Bart Elmore in The Conversation reports:
“The herbicide dicamba [marketed by Monsanto and others] was supposed to solve farmers’ weed problems—instead it’s making farming harder for many of them… In 2021, thousands of U.S. growers reported to the Environmental Protection Agency that dicamba sprayed by other farmers – sometimes up to a mile and a half away – damaged crops in their fields. Complaints came from all over the country.
The list of affected plants was astounding: sycamore, oak and elm trees; azaleas, black-eyed Susans and roses; garden tomatoes, peppers and peas. According to an EPA memorandum, there were 2,700 “dicamba incidents,” affecting about 3.6 million acres, in 2017. Two years later, the number of incidents ballooned to 3,300.”