Lawsuit: Blame Monsanto for widespread Kansas crop losses

A new lawsuit alleges that Monsanto knew that a potent herbicide would harm crops that weren’t resistant, but sold a product based on it anyway. As a result, potentially thousands of acres of crops that weren’t resistant to the herbicide died, the lawsuit says. The legal complaint was filed by 4-R Farms, which lost 200 acres of soybeans. The herbicide, dicamba, has been used in the United States since the late 1960s, but only since 2017 in so-called over-the-top applications where it is sprayed on fields after the soybeans are already growing. It is the basis of  Monsanto’s XtendiMax herbicide, which is meant to help farmers control weeds, including pigweed. It’s designed to be used on genetically modified soybean and cotton crops created to be tolerant to weed killers. The herbicide can reportedly drift, though, landing on nearby fields and destroying non-GMO crops. Monsanto isn’t the only company that sells dicamba-based products. The Kansas lawsuit also names chemical company BASF as a co-defendant. BASF is facing its own mounting pile of lawsuits over dicamba.