A Tough Row to Hoe
SCOTUS Roundup decision pre-empts day in court
This week the Supreme Court has begun clearing its docket, releasing a spate of rulings on a handful of highly-anticipated cases. One verdict, Monsanto Company v. Durnell may fall under the radar – unless you’re a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) advocate, or a row-crop farmer. Nevertheless, it’s one that has real-world impacts for Iowans, and much of the country.
The suit was brought by John Durnell, a Missourian who used Roundup, the most widely-used herbicide in the U.S., in local parks and public spaces for two decades. He contended that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and accused Monsanto of failing to include a product health warning label.
Durnell convinced a jury in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis to award him $1.25 million in damages. The Missouri Court of Appeals let this verdict stand. However, Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and biotech company that purchased Monsanto in 2018, countered that a cancer warning is unnecessary since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t classify glyphosate as a carcinogen. It appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
Bayer argued that glyphosate is safe when used according to the label, and said states cannot set their own labeling standards for herbicides. The company has actively been pursuing a $7.25 billion class settlement of about 65,000 similar lawsuits. It’s not so much an admission of wrong-doing, but a strategy to condense interminable years of litigation into annual payments over the next 21 years.
Earlier this year, President Trump, invoking the Defense Production Act, threw his hefty weight behind Bayer, signing an executive order to “fortify” the domestic production of glyphosate, and protect manufacturers from liability. MAHA supporters were irate, since HHS Secretary Kennedy’s May 2025 report argued the need for more research to address concerns about glyphosate as well as atrazine, another weed-killer. However, by September, Kennedy appeared to back off these concerns in his follow-up Make America Healthy Again report.
Thursday’s Supreme Court’s verdict, siding with Bayer (Monsanto) set loose a MAHA hornet’s nest. However, it’s a legal ruling, not a scientific or medical verdict about whether glyphosate is a carcinogen. The 7-2 majority found that Monsanto can’t be held liable under state law, since state law cannot supersede Federal law, and Federal law under FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act), doesn’t require a warning label on Roundup.
Precautions Advised Early On
Glyphosate has been on the market since the early 1970s. Full disclosure: I was a writer at Successful Farming for the following three decades, and married a farmer in 1984. I never wrote about the efficacy of Roundup, or any crop protection product. In fact, I co-wrote a January 1986 article in which I participated in a field project demonstrating the effectiveness of wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) when spot-spraying Round-up while riding on a “bean-bar.”
We launched the article with these words, “No one really knows the long-term effects of exposure to most agricultural chemicals. . . Even highly toxic chemicals can be safe to use, if you suit up for safety.” To help convince our readers to wear PPE, we added a fluorescent agent to Roundup, spot-sprayed soybeans in the field, and then worked with an environmental scientist at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station at Rutgers University to photograph exposures under ultraviolet light, comparing the protective effect of wearing rubber gloves and a disposable Tyvek fabric garment during application.
Our 1986 article referenced preliminary research by the National Cancer Institute and the universities of Iowa and Minnesota indicating that “farmers who used pesticides in the 1950s and 1960s may run a greater risk of certain kinds of cancers, particularly leukemia and lymphoma.” The good news was that data indicated people who took precautions, such as wearing PPE seemed at lower risk. We concluded the article with this advice: “Read your pesticide labels.”
Flooded with Lawsuits
However, that advice wouldn’t resolve any concerns in this case. EPA maintains it has not found enough evidence to identify glyphosate as a carcinogen. So, there’s no health warning label.
In fact, studies over the past two decades have produced contradictory results concerning Roundup’s safety. Most studies have not shown a statistically significant association between human cancer and glyphosate. However, in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as a ‘probable carcinogen to humans”. There’s also was controversy about the possible influence of a Bayer employee in one “ghost-written” research study.
However, my gold standard is the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), launched in 1993 and funded by the National Cancer Institute. I reported on its findings for over two decades. Although the AHS found that farmers have fewer cancers overall than general public, there are associations (not correlations) with specific cancers. In its summary of research findings from 2015 to the present, AHS states, “Glyphosate was not associated with overall cancer risk.”
Approximately 90% of the lawsuits filed against Bayer are brought by residential users of lawn and garden products. Bayer pledged to remove all glyphosate-based products in the residential lawn and garden market in the U.S. by 2023, and glyphosate no longer is an ingredient today. Bayer has threatened to withdraw Roundup from U.S. agricultural markets if the lawsuits continue.
I’m surprised there are so many glyphosate litigants who are nonfarmers, likely only using it on their small lawns or acreages. (Granted farmers are a small percent of the U.S. population.) Are farmers more cautious about chemical use, and more likely to use PPE? Or would farmers, who use more than one chemical, have a difficult time determining which crop protection product caused their cancer diagnosis?
