Bartow J. Elmore - Seed Money: Monsantos Past and Our Food Future

SEED MONEY

Monsantos Past
and
Our Food Future

Bartow J. Elmore

For Joya Elmore

In Memory of Susan Elmore

Contents

Figure 1: Genetically engineered (GE) glyphosate-tolerant crop adoption rates in the United States: percentage of planted acres of corn, cotton, and soybean, 19962016.

Figure 2: Rise in the number of weed species resistant to ALS inhibitors, 19822000.

Figure 3: Estimated agricultural use of glyphosate in the United States, 1992 and 2017.

Figure 4: Rise in the number of glyphosate-resistant weed species, 19962019.

Figures 5a and 5b: Herbicide use trends for soybean, 19922016: pounds of glyphosate per acre compared with pounds of all other herbicides per acre (top); pounds of glyphosate compared with pounds of all other herbicides (bottom). Data compiled from Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio.

Monsanto made a lot of money from its herbicide Roundup, and eventually got into biotech to make its patented Roundup Ready seed system. But in less than two decades, that seed system began to falter. Monsanto said it had the answer: Xtend seeds like those seen here.

BLACK SUVS VEERED INTO THE PARKING LOT OF THE RUSH Hudson Limbaugh Sr. US Courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It looked like the feds showing up, recalled Bev Randles, an attorney with the Kansas City firm Randles & Splittgerber. Then in her late forties, Bev was a native of the Show-Me State. She had grown up on a farm just thirty miles from Cape Girardeau. In a way, coming to the courthouse was coming back home.

Thick fog enveloped the area as more than a dozen dark-suited corporate attorneys for German chemical and pharmaceutical companies BASF and Bayer filed out of their vehicles and into the sleek courthousea palace, Bev called italong the banks of the Mississippi River. They were there to meet federal judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr., grandson of the famed Missouri attorney for whom the courthouse was named and first cousin to the conservative talk show host most people know. This was Limbaugh country, a little over an hour south of St. Louis in the fertile farmland just north of what Missourians call the bootheel of the state.

Something big was going down in this small town, though only a handful of reporters were there to document what was happening. It was January 27, 2020, the start of the Bader Farms v. Monsanto and BASF jury trial, and Bev Randles and her husband, Billy, were getting ready to start the biggest case of their lives.

The Randles were representing Bill Bader, a Missouri peach farmer who filed this case back in 2016roughly a year and a half before Bayer bought Monsanto in a mega-merger that made headlines across the globe. Around that time, Bev Randles had been running for lieutenant governor on the GOP ticket, hoping to become the first Black politician elected to statewide office, when she visited Baders farm for a photo op. She had spent enough time around farms to know that Baders peaches did not look right. They had curled leaves, and many looked like they were dying. When Bader told her that he believed a herbicide sold by BASF and Monsanto was to blame, Bev told him she wanted to help.

The herbicide was dicamba, and it was used to fix a problem created years before. Back in the mid-1990s, Monsanto had introduced Roundup Ready technology that made commodity cropssuch as soybeans, corn, and cottongenetically engineered (GE) to be resistant to its blockbuster herbicide, Roundup, which was first commercialized in the 1970s and contained a powerful weed-killing chemical called glyphosate. Farmers had loved the system because it allowed them to spray Roundup throughout the growing season, keeping fields clean of unwanted plants. But within a few years weeds started developing resistance to Monsantos herbicide, which is why the company started working feverishly to create crops that would tolerate Roundup and dicamba, another powerful herbicide that had been around since the 1960s. In 2007, Monsanto acquired from the University of Nebraska the gene sequence that bestowed dicamba resistance to plants, and eight years later Monsanto commercialized its first dicamba-tolerant seedsbranded Roundup Ready Xtendbeginning with cotton in 2015 and then soybeans in 2016.

But there was a problem, and it was a serious one: dicamba was volatilemuch more so than Roundup. When soybean and cotton farmers sprayed their fields, this chemical often vaporizedespecially in hot temperaturesdrifting onto adjacent farms and ecosystems, damaging everything from watermelons to sycamore trees. Farmers without dicamba-tolerant GE crops were incensed, especially fruit farmers like Bill Bader who had no way to avoid damage when farmers nearby sprayed dicamba on their own fields. After all, there was no such thing as a dicamba-tolerant peach tree.

This is the nastiest litigation Ive ever been involved in, Billy Randles said of the trial, which was saying a lot, considering the fact that he had been involved in legal suits where he represented Philip Morris back when cigarette companies were still selling doubt about the link between smoking and cancer. An alumnus of Harvard Law School, Randles had been in practice for thirty years and had even run for governor of Missouri. He was comfortable speaking in front of big audiences, including at the Kansas City church where he moonlighted as a preacher. Nevertheless, Randles and his wife, Bev, had never been lead lawyers for a case this big.

Bayer, now the owner of Monsantos technology, was clearly sending its top litigation specialists to Cape Girardeau to battle a husband-and-wife team whose lawsuit could do real damage to the firm. Recognizing the stakes, Jan Miller, Bayer/Monsantos lead attorney, appealed to Judge Limbaugh before the trial to put a gag order in place that would prevent Baders legal team from talking to the press. Limbaugh honored the request.

Observers in the gallery may well have been surprised by the judges order, but when Billy Randles took to the podium to deliver his opening statement, it quickly became clear why Miller had made his move. As Bev sat pensively at the plaintiffs desk next to the farmer she had promised to help roughly four years prior, her husband began to lay out a series of internal memoranda and documents that no corporation would want exposed.

Dont do it. Expect lawsuits, concluded a Monsanto employee in a document summarizing the findings of an advisory panel to Monsanto that Randles cited in the first moments of trial. Monsanto had created the academic review committee in an attempt to get frank feedback about its dicamba system, and the panel had concluded that Monsantos seeds were going to wreak havoc, especially for specialty crop farmers growing fruits and vegetables. Steve Smith, a tomato grower Monsanto had asked to serve on the panel, claimed dicamba-tolerant crops were the most serious threat to specialty crops of anything I had seen. He fired off a blistering email to Monsanto managers saying, While I know you are hearing the comments I and others are making, Im not sure you are HEARING.

Documents showed that Monsanto knew dicambas tendency to drift off-target could help them make money. After all, vaporized dicamba could also harm soybean and cotton farmers that did not use Monsantos Roundup Ready Xtend traits. If they wanted to protect their crops from dicamba drift, they were going to have to use the companys new seeds that made crops resistant to both Roundup and dicamba. In 2013, as Monsanto prepared to launch its new product, a company slideshow coached salespeople on how to convince commodity crop growers who were not troubled by Roundup-resistant weeds to buy the new dicamba-tolerant seeds. Why should I pay for something I dont need? a farmer might ask. Push protection from your neighbor, one slide said, revealing that the firms officials were not only aware of the implications of drift for neighboring farms and ecosystems but were thinking of it as an asset that would force farmers to purchase company seeds.