The move heightens the competition for sales to farmers with rivals Bayer and BASF.

Up to 20 per cent of U.S. soybean acres this year could be planted with Corteva’s Enlist E3 soybeans, which are genetically modified to withstand applications of three different weed killers, the company said. That forecast was up from Corteva’s prior estimate for plantings on 10 per cent of U.S. acres.

Corteva also said that starting in 2021 it will “significantly reduce” over five years its volume of seeds engineered by Bayer to tolerate herbicides based on the chemicals dicamba and glyphosate.

Corteva, which spun off last year after a merger of Dow Chemical and Dupont, had previously been set to sell Bayer’s dicamba-resistant Xtend brand soybean seeds for the next few years.

Corteva now expects “minimal use of the trait platform after the completion of the ramp-up of the Enlist weed control system,” according to a statement.

Bayer’s Xtend soybeans have been popular for their robust yields but have drawn complaints, lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny after the dicamba herbicide drifted to neighbouring fields and killed plants that were not genetically modified to resist it.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2018 approved the use of dicamba for two more years, adding restrictions on how it can be used.

Bayer has separately faced lawsuits claiming that its glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide causes cancer. The company said on Friday it reached an agreement with plaintiffs’ lawyers to postpone a Missouri jury trial over such allegations.

Corteva shares were up 4.7 per cent in morning trading after the company posted a surprise quarterly profit. Bayer’s shares were down 1.9 per cent, and BASF’s down 1.3 per cent.

— Reporting for Reuters by Tom Polansek and Karl Plume in Chicago.

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Arkansas will prohibit the use of herbicides based on dicamba from April 16 to Oct. 31, the strictest state limits imposed on the product after it was linked to millions of acres of U.S. crop damage last year.

The ban makes it less attractive for farmers to buy soybean and cotton seeds that Monsanto engineered to resist dicamba because the crops are designed to be sprayed with the chemical during the summer growing season.

Monsanto is banking on its dicamba-based herbicide and soybean seeds engineered to tolerate it, called Xtend, to dominate soybean production in the U.S., the world’s second-largest exporter.

The U.S. faced an agricultural crisis last year caused by new formulations of dicamba herbicides. Farmers and weed experts said the products evaporated and drifted away from where they were applied, hurting crops that could not resist them.

Arkansas farmer Reed Storey, who said his soybeans were among those damaged, wants the agrichemical companies to develop dicamba products that drift less.

“Until they can find a newer formulation, then I’m completely tickled pink with the decision,” he said.

Monsanto and BASF say their dicamba-based herbicides are safe when used properly. They opposed the ban in Arkansas and have said it will hurt growers there by removing a tool to fight stubborn weeds.

Monsanto, which is being acquired by Bayer for US$63.5 billion, has also sued Arkansas to stop the ban.

Arkansas blocked sales of Monsanto’s product, called XtendiMax with VaporGrip, in 2017 because the company did not provide testing data that state officials wanted.

“It is distressing that we’re in an environment in Arkansas where bringing the most modern tools to farmers is difficult,” said Scott Partridge, Monsanto vice-president of global strategy.

Other farm states, including Minnesota, Missouri and North Dakota, have imposed limits on dicamba sprayings for 2018 in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the crop damage last year.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last fall also revised the registration for Monsanto’s XtendiMax, making it a restricted use pesticide (RUP) and requiring all applicators to complete training before applying the product in 2018.

Still, Monsanto projected before Friday’s move by lawmakers in Arkansas that farmers would grow Xtend soybeans on 40 million acres this year, which would be double from 2017 and account for 44 per cent of all U.S. soybean plantings.

In an open letter to growers published Wednesday, Monsanto’s chief technology officer Robb Fraley said “the majority of growers saw tremendous results” with the company’s Roundup Ready Xtend system in 2017.

In 2018, he wrote, the company plans to distribute about a million spray nozzles “at no cost to grower customers” ahead of the spraying season, and is also developing an app to “help applicators create and retain application records and identify weather conditions conducive for successful application.”

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and agribusiness for Reuters from Chicago. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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“The intent was never for this to be a long pause,” Missouri Agriculture Director Chris Chinn told the U.S. farm show Agritalk on Monday, after Missouri became the second state to announce such a ban so far this month.

