Dicamba herbicide drift destroys neighboring farms' crops with no practical way to prevent exposure or recover losses quickly

Dicamba-tolerant soybean and cotton acreage has grown 341% since 2017, but dicamba is highly volatile and prone to off-target movement, damaging non-dicamba-tolerant soybeans, specialty crops, trees, and gardens on neighboring farms miles from application sites. Drift occurs even when applicators follow all label requirements due to temperature inversions and volatilization hours after spraying. So what? A neighboring soybean farmer growing non-dicamba-tolerant varieties can lose 20-70% of their yield from drift exposure, with cupped and stunted leaves reducing photosynthesis during critical reproductive stages. So what? Specialty crop growers are hit hardest: a Missouri peach farmer was awarded $265 million in damages after dicamba destroyed his orchard, but most affected farmers cannot afford multi-year litigation against Bayer/BASF. So what? The burden of proof falls on the victim: damaged farmers must document the drift event, hire consultants to rule out other causes, file complaints with state departments of agriculture, and potentially retain attorneys, all while managing their own harvest. So what? State pesticide complaint processes take months to investigate and rarely result in compensation, leaving the damaged farmer to absorb losses in the current season while the complaint winds through bureaucracy. So what? This creates an arms race where farmers feel compelled to plant dicamba-tolerant varieties defensively, even if they do not want to, further concentrating seed market power in the hands of the companies that created the drift problem. The problem persists because the EPA has repeatedly approved and re-approved dicamba despite federal courts striking down previous approvals as unlawful (2020 and 2024), the chemistry is inherently volatile at temperatures common during growing season application, and the regulatory framework treats each application as compliant if label directions are followed, even though aggregate drift from thousands of simultaneous applications creates landscape-scale damage.