Lobbying for Legislative Remedies
However, Bayer hasn’t confined its damage-control campaign to state and federal courts. It’s also actively pursuing legislation at the state level to shield it from liability. To date, Georgia, North Dakota, and Kentucky have passed shield laws, stating that an EPA approved label satisfies all state “duty to warn” requirements. This legislation has been debated in Iowa for the past two years, and last year the Iowa Senate passed it. However, it stalled in the House.
Earlier this year, the U.S. House stripped a set of controversial provisions from the farm bill aimed at protecting pesticide manufacturers by limiting state and local governments’ ability to include labeling of pesticides that diverges from Federal law. The Senate bill to date does not include this provision, and the bill will be marked up after July Fourth. No doubt lobbyists will be working overtime this summer.
Be Careful What You Wish For
I’m not writing this to defend glyphosate, or any agricultural chemical. None should be used casually. They’re designed to kill a wide swath of plants and vegetation. But crop protection is a complex topic with nuances that many critics may not consider.
Bean bars, and “walkin’ beans” disappeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s when genetically-engineered glyphosate-tolerant soybean seed was developed, allowing farmers to spray without damaging the crop. It also eliminated exposures to the skin and eyes of bean-bar riders spot-spraying weeds.
What if glyphosate were taken off the agricultural market? Weeds are ubiquitous, and they cause crop loss. Using Roundup also enables farmers to avoid relying on soil tillage to remove weeds, resulting in less soil and fertilizer washing off fields after heavy rains, and limiting soil erosion.
What other ag chemicals would farmers turn to? Are other alternatives safer? EPA has determined acetochlor has carcinogenic potential. Another option, paraquat, is toxic to birds, and has been banned in about 70 other countries. On the other hand, is our reliance on Roundup blocking development of newer, safer products?
Farmers have few product choices, due to the concentration of crop protection companies. It’s difficult to overstate how much agriculture relies on Roundup. It certainly would be a tough row to hoe without it. Organic farming isn’t feasible for many operations. Farmers also remain on the front line of potential health impacts.
Mixing Politics and Science
Bayer/Monsanto is not entirely off the hook. It still faces other lawsuits that extend beyond failure-to-warn claims, and this verdict won’t impact the on-going $7.2 million class action settlement.
Still it’s likely that thousands of pending cases will be thrown out, based on the Supreme Court decision. Denying individuals the right to be heard in court seems almost unAmerican. What is the recourse for citizens to have their day in court? Scientific research is notoriously slow and deliberative, and cancers typically require 20 years to develop. However, if you look online, you won’t have any trouble finding attorneys actively recruiting clients to file Roundup lawsuits (think ambulance-chasers).
What if EPA is wrong about glyphosate’s health risks, or even worse, is being bought off? Can a Federally regulated agency permanently shield a corporation from accountability? Does this set a dangerous precedent for other industries or companies to make this same argument?
Only a few years ago, the Biden administration urged EPA to launch new investigations into Roundup, and wrote an amicus brief asserting that federal pesticide/insecticide laws don’t pre-empt state level failure-to-warn lawsuits.
The SCOTUS decision may hover over Iowa’s midterm horizon. Iowa’s high cancer rates, its status as an agricultural powerhouse, Bayer’s heavy-handed corporate power plays, and the betrayal felt by MAHA influencers all are highly volatile ingredients likely to lead to combustible combinations – and strange political bedfellows. Both gubernatorial candidates already have been critical of the SCOTUS decision.
Cancer isn’t a red or blue issue. It’s a complex issue couched in precisely-defined terms like correlation and association. Mixing the potent expectations of Iowa voters into the petri dish of politics isn’t likely to produce a science-based solution.
Cheryl Tevis writes as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Learn more about the group and consider becoming subscribers — for free or for modest fees, your choice — by using the link below here. Your support keeps us writing for you!
Stupid is as stupid does. Only 3 are intelligent!
Cheryl…thank you for a balanced look at a difficult issue. Control of weeds is such a huge issue in all of agriculture. Sometimes it seems that non-farmers cannot comprehend that non-chemical weed control takes a tremendous amount of labor and that ag labor is in extremely short supply. I was just recalling the 1970’s and 1980’s with a classmate. We ran rotary hoes once over the row crops, then two or three trips with the cultivator…not to mention all the pre-plant tillage: plow or chisel, disk, field conditioners/harrows. Far more fuel and labor per acre than no-till methods. These trade-offs aren’t well understood.
Of course we all need more and safer alternatives. But we do not see a huge influx of people running into non-chemical farming for a reason: scale and profitability.
Politicians may simplify these issues but they are not at all simple on the farm level.