“A lot of farmers are finding a lot of success with this product (dicamba), but there are a lot of farmers who have a lot of damage.”

Missouri’s dicamba ban comes in the wake of over 130 complaints about drift injuring nearby crops from across the state, and “that number just keeps growing every day,” she said.

Missouri’s ban on dicamba application provides for civil penalties of up to US$1,000 per violation as well as restitution payments where deemed necessary.

Chinn said the state hoped to have the product back in farmers’ hands this week, “as soon as (dicamba manufacturers) get us a label we can agree upon.”

Lifting the ban, she added, could “very easily” happen “the same day we get that label.”

Monsanto, which makes dicamba and produces dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton sold under its Xtend brand, said it will “actively engage” in an expedited investigation and consideration of “additional special local-need labeling restrictions for the rest of the 2017 growing season,” online publication Ag Insider reported.

It’s estimated over 200,000 acres of soybeans have been damaged by dicamba drift, a University of Missouri weed specialist told Brownfield Ag News on Friday.

Dicamba use is up because of plantings of Xtend soybean and cotton. But unlike Xtend crops, many other crops, including fruit trees and vegetables, are not dicamba-tolerant.

Arkansas recently approved an emergency rule allowing fines of up to US$25,000 for “egregious” misuse of dicamba and was expected to implement a 120-day ban on dicamba applications on Monday in the wake of almost 600 dicamba spray drift complaints.

Monsanto says Arkansas is an anomaly. Part of the issue is that while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved Monsanto’s less-volatile form of dicamba — branded as Xtendimax with VaporGrip Technology — Arkansas’ state government hasn’t.

BASF also makes a less-volatile dicamba, called Engenia.

— Allan Dawson is a reporter for the Manitoba Co-operator at Miami, Man.

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What’s been happening in Arkansas underscores the risk dicamba drift presents. The U.S. state of Arkansas on Friday announced a 120-day ban on the use and sale of dicamba in the wake of 550 drift complaints this season.

And last year an altercation between two farmers over drift escalated to the alleged shooting and death of 55-year-old farmer Mike Wallace of Monette, in the state’s northeast.

The Arkansas Legislative Council had already approved an emergency rule allowing fines of up to US$25,000 for “egregious” misuse of dicamba.

“Dicamba drift damage can occur at low doses,” Terry Buss, a provincial farm production extension specialist for pulses, said in an interview Wednesday during Manitoba Agriculture and the University of Manitoba’s Crop Diagnostic School at the university’s Carman research station.

Roundup Ready 2 Xtend Soybeans, which can tolerate the herbicides glyphosate and dicamba, were made commercially available to Manitoba farmers for the first time this spring.

Dicamba, a group 4 herbicide, is more volatile than some other weedkillers, provincial weed specialist Jeanette Gaultier said in an interview Friday.

However, two less volatile dicamba formulations — BASF’s Engenia and Monsanto’s Xtendimax with VaporGrip Technology — are available.

Dicamba drift can be further reduced by applying it before crops emerge, increasing droplet size, spraying when winds are light and keeping sprayer speeds down.

Monsanto Canada spokeswoman Trish Jordan said Arkansas is an anomaly.

“What we’ve seen so far is the vast majority of farmers and applicators using our products are seeing great results, both from a weed control and efficacy standpoint, as well as the application itself and the products staying put,” Jordan said in an email Friday. “So we feel really good about what we are seeing.”

Though Xtendimax has been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, farmers in Arkansas don’t have access to it because the state government hasn’t approved it, Jordan said.

“Therefore they don’t have access to the formulation that is designed to go with the product, nor have any of their farmers had the benefit of education and training sessions like in other states.”

Dicamba drift complaints have also been filed in Tennessee, Missouri and Mississippi.

But Jordan said the number of complaints is normal, despite 25 million acres of Xtend soybeans and cotton planted in the U.S. this year.

“(W)e will continue to work with every farmer that’s purchased our technology… to have a positive experience,” she said.

Manitoba Agriculture has heard a few dicamba drift complaints, but the extent of damage isn’t known yet, Gaultier said.

She suspects warmer weather in the southern U.S. might be contributing to more problems there.

