Why do we recommend glyphosate based herbicide for native meadow/prairie Preparation?
Organic Site Preperation vs. Herbicide Treatments
The Controversy over Glyphosate
Interestingly enough, solarization is often considered an organic method, but the plastic required to solarize would take hundreds of years to fully biodegrade, while the glyphosate requires 60 to 120 days for full degradation depending on the conditions. How solarization, hundreds or thousands of square feet of plastic, became seen as the more environmentally friendly option is due to the general lack of understanding of herbicides from people outside of the environmental restoration profession combined with a sea of damning media around glyphosate. Speaking as an Enviromental restorationist, I don’t know the professional details of an Accountant or a Banker or a Grade School Teacher. Herbicide usage is professional knowledge typically collected through the studying process required to become licensed to use herbicides commercially or agriculturally, and this knowledge is deepened by field experience and field experiments. As an Environmental Restoration Professional who’s also licensed to apply herbicides commercially and agriculturally; there are pretty toxic herbicides out there, like Dicamba, 2,4-D, and even Triclopyr is fairly toxic and persistent. But glyphosate is the least toxic of the bunch and it's half-life of 30 to 60 days has to be considered more environmentally friendly than the effects of repeated tilling opening up the soil to mass erosion or solarization plastic use. This is a confusing issue since most people's profession is not land management and restoration, and it is generally made more confusing by the common technique the media uses of sensationalizing anti-Roundup stories and environmental advocates, often in the service of “clickbait” style articles. If you hire a professional who's specialized in native habitat creation, and who does larger projects; they're going to recommend glyphosate and they should have the know-how to be able to apply it safely.
A Major Difference in the Quantity of Usage Determines Environmental Impact
A simple truth - the negative environmental impacts of glyphosate comes from industrial farming usage – not environmental restoration usage or homeowner usage.
The farming and industrial usages of glyphosate is annual usage, often multiple times a year, over hundreds of millions of acres of cropland and roadsides with no projected end in sight. This is how glyphosate ends up in groundwater and rivers where it takes longer to biodegrade and can impact amphibians negatively – specifically the surfactants used with glyphosate. We’ve outlined an alternative to this destructive agricultural system in our book; Native Plant Agriculture Vol. 1: Responding to Biodiversity loss and Climate Change with Large Scale Ecological Restoration, published 2/14/2020.
Creating a native meadow or prairie requires typically 1 to 3 100% or less coverage applications as opposed to the year after year mass usage in agriculture. These applications are sometimes followed by a couple of follow up applications of less than 15% of the square footage for missed spots or glyphosate resistant species. This is much different than how it's used in agriculture as after a grassland planting or a native meadow is established there will be little to no use of glyphosate after the first 3 years of establishment. In 2014, U.S. farmers sprayed enough glyphosate to apply .8 pounds of the active ingredient - glyphosate, per every acre of U.S. cultivated cropland. As stated before, agricultural usage is over hundreds of millions of acres multiple times a year, every year, with no end in sight. This type of usage of glyphosate deserves much of the negative media surrounding the issue, undoubtedly.
Studies show that residential use of glyphosate is minor and insignificant; 90.3% is used for agriculture, and 9.7% is used non-agriculturally. The majority of non-agricultural use (9.7%) is industrial use such as roadside management, powerline management, and commercial usage. The most commonly used herbicide by homeowners; which is much more toxic than glyphosate, is actually 2, 4-D which is used to kill the broadleaf weeds inside of lawns. In the USA, between 2001 and 2007 glyphosate used by the home and garden market sector only amounted to 1.2% to 2.4% of the total amount of glyphosate used. This percentage will likely steadily decrease as farmers continue to use more glyphosate each year.
How to Use Glyphosate Safely
It’s pretty simple to use glyphosate based herbicides safely. Here’s a few guidelines from a licensed professional: 1. Wear disposable latex gloves 2. Wash hands and forearms after using the herbicide. 3. Use a blue dye to avoid over spraying; blue pond dye is cheapest. 4. Don’t touch your face with the latex gloves after putting them on. 5. Spray on calm-winded days. 6. Spray on days of over 65 degrees or for winter weeds 55 degrees that have no rain forecasted within 36 hours. 7. Use Glyphosate formulated for wetland or riverside usage within 20 feet of water ways; one goes by the name of Rodeo. 8. Mix a 41% Glyphosate concentrate at just 4 ounces per gallon for lawn and clover treatment to prepare for a native meadow, and 5 ounces per gallon for noxious weed treatment. 9. Keep foot traffic and pet traffic off of the sprayed area for at least 8 hours after spraying or until the application has visibly dried onto the vegetation. 10. Wear Pants while using herbicide and wash the pants directly after herbicide applications. 11. Hire a professional landscaper to treat the area if the job feels too large or too far out of your comfort zone.