Roundup

Ten employees at Syngenta Kauai were taken to the hospital when they walked onto a corn field 20 hours after the application of chlorpyrifos, reports The Civil Beat. Typically, workers are supposed to wait 24 hours before going back into the fields after a chlorpyrifos spray. Three of the workers stayed overnight at the hospital, but all have since been released and cleared for work.

Monsanto sued California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), demanding that the agency not add glyphosate to the state’s list of known carcinogens, reports Reuters.

Kansas, often the No. 1 wheat state, is the latest hot spot for emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds.

A state environmental agency in California says it intends to list glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, "as known to the state to cause cancer" under the so-called Proposition 65 law.

In a column in the New England Journal of Medicine, two scientists called for a new U.S. safety assessment of glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world, said Reuters.

The Just Label It campaign for mandatory labeling of food made with genetically modified organisms "rolled out a trio of academics on Wednesday in a bid to raise public awareness of the public health and environmental costs of herbicides used in the production of genetically engineered crops," said Agri-Pulse.

After a decade of development, Monsanto anticipates its genetically engineered Xtend soybean and cotton varieties will be its "largest biotech trait launch...with six times the number of varieties" that it offered in a previous set of GE strains.

More than a decade after pulling the plug on genetically engineered wheat, Monsanto is working again on biotech wheat, says the St Louis Post-Dispatch after visiting a research center run by the agribusiness giant.

Two farm operations in southwestern Oregon filed suit in state court against a voter-approved ban on genetically engineered crops in Jackson County, says the Medford Mail Tribune.

Plant breeder Frank Kutka is working on corn varieties that organic farmers can plant without fear of cross-pollination from GMO corn in neighboring fields, writes Ken Roseboro at Civil Eats. It is a multimillion-dollar challenge because organic crops cannot include genetically modified organisms. Corn is the most widely grown U.S. crop. Farmers can take precautions such as planting their fields earlier or later than their neighbors so the fields mature at different times but that is an imperfect tactic.

Monsanto Co, the giant seed company, expects to begin sales in 2016 of soybeans engineered for tolerance to a wider range of herbicides, says the St Louis Business Journal.

As it promised last month, Bayer, the world's largest seed and agricultural chemicals company, asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to overturn the $25-million award to Edwin Hardeman, a California man who blamed Roundup herbicide for giving him cancer. The appeal is a key element in Bayer's plan to resolve billions of dollars of claims against Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world.