States such as Arkansas also have more dicamba-susceptible crops, while canola and wheat, Manitoba’s two biggest crops by acreage, are not injured by dicamba drift. However, Gaultier said, non-Xtend soybeans, edible beans, sunflowers, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers are.

Some of the problems with dicamba drift in the U.S. are the result of “rescue” treatments when both crops and weeds are well advanced, Buss said. Susceptible crops hit with dicamba entering the reproductive stage result in bigger yield losses because they don’t have time to recover, he said.

Although dicamba can be applied to Xtend soybeans from pre-emergence to early flowering, applying pre-emergence has a lot of advantages. For one, if your crop isn’t up, your neighbour’s might not be either, and can’t be damaged.

“Dicamba provides residual control for a short period of time,” Buss said.

Research has shown earlier weed control boosts crop yields.

Monsanto also recommends applying dicamba with nozzles that produce coarse to ultra-coarse droplets such as Turbo TeeJet Induction and Air Induction. Those nozzles require application rates of at least 10 gallons of water an acre.

Spraying should take place when wind speeds are three to 15 km/h and at sprayer travel speeds of no more than 24 km/h. Boom height should be no more than 50 cm, Monsanto says.

Farmers shouldn’t spray during inversions, or when wind conditions are dead calm, Buss said. The spray might not penetrate the crop canopy and could move to a neighbouring field.

“There is potential for a lot of drift damage if we are not doing things properly,” he said.

While widespread drift damage is unacceptable, Buss hopes Manitoba famers cut each other some slack where field edges meet.

“I think people are going to have to be reasonable… because it could be you causing the damage next year,” he said.

“I don’t think we saw as much of the minor drift that was going on and now we are going to be more aware of it.”

Farmers and their employees should also pay more attention to what they and their neighbours are growing to avoid not only drift, but spraying the wrong field, Buss said.

Cleaning all the dicamba out of a spray tank isn’t hard, but critical.

“Eight ounces of dicamba solution — not the concentrated product, but the solution left in a big sprayer filled up with something else — can cause (injury) symptoms,” Buss said.

“If you leave three gallons of solution in that sprayer… and then fill up and go spray something else susceptible you can actually cause yield loss.”

Monsanto recommends triple-rinsing sprayers after applying dicamba. The first rinse is with water. All filters and screens should cleaned with an ammonia- or detergent-based solution. The tank should get a similar solution and be agitated, then flushed. A third rinse, with water, should then follow.

— Allan Dawson is a reporter for the Manitoba Co-operator at Miami, Man. Follow him at @AllanReporter on Twitter.

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Monsanto’s Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans, genetically modified with a tolerance to dicamba and glyphosate herbicides, were recently approved for import by the European Union.

Monsanto planned to introduce Xtend soybeans in Canada for the 2016 growing season, but was held back due to the EU’s lack of clearance.

Canada fleabane is the biggest problem weed soybean farmers have in Ontario, which has become resistant to Roundup, said Jeff Barlow, a farmer near Binbrook, Ont. and director with Grain Farmers of Ontario.

“We’re pretty excited about Roundup Ready Xtend being approved… it will give everybody another mode of action to beat up on some of this fleabane,” he said.

Canada fleabane has strong seeds that can survive in the ground for years and spread quickly, he said.

“It’s a very proliferous plant… they spread really quick and grow really tall, so if you have a lot of them in your (soybean) field, they’ll hurt the yield a lot…and there’s no way for you to kill it,” he said.

Since first being identified in the province in 2010, glyphosate-resistant Canada fleabane has spread from one county to 26 counties in only six growing seasons, said Mike Cowbrough, weed management lead with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture at Guelph.

“Like any other weed, it’s competing for resources and that will come at the expense of yield… If there’s a heavy enough population, there have been documented yield losses as high as 97 per cent,” he said.

“More realistically, it’s about 50 to 60 per cent loss on average if you can’t control it effectively. Regardless, whether it’s 50 per cent or 97 per cent, that’s pretty significant economically.”

Until now, the only opportunity to manage Canada fleabane in soybean crops was some sort of tillage or pre-seed burndown prior to planting, Cowbrough said.

