According to NBC DFW News, grape growers in Texas and surrounding states filed lawsuits against pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer-Monsanto and chemical giant BASF (BASF), accusing them of harming vineyards with their cotton herbicides.
Lawyers for grape growers say that the cotton seed system created by Bayer-Monsanto and BASF uses a highly volatile herbicide called dicamba to kill weeds. This system is drifting towards nearby vineyards. Destroy grapes that are not resistant.
The lawsuit alleges that vineyard yields have fallen sharply and the grapes grown are often rejected due to poor quality. According to the lawsuit, because two-thirds of the 3 million acres of cotton in Texas High Plains were sprayed with dicamba herbicide, the survival of many High Plains vineyards was threatened.
Dicamba has been the subject of many lawsuits, most of which are farmers, who claim that their crops are not resistant to dicamba and that the use of dicamba is destroying and killing their crops. In February 2020, Bayer and BASF were ordered to pay $265 million to a peach farmer in Missouri. The peach farmer said that these herbicides drifted from nearby cotton fields and damaged thousands of his trees.
Bayer responded to this recent lawsuit in a statement, saying that it sympathizes with growers who have suffered crop losses, but there may be many reasons for the losses, so it will continue to defend the use of dicamba.
The lawsuit seeks to recover US$114 million in damages, and also requires Bayer-Monsanto and BASF to pay US$228 million in punitive damages each, based on these companies' knowledge of the possible losses caused by the herbicide.
