Scientists warned this weedkiller would destroy crops. EPA approved it anyway.

“Everybody brags on my stuff,” said Joyce, 58, a wistful pride crossing his bronzed, weathered face. But now, he has nothing to sell.Joyce leans against the greenhouse he’s building, hands in the pockets of his overalls, peering at the field where he started nearly 800 tomato plants in the spring. It was early August when the telltale signs of trouble emerged. The plants’ broad, flat leaves shriveled and curled, their branches twisted and buckled. Then blossom rot set in. Joyce knew they couldn’t be saved. He climbed onto his tractor and mowed down his bestselling crop — for the third year in a row.The plague that struck Joyce’s farm in Malden, Missouri, was not a natural disaster, but a man-made weedkiller called dicamba. Farmers had applied the drift-prone chemical sparingly for decades. But in the past two years, its use has grown exponentially, and now dicamba is destroying millions of acres of crops worth millions of dollars, pitting farmer against farmer and scientists against manufacturers. As farmers sprayed these crops in 2017 and 2018, scientists estimated that dicamba had damaged nearly 5 million acres of soybeans in 24 states, mostly Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Illinois. (No one tracks damage to specialty crops such as tomatoes or home gardens, trees and wild plants.) Only two crops have been engineered to resist dicamba: soybeans and cotton. Every other broadleaf plant, including non-genetically modified soybeans and cotton, is at risk.