Copyright Bloomberg
The chemical that revolutionized farming over the last 50 years is in trouble. Glyphosate, once vaunted for its ability to kill plants and spare animals, is under assault on both fronts. In the UK, weeds are for the first time refusing to die after being sprayed with the herbicide — a problem that’s long tormented American farmers, too. And thousands of former users in the US contend that the world’s most widely used weedkiller might actually be slowly killing them. Earlier this year, a Georgia jury punished Bayer AG to the tune of almost $2.1 billion after a man who had used Roundup, the German company’s glyphosate-containing weedkiller, developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It was only the latest slapdown by a jury. Bayer has coughed up more than $10 billion in legal costs over a product it inherited last decade with its $63 billion acquisition of agrochemical producer Monsanto. Its legal battles are far from over, too, with Bayer facing more than 60,000 outstanding claims from US plaintiffs who say the chemical caused their cancer. The litigation has cast such a massive cloud over Bayer’s stock, which is down more than 70% since the Monsanto deal, that Chief Executive Officer Bill Anderson is considering whether the company should even make glyphosate anymore. “Basically it comes down to: We will either find a solution on these things or we will be exiting the business,” Anderson told reporters in August. Glyphosate may be an “essential tool for farmers to produce an abundant and safe food supply for America and frankly around the world,” he said, but the chemical hasn’t had a patent protection for 25 years and is hardly profitable at this point. Read More: Bayer Hires Judith Hartmann as CFO in Latest Management Change Still, leaving the business would cause a major hole in Bayer’s books. Glyphosate accounted for about 12% of its crop division’s €22.3 billion ($25.7 billion) in revenue last year — and much of the company’s lucrative corn, soybean and other seed offerings are designed for farmers using glyphosate in the first place. Marketed as a cleaner and safer alternative to older herbicides, for 30 years glyphosate has offered a relatively simple commercial model: Farmers pay a premium for seeds that are genetically altered to resist the herbicide in hopes of boosting their profits through cheaper, easier weed management. At least $5 billion worth of the chemical is sprayed across the world’s fields each year, from the US and Brazil to China and New Zealand. But the promise of that paradigm is breaking down amid the combination of weeds that have evolved their own tolerance to glyphosate and growing regulatory and legal challenges over the chemical. Recently, representatives for Bayer have even raised the specter of bankruptcy for the Monsanto division as they engage in high-stakes settlement talks with plaintiff attorneys, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing private matters. If Bayer ceases manufacturing glyphosate at its factory in Louisiana and a few related sites, it will expedite the world’s retreat from the chemical, eliminating about 40% of global production capacity in a single step. In the short term, that will leave farmers deeply dependent on supplies manufactured in China. In the longer term, it raises questions about how today’s farmers — some of whom have been nicknamed “Roundup Babies” for coming of age so reliant on the chemical — will feed the world’s growing population as global warming increases the risk crops face from storms, droughts and new types of pests. “The climate is emerging as a gigantic problem that will compromise our sustainability,” warns Luca Comai, distinguished professor of plant biology at University of California at Davis. But although the problems with glyphosate are becoming more urgent, it’s not entirely clear what might replace it. “There are many, many ways of making the process of growing plants more effective and less impactful on the resources and the ecosystem,” Comai says. “Whether you can make money out of it, I don’t know.” When Monsanto first developed glyphosate for agriculture in its St. Louis labs in the early 1970s, it wasn’t obvious that it would ever turn a profit. A tiny molecule, it works by binding to an enzyme in all plant cells (that animals lack) that helps create essential amino acids for growth. As a result, it pretty much kills everything — weed or crop — that’s green and grows. Back then, US farmers preferred using other types of herbicides — in particular, ones that didn’t harm their crops. Farmers had other gripes about glyphosate, too. The chemical took days to kill unwanted plants and tended to quickly degrade in the presence of sun or rain, meaning it didn’t stick around in the soil to prevent weeds from emerging later in the season. Monsanto tried to turn these drawbacks into strengths, marketing glyphosate as less harmful than other weedkillers, many of which were facing fierce criticism over their dangerous effects on people or their tendency to, say, leach into waterways and poison frogs and fish. Beyond that, Monsanto promoted its chemical as a great way to foster more “no-till” agriculture, in which farmers stop plowing their land with tractors and thus reduce carbon emissions and negative impacts