This Is How Badly Monsanto Wants Farmers to Spray Its Problematic Herbicide

The drama surrounding Monsanto’s latest blockbuster genetically modified soybean product grinds on. The enormous seed/pesticide company announced recently that it’s offering farmers a cash reward to spray its proprietary version of an herbicide called dicamba, so long as they spray it on Monsanto’s soybeans that are engineered to tolerate it. Dicamba, of course, is the very herbicide that caused huge stirs in the farm belt in both 2016 and 2017 because of its apparent difficulty staying in place.

December 12, 2017 | Source: Mother Jones | by Tom Philpott

Drama around dicamba keeps swirling.

The drama (background here) surrounding Monsanto’s latest blockbuster genetically modified soybean product grinds on. The enormous seed/pesticide company announced recently that it’s offering farmers a cash reward to spray its proprietary version of an herbicide called dicamba, so long as they spray it on Monsanto’s soybeans that are engineered to tolerate it. Dicamba, of course, is the very herbicide that caused huge stirs in the farm belt in both 2016 and 2017 because of its apparent difficulty staying in place.

Reuters reports that Monsanto’s XtendiMax dicamba-based herbicide “costs about $11 per acre to buy,” That means the rebate, $6 per acre, effectively amounts to a 54 percent discount on the chemical.

Why is Monsanto offering such a sweet deal on its dicamba mix? It’s probably not what the company had in mind when it broke ground on a $975 million expansion of its dicamba plant in Luling, La., earlier this year.

The answer likely lies in the more than 3.6 million acres of non-dicamba-tolerant soybeans that the US Environmental Protection Agency reports were damaged by wayward dicamba applications during the 2017 growing season. In addition, the EPA notes, off-target dicamba hit a variety of fruit and vegetable crops, as well as residential gardens, trees, and shrubs.

A group of state-university weed scientists say that the core of the problem lies in the dicamba compound itself. It easily “volatilizes”—that is, transforms into a gas that can be carried in the wind away from its targeted field. And the volatility problem gets worse after temperatures rise over summer—the very season farmers are supposed to apply it to dicamba-tolerant soybeans as they grow.

Monsanto, for its part, insists that its patented “low-volatility” formulation effectively keeps the compound in place, and any problems in 2017 stemmed from user error—farmers who either failed to follow the product’s complex label or who secretly used a cheaper generic alternative.