There was a great deal of action last Friday in the case that vacated the registrations of XtendiMax, Engenia, and FeXapan dicamba-based products.  Despite a barrage of court filings on Friday, however, nothing has changed the current legal status of the dicamba products in Ohio, and Ohio growers may use existing stocks of the products now. Still, they must end-use by June 30th, 2020. 

Here's a rundown of the orders that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued in the case last Friday:

The court denied the emergency motion that the petitioners (National Family Farm Coalition, Center for Food Safety, Center for Biological Diversity, and Pesticide Action Network North America) filed on June 13th.  That motion asked the court to enforce its previous mandate to vacate the registrations, to prevent any further use of the products, and to hold the EPA in contempt for issuing the Cancellation Order the agency had made that allowed continued use of existing stocks of the products.  The court did not provide its reasoning for denying the motion.

The court granted amicus curiae (friend of the court) status to CropLife America and American Farm Bureau (representing  itself as well as national soybean, cotton, wheat, corn and sorghum association interest.)  Those parties filed their amicus curiae briefs in support of the EPA's Cancellation Order and opposition to the petitioners' emergency motion.

The court also granted emergency motions to intervene in the case filed by BASF Corporation, maker of Engenia, and DuPont (Corteva), maker of FeXapan. The companies argued that they did not know that the scope of the court's order on Bayer's XtendiMax product registration would also affect their dicamba product registrations, and they should now be permitted an opportunity to defend their products. 

BASF filed a motion asking the court to recall the court's mandate that had canceled the registrations of the products, claiming that the court had not followed appropriate procedural rules. In its brief, BASF also suggested that the company would be filing petitions for rehearing since BASF had not had an opportunity to be heard when the court vacated the registration of its Engenia product.

The court ordered the original petitioners to file a brief in response to BASF's motion to recall the mandate by June 23rd, and for BASF to reply to that brief by June 24th.

The companies that make the dicamba products clearly intend to challenge the vacatur of their product registrations, even though the EPA's Cancellation Order allows the continued use of existing stocks of the products until July 31st, 2020. This dicamba battle is not yet over, and we'll keep you posted on new developments.

Read our previous posts on the court's vacatur in National Family Farm Coalition here, on the EPA's Cancellation Order here, and on the Ohio Department of Agriculture's ruling on the use of the products in Ohio here.