Farmers’ Favorite Weedkiller Nears Its End, Bayer Warns

By Patrick Thomas, The Wall Street Journal
Published April 14, 2025

Roundup’s time may be up.

Pharmaceutical and agriculture conglomerate Bayer said it could stop producing the world’s most popular weedkiller, unless it gets court protection against lawsuits blaming the herbicide for causing cancer.

Roundup has generated tens of billions of dollars in sales over time for Bayer and Monsanto, the biotech seed giant and developer of Roundup that Bayer acquired in 2018. Bayer currently produces about 40% of the world’s glyphosate, which farmers spray across fields to tame crop-threatening weeds. 

But over the past decade, the herbicide has also brought Bayer a wave of litigation, pressuring its share price and costing about $10 billion in payouts to plaintiffs. In early March, Bayer told farmers, suppliers and retailers that it may stop selling Roundup, which would leave U.S. farmers reliant on imported glyphosate from China.

“We’re pretty much reaching the end of the road,” Bayer Chief Executive Bill Anderson said in an interview. “We’re talking months, not years.”

For many American farmers, agriculture without Roundup is like playing baseball without a glove. More than 90% of soybean, corn and cotton crops planted in the U.S. are genetically modified to withstand glyphosate-based weedkiller, according to the Agriculture Department. American farmers apply almost 300 million pounds of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, to their fields each year, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Farmers use these products and rely on them,” said Stu Swanson, a corn and soybean grower in northern Iowa who plans to spray glyphosate on his fields this spring. 

Swanson, who is also president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, said farmers trust glyphosate’s safety. “It helps us produce in an economic way and for products we raise to be cheaper.”

Claims that glyphosate causes cancer have dogged Bayer since its purchase of Monsanto, which marketed glyphosate under the Roundup brand since the 1970s and later revolutionized farming with seeds genetically engineered to tolerate the weedkiller. About 67,000 cases alleging it caused plaintiffs’ cancer are pending, and the company has so far set aside $16 billion for settlements.

Bayer maintains that Roundup is safe, citing reviews by the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators.

Dropping Roundup could come with its own costs. Joel Jackson, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said the move could reduce the value of seed technology that Bayer licenses to other companies because Bayer has had problems securing regulatory approval for a different herbicide, dicamba, which is effective at killing glyphosate-resistant weeds.

U.S. farmers would likely turn to generic versions made in Asia, Jackson said. Some could shift to other, potentially more harmful herbicides. 

Since taking over as Bayer’s CEO in 2023, Anderson has said one of his goals is to get the glyphosate litigation under control by 2026. He said that in some years, Roundup-reled litigation expenses eclipse Bayer’s agriculture research-and-development budget.

“We barely break even on glyphosate production and distribution, and if you then factor in litigation, you’re talking $2 billion to $3 billion in losses a year,” Anderson said. Bayer said it brought in $2.8 billion from glyphosate sales last year.

Read the full article on WSJ.com »

[Podcast] What a Glyphosate Ban Could Do to U.S. Agriculture

No-Till Farmer Podcast
Published March 28, 2025

With Bayer CropScience shelling out more than $10 billion so far to settle claims that Roundup and glyphosate cause cancer, there is concern about the long-term availability of glyphosate as a tool in production agriculture, including no-tillers and strip-tillers who use the approved chemistry to kill weeds and reduce or eliminate the need for tillage.

In this episode of the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, executive director of the Modern Ag Alliance (founded by Bayer), details the organization’s work to protect the availability of crop protection tools such as glyphosate.

She also highlights state and federal legislation that has been introduced that could limit or end the litany of legal claims, and she predicts what effects a ban on glyphosate would have on farmers and conservation efforts.

Glyphosate: Science, Safety and Fiction

By Todd Martin, Independent Professional Seed Association
Published April 1, 2025

A few weeks back, a Georgia jury awarded a plaintiff $2.065 billion in compensation and damages in the latest Roundup product-liability verdict against Bayer since its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018.

The plaintiff, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, filed his lawsuit against Monsanto in 2021. According to his attorney, "Our client… used Roundup at both home and work, which exposed him to higher levels of glyphosate than most people. Of course, [he] felt he had nothing to fear because Monsanto had publicly said Roundup was safe even though its internal scientists knew that it was not."

I'm going to say "Poppycock." (For those who know me, you know I would say something relating to the male bovine).

