When I started farming corn and soybeans on our 320-acre family farm in Greene County, Iowa, in 1976, herbicides like dicamba were a go-to to control weeds. Dicamba is quite toxic, but it helped control broadleaf weeds in my corn crop — until it didn’t.
Like so many herbicides, dicamba became ineffective over time as weeds built up resistance. In a typical pattern, the pesticide companies would cook up new chemicals to keep us on a toxic, ecologically damaging treadmill to manage farming the same crops, year after year. But dicamba created other problems, too.
When I sprayed dicamba on fields of young corn, I often saw leaf damage on my soybeans or on my neighbors’ crops — sometimes quite a distance away from my farm. Weeks later, after a big rain, dicamba-laden water would run off a corn field into the soybeans and damage them again. Like many other farmers, I lost faith in dicamba.
