Editor’s Note: This installment of “Your No-Till History” expands upon a 1-page article that appeared in June 2022.

Glyphosate (or Roundup), brought to market by Monsanto in the mid 1970s, is a virtually ideal herbicide, says international weed authority Dr. Stephen Powles, and a “once-in-100-years breakthrough” that was “as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease.”

Farmers on the 1974 and 1975 Hawaii trips run by No-Till Farmer saw the new herbicide in research plots. Approved to much anticipation in 1976, farmers suddenly had access to a product that promised to eradicate troublesome weeds —without the plow.

It’s no coincidence that U.S. no-till acres grew 2.5 times in Roundup’s first 10 years and 7-fold by the time the exclusive patent expired in 2000. Its enormous impact on no-till — on yields, income and ability to farm more acres with less fuel, machinery and labor — is difficult to quantify, as is the value of keeping soil in its place and avoiding the runoff of sediment and fertilizer.

Indiana no-tiller and conservationist Ray McCormick continues to staunchly defend glyphosate. 

“It’s going to save the planet because no-till, cover crops and soil health help sequester the carbon, and Roundup made that possible. Roundup and Monsanto have been heroes.”

To tell the history of glyphosate, we turn to a discovery of our own. We located a 59-page transcript from an oral history project sponsored by the Society of Chemical Industry of Wilkes University Chemistry Professor Dr. James J. Bohning’s 1994 interview with glyphosate herbicide patentee John E. Franz of Monsanto. Franz is now 93. 

John E. Franz was the second youngest of six children in his family, raised in Springfield, Ill. His father was manager of a dairy, Sangamon Dairy Products Co., and had only a grade-school education before entering the workforce. His mother was a homemaker, and John would be the only one of the children to pursue a career in science.

Franz attended Springfield Junior College for a year before enrolling at the University of Illinois and then attended the University of Minnesota for his Ph.D. in organic chemistry.

An Impressive Bio

Numerous Monsanto and Bayer (which now owns Monsanto) news releases, coupled with the interview transcript, provide an overview of Franz’ career. 

After completing his doctorate in 1955, Franz accepted a job with Monsanto’s Organic Division (Monsanto didn’t have an Agricultural Division until 1960). There he worked on a variety of projects that included polymer flame-retardants.

In 1967, Franz jumped at a chance to transfer to the new Ag Division because he liked its emphasis on publishing, academic contacts and the freedom to pursue ideas.

“For a year, I studied plant physiology and did basic plant growth studies; no chemistry,” Franz says. “During the year I spent with the biologists and plant physiologists I became convinced that the biorational approach was the direction to move in.”  

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“He tried to get chemists interested in the project, and everybody rejected it. They thought, ‘Dead area! Don’t bother me with this…” – John E. Franz

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For discovering glyphosate (Roundup) as a herbicide in 1970, Franz has been recognized with numerous awards — far outstripping the $5 he got from Monsanto for the first glyphosate patent. Some of the most notable honors include becoming the first recipient of the Queeny Award in 1983, Monsanto’s highest technical award to recognize an invention of commercial success. In 1987, Pres. Ronald Reagan presented Franz with the National Medal of Technology, recognizing Roundup’s impact “upon the production of agricultural food and fiber as well as agricultural practices throughout the world.” He also received the Perkin Medal in 1990 in recognition of his contributions to research and development of applied chemistry.

Farm Chemicals magazine, in its September 1994 100th anniversary edition, named the original Roundup herbicide one of the “Top 10 Products That Changed the Face of Agriculture,” in large measure for enabling and encouraging conservation tillage. Two years later, Monsanto received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development for “pioneering sustainable technologies.” 

Franz retired from Monsanto in 1991 with his name attached to more than 840 U.S. and foreign patents. In 2007, he was inducted into the U.S. Inventor’s Hall of Fame.

Start of Roundup’s Discovery

Franz says the “glyphosate as a herbicide” story began in 1960, 10 years before glyphosate was discovered. “The thing that started all this off was a couple of chemists in the Inorganic Division of Monsanto had developed a new process for making a class of compounds called tertiary aminomethylphosphonic acids. This class of compounds were of interest as sequestering agents, detergents and complexing agents.”

