$400 Million Dicamba Crop Damage Settlement for Soybean Farmers Nationwide

Starting around 2015, tens of thousands of soybean farmers across the Midwest began reporting a pattern of crinkled, cupped leaves and stunted plants on fields that had never been treated with dicamba herbicide. The culprit, investigators found, was the herbicide drifting off neighboring fields planted with Monsanto's new Xtend dicamba-tolerant seeds. Monsanto had released those seeds commercially before a stable, low-volatility formulation of the companion herbicide was ready, and the versions that reached the market were prone to volatilize and travel far beyond the intended spray zone.

Farmers filed complaints with state agriculture departments and the EPA in numbers that Don Downing, an attorney at Gray, Ritter & Graham in St. Louis, described at the time as 'just the tip of the iceberg.' More than 100 lawsuits were eventually consolidated as multidistrict litigation before U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. in the Eastern District of Missouri (MDL No. 2820). Judge Limbaugh appointed Downing to chair the court-designated Plaintiffs' Executive Committee, a multi-firm group responsible for organizing discovery, coordinating depositions across hundreds of claimants, and preparing cases for trial.

The first case to go to a jury, Bader Farms v. Monsanto and BASF, resulted in a February 2020 verdict of $15 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages for a Missouri peach orchard that had suffered years of dicamba drift. That verdict, the first of its kind in the country, intensified pressure on Monsanto's parent company Bayer to resolve the broader MDL. The Plaintiffs' Executive Committee had reviewed more than two million documents and taken dozens of depositions to build the evidentiary record that supported settlement negotiations.

On June 24, 2020, Bayer signed a memorandum of understanding to resolve all MDL dicamba claims. The definitive settlement agreement was finalized on December 16, 2020. Under its terms, Bayer agreed to pay up to $400 million, with $300 million allocated specifically to soybean producers and the remainder covering non-soybean crop claims and administrative costs. The claims portal opened December 29, 2020. To receive payment, farmers were required to document dicamba symptomology on their crops and provide yield records showing measurable loss.

The settlement resolved crop-damage claims for the 2015 through 2020 growing seasons. It did not include the Bader Farms peach orchard judgment, which Bayer contested separately. Downing received a Missouri Lawyers Award in 2021 for the outcome, which was cited as the top settlement of 2020.