Basically, this attorney is attempting to portray Bayer and legacy Monsanto as knowingly hiding risks, drawing comparisons to how Big Tobacco concealed smoking's health effects. While that’s a dramatic narrative, it’s worth noting that juries have, at times, found it persuasive. Plaintiffs point to the 2015 IARC classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen to support their case, though the decision runs counter to the findings of major regulatory agencies around the world. This is a distortion of evidence—more about winning emotional arguments than following the proven science.

Despite today's divisive climate, facts and science still matter. I grew up in the 1960s. It was a turbulent time. There was also wonder, the Space Race. Apollo. "The Eagle has landed".  Mankind on the Moon. It was a decade of science.  We pushed the limits of our ability.  We strove for great accomplishments.  We succeeded.

Those were my formative years.  Very early in life, I became a believer in science and fact.

So let’s talk facts:

Glyphosate was introduced in 1974. Literally hundreds of studies have been reviewed and have verified the safety of glyphosate.

For 50 years, leading health regulators around the world have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate products can be used safely, and that glyphosate is not carcinogenic. Those agencies include the European Food Safety Authority, the European Chemicals Agency, the European Commission and the US EPA. This constitutes overwhelming scientific consensus. According to Elizabeth Burns-Thompson of the Modern Ag Alliance in an opinion piece, "Critics have built their case on a single 2015 opinion by a fringe World Health Organization subagency—an outlier that has not been validated by a single leading global regulatory body and is contradicted by decades of scientific research. Despite conducting no original studies and failing to assess real-world risk, this opinion has been leveraged by the litigation industry to file tens of thousands of lawsuits against manufacturers of glyphosate-based herbicides."

One of the most important conclusions is from a study not solely focused on glyphosate: the Agricultural Health Study (AHS) by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This long-term research project investigates the health effects of pesticide exposure among over 50,000 licensed pesticide applicators and their spouses, following these individuals for over 20 years. In 2018 and based on the data from the AHS, the NCI released a study that found no statistically significant association between glyphosate use and overall cancer incidence or most specific cancer types.

If a long-term study in agricultural health cannot find a link between glyphosate and cancer in farmers and applicators, how do homeowners have more exposure? That is an important question, because the vast majority of litigation cases are not farm-related but are related to homeowners and residential/commercial uses. This is where I lose it. There are no facts and science here. This concept that a homeowner can have higher exposure to glyphosate than a farmer is just garbage.

The lawsuits are not about facts and science—they are about labeling. The central legal question is: should Bayer be required to put a cancer warning label on Roundup? The fact is: they can't, it's illegal. You read that right—Bayer cannot put a warning on the label, because the EPA, which has sole authority over pesticide labeling, has determined that glyphosate does not pose a cancer risk when used as directed. If Bayer did add this label, it would constitute misbranding and violate federal law.

Bayer has pulled glyphosate from the home and lawn business because of the liability of more litigation. Could the same thing happen to the farming business? The answer to that question is very likely yes, and that would be catastrophic to farmers.

When the costs of anything outweigh the benefit, you get rid of it.

Glyphosate is no longer protected by a patent. This means that if excessive litigation costs force Bayer out of the market, farmers will be left to rely on generic formulations, most of which are produced in China, raising concerns about quality control and supply-chain resilience. Bayer's product is 100% American-made, from the phosphate mines in Idaho to the manufacturing plants in Missouri and Louisiana. My Dad, forever the Eagle Scout of his youth, combined my love of science with an instilled sense of right and wrong and fairness.

Right is following the science. Science says glyphosate is safe.

Fairness is following the law. The law says the Roundup label is correct.

What is happening with glyphosate is neither right nor fair. It is just plain wrong.

Bayer Says it Could Stop Selling Roundup

Bayer has told U.S. lawmakers it could stop selling Roundup weedkiller unless they can strengthen legal protection against product liability litigation, according to a financial analyst and a person close to the matter. Bayer has paid about $10 billion to settle disputed claims that Roundup, based on the herbicide glyphosate, causes cancer. About 67,000 further cases are pending for which the group has set aside $5.9 billion in legal provisions.

The German company has said plaintiffs should not be able to take Bayer to court by invoking U.S. state rules given the federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly labelled the product as safe to use, as have regulators in other parts of the world. “Without regulatory clarity (Bayer) will need to exit the business. Bayer have been clear with legislators and farmer groups on this,” analysts at brokerage Jefferies said in a note on Thursday, citing guidance Bayer's leadership provided in a meeting.

Disclosing glyphosate sales numbers for the first time, Bayer on Wednesday said the product, one of the most widely used weedkillers in U.S. field farming, generated 2.6 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue last year. 

Read more from the "In the Weeds" Series »