It was only a matter of time.

When Monsanto patented glyphosate — better known under its trade name Roundup — in the 1970s, it was a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough for farmers. Glyphosate was a completely new form of weedkiller. Spray it on a field and it knocked out a variety of weeds without, it seemed, harming humans much at all (that is as long as you don’t eat a pretty good dose of it or get it in your eyes).

Perfect, right?  Not exactly. The problem was that Roundup killed just about any growing plant, crops as well as weeds. You had to spray it carefully and at the right time.

So Monsanto brewed up a second bit of magic: glyphosate-resistant crop strains. Now you could grow Monsanto corn, for instance, and spray it with Monsanto herbicide, killing the weeds but leaving the corn untouched. Monsanto not only sold the weedkiller and the weedkiller-resistant crops, but also made sure you had to buy new seed every year. You have to admire a brilliant corporate strategy when you see one.

Great science, good marketing, and farmers bought in by the millions of acres. The system was easy, effective, and even had some ecological benefits: You could now, for instance, spray weeds to death instead of plowing them under (the old way of weeding a few thousand acres) which cut back on plowing, which helped conserve soil.

Perfect, right?  Not exactly.  Spraying millions of acres with Roundup killed all the weeds susceptible to glyphosate — and made a welcome environment for any weed that somehow developed a resistance to the spray.  Of course, some weeds took the challenge. We are now seeing the first glyphosate-resistant weed strains invading fields across several states. Superweeds, some people are calling them. Here’s a story for you, from today’s Iowa Independent: “Resistant weeds threaten to cripple Iowa’s agriculture economy.”

This is  just the beginning. In India reports of insects resistant to different genetically engineered crops are, well, cropping up. Looks like the same broad process at work here that you find with antibiotic resistance in bacteria: zap nature with enough of a killer chemical, and nature will develop strains that defeat the poison. That’s how evolution works, folks.