Farmers Claim Monsanto, BASF Product Destroyed Crops

New to ClassAction.org? Read our Newswire Disclaimer

Monsanto Company, BASF SE, and its American subsidiary are facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a group of farmers who claim the defendants destroyed their crops. The farmers allege that many weeds have become resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s popular herbicide Roundup. As a result, the need arose for a new herbicide containing dicamba, which Monsanto and BASF partnered together to develop, according to the suit. The result was a “dicamba crop system” that included dicamba-resistant seeds and a dicamba herbicide product to be used on the resistant crops, the complaint says.

The plaintiffs claim the genetically modified seeds – soybeans and cotton seeds branded as the Xtend Crop System – were sold in early 2015. The new herbicide meant to be used on the seeds, however, had not yet been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, the suit says. The herbicide was allegedly not approved until “well after” the 2016 growing season. Consequently, farmers were left with no choice but to use an older, “more volatile” dicamba-based product on their crops that tended to drift, meaning it would spread through the air to non-target sites that could be several miles away from the resistant fields. The plaintiffs claim the use of the defendants’ older product destroyed thousands of acres of farmland across the United States. They argue that they purchased the dicamba crop system with the expectation that a less volatile herbicide would be available to minimize drift, but that the defendants’ control of the market forced them to use an inferior product that killed their crops.