The agrichemical giant is lobbying for state and federal laws that would give it legal immunity from claims that Roundup causes cancer, and launched a new ad blitz.
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The agrichemical giant is lobbying for state and federal laws that would give it legal immunity from claims that Roundup causes cancer, and launched a new ad blitz.
April 8, 2025
Community and environmental groups in Iowa voice their opposition to a bill inside the state capitol building in Des Moines on February 10. The bill would give legal protection to pesticide makers against lawsuits. (Photo credit: Julie Russell-Steuart)
May 14, 2025 Update:Governor Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s bill into law.
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April 28, 2025 Update: North Dakota’s governor signed the first bill protecting pesticide companies from liability into law last week. In Georgia, the bill is still with the governor.
On March 21, a jury in a Georgia courtroom awarded John Barnes $2.1 billion in damages, affirming his claim that using Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that the company that made the product should have warned him of the risk.
It was one of about 177,000 lawsuits to date filed against Bayer, which acquired Monsanto, the maker of the world’s most widely used weedkiller, in 2018. The company has set aside $16 billion to handle the litigation, and this case looked like another major loss.
On the contrary, it may be the last Roundup litigation case in the state.
The week prior, Georgia’s state lawmakers passed a bill that would protect pesticide manufacturers from the same kind of legal liability in the future. It is now awaiting Republican Governor Brian Kemp’s signature.
If the bill becomes law, it will mark a turning point in Bayer’s long search to find the right strategy to beat back the lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. Bayer maintains that Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe when used as directed, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly found it is not likely to cause cancer.
“The fact these chemical companies want immunity from the harm that their pesticides may have on an individual or many individuals, it’s just not fair.”
International health agencies and multiple juries, presented with scientific research and documents that show Monsanto worked to hide evidence of harm, have reached different conclusions, affirming its connection to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
In addition to many other approaches to mitigate the cost of litigation, the agrichemical giant first began writing and lobbying for the passage of “pesticide immunity” laws in a handful of states last year.
The laws eliminate individuals’ ability to bring “failure-to-warn” claims, which most Roundup litigation has been based on to date. Essentially, these laws declare that if the EPA has approved a chemical as safe, companies cannot be held liable for failing to warn users of risks. Opponents point out that the EPA’s approvals do not always keep up with emerging risks. Chlorpyrifos and atrazine, for example, have remained in use with EPA approval despite known risks.
Last year, Bayer lobbied lawmakers in Iowa, Idaho, and Missouri to push immunity bills, but the bills failed to pass. The company then ramped up its campaign heading into 2025. It created the Modern Ag Alliance to promote farmer support for the bills and began a cross-country ad blitz. Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers have introduced similar immunity bills in about a dozen states. Bills were defeated in Montana, Mississippi, and Wyoming and are still pending in Idaho, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, and Iowa.
“People who know about the bill are opposed to the bill and really don’t want their rights curtailed. We don’t need to have the Iowa legislature making this decision on behalf of Bayer,” said Jennifer Breon, an organizer at advocacy group Food & Water Watch who has been coordinating opposition to the Iowa bill. “If they feel that their cancer or whatever illness has been caused by using a pesticide, people should have a chance to make that case in court.”
While action continues in the states, Bayer is actively supporting two current pathways to federal law changes that could achieve a similar result: The first is a petition submitted by the attorneys general of 11 Republican-led states asking the EPA to initiate a rulemaking process that would further affirm the EPA’s authority on pesticide labeling. The second, a piece of legislation called the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, could be attached to a future farm bill.
There is also a wild-card factor in the mix: While Republicans have mostly supported Bayer’s efforts in the past, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the lawyers who won the first verdict against Monsanto (now Bayer) based on claims Roundup caused Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s cancer. And some of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) followers have been speaking out against the bills.
Bayer did not respond to questions from Civil Eats by press time.*
On April 1, Iowans stood in front of their state capitol building in Des Moines holding letters that spelled out, “NO CANCER GAG ACT.” State Representative Megan Srinivas, a Democrat, who has been leading opposition to the bill in the legislature, stepped up to the podium.
“This bill only gives corporate profits a boost,” she said. “It tells Iowans, ‘Your lives don’t matter.’ ”
The bill, SF 394, passed in the Senate, although all Democrats and six Republicans voted against it. House lawmakers had an April 4 deadline to take it up in their chamber or it would be dead for the session, and the press conference at the state capitol was organized in support of that outcome. A coalition of 31 advocacy groups also sent a letter to House lawmakers, urging them to oppose the bill.
At the rally, Srinivas brought up Iowa’s high and rising cancer rates, a rallying cry from last year’s battle. Srinivas linked those rates to widespread use of agricultural chemicals in the state.
Bayer has been running ads, including the one on the left, that emphasize glyphosate’s safety when used as directed. Many of the Modern Ag Alliance’s ads, like the one on the right, emphasize support for farmers and don’t disclose Bayer’s involvement.
