Peach farm wins big in dicamba case against Monsanto and BASF

Valentine’s Day was indeed a sweet day for Bader Farms, a peach farm in Missouri that claimed that dicamba products by Monsanto/Bayer and BASF drifted onto its property and injured 20,000 of its peach trees over 700 acres.  A federal jury agreed and awarded the farm $15 million in compensatory damages.  The following day, the jury gave the farm another $250 million in punitive damages against Bayer and BASF, bringing the total award to $265 million.

In 2016, Bader Farms was the first to file a dicamba drift lawsuit against Monsanto.  A summary of the lawsuit from our partner, the National Agricultural Law Center, explains that the farm’s claim alleged widespread damage to the peach orchards and a multi-million dollar financial loss. At the center of Bader Farms’ original complaint was Monsanto’s genetically modified Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans and Bollgard II Xtend cotton seeds (“Xtend crops”), dicamba-resistant seeds that Bader Farms alleged were released without an accompanying EPA-approved dicamba herbicide in 2015 and 2016. The farm argued that by selling the Xtend crop seeds without a corresponding herbicide, it was foreseeable to Monsanto that farmers would use old, highly volatile, drift-prone dicamba that had a strong chance of damaging neighboring crops. 

Bader Farms later added BASF as a defendant to the case and also added new complaints for dicamba-related damage it suffered during the 2017 growing season. Bader Farms stated that Monsanto and BASF had worked together to manufacture, market, and sell dicamba-based products that they knew would cause harm. 

The jury in the federal lawsuit ruled in favor of Bader Farms on all counts.  Specifically, the jury concluded that Monsanto was negligent by releasing dicamba-tolerant seeds before releasing the herbicide.  The jury also determined that both Monsanto and BASF were negligent because they issued new dicamba products that drifted off-target although the companies claimed that the products were less likely to drift.  Important to the punitive damage award, the jury found that Monsanto and BASF had engaged in a “conspiracy to create an ecological disaster to increase profits.”

The Bader Farms case is the first of many dicamba-based cases against Monsanto/Bayer and BASF, combined last year into Multi-District Litigation involving both a Crop Damage Class Action Master Complaint and a Master Antitrust Action Complaint.  For an excellent review of the dicamba cases, see the National Agricultural Law Center’s series on “The Deal with Dicamba,” available at https://nationalaglawcenter.org/the-deal-with-dicamba-part-three/.