Dicamba is issue today at Capitol

Monsanto suing to prevent cutoff

Arkansas isn’t the only state restricting the use of dicamba, but so far it is the only one facing the courtroom wrath of Monsanto, the St. Louis-based seed and chemical company.

A Legislative Council subcommittee will consider the proposed ban at 1 p.m. today. With the panel’s approval, the state Plant Board can immediately file the rules change with the secretary of state’s office and make it effective.

Monsanto has asked Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza for preliminary and permanent injunctions against the April 16-Oct. 31 spraying ban on a herbicide that is central to the company’s new Xtend system of dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton.

Monsanto is investing nearly $1 billion in a dicamba-production plant in Luling, La., and wants to have its Xtend soybeans on about half of the nation’s 90 million acres of soybeans next year. In Arkansas, Xtend soybeans were on about half of the state’s 3 million acres of beans this year.

Monsanto has asked Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza for preliminary and permanent injunctions against the April 16-Oct. 31 spraying ban on a herbicide that is central to the company’s new Xtend system of dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton.

The April 16 cutoff date, Monsanto says in its lawsuit, is arbitrary, conflicts with federal law on commerce and isn’t based on science.

Not long after the Plant Board’s vote Nov. 8 in favor of the April 16 cutoff date, Missouri Agriculture Secretary Chris Chinn set two geographic-based cutoff dates for spraying Engenia, a dicamba made by BASF: June 1 for the 10 counties that make up Missouri’s boot heel and July 15 for the rest of the state.

On Monday, Chinn set the same cutoff dates for dicamba products made by Monsanto and DuPont.

“Any cutoff date, really, is arbitrary,” Scott Partridge, a Monsanto vice president, said Monday. “Now, June 1 and July 15 [in Missouri] are still better than in Arkansas. There’s no significant data to support any cutoff date.”

No hearing dates in Monsanto’s lawsuit have been set, and a response by the attorney general’s office, which is representing the Plant Board, hasn’t yet been filed. Scott Trotter, a Little Rock attorney representing Monsanto, filed nearly 60 exhibits last week in a motion for a preliminary injunction.

North Dakota Agricultural Commissioner Doug Goehring has said he will prohibit dicamba’s in-crop use after June 30 and will set a temperature cutoff of 86 degrees to limit the potential for the herbicide to move to susceptible crops.

Monsanto has objected to that date but hasn’t sued.

Partridge wouldn’t promise similar lawsuits against those states. “The last thing we want to do is enter into litigation,” he said.

In Minnesota, a specially appointed task force has recommended a cutoff of spraying whenever temperatures hit 85 degrees.

MFA Inc., a farmer-owned cooperative of some 45,000 farmers in Missouri and other Midwestern states, said it will restrict dicamba’s use even more. MFA said last week it will no longer spray dicamba once soybeans hit the R1 growth stage, or just as plants begin to flower and are at high risk for dicamba damage.

Partridge said the company also opposes temperature restrictions. “They make no sense at all,” he said. “There is no science that supports a temperature cutoff. A weed doesn’t know what day of the month it is.”

Weed scientists in Arkansas and other states say dicamba has the ability to lift off sprayed plants as a vapor and move off target, and that ability, called volatility, increases as heat and humidity rise. They also say there is little difference between older, more volatile formulations of dicamba and the 1-year-old products by Monsanto, DuPont and BASF.

The dicamba problems in extreme southeast Missouri counties mirrored those in its closest Arkansas neighbors, Mississippi and Craighead counties, the source of about one-third of the 985 dicamba complaints in Arkansas this year.

Soybeans that are not dicamba-tolerant, as well as fruits, vegetables, peanuts, backyard gardens and ornamental shrubs and trees, were reportedly damaged throughout the summer as farmers sprayed the herbicide across their dicamba-tolerant beans and cotton. Monsanto developed the dicamba-tolerant crops as weeds grew resistant to glyphosate, better known as Monsanto’s Roundup.

Monsanto has said errors by applicators — not volatility — caused most of the problems this summer in Arkansas and some 23 other soybean-producing states.

Additional training, the company says, will correct those problems.

Missouri and other states have been able to impose restrictions with relative ease compared with Arkansas, usually a decision solely by their agriculture commissioners.

The Arkansas law that governs the operations of boards and commissions requires a series of maneuvers.

The proposed ban got its start with the appointment of a special dicamba task force. The group met twice in August and, in a splintered vote, proposed a cutoff date. A Plant Board subcommittee on Sept. 12 voted for a cutoff date, a recommendation backed by the full board on Sept. 21. By law, the board then opened the proposal to public comment, from Oct. 1-30, and held a required public hearing and final vote on Nov. 8.

Even a 120-day emergency ban on dicamba approved in the middle of this summer by the Plant Board — and backed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson — took 18 days to be put into place.

“That’s a rather complex process that, by its nature, when you look at it, becomes very political,” Partridge said.

Of some 2,300 dicamba-related complaints in the nation this year, nearly 1,000 were in Arkansas, Partridge noted. “I will draw a direct connection between the nature of the process and the experience Arkansas had,” he said.

As the spraying season — and complaints — wound down in October, the federal Environmental Protection Agency mandated special training for dicamba users for 2018. Farmers also will be required to keep more detailed records on what they sprayed, and when.

Because of the questions surrounding dicamba, the EPA in 2016 approved a federal label for the new formulations only for two years. Those labels expire Nov. 9, although the agency has said it can stop the herbicide’s use if problems persist at “unacceptable” levels before then.