In 2024, farmers sprayed glyphosate on an estimated 15.5 million acres of corn and soybeans fields across Iowa. That’s not including its use in fields sown with other crops like wheat and oats, or across lawns, golf courses, and gardens.
“There’s just more exposure in Iowa,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney with Food & Water Watch.
However, health agencies disagree on the carcinogenic effects of glyphosate, and cancer is a complicated disease with many causes. It’s difficult to tease out how much of an impact agricultural chemical use has on cancer rates overall or to distinguish the impacts of one chemical from another when so many are used across the landscape.
Roundup is less toxic compared to many other approved pesticides but is used at a scale that is exponentially greater than other chemicals, so its association with non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma risk has had a much broader impact. In 2019, for example, U.S. farmers used about 275 million pounds of glyphosate. Atrazine was the second most widely used herbicide, at 75 million pounds.
Roundup is also more widely used by individuals outside of agriculture, including landscapers and gardeners. (Bayer is now in the process of taking glyphosate out of home use Roundup products as another prong in the plan to end lawsuits.) However, advocates say it’s important to note that the pesticide immunity bills won’t just apply to Roundup, they’ll apply to any pesticide.
In support of the pesticide immunity bill, Bayer sent four lobbyists to the Iowa state house and forged alliances with powerful agricultural groups. The Agribusiness Association of Iowa, Iowa Soybean Association, and Iowa Corn Growers Association are all partners in the Modern Ag Alliance and registered lobbyists to support the bill.
In an effort to pass state bills, the company has focused on a public messaging campaign that included ads on television, news sites, and social media. In the first three months of the year, the Modern Ag Alliance spent about $171,000 on Meta ads alone, $21,800 of that targeted to Iowa.
Some of the ads go directly to a page on the Modern Ag Alliance website where one can click on a state and send a pre-written letter to lawmakers supporting a specific bill. In Iowa, the website reports that more than 600 individuals have done so. Meta only requires companies to report spending on political ads, so the $171,000 does not include spending on a deluge of Bayer ads on glyphosate that have been flooding this reporter’s Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn feeds, for example, ever since reporting began for this story.
The political ads cover a range of messages: Some draw unsubstantiated connections between glyphosate litigation and food prices, set up Roundup lawsuits as a battle between trial lawyers and farmers, and claim the research that links Roundup to cancer is from a “discredited foreign study.” But many of Bayer’s larger set of ads simply hammer away at a simple message: Glyphosate is safe, farmers need it, and if these bills don’t pass, it might not be available anymore.
The agrichemical giant first began writing and lobbying for the passage of “pesticide immunity” laws in a handful of states last year.
“They’re promoting this idea that farmers need access to glyphosate to grow corn and soybeans in Iowa, and that’s, of course, not what the bill’s about,” Food & Water Watch’s Breon said. “Glyphosate is not going anywhere. This is just about their bottom line and their profits that they’re protecting.”
Civil Eats sent questions to Bayer asking specifically about whether the company would stop making glyphosate but the company’s representative did not send answers by press time.
Farmers, Breon noted, are among those most often exposed to agricultural chemicals, who might want to retain their right to sue in case at some point they are diagnosed with an illness and find that chemical companies knew about undisclosed risks.
While the Iowa Farm Bureau lobbied for the bill, the Iowa Farmers Union lobbied against it, declaring in a statement that farmers should be able to seek relief if they’re harmed by a chemical and that “Iowa law should protect our farmers and our communities instead of pesticide companies.”
In Idaho, Jonathan Oppenheimer, the government relations director for the Idaho Conservation League, which led opposition to Idaho’s pesticide immunity bill, said the one message he saw building support for the bills was the idea that Bayer would stop making Roundup if states did not grant them immunity and litigation continued. In his state, the Modern Ag Alliance spent more than $20,000 on targeted Meta ads and close to 700 people filled out its legislative action form. The bill died in the legislature without getting a hearing.
And in February, the Idaho Conservation League released the results of a survey commissioned by advocacy groups to gauge support of pesticide bills among residents in Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri, where pesticide immunity bills were introduced in 2024. The pollsters found 90 percent of Idahoans surveyed opposed the bills. “It was overwhelming to the point that the polling firm said they had never seen numbers this high,” Oppenheimer said.
Given the fact that very few of the state bills have passed so far, he said, the sentiment may extend beyond those states. “It surprises me that Bayer pushed so hard and spent so much money this year with relatively—except for Georgia—no success,” he said. “They’ve succeeded in one state and one state alone.”
In Iowa, on April 3, Republican House Speaker Pat Grassley announced that the bill did not have enough support to pass.
A full-page Bayer ad placed in The New York Times on March 30, 2025. The ad reads in part, “Relentless litigation threatens the future of American Agriculture,” and includes the logos of 99 members of the Modern Ag Alliance. (Click image for larger version)
While Bayer’s state-level efforts appear to be stalled in most places, the company could still succeed in Washington, D.C. In January, Bayer hired Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm with the closest ties to the Trump administration. At the same time, their ad campaigns began targeting spaces where federal lawmakers and other Beltway insiders with influence on agricultural policy gather and get their news.
