Missouri farmers wrestle with toll of widespread dicamba damage
PEMISCOT COUNTY, Mo. — It’s been a stressful growing season for Chris Crosskno — one characterized by the cupped and crinkled soybean leaves that were a common sight across millions of acres of the nation’s farmland this year.
“We had about 2,000 acres of Liberty soybeans and every one of ‘em was damaged at some point,” says Crosskno, who farms deep in southeast Missouri’s Bootheel region and across the state line in Arkansas.
The distinctive symptoms point to exposure to dicamba, a decades-old chemical the agriculture industry is now turning to in the fight against increasingly stubborn “superweeds” — a controversial shift that has borne different results for different farmers and left the agriculture community divided.
Damage like that experienced by Crosskno has been widespread across the Farm Belt, causing conflicts between neighbors, recriminations and lawsuits, culminating with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing this month that increased regulatory oversight will be required for dicamba applications in 2018.
Sparking the controversy was a shift to new technology spearheaded by Monsanto, the seeds and traits giant that, for years, has counted the herbicide, Roundup, as its signature product. But with weeds developing resistance to Roundup, dicamba has begun to emerge as a successor over the last couple years, as the company, headquartered in suburban St. Louis, introduced new cotton and soybean varieties genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, enabling farmers to spray it over the top of those crops.
The new dicamba system — fully available for the first time this growing season — is hailed by many farmers in the Bootheel as a critical tool that has helped facilitate record yields and some of the “cleanest” or least weed-afflicted crops since Roundup-resistant seed varieties first came out in the 1990s.
But others, like Crosskno, have not shared the abundance enabled by the technology, and have perhaps even been hurt by it.
Though an effective weedkiller, dicamba is a notoriously volatile chemical, meaning it is prone to turning into vapor that can drift off target. Soybeans are particularly sensitive to dicamba damage, but many types of non-tolerant plants — including trees and garden vegetables — can also be susceptible to injury.
The dicamba varieties approved for use on Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant Xtend crops this growing season were less volatile than older forms of the chemical, but as the acreage sprayed with the herbicide rose across the country this year, so too did reports of damage caused by off-target movement.
With the harvest ongoing, the impact that damage could have on Crosskno’s yields is still coming into focus. But he worries that, like some of his neighbors are reporting, he could lose 8 to 10 bushels of his LibertyLink soybeans per acre — a loss that would amount to $180,000 or so.
To avoid future losses, Crosskno says he’ll have no choice but to switch, begrudgingly, to Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant seed next year, sparing himself the stress he’s endured this season.
“You either get on board or get hurt,” he said. “I absolutely hate it. I despise the idea that Monsanto can dictate what we have to use, have to plant.”
••• Crosskno’s experiences — of frustration, financial stress and pressure to conform to a controversial new technology — are ones that many other farmers have faced ever since Monsanto brought its new dicamba-tolerant crops to market.
Complaints of dicamba-related crop damage have mushroomed into a national epidemic this year, surfacing in 21 states and launching thousands of case-by-case investigations by state departments of agriculture.
The Mid-South has been hit especially hard, with northeast Arkansas and the Bootheel standing out as areas with the nation’s highest concentration of damage reports.
Kevin Bradley, a University of Missouri plant sciences professor who has closely tracked the issue, says he thinks the more pronounced damage in states like Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee may be tied to the fact that both cotton and soy are grown in the region, while other areas don’t support multiple dicamba-tolerant seed varieties.
“My perception is, the areas with the highest rates of adoption and use of the products had the biggest problems,” said Bradley.
Farmers and other agribusiness workers in the Bootheel estimate that upwards of 90 percent of area soybeans planted this year were Xtend seeds, compared to just a fraction one year prior. They said use of Xtend cotton is now nearly ubiquitous in the area, even though it still represented a sizable majority of the region’s crop in 2016.
As it is with Crosskno, selfpreservation was a main motivator for many in the Bootheel to adopt Xtend crops this year, just one year after rampant damage from the chemical was reported by area farmers. Last year’s damage was widely blamed on illegal, or “off-label” applications of older, more volatile forms of dicamba, since none of the lowervolatility sprays intended for use with the new seeds had yet been approved. But the availability of dicamba-resistant seed created the temptation for some growers to spray illegally, jeopardizing the crops of others nearby.
“I got burnt so bad last year with dicamba on my beans,” said Ted Rouse, who also farms in both Arkansas and Missouri. “I planted all dicamba seed (this year) just for self-protection to keep from having that damage again.”
“Most everybody in my area did the very same thing that I did,” Rouse adds. “We were forced to buy the seed even though they’re more expensive.”
He said the dicamba-tolerant seed can cost about 20 percent more than alternative varieties. But some say it’s worth it for the yields, reduced herbicide costs and peace of mind.