For soybean and cotton farmers, the upcoming 2025 growing season will be the first since 2016 without legal access to over-the-top (OTT) versions of dicamba. A federal court vacated the three OTT dicamba herbicide registrations in February 2024. Though the EPA issued an existing stocks order that allowed for OTT dicamba to be applied on farms in 2024, the vacated registrations mean that farmers cannot apply OTT dicamba on their farms in 2025. Since that court’s ruling, a whirlwind of other lawsuits surrounding the herbicide registration process means that the EPA will spend significantly more time reviewing the latest submissions to re-register OTT dicamba than in 2020 after a similar court ruling. As a result, soybean and cotton farmers across the country will be unable to use one of the most widely used herbicides over the last decade.
In this issue of the NC State Economist, Assistant Extension Professor Nicholas Brown tells the brief, yet fickle story of dicamba-tolerant crop systems to illustrate how we got to this critical juncture. Herbicide options for farmers in 2025 will then be discussed alongside concerns of some commentators regarding a recurrence of off-label applications of pre-emergent dicamba such as that which occurred in 2015 and 2016. To conclude, the article will project the future for OTT dicamba and the overall herbicide registration process beyond 2026.
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