Bayer will have to wait until the fall to find out if the court will hear its Roundup case, and the pork industry loses another Prop. 12 battle.
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Bayer will have to wait until the fall to find out if the court will hear its Roundup case, and the pork industry loses another Prop. 12 battle.
June 30, 2025
June 30, 2025 – The Supreme Court announced two decisions today that have major implications for American agriculture.
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The first relates to Bayer’s petition for the court to hear a case that the agrichemical giant hopes could end the more than 100,000 filed lawsuits that claim individuals have developed cancer due to the use of its marquee weedkiller, Roundup. (Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup.) Instead of deciding yes or no on the petition, the court asked the Solicitor General, the federal government’s Supreme Court lawyer, to weigh in on the case first. That pushes the final decision on whether the court will hear the case to the next session, which starts in the fall.
“We see this request as an encouraging step and look forward to hearing the views of the government,” Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said in a statement on the decision. In the meantime, according to the statement, the company will continue to work to get state laws passed that protect them from future Roundup litigation. So far, they’ve been successful in Georgia and North Dakota.
The other case involved the U.S. pork industry in its second attempt to ask the court to overturn California’s animal welfare law known as Proposition 12. Prop. 12 is controversial because its requirements for housing mother pigs approved by California voters apply to pork producers in other states, if they want to sell their meat in California. The law has been the subject of ongoing attempts by the pork industry to stall or overturn it, but more than a year after it went into full effect, Civil Eats’ reporting found that many large producers have already complied with the law, and Prop. 12 may also be helping smaller producers reach new markets.
Today, the Supreme Court denied the Iowa Pork Producers’ Association’s petition to take up the case once again. In 2022, the court heard a different case brought by the National Pork Producers Council challenging Prop. 12, and their 2023 ruling left the law in place. The pork industry is also lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would overturn the law. (Link to this post.)
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