The Dangers of Roundup Ready Seeds: Background information when reading The Mighty Red

In Louise Erdrich's novel The Mighty Red, a rural community in North Dakota grapples with common problems facing agricultural centers—the bankruptcy of small farms and resulting consolidation into mega-farms; job loss and depopulation; and increasingly brittle economies and ecosystems damaged by monoculture.

In Erdrich's story, the monoculture crop is sugar beets, one of the most nutrient-poor crops on the market. The largest farm in town has also moved to genetically modified Roundup Ready seeds, meaning their crops can be doused repeatedly with Roundup, Monsanto's trade name for the herbicide glyphosate. Roundup is supposed to kill the weeds competing with the beets; the problem is that the chemicals kill all other insect and animal life and turn the soil into a barren wasteland—dirt so empty of nutrients and structure that, in a memorable scene in the novel, it can't even absorb a few drops of beer. The desertification of the landscape they rely on is a metaphor ...