Monsanto Co., BASF Corp., and DuPont face a class-action lawsuit from farmers who claim their crops were damaged by the herbicide dicamba, a new legal front against producers of soybeans and cotton resistant to the weed killer.
 
The lawsuit stems from a wave of complaints from farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and elsewhere who say that their crops were damaged by dicamba being sprayed on nearby fields planted with dicamba-tolerant corn and soybeans that were developed primarily by Monsanto (  Smokey Alley Farm P’ship v. Monsanto Co. , E.D. Mo., No. 4:17-cv-02031, 7/19/17 ).
 
The Monsanto seeds—Roundup Ready 2 Xtend Soybeans and Bollgard II XtendFlex cotton—were designed to be used with newly developed versions of dicamba that were said to be less prone to drift onto neighboring fields and cause crop damage. But Monsanto began selling the seeds to farmers before the Environmental Protection Agency had approved the new versions of dicamba. Without that approval, farmers who had invested in the seeds turned to older and more drift-prone versions of dicamba to control weeds
 
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