Impact of glyphosate-resistant sugar beet

Abstract

Glyphosate-resistant (GR) sugar beet became commercially available to US sugar beet growers in 2008 and was rapidly adopted. Prior to the availability of GR sugar beet, growers would commonly make 3–5 herbicide applications. This often resulted in some crop injury, but was accepted to reduce the impact of weeds. In addition, non-GR sugar beet was cultivated 1–3 times and often followed by hand weeding. The introduction of GR sugar beet drastically reduced the complexity of weed management. Concerns about GR weeds in the United States also apply to sugar beet growers. Changes in weed management strategies will be required to keep this technology. Sugar beet is arguably one of the most suitable crops for GR technology because: (1) none of the herbicides registered for use in this crop was very effective without risking crop injury; (2) sugar beet cannot be grown in the same field year after year owing to disease concerns and thus requires a 3–4 year rotation; (3) pollen-mediated gene flow is negligible from the sugar beet crop because it is a biennial and harvested before it flowers; (4) the processing of harvested roots to extract the sucrose rapidly degrades the DNA in the extracted raw juice and subsequent refining so that no DNA is present in the finished sugar; (5) studies have shown that processed GR beet sugar is identical to non-GR beet sugar, as well as cane sugar. © 2016 Society of Chemical Industry.