Larry Powell Powell is a veteran, award-winning journalist based in Shoal Lake, Manitoba, Canada. He specialize in stories about agriculture and the environment. For decades, he worked for broadcast outlets in all four provinces in western Canada. This included a 5 years stint as Senior Editor for CBC Radio News in Saskatchewan. He is authorized to receive embargoed news releases on important, global stories, through the Science Media Centre of Canada, the Royal Society, Nature Research and the World Weather Attribution Network. He's a member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists and a past member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2020, Powell joined an international team of writers providing articles for the Swiss-based online journal, Focusing on Wildlife - celebrating the biodiversity of Planet Earth. In June, 2014, he was a panelist at a world conference in Winnipeg entitled Holding
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http://www.planetinperil.ca/2012/09/field-of-nightmares.html
Here's part of it: "Extensive research by Agriculture Canada, published in 2009, showed that glyphosate was the most significant agronomic factor in incidences of fusarium head blight (FHB) and common root rot (CRR) in wheat and barley crops. Both FHB and CRR are considered serious cereal crop diseases in places like eastern Saskatchewan (where the trials were conducted). Fusarium toxins have been known to cause livestock to vomit and refuse food, and their fungi create more severe diseases for other crops. While tillage practices were also a contributing factor, the research concludes that 'previous glyphosate use was consistently associated with higher FHB levels' and 'significantly increased' the risk of plant diseases."
A few days ago, the farm newspaper, the Western Producer, published a story with the headline "Durum Acres on the Canadian Prairies Fall Prey to Fusarium - Fields that once grew profitable durum no longer do so because of fusarium, leaving some to speculate that prairie durum may go the way of the dodo bird and the dinosaur."
http://www.producer.com/…/utm_source=Western+Producer&utm_c…
Not surprisingly, the paper makes no mention of the Roundup-fusarium connection. I say not surprisingly because it has long been evident that their coverage is often coloured by the fact they are mega-advertisers for the agri-chemical companies which make products like Roundup.
And policy-makers in government and industry seem not to care about science - just about market forces and profits for the "mega-corps." Meanwhile, chemical farming carries on its merry way.