$265M dicamba verdict provides ‘road map’ for new suits targeting controversial weedkiller

“I had to start growing dicamba beans because the losses were so much you can’t stand it,” said Sam Branum, a recently retired farmer near Hornersville. “If you’re farming around it, you either get with it, or you get out.”

Xtend crops now blanket the area’s cotton and soybean fields.

“It’s more or less taken over down here,” said Carlis McHugh, a retired farmer and the former owner of Billy’s Steakhouse in Portageville, about an hour south of Cape Girardeau. “All the farmers use it.”

He says there are multiple reasons for Xtend’s regional surge toward saturation. One is visible to the naked eye: It provides extremely “clean” fields, free of weeds.

“You can drive around and not see a weed. That’s how effective the stuff is,” said McHugh. “It kills everything but the crop.”

Self-preservation, though, is another top selling point. McHugh says his crops were damaged once, forcing him to join the ranks of Xtend converts.

“We switched over to it to protect ourselves,” said McHugh. “You didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice, if you know what I mean.”

Incentive for defensive planting is unlikely to diminish. Weed science experts say some drift is an inevitability, and a new way of life that many growers have come to accept.