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August hasn’t been a happy month the for the Monsanto PR team. No, I’m not referring to my posts on how Gaza and Mexico don’t need the company’s high-tech seeds-the ones it will supposedly be “feeding the world” with in the not-so-distant future.

Monsanto’s real PR headache involves one of its flagship products very much in the here and now: the herbicide Roundup (chemical name: glyphosate), upon which Monsanto has built a highly profitable empire of “Roundup Ready” GM seeds.

The problem goes beyond the “superweed” phenomenon that I’ve written about recently: the fact that farmers are using so much Roundup, on so much acreage, that weeds are developing resistance to it, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic “pesticide cocktails.”

What Roundup is doing above-ground may be a stroll through the meadow compared to its effect below. According to a USDA scientist Robert Kremer, speaking at a conference last week, Roundup may also be damaging soil-a sobering thought, given that it’s applied to hundreds of millions of acres of prime farmland in the US and South America. Here’s a Reuters account of Kremer’s presentation:

 The heavy use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide appears to be causing harmful changes in soil and potentially hindering yields of the genetically modified crops that farmers are cultivating, a U.S. government scientist said on Friday. Repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, impacts the root structure of plants, and 15 years of research indicates that the chemical could be causing fungal root disease, said Bob Kremer, a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.