There is often strong public dissent to innovations, typically fanned by those who lose out economically, but the reasons they promulgate are not economic and are targeted to public emotions. Agriculture has some problems that have been intractable to present technologies and we have no choice but to utilize new technologies to overcome them. These include developing new herbicides that affect multiple targets, new selective synergists and safeners, transgenic herbicide resistant plants that will not have the transgenes expressed in related weeds, using transposons or gene drives to disseminate deleterious genes in weeds, sterile pollen, enhanced-virulence biocontrol agents with sustaining formulations. These might be workable for multiple resistant Amaranthus and Echinochloa species, parasitic weeds, Phalaris in wheat as well as weedy rice in rice. Per force, most of the innovations must originate in the public sector, by weed scientists who have a broad training in basic sciences, in collaboration with experts from other fields.