Stopping the Drift-Prone Pesticide Dicamba
Dicamba is an herbicide notorious for its tendency to volatilize and drift to neighboring farms, where it indiscriminately kills wild plants and crops alike.
What is Dicamba?
Dicamba is an herbicide introduced in the 1960s that kills flowering plants of all sorts. Dicamba’s pronounced tendency to volatilize and drift, damaging neighbors’ crops, made it unpopular with conscientious farmers and limited its use for many years. That all changed with Monsanto’s introduction of the dicamba-resistant crop system in 2017.
By genetically engineering soybeans and cotton to withstand over-the-top application of its new dicamba formulation, Monsanto opened the floodgates to massive spraying of this volatile herbicide in the heat of the summer. The result was devastating, and entirely unprecedented in the history of U.S. agriculture.
Our Dicamba Litigation
Since 2017, Center for Food Safety has led major legal challenges against EPA’s approval of dicamba herbicides sprayed on genetically engineered crops.
In 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated EPA’s approval of several dicamba products after finding the agency failed to properly assess the enormous risks and widespread damage caused by dicamba drift.
In 2024, a federal court again revoked EPA’s dicamba approval, holding that the agency unlawfully ignored public input requirements and failed to adequately address the pesticide’s extensive harms to farmers, crops, pollinators, and natural areas.
Center for Food Safety continues to challenge EPA’s repeated re-approvals of dicamba and advocate for stronger protections for rural communities, endangered species, public health, and the environment. In 2026, CFS and allied groups filed another lawsuit challenging EPA’s latest dicamba reapproval.
CFS has also pursued transparency around EPA’s dicamba decision-making process, including filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain records related to endangered species protections and federal consultation requirements.
Dicamba's Impacts and Our Work
With such extensive injury to crops, it’s not surprising that dicamba drift and runoff also damage natural areas and wildlife refuges. Cypress trees that provide habitat to eagles and other birds are dying from dicamba in Tennessee. Trees throughout the rural Midwest and Mid-South—along field edges, in peoples’ yards, and in towns—incur dicamba damage; and unlike annual plants, the injury to trees accumulates over years.
Most critically, dicamba injures or suppresses wild flowering plants that bees rely upon for nectar and pollen, thus causing huge drops in honey production and forcing some beekeeping operations to shut down. While largely unmonitored, wild bee populations are undoubtedly suffering as well. Finally, EPA revealed hundreds of dicamba damage episodes in counties with threatened and endangered species in 2021 alone.
Exposure to dicamba was linked to nearly twice the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Canadian farmers, while rats and mice fed dicamba exhibited a dose-dependent increase in malignant lymphomas. Yet EPA dismisses this evidence, in violation of its cancer assessment guidelines. More recently, a National Cancer Institute study shows higher rates of liver cancer in U.S. farmers highly exposed to dicamba.
In 2017, Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued EPA for unlawful approval of dicamba formulations sprayed on Monsanto’s crops, on behalf of farmers and conservationists. A federal court ruled in our favor in 2020, revoking EPA’s approvals and prohibiting further sales. However, months later the Trump administration re-approved dicamba, and CFS is currently leading a new challenge to those approvals.
Since 2017, Center for Food Safety (CFS) has led major legal challenges against EPA’s approval of dicamba herbicides sprayed on genetically engineered crops.
CFS and allied groups challenged EPA after dicamba drift damaged millions of acres of farms, orchards, natural areas, and wildlife habitat across the country.
In major victories in 2020 and 2024, federal courts ruled EPA unlawfully approved dicamba products and failed to adequately address the pesticide’s widespread harms.
In 2026, CFS and allied groups filed another lawsuit challenging EPA’s latest dicamba reapproval.
CFS continues to challenge EPA’s latest dicamba reapprovals and advocate for stronger protections for farmers, rural communities, pollinators, endangered species, and public health.
