President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency looks likely to once again allow the widespread use of a controversial weed killer that’s turned neighbor against neighbor in the Arkansas Delta.
Dicamba has been used in the United States since the 1970s, but using it “over the top” by spraying it on already sprouted soybeans and cotton didn’t begin until the 2010s.
The practice stirred controversy in farm country, especially in the Arkansas Delta, because of the chemical’s proclivity to drift onto neighboring fields, withering any plant not genetically engineered to be resistant. Complaints came not only from fellow farmers whose own crops suffered, but from naturalists who aimed to protect surrounding trees, prairies and wildlife. Thousands of complaints poured into the Arkansas State Plant Board over suspected illegal or improper use of dicamba.
Court challenges have limited dicamba use in recent years. A recent federal court order out of Arizona blocked the sale and use of over-the-top dicamba products entirely for the 2025 season.
Now, under the Trump administration’s more permissive and corporate-friendly EPA, dicamba clouds may soon float across property lines in Arkansas and elsewhere. Bayer, Syngenta, BASF and other chemical companies are pushing to get over-the-top dicamba products approved by federal environmental regulators again.
The companies hope to sell a new dicamba product in 2026 that they argue is safer than the previous version.
And in a public memo supporting the application, the EPA said it recommends that the new products be approved by regulators. The agency is taking public comments on the proposal until August 22.
With dicamba set to reenter farm country, advocates against the herbicide recognize they will be in a much harder fight this time around to get the chemical off the market. Federal regulators can approve the herbicide faster than lawsuits can move to get it paused, and in the meantime, dicamba will likely continue to damage non-resistant crops and vegetation as adoption becomes more common.
Challengers, supporters line up
National environmental and sustainable farming groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, National Family Farm Coalition, Center for Food Safety and the Pesticide Action Network are gearing up to challenge the herbicide again if it should be approved.
But the farming community in Arkansas and elsewhere remains divided on the future of dicamba. The Arkansas Farm Bureau, one of the largest trade organizations representing farmers in the state with 190,000 member families, has not even taken a stance on the controversial chemical.
A spokesperson for the organization said the lack of a position on the product was likely on purpose, with the state policy committee of the Farm Bureau not wanting to ruffle feathers. The spokesperson just cited two policies where the organization recommends researchers prioritize addressing volatility in herbicides like dicamba, and supporting lowering the need for dicamba through investing in new seeds and new herbicides. The spokesperson also said there was no effort underway to update the policy on dicamba usage.
Such neutrality is somewhat surprising, considering that Arkansas was considered ground zero for the destructive expansion of the chemical in the 2010s and at one point had some of the most effective state regulations on dicamba.
A University of Missouri report from 2019 estimated that Arkansas had more crop damage from dicamba than any other state, with a whopping 900,000 acres of soybeans damaged or destroyed during the 2017 season. For reference, Delta farmers grow around 3 million acres of soybeans a year.
Then there was the infamous case where farmhand Curtis Jones was convicted of murdering Arkansas farmer Mike Wallace after a dispute over dicamba damage to Wallace’s fields. Wallace’s funeral drew thousands and set off a national discussion on how the product was turning farmers against one another.
The anti-dicamba crowd has a bigger fight on their hands this time around. Nearly a decade after over-the-top dicamba was introduced to the Delta, dicamba-resistant crops have now become dominant in the South and Midwest. The EPA estimates that 65 million acres of crops in the U.S. – an area nearly the size of Alabama – are resistant to dicamba, meaning farmers can spray the herbicide without damaging their harvest. These dicamba-resistant crops include two-thirds of soybeans and three-fourths of cotton being grown in the South and Midwest.
Still, some Arkansans are ready to keep fighting the wider acceptance of the herbicide and to try and hold the companies that make it accountable for damages.
Chased away by dicamba
Richard Coy ran an Arkansas family beekeeping operation, Coy’s Honey Farm, which was started by his grandfather in the 1960s in Memphis. Throughout counties in eastern Arkansas, Coy would work with farmers to put out beehives to help farmers with pollination. His father moved the business to Jonesboro in the 1980s, and Coy started full-time work with the company in 1991.
When dicamba was unleashed on soybean and cotton fields in the Delta in 2016, Coy immediately saw impacts on his beekeeping business.
“A lot of the wild vegetation that our bees relied on to make a honey crop and build more population in the beehive, a lot of that would be damaged by dicamba enough so that it produces less nectar and pollen,” Coy said. “Nectar and pollen are essential for the beehives because pollen is the protein source and nectar is the carbohydrate, and without both of those, beehives cannot survive. So for the beehive to grow, it needs food and it needs natural food. Without a good population of bees in the hive, there are not enough bees in the summer to produce enough honey for me to harvest.”
