Abstract
When crops die in a field prior to harvest, a farmer loses a portion of his salary for that year. When the cause of the crop loss is natural, farmers can usually seek compensation through crop insurance and government commodity support programs. When the crops were lost as a result of pesticide drift, these forms of compensation are not usually available to farmers.1 In order to make up for their losses, farmers can seek damages through judicial redress. For many decades, various state and federal laws have combined to complicate and at times prevent farmers adversely affected by pesticide drift from recovering their losses via these judicial means. The recent adoption of post-emergent dicamba applications on cropland brought about wide-scale pesticide drift that magnified this shortcoming in the country’s pesticide regulatory scheme. This paper is divided into three parts to fully illustrate this issue and provide a policy proposal that addresses all aspects of the situation. Part I is subdivided into three sections, with the first section providing an overview of modern agriculture in the US. This overview is followed by a brief summary of recent soybean losses experienced due to dicamba drift as well as a scientific definition of pesticide drift. Part I concludes with an outline of the pesticide regulatory scheme in the US. In Part II, torts currently available to farmers who experience losses due to pesticide drift are discussed with an emphasis in the shortcomings of each tort under current state and federal laws. In Part III, a policy proposal is advanced to recommend the amending of state right-to-farm acts in order to allow nuisance suits under the specific circumstances presented by pesticide drift suits.
Recommended Citation
(2020)
"TORTS AND PESTICIDE DRIFT: AMENDING RIGHT-TO-FARM ACTS IN THE WAKE OF WIDESPREAD DICAMBA DRIFT by Nicholas Brown** and Matt Roessing*,"
Journal of Legal Studies in Business: Vol. 23, Article 4.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/jlsb/vol23/iss1/4
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