like soil erosion and nutrient loss. But that strategy only really triumphed after Monsanto scientists stumbled on a glyphosate resistance gene in an unlikely place — the waste ponds of the company’s glyphosate factory on the banks of the Mississippi River. There, bacteria had evolved a gene that blunted the chemical’s attack and were thriving. The Monsanto scientists isolated the genetic matter and transferred copies into soybean seeds, kicking off the farming world’s new, genetically modified era. It was a scientific coup, but it came with a catch. Given enough evolutionary pressure in those ponds, Mother Nature had come up with a way to withstand glyphosate. Could the same thing happen on farms? At the time, Comai was employed by rival biotech Calgene Inc. and didn’t see it coming anytime soon. But he recognized the threat. “We live in Jurassic Park,” he says. “There’s a lot of natural genetic engineering going on.” Monsanto debuted its “Roundup Ready” soybeans in 1996 and within a couple of years it was also selling glyphosate-tolerant seeds for corn, canola and cotton. In countries like the US, Canada and Brazil, many farmers embraced the new approach and before long relied on glyphosate for virtually all of their weeding needs. As a result, glyphosate use on US farms skyrocketed, roughly tripling in volume from 2000 to 2010, according to government data. In Europe, which largely rejected the premise of GM crops, there was no incentive to increase use of the chemical, so farmers kept on using it as they always had — for surgical weed killing, say, or the clearing of fields ahead of planting season. Farmers often loved the system’s simplicity, since they no longer had to apply various chemicals over the course of the year and could devote less time and energy to fighting weeds with machinery and manpower. For many, that freed up resources to expand their operations, reinforcing a trend in the US toward fewer but bigger farms. Yet cracks soon emerged. By 2010, glyphosate-resistant weeds were frustrating farmers in more than 30 US states. That forced many to bring back other, older chemicals and hire people to pull out the new weeds with their hands and with hoes. More than that, it forced the agriculture world to confront a choice: Should farmers retreat from this new approach and recommit to older methods of fighting weeds? Or, in concert with companies like Monsanto, should they double down? Many opted for the latter approach. As early as 2005, Monsanto announced plans to develop seeds that would be resistant to the herbicide dicamba, too. That opened the door to a new era in which farmers would combine chemicals on their genetically modified crops much in the way that doctors wield antibiotics to tackle bacterial infections. It also enabled Monsanto and its rivals to patent new aspects of their seeds at a time when the exclusive rights on their first-generation offerings were nearing expiration. While glyphosate use plateaued in the US in the early 2010s, farmers began increasing their reliance on chemicals like dicamba, which for decades had failed to win them over because of its tendency to vaporize and drift into nearby fields, killing other crops. (Another chemical that gained in popularity is paraquat, which the European Union banned in 2007 and China in 2016 thanks, in part, to fears that it raised the risk of Parkinson’s disease.) By 2017, dicamba use in the US had soared — and the problems of drift resurfaced. That year, an Arkansas farmer was convicted for killing his neighbor in a dispute over dicamba damage. Before long, about 250 plaintiffs had sued Monsanto, alleging crop damage from dicamba. In 2020, Bayer announced a $400 million mass tort settlement for that litigation, though a small number of claims are still pending. In recent years, federal courts in the US have twice placed major restrictions on dicamba, though those limits may expire. As a result, soybean farmers have increasingly turned to 2,4-D, which has its own history of environmental and health concerns. Weeds, meanwhile, have emerged that are resistant to each of these herbicides and others. This has forced companies like Bayer to ratchet up their efforts, stacking their seeds with more resistance traits in a cat-and-mouse game with nature. This spring, Bayer introduced its “Vyconic” soybean, which is tolerant to a record five different herbicides: glyphosate, dicamba, glufosinate, 2,4-D and mesotrione. While it probably won’t hit the North American market until 2027, Bayer is already calling it “the answer farmers have been looking for.” David Mortensen, a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, isn’t convinced. Glyphosate brought a silver-bullet mentality to weed management, he says. The approach ignores what he sees as the real problem, which is that weeds will develop resistance to any chemical so frequently used. Farmers should employ other methods to prevent unwanted pests, with a heavy focus on rotating their crops, he says. “Nature,” Mortensen says, “has a way around silver bullets.” Glyphosate faces another big challenge: growing concern over the risks to human health. Trace amounts of glyphosate have been found in everything from children’s cereals to breastmilk to people’s urine — a legacy of the sheer volume of herbicide used in recent decades. Anxiety about the chemical accelerated in 2015, when a World Health Organization unit classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Before long, lawsuits piled up in the US from former Roundup users — mostly landscapers and hobby gardeners rather than farmers — who had developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Bayer made its bid for Monsanto the following year, a gamble to pair its extensive library of (non-glyphosate) pesticides with Monsanto’s world-beating ability to manipulate seeds to be resistant to chemicals. Within weeks of the deal closing in 2018, however, a San Francisco jury awarded a former groundskeeper $289 million (later reduced to $21 million) in the first Roundup trial. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now health secretary in the second Trump administration, was a plaintiff attorney on the case. Bayer insists that Roundup is safe, stating that glyphosate has been subject to some 2,400 studies over the past 50 years, many of which find no association between its use and cancer risk. Opponents counter that plenty of studies raise doubts about that stance or have even reached the opposite conclusion. Generally, the lawsuits claim that Monsanto either knew or should have known that Roundup can cause cancer and never warned users. Plaintiffs have won 11 of the 28 trials so far, some of which have resulted in massive penalties against Bayer. While the company has successfully reduced the damages in numerous post-trial motions, it’s nonetheless already paid out more than $10 billion in legal costs. In a bid to prevent cases from piling up indefinitely, Bayer in 2023 removed glyphosate from the “lawn and garden” versions of Roundup that consumers buy at US stores like Home Depot. These days, Bayer’s defense rests, in part, on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s position that — as the agency put it in 2020 — glyphosate is “unlikely to be a human carcinogen” and that “there are no risks of concern to human health” when it’s used “in accordance with its current label.” The EPA has for years cleared the Roundup label without a cancer warning and Bayer argues that it therefore shouldn’t face lawsuits at the state level over the matter. (In 2022, a federal court compelled the EPA to withdraw its stance on glyphosate’s safety, saying that the agency had failed to fully explain how it had reached its conclusion; the EPA says it is updating its evaluation and looking to “better explain its findings” as soon as next year). After convincing one federal appeals court but failing to sway two others, Bayer is now seeking a hearing before the US Supreme Court. In 2022, it failed to persuade the court to review the litigation, though its chances may be better this time around thanks to the conflicting appellate rulings. But even success on that front may not fully resolve the safety question over glyphosate. In May, the Trump administration released its “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report, which cited studies that raise concerns that glyphosate increases the risk of reproductive and development disorders, cancers, liver inflammation and metabolic disturbances. In a statement at the time, Bayer said that the report “contains some details around pesticides and the associated regulatory process that are not fact-based.” A follow-up White House strategy document went easier on pesticides, saying the EPA will partner with “food and agricultural stakeholders” to make sure the public is confident in its review procedures. Bayer also notes that regulators in countries from the US to Japan to New Zealand have recently reaffirmed that glyphosate-based products can be safely used as directed. While the European Union reauthorized glyphosate for 10 years in 2023, individual countries including Germany and Austria have placed restrictions on the chemical. Meanwhile, Vietnam banned glyphosate in 2021. As US litigation festers, Bayer has increasingly taken its defense outside of the courtroom, lobbying US politicians at the local, state and federal levels. In Georgia and North Dakota, new legislation shields pesticide manufacturers from some failure-to-warn claims. Yet much of the Roundup litigation is concentrated in states like California, Missouri and Pennsylvania, where such laws will be tougher to enact. The company is pushing for measures at the federal level that could achieve some of that legal protection nationwide. Amid all the fighting, there’s an uncomfortable reality for all parties — Bayer is far from equipped to fight these legal battles forever. Before its initial bid for Monsanto, Bayer was one of Germany’s most valuable publicly traded companies. Since the deal closed, its stock has plunged, leaving its market valuation today at about €25.7 billion — less than the €33.3billion that it has in net debt. Meanwhile, other challenges loom. Its pharmaceuticals unit, for example, may struggle to grow at all in coming years after losing patent protection for two of its top-selling drugs. Since Anderson became CEO in 2023, he’s slashed thousands of jobs and considered one day breaking up the conglomerate. He’s also pledged to “significantly contain” the legal mess by the end of 2026. This summer, he set aside an additional $1.4 billion for the Roundup litigation, raising the company’s total outlay for the suits to nearly $18 billion. If Bayer can’t resolve the litigation by other means, it may be forced to take drastic action. As settlement talks proceed with plaintiff attorneys, representatives for Bayer have threatened in recent months to put the US-based Monsanto division into bankruptcy protection, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing private matters. “We have a multi-pronged strategy in place to significantly contain litigation,” a spokesperson for Bayer said. “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on speculation around this matter.” Bayer’s bosses have previously considered more long-shot options for restructuring and continue to look for any approach that could put a stop to the litigation. “Everything remains on the table,” Anderson said in August. “We remain acutely aware of the threat of this issue for US farmers, US consumers and for our company.” If Bayer stops making glyphosate, it will eventually put an end to the Roundup litigation, though that could take a while. The company once assumed a 15-year latency period between someone being exposed to a carcinogen and being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Farmers, meanwhile, could still procure glyphosate from Chinese producers, even if the exact formulations of the products may differ from Roundup and complicate their usage on the farm. There are risks to concentrating manufacturing in any single country. In recent years, prices for glyphosate surged when Chinese factories slowed production amid Covid lockdowns and again when Hurricane Ida barreled through Louisiana in 2021. Prices would likely spike again if Bayer shuttered its production, perhaps incentivizing farmers to increase their embrace of other chemicals. Of course, it wouldn’t be easy for the world to do without glyphosate. After generations of efforts, scientists still haven’t developed another chemical that attacks plants in quite the same way. Meanwhile, bringing new herbicides to market has gotten more cumbersome, in part since regulators require more safety evidence. In 1995, Bayer had to screen about 50,000 molecules to find one fit for development, it says. By 2014, that number had more than tripled. Today, a company can spend a dozen years or longer developing an herbicide, one reason why few besides agrochemical giants like Bayer, BASF SE, Corteva Inc. and Syngenta Group Co. even bother trying. Bayer’s latest product, Icafolin, captures the challenge. After announcing the chemical in February 2020, the company now says it will become commercial in 2028, though initially only in Brazil. While Icafolin has a unique method of attacking weeds at the cellular level, it’s only intended to complement glyphosate, not replace it. Bayer says that peak sales of the chemical may reach €750 million, less than a third of its current annual haul from glyphosate. However, it’s the first herbicide the company has developed using CropKey, an approach that employs artificial intelligence to search for potential weak spots in a weed’s protein structure. From there, scientists try to design molecules that can bind to the target protein. The approach aims to turn developing new herbicides into a more systematic process, one that factors in safety and sustainability on the front end. “This is the first time that we’ve approached the development of a crop protection solution in a very different way,” says Mike Graham, head of research and development at Bayer’s crop science division in St. Louis. “We’re going to continue to design molecules that are more effective, but that are also safer.” Going forward, a key question will be just how big of a role chemical herbicides and genetically modified seeds play in the future of farming. Even Bayer acknowledges that a more nuanced, or “integrated,” approach to weed management is needed to ensure ample harvests and a clean environment. One tool that could see increased use is biological herbicides, which rely on living organisms like bacteria or naturally occurring materials and can help farmers keep their harvests eligible for organic certification. The approach has caught on with farmers growing fruits, vegetables and nuts, though there’s opportunity for bigger crops like corn, soybeans and wheat. Other, more time-tested methods that have lost favor in recent decades are back in the conversation, too, such as sophisticated crop rotation regimens and the planting of “cover crops” like oats and clovers in the winter to suppress weeds and add nutrients back to the soil. Some farmers are turning to wheeled robots and aerial drones to hunt down weeds, then either zap them with lasers or douse them with microdoses of herbicides. In the decades to come, tools like gene editing could even bring forth crops designed to withstand threats such as punishing droughts. Comai, the UC Davis professor, is confident that all of these methods have a role to play. Yet he’s concerned that farming has become such a contentious subject during the glyphosate era. “It doesn’t look terribly rosy unless there’s a compact of government, scientists and the public into figuring out what the solutions may be and how to get there,” Comai says. “We’ll need every possible tool to survive in a civilized way as humans.”