After seeing large economic losses between 2016 and 2019, Coy relocated his business in the winter of 2019 to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Now, his bees are raised mostly in South Mississippi before his company trucks the hives around to farms in different states to help with pollination.
“I saw a reduction in honey production in 2016, in a small area in northeast Arkansas where there was a large amount of acres of dicamba-resistant seed planted,” Coy said. “At the time, I was ignorant of what it was. But in 2017, when the use became legal and more widespread, that’s when I started doing research and learned that when plants are exposed to only 1% of the application rate, that pollinator visits were reduced by 50%. And my production records showed that my production was reduced in areas with high dicamba usage.”
Coy cited a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University from 2015 that showed those interactions between pollinators and dicamba. A more recent study, from the University of Michigan and University of Pittsburgh, built on that evidence.
“We spent 40 years building a business that it only took dicamba two years to destroy. We all had to leave home to keep our business going and it disrupted the whole family unit,” Coy said.
While the EPA is proposing limits on the usage of dicamba during the summer based on the temperature, Coy said it’s nearly impossible for regulators to address the issue. Previously, the EPA was cutting off the spraying of dicamba after a certain date when temperatures would begin climbing, but now they are trying the new temperature limit. Will they work? Even in past years, there was widespread reporting that farmers were illegally applying the chemical anyway because they’d rather accept a fine than a loss of crops.
But Coy wasn’t going to take his displacement lying down. He enlisted Arkansas environmental attorney Richard Mays, a former lawyer for the EPA, and filed a lawsuit against Bayer and BASF over economic losses to his business.
“We want damages, and believe me that these chemical companies we are suing have already paid out a lot of money to farmers whose crops have been damaged by these dicamba herbicides,” Mays said. “This may be the first bee case we’ve had, but it just makes it another link in the chain that we will have to prove that dicamba didn’t harm the bees directly, but it did remove their food source, and any organism that can’t get food is going to die. That’s what happened to Coy’s hives. So we want money damages.”
Coy’s lawsuit is now part of a multidistrict case with other plaintiffs across the South and Midwest suing Bayer and BASF for damages related to their dicamba products. The federal case is in the Eastern District of Arkansas before Judge Kristine Baker.
Mays said he will likely request upwards of $10 million in damages. He took inspiration from the landmark Bader peach farm case where farmers won millions in damages from Bayer and BASF.
A courtroom win would be great for Coy, but would do little to mitigate damage for other farmers.
“Specifically in the case of dicamba, a court has revoked the registrations of the product twice and we are in this place where the way the law is written, the way the framework is set up, just as plaintiffs are within their rights to file lawsuits, the manufacturers are within their rights to reapply for product approval,” said Brigit Rollins, a legal academic studying the intersection of agriculture and environmental law. Rollins is a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center, where she has compiled legal research on dicamba.
Rollins said that under the current law, companies will always have opportunities to tweak their product applications to get dicamba reapproved time and time again, faster than courts can remove any products from the market for not following the proper regulatory process.
Ford Baldwin, a weed scientist who now consults with Riceland Foods after a career in academia at the University of Arkansas and who has spent much of his career battling dicamba, said he won’t waste any energy filing a public comment with the EPA to protest the pending reauthorization of over-the-top spraying. His opinion is that the EPA’s decision will be based not on the science, but on the politics. After all these years, he’s come to the cynical conclusion that regulators are listening to industry lobbyists, and any comment based on scientific evidence will be ignored. To Baldwin’s point, Trump selected agriculture industry lobbyist Kyle Kunkler to oversee pesticide policy within the EPA.
Rollins said that for environmentalists, only an act of Congress could get dicamba off the market at this point. With how partisan and deadlocked the institution has become, that doesn’t seem likely.
Beekeeper Coy also said he won’t get his hopes up.
“I had a motto I started saying in 2018 and it has proven true and it goes like this: As long as dicamba-tolerant seeds are planted in the ground, dicamba will be floating all around,” he said. “Until the seed technology is removed from the market, dicamba will be applied in copious amounts. Roundup was brought on to the market in the 1990s and was used until the Liberty system came on to the market because weeds were becoming resistant to Roundup. But those two products stayed where you spray them and farmers could grow what they wanted to grow. But all that stuff became less effective, and dicamba came on. How do we stop the problem? You take the seed technology out of the market, and I don’t think that will ever happen.”
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