ST. LOUIS — The trucks were at his family farm when Barry Bean got the news.
Deliveries of the weedkiller dicamba, plus the crop seeds engineered to withstand it, had already pulled into the farm’s loading dock. Then the judge’s ruling came down: Dicamba was barred from usage across the U.S.
Bean paused the deal at the last minute, he said. But he doesn’t know what to do now.
“The timing could not be much worse,” said Bean, whose family plants cotton, soybeans and other crops on thousands of acres in southeast Missouri’s Bootheel region. “Everything is on hold. Everyone is trying to get more information about if there will be an appeal and what the odds are of a stay.”
A federal judge’s decision in Arizona last week to block the controversial drift-prone weedkiller dicamba — sold by three leading manufacturers, Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta — from being sprayed on soybeans and cotton has generated a spectrum of cheers and criticism. But perhaps most of all, it has sparked gridlock and uncertainty throughout the agriculture industry as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers how to respond, the companies consider appeals and farmers wonder if exceptions will be made this time as they have been in the past.
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Southeast Missouri farmers are scrambling “back to the drawing board,” said Bean. Herbicide and planting decisions for the coming season are usually made from October to December, in the months immediately following the last harvest.
“Here we are in mid-February and we’ve already done a lot of the groundwork,” Bean said.
Farmers already have seed and dicamba “stacked up in their shop,” he said.
By dollar amount, the financial stakes of the ruling might be greatest for companies like German conglomerate Bayer, whose North American crop science division is headquartered in Creve Coeur. The company sells dicamba-based spray and dicamba-tolerant seeds, called Xtend, introduced by Monsanto before it was purchased by Bayer.
Herbicide sales are a multibillion-dollar business for Bayer, accounting for about 13% of the company’s overall revenue — and 31% of its crop science division’s revenue — in the third quarter of 2023.
Much of that revenue comes from sales of other weedkillers. But weeds have been developing a resistance to Monsanto’s long-dominant herbicide, Roundup, and settlement costs have been soaring amid lawsuits alleging that the product causes cancer. The company has already paid about $10 billion to settle more than 100,000 cases, and analysts at Chicago financial services firm Morningstar expect that amount could double.
Bayer, and Monsanto before it, had been positioning dicamba as a successor, introducing seeds engineered to resist the chemical.
But in recent years, farmers have alleged that the product doesn’t stay on the fields on which it is sprayed, instead drifting to other fields, sparking reports of damage to millions of acres of crops.
And as farmers spray more dicamba on fields, some have said they’ve felt pressure to adopt seeds that can tolerate the chemical, in order to shield themselves from that drift.
More than 75% of all cotton acreage in the U.S. now uses dicamba-tolerant seed varieties, according to the National Cotton Council, which denounced the recent ruling and echoed that it comes “at an especially problematic time of the year as many producers have already made their cropping decisions, secured seed, and are doing preparatory field work.”
Farmers like Bean argue that dicamba is a needed tool in the fight against weeds. Bad outbreaks of Roundup-resistant weeds like pigweed can dent cotton yields by 20% to 60%, he said, and diminish the quality of the product that remains. In worst-case scenarios, pigweed can overwhelm fields entirely.
Yet continued problems from dicamba drift carry their own price tag. Damage has been reported across millions of acres of farmland in recent years, affecting crops ranging from soybeans, valued at $510 per acre, according to the Arizona court ruling, to peaches, valued at $7,300 an acre.
Some farmers have already moved on from dicamba, tired of fighting with neighboring farmers when the weedkiller drifts onto other fields, or weary of continued regulatory and legal uncertainty — dicamba herbicides briefly faced a court-ordered block in 2020, and some states have imposed individual restrictions.
“The area that I’m in, a lot of people have gone away from it anyways,” said Tyler Mudd, a farmer and seed dealer in Monroe City, in northeast Missouri. “I think guys had kind of seen that on the wall the past few years.”
He knows there is hand-wringing by farmers in other parts of the state, particularly in places like the Bootheel that also support cotton production.
But not in Monroe City.
“No one,” Mudd said, “has been asking for Xtend here.”
Annika Merrilees of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.