In all-day testimony on the eighth day of the trial, [farmer Bill] Bader said as long as dicamba is sprayed during the growing season, his peach farm will not be a sustainable business.
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The case centers around the weed killer dicamba, the spraying of which greatly increased starting in 2015, after Monsanto and BASF released dicamba-related products. The lawsuit alleges that the companies released their products knowing that it would result in damage to farms, creating more demand for their products.
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Lawyers representing BASF and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, asked Bader questions about other issues the farm has, including weather events and soil fungus.
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Monsanto presented a chart of Bader Farms’ yields from 2011 to the present that showed that the harvest had been about 60,000 to 80,000, except for in 2015 and 2018.
In each of those years, Bader’s trees suffered damage from weather events, and in 2015, he claimed damage from a pesticide drift incident unrelated to dicamba.
Those numbers were far from the 162,000 from the early 2000s, when the farm was supplying up to 70 percent of the fruit grown in Missouri each year and its fruit was being sold in grocery stories across the Midwest and South, said Miller, a lawyer for Monsanto.
