I’ve got some amazing news. You may have heard it. It’s just breaking recently. The announcement went out 3rd June 2020, but I want to give you the impact of it. The courts–the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals–in a three-judge panel ruled that the EPA‘s approval of Dicamba herbicide (and I’ll explain why this is so huge) was wrong. They blasted the EPA for incredible negligence and said no one can use Dicamba.
Now, to put this into perspective, Roundup has been driving the motors of Monsanto for years. Monsanto was bought by Bayer, and it was purchased at a ridiculous time because not only was there a ruling that it (Roundup) could cause cancer but also there was an enormous amount of weeds developing resistance to the chief poison in Roundup, called glyphosate.
Monsanto developed new seeds for cotton and soybean crops that will be resistant not only to glyphosate (Roundup), but also to Dicamba, because they want to mix the two together, and they figured that the cocktail of these two poisons would end up killing these Roundup-resistant weeds. So this was a huge marketing ploy by Monsanto. And VASF and Cartiva, two other GMO makers, picked it up, and they created the same Dicamba and glyphosate mixture, and they got it approved by the EPA.
People have been using Dicamba for 50 years, but they use it early in the season because Dicamba has the capacity to do what’s called volatilize. It can grow, it can end up in the air and move, and then land on other crops to damage them. And there were a million acres at the last count of crops that were damaged. Actually, I’ve heard much larger numbers–thousands, and thousands of complaints by farmers that their soybean fields, their peach trees, their gardens, their grasses– were damaged by the movement of Dicamba from these cotton and soybean fields.