North Dakota and Georgia became the first two states to implement legislation that will limit liability for pesticide manufacturers involved in failure-to-warn lawsuits. The laws will reduce or eliminate pesticide users’ abilities to win cases alleging negative health outcomes caused by pesticides that have been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“No corporation likes to pay out,” Jonathan Oppenheimer, Government Relations Director at the Idaho Conservation League, tells Food Tank. In areas where laws are implemented, he says, “you would be left paying your own medical bills, or your insurance companies paying the claims. There wouldn’t be any recourse to seek damages from the company that made the product that you felt caused the harm.”
In North Dakota, Governor Kelly Armstrong signed H.B. 1318 into law. Several weeks later, Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp signed a parallel piece of legislation. Similar bills have also been introduced in several other states, including Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, and Florida.
Bayer has faced about 177,000 lawsuits involving RoundUp and has paid billions of dollars in settlements. U.S. farmers use hundreds of millions of pounds of RoundUp every year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey—not including private home and landscaping use.
When similar legislation failed to pass in multiple states in 2024, Bayer founded the Modern Ag Alliance, a coalition that claims to be protecting farmers’ access to “crop protection tools.” The group spent over US$300,000 on Meta ads in 2025 alone, the majority of which boast the safety and efficacy of glyphosate or assert that glyphosate keeps food prices down. But a survey conducted by the Idaho Conservation League found that 90 percent of Idahoans opposed the legislation.
The EPA has deemed glyphosate noncarcinogenic, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. Bayer has repeatedly denied the link, but according to a study published in Research Policy there is evidence that the company has interfered with or manipulated research on its products. Oppenheimer also adds that the EPA typically tests the active ingredients in pesticides, but not always the product as a whole.
Bayer representatives argue legislation like the bill passed in North Dakota is important because it can “reinforce the authority of the EPA’s rigorous, science-backed labeling decisions.”
But North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern (D-Fargo) doubts the ability of the current EPA—facing massive layoffs under the Trump-Vance administration—to provide this rigor. “There are protections, but they’re being dismantled day by day,” he tells Food Tank.
“You can’t have it both ways,” Mathern says. “You can’t say, ‘we’ll be fine because we have the EPA,’ and at the same time want the federal government gutted.”
Policymakers are also considering laws that will provide protections against failure-to-warn claims at the federal level. A petition created by eleven republican states seeks rulemaking that would designate state labeling requirements inconsistent with the EPA’s as misbranding.
Representative Dusty Johnson (R-SD) recently introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act (ALUA) in 2023, which seeks to clarify existing federal regulation and ensure regulatory consistency across states. The ALUA did not pass in 2023, but could be attached to a future farm bill.
Legislation as in North Dakota and Georgia would not only protect Bayer from failure-to-warn claims, but all pesticide manufacturers. The EPA has approved almost 80 pesticides—accounting for 322 million pounds of pesticides used in the United States—that have been banned by the European Union, according to a study in Environmental Health.
While there has been some organizing effort against these immunity bills, opponents are significantly outweighed in resources by Bayer and the Modern Ag Alliance, Mathern says. “It’s been difficult to get traction, to get enough opposition to the bill to make a difference,” he tells Food Tank. “Often, the lobbying and investments are what wins the day.”
Oppenheimer echoes Mathern’s statements: “I think the focus right now is pretty firmly on that defensive side, unfortunately.”
But he notes that advocacy groups are still trying to push back against legislation where they can.
“Ultimately, what it comes down to is that Americans—Idahoans, Floridians, Missourians, Iowans—everyone deserves to know whether the products that they’re utilizing on their lawns, on their flowers, on their plants, are safe,” Oppenheimer says.
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Photo courtesy of Gabriel, Unsplash
