and retailers, also use open-source software, and patent battles would just create unease among them. The same rules of engagement, however, may not apply to their relationship with the Web giants. This new generation prides itself on not buying technology from established Silicon Valley players, says Jonathan Schwartz, the former CEO at Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2009. “To the extent that is true, they are very attractive targets,” he says. (IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft declined to comment.) And the open-source label did little to keep Google’s Android software out of trouble. That mobile operating system is at the heart of the recent tech-world patent battle that has attracted lawsuits from Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle.

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