Mike Wallace sat in his truck looking at his phone. It was October, the end of the farming season in the Arkansas delta. The soybeans had been harvested, pulled from the fields by combines and poured from auger tubes into the backs of trucks. They were now in barges and train cars, headed for processing into animal feeds, oils, plastics, or any of the myriad other uses for this miracle crop of the Industrial Age.

This was the season when half a year’s labor was balanced in the books and Wallace’s accounts were coming up short. He had lost most of his crop, for the second year now, and his five-thousand-acre farm couldn’t take the hit of another season’s devastation. It wasn’t weather or soil, wind or rain that were at fault. It was a chemical, the herbicide dicamba, and Wallace blamed the man he believed had illegally applied it: Allan Curtis Jones.

Are weeds just an ancient curse on humankind, or can they teach us something?