“Once the soybean crops have emerged, we don’t have the tools to control (Canada fleabane), aside from physically going in and pulling plants, but when you have a population of 60,000 to 80,000 plants per acre, that would be a tough task,” he said.

Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans will be resistant to dicamba, a herbicide very effective against Canada fleabane, Barlow said.

“It will help a lot of people next year…give them one more thing they can use to keep the fleabane at bay,” he said.

In areas of the U.S. where Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans have already been planted, dicamba has been causing headaches for neighbouring fields, as the chemical easily drifts and is toxic to regular soybeans and other crops, according to U.S. reports.

There is a concern for dicamba drift in Ontario, especially in southwest areas rich with horticulture, tree fruit and vineyards, said Cowbrough.

However, the herbicide has very specific guidelines on drift mitigation and what applicators should be doing to apply responsibly.

“With any herbicide or pesticide applied to a crop, you always want to mitigate drift. Some herbicides, their drift injury is just more visible than others,” Cowbrough said.

— Erin DeBooy writes for Commodity News Service Canada, a Winnipeg company specializing in grain and commodity market reporting. Follow her at @ErinDeBooy on Twitter.

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Under the deal, whose terms were not disclosed, Monsanto will supply its farm seeds and chemicals rival with the herbicide, which will be sold as DuPont FeXapan herbicide plus VaporGrip Technology, the companies said.

The chemical is meant for use with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans, a genetically modified variety designed to tolerate applications of dicamba and glyphosate herbicides. DuPont signed a licensing agreement in 2013 to incorporate Monsanto’s Xtend trait in its seeds.

Widespread planting of glyphosate-tolerant corn, soybeans and cotton in the U.S. has contributed to the rise of weeds resistant to the herbicide so farmers are seeking alternative varieties that can withstand other weed killers.

Monsanto has invested more than $1 billion in a New Orleans-area dicamba production facility to supply demand it expects will blossom in the coming years (all figures US$). The company has said the Xtend platform will be its largest-ever technology launch.

The Xtend soybean trait was planted on around one million acres in the U.S. this year, less than initially planned due to import-approval delays in the European Union. Monsanto expects 15 million acres to be planted with Xtend soybeans next season and 55 million acres by 2019.

DuPont’s deal with Monsanto comes amid a period of heightened consolidation in the farm seeds and chemicals industry that has long been dominated by six large companies.

DuPont and Dow Chemical agreed to a $130 billion merger last year and Syngenta agreed in February to be bought by ChemChina for $43 billion. In May, Monsanto turned down a $62 billion takeover offer from Bayer but said it remained open to a deal.

— Karl Plume reports on agriculture and ag commodity markets for Reuters from Chicago.

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China, the world’s biggest soybean importer, does not allow imports of new genetically modified crops until they are approved by government regulators.

The U.S. seed and agrochemical company’s next-generation soybean variety is engineered to tolerate applications of both glyphosate and dicamba amid a growing problem of glyphosate-resistant weeds in North America.

Dicamba herbicide use is allowed in Canada, but not yet approved in the U.S., where the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is still reviewing the chemical, Monsanto said.

Monsanto said the EPA approval is in the “late stage” and the company will offer discounts to U.S. farmers buying Roundup Ready 2 Xtend seeds in case the regulatory approval does not arrive in time for the 2016 growing season.

The company is aiming for three million acres planted in the upcoming season and expects the genetic technology to be planted to two-thirds of U.S. soybean acres by 2019. The company also licenses its GMO properties to other seed companies.

“To date, we’ve had significant pre-orders from farmers and are excited to move forward with commercialization,” Miriam Paris, Monsanto’s U.S. soybean marketing manager, said in a release.

Monsanto has had clearance in Canada for the glyphosate- and dicamba-tolerant trait stack since 2013.

The company has previously said its field testing of Xtend soybeans in southern Ontario showed dicamba has “proven effective” on glyphosate-resistant giant ragweed and Canada fleabane populations in the province.

The option to use dicamba in soybeans is also expected to offer improved control of other populations of herbicide-resistant weeds, such as Group 2- or Group 5-resistant biotypes, that are also known to exist in Canada, Monsanto said previously.

— Reporting for Reuters by Karl Plume. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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