Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 2/18/20

Bayer's legal troubles over a portfolio of weedkillers the company inherited when it bought Monsanto worsened over the weekend. A seven-member jury awarded a Missouri peach farmer $265 million in a case against Bayer and BASF that alleged the herbicide dicamba ruined thousands of his trees in 2015 and 2016 when it drifted from neighboring cotton fields planted with biotech seeds resistant to the chemical.

The lawsuit brought by Bader Farms Inc. is the first involving dicamba to go to trial. There are about 35 other cases filed by farmers in Illinois, Arkansas, Missouri and other states, the Wall Street Journal reports. These cases allege that Bayer and BASF launched a new dicamba-resistant soybean ahead of the EPA approving a new version of the herbicide designed to minimize drift, giving farmers an incentive to illegally spray older forms of the chemical.

The companies have largely attributed crop damage from dicamba to farmers' own mismanagement. The EPA by the end of this year is expected to decide whether farmers can continue spraying the herbicide.

Separately, Bayer has lost three cases over its most lucrative herbicide, Roundup , which tens of thousands of plaintiffs have alleged caused their cancer. The company has appealed those rulings and continues to defend the safety of the glyphosate-based product, which the EPA and other scientific agencies have signed off on.