Wisconsin Joins Call for Timely Dicamba Registration

Nov 28, 2025

The Wisconsin Soybean Association (WSA) has joined the American Soybean Association (ASA) and fellow state soybean organizations in urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finalize a new federal registration for over-the-top (OTT) dicamba use on dicamba-tolerant soybeans before the end of 2025. The unified request was outlined in a letter to be delivered to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

In the letter, ASA, which represents nearly 500,000 U.S. soybean growers, emphasized the importance of dicamba as a critical weed-management tool, especially for controlling herbicide-resistant weed populations. The associations commended EPA for making progress on pesticide reviews and for providing growers the opportunity to offer feedback during the public comment period that closed in September.

“Our farmers need a variety of tools to effectively produce a crop each season,” said WSA Executive Director Adam Kask. “It’s important to support the ones we have.”

With the 2026 growing season approaching, the organizations stressed that growers are preparing seed and crop protection plans now. Delayed clarity on dicamba availability, they noted, puts farmers at a disadvantage during one of the most consequential decision-making periods of the year. The letter also highlighted that registrants need sufficient time to produce and distribute updated product labels before planting begins — a key reason ASA and its state partners are asking EPA to finalize the new low-volatility dicamba registration by December 31.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids