Bader Farms Won $265 Million From Monsanto After Dicamba Killed 30,000 Peach Trees

Bill Bader's family ran Bader Farms in Campbell, in southeastern Missouri. Roughly 1,000 acres, the largest peach operation in the state. Then the dicamba started drifting in.

The Drift

Dicamba is a herbicide sold by Monsanto (now Bayer) and BASF, designed to be paired with genetically modified dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton. The problem with dicamba is that it is volatile. It evaporates off treated fields and drifts onto neighboring land, killing crops that were not engineered to resist it.

Bader's peach trees were not dicamba-tolerant. When neighboring soybean farmers started spraying, the herbicide drifted onto his orchards and destroyed approximately 30,000 peach trees, effectively wiping out the operation.

The Documents

Bader Farms sued Monsanto and BASF in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. During trial, the plaintiffs introduced more than 180 internal company documents. The records showed Monsanto had projected thousands of off-target drift complaints from farmers and rolled the product out anyway.

The Verdict

In February 2020, the federal jury found Monsanto/Bayer and BASF liable. The award was $15 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages, totaling $265 million. It was one of the largest agricultural verdicts in American history.

The Appeal

The verdict did not survive intact. The trial judge first cut the punitive damages to $60 million. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals then vacated even that reduced amount and ordered a new trial on punitive damages only. The $15 million in compensatory damages stands. The final punitive number remains unresolved.

What remains is a precedent: a family farmer with 30,000 dead trees and a stack of internal corporate emails took on one of the world's largest chemical companies in front of a federal jury, and won.