How Monsanto propagated an unenviable reputation with hubris and herbicide

2017 National Fellow Bartow J. Elmore's book Seed Money was reviewed by the Washington Post.

For decades before its merger with the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer in 2018, Monsanto was the company environmental activists loved to hate. There were good reasons for this antipathy, we learn from historian Bartow J. Elmore’s authoritative new book Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future.

In addition to manufacturing some of the most toxic substances known to science, the St. Louis-based concern unleashed a firestorm of controversy when it introduced genetically modified crops on a massive scale in the mid 1970s, together with the herbicide glyphosate, which it sold as Roundup.

Elmore, an associate professor at Ohio State University, details how the herbicide became the best-selling agricultural chemical in history, dousing the corn, soy and cotton fields of middle America for decades. Farmers liked the fact that they could use it as many times as they needed without damaging the crop, which had been genetically modified to withstand multiple sprayings of the herbicide.