For example, in late March, Bayer’s Modern Ag Alliance ran full-page ads in The Washington Post and The New York Times with the headline “Relentless Litigation Threatens Future of American Agriculture.” The ads warned farmers can’t achieve high yields and keep costs low without glyphosate. “This is a real crisis but we have the power to fix it,” it read. “We urge elected officials to stand with farmers over the litigation industry and anti-ag activists.”
In February, the company sponsored Politico’s Morning Ag newsletter. One ad read, “Farming brings $1.5 trillion to America. Bayer is proud to partner with the country’s farmers to help make that possible.” The ad linked to the company’s “glyphosate guide” with information attributing lower food prices, environmental gains, and economic growth to glyphosate use.
And on March 13, the company sponsored a Politico Live event focused on agriculture policy. Bayer’s CEO, Bill Anderson, appeared on stage right after interviews with senators Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) Tina Smith (D-Minnesota), and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee.
At the event, Anderson started by framing Bayer as a company that helps farmers meet pressing challenges. Early in his remarks, he said one of the biggest challenges growers face today is “regulatory ambiguity” around glyphosate. “If a manufacturer can do 50 years of safety studies and be endorsed as safe by every regulatory agency on Earth but still end up with billions of dollars of litigation, that’s really hard, frankly, on the future of innovation,” he said. “So, that’s something that we think is pretty important, and I’ve talked to many farmers. There are a lot of farm groups in Washington, obviously, and they see it the same way. This is essential.”
In support of the pesticide immunity bill, Bayer sent four lobbyists to the Iowa state house and forged alliances with powerful agricultural groups.
When the moderator asked about the upcoming farm bill, Anderson spoke about the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act. “One thing that is absolutely essential is we need clarity in pesticide labeling,” he said, explaining that what he sees as a current lack of clarity has powered “frivolous” lawsuits. “So, we have an opportunity in the next farm bill to provide clarity around that. That’s clarity for farmers. That’s clarity for the American public. We think that’s essential.”
The Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act would codify the fact that the EPA is the single authority on pesticide labels and warnings, making failure-to-warn claims harder to bring in court. It would also ban states from adding their own labels to pesticides. California, for example, previously added a cancer warning to glyphosate products based on the findings of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which has linked glyphosate exposure to cancer.
Representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the uniform labeling bill in 2023; it has not yet been re-introduced in this Congress. Generally, this kind of legislation would get attached to a farm bill, but since there has been little movement on passing a new farm bill, lawmakers could try to pass it in another way.
In the meantime, Bayer and its allies have been commenting on the petition asking the EPA to introduce a rule that would take similar action to mandate EPA’s authority on labeling and ban additional warnings on its own, without waiting for Congress. When the Trump administration took office, the EPA extended the deadline for comments. Now, the petitioners are awaiting the agency’s review of the comments and, ultimately, a decision.
Advocates in states around the country could turn their attention to those federal efforts.
In Iowa, Diane Rosenberg got her group, Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors (JFAN), involved in opposing pesticide immunity bills even though it wasn’t their typical fight: JFAN has been opposing the expansion of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) across Iowa for years.
But Bayer’s attempt to gain immunity from Roundup lawsuits, she said, is similar in the way that big agricultural corporations want to call the shots in rural America.
“Everybody—the neighbor, the farmer, everybody—is basically under the thumb of these corporations,” she said. “The fact these chemical companies want immunity from the harm that their pesticides may have on an individual or many individuals, it’s just not fair. To me, it feels morally bankrupt.”
An earlier edition of this article misstated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role as the lead lawyer in the Monsanto lawsuit; he was one of several leading the case.
April 8, 2025 update: After we published this article, a Bayer spokesperson emailed a statement to Civil Eats that reads, in part:
“Proposed legislation at the federal and state level—such as bills being considered in a number of states—would simply help ensure that any pesticide registered with the EPA—and sold under a label consistent with the EPA’s own determinations—is sufficient to satisfy requirements for health and safety warnings.
These bills are important because they reinforce the authority of the EPA’s rigorous, science-backed labeling decisions, so that when the EPA determines what a crop protection label should say, that decision is consistent and reliable for everyone.
The notion of these bills being a blanket immunity shield is a false narrative positioned by the Litigation Industry as a distortion of the truth. No company should be afforded blanket immunity. Plaintiffs regularly allege various causes of action/claims including negligence, Breach of Warranty and others. These are different than failure to warn.”
May 9, 2025 update: In May, Bayer stepped up its federal policy efforts with a promotional installation in the center of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, steps from Capitol Hill. The installation links glyphosate to lower food prices and includes staff who relay that message to passersby:
Photo credit: Lisa Held
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