When the chemists found a simple process of making the compounds, the inorganic division cranked them out for testing. 

“A Fellow who ran the plant physiology section of Ag by the name Dr. Philip Hamm was interested in getting these compounds tested for herbicide and plant growth regulating properties. Apparently, at that time, they weren’t being submitted into a general screen, so he collected them and brought them over to Ag and started screening them because he was head of the screening section.”

Franz noted that the inorganic chemists who originally made these compounds were making them as complexing agents. 

“The fact that Hamm had to procure the compounds for ag screening indicated that the inorganic chemists weren’t interested in them as herbicides, and they weren’t even thinking of them in those terms.”

In the screening process, Hamm found two compounds that had interesting perennial herbicidal properties. They were interesting, but weak and not commercial-type products. “Hamm was pretty enthused about it, though, because there weren’t too many compounds that were useful or actually sold for perennial herbicide activity in the early 1960s.”

No Researchers Wanted the Job

“Hamm was always hoping to be able to get a compound of at least 10-fold higher activity. For the next 9 years, from 1960 to 1969, chemists kept cranking out these compounds and having them tested, but they never could find anything better.

“Hamm kept testing the two compounds that were considered leads in the field, trying to reformulate them and do other things that would improve their activity, but he couldn’t get them up to the point where they could be commercially interesting.”

The other researchers all had their own projects going, and here’s Hamm “coming around trying to beat them over the head and put another thing on their agenda,” Franz says. “It turns out, Phil was the type of guy who had hundreds of ideas, most of them bad, but some of them darn good. He just spewed out these ideas, which is good because he wasn’t biased by anything. But he couldn’t convince any of the ag chemists to get interested in the phosphonic acid area of chemistry.

“By 1969, they just about given up hope — at least, all the other people had. Hamm always felt that in the phosphonic acid chemistry area, there was something that was going to be commercial. He didn’t know what, but somebody should keep working in that area, he thought. He went around to various chemists and tried to get them interested in this, and everybody rejected it. They thought, ‘Dead area! Don’t bother me with this.’”

Franz joined the Ag Division in 1967, about the time the program was dying out. “The first thing he did was nab me. I’d had all these other projects going, but he did get me interested — maybe because I didn’t have the biases that the other people had.” The newcomer agreed to take a look and see if he could come up with any ideas.

Franz’ ideas involved other compounds that hadn’t been made and he started some synthesis that was a “total failure.” Proceeding along the same lines, he says, none of these other compounds was any more active than the original ones. 

The No-Till Farmer meetings in Hawaii not only introduced farmers to the new no-till concept, but it also gave them a look at glyphosate in 1974, 2 years before it would be approved for use. Image From Maverick to Mainstream: A History of No-Till Farming

“By early 1970, I was about ready to terminate that project, too, but something told me I ought to at least try it from a different perspective. You know, try to think of some way to approach the problem on a totally different basis than just a chemistry synthesis viewpoint, which is the way chemists usually operate.

“I started thinking in biological terms, instead of synthesis, and I came up with this hypothesis: maybe the lead compounds were metabolized by the plants to produce something common that was more active.”

Franz wrote a hypothetical scheme, which he admitted didn’t look promising, but he started making the metabolites, first with the tertiary aminomethylphosphonic acids and then the secondary ones, which no one at Monsanto had done before.

He had 3-4 secondary acids in his scheme. The first one he made was “deader than a door nail” and showed no activity whatsoever.

Luckily for agriculture, Franz figured that was “par for the course” and kept at it. “I was convinced I was going to complete the synthesis of all the compounds that I had postulated from my hypothesis, so I went on and made the next one.

“The second one was glyphosate, and yes, I was as surprised as everybody else that it was really quite active. It was at least 10 times more active than the lead compounds, so that’s what started the glyphosate program.

“The funny thing is, of all the analogs of glyphosate we’ve made since then — every reasonable one we could think of — none of them are active.”