Farmers' Fight With Dicamba
Dicamba is a powerful and volatile herbicide that has a tendency to drift, damaging other farmers' crops. For this reason, dicamba was not approved for on-crop use until late 2016, after Monsanto and German chemical company BASF developed new formulations of the herbicide that would, hopefully, be less prone to drift. But that obviously didn't work.
Dicamba has really taken a real toll on farmers. In Arkansas, hundreds of farmers have suffered from dicamba drift, forcing them to file complaints about dicamba with the Arkansas Plant Board. As of this month, those complaints near a thousand in number.
It was in June that the Arkansas Plant Board approved a ban of the sale and use of the herbicide dicamba for soybean and cotton crops. Missouri followed suit, and has also banned the sale and use of dicamba.
Arkansas farmers have also filed class action lawsuits in federal courts in both Missouri and Arkansas, and have named as defendants dicamba makers Monstanto, BASF, DuPont and Pioneer.
The products at issue in those cases are Monsanto's Roundup Ready 2 Xtend Soybeans, Bollgard II XtendFlex cotton, which are used with dicamba herbicides such as Monsanto's XtendiMax® herbicide with VaporGrip® Technology, BASF's Eugenia herbicide, and DuPont's FeXapan herbicide Plus VaproGrip® Technology.
Those damaged by these dicamba problems are farmers that paid for the more expensive seeds and the technology, farmers suffering crop damages due to drift, and even applicators of the herbicide that followed instructions, but have had claims filed against them.
Poynter Law Group and Steel, Wright, Gray & Hutchinson have been involved in agricultural issues and representing Arkansas farmers for over a decade. Scott Poynter served on the leadership committees in Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, and the Genetically Modified Corn Litigation.
Please contact us if you have suffered any of these dicamba problems, because we want to help.
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