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Ag Front Group Shields Bayer in Controversial Roundup Liability Fights
Credit: Julie Russell-Steuart via Food & Water Watch
This is the third in a three-part series on Bayer’s crusade for immunity from Roundup-related cancer claims, published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy. Read the first and second parts of the series.
For the past two years, the Modern Ag Alliance has been the leading public face of a campaign to quash tens of thousands of cancer claims surrounding the use of Roundup, the highly controversial and most widely used pesticide in the world.
“Control weeds, not farming” and “American farmers need your help” proclaim its ads and billboards across America’s bread basket. And, most recently, its online ads have congratulated President Trump for his executive order declaring that production of Roundup’s primary ingredient, glyphosate, is “critical to the national defense” (see Part I of this series).
The Modern Ag Alliance (MAA) purports to now represent more than 110 agricultural organizations in the U.S. and claims that farmers need “crop protection tools” like Roundup “to ensure that [Americans] have a robust and affordable domestic food supply.”
More from the Center for Media and Democracy
But a look below the surface reveals that Bayer AG, the German pharmaceutical giant that produces Roundup—and whose Roundup-related liabilities topped $11 billion last year—launched the group in 2024 to help protect its bottom line and shield the company from rising public anger over the product’s cancer risks. Bayer’s lead lobbyist, Hallie Utley, serves as its CEO and board president.
“We will defend ourselves inside and outside the courtroom, including supporting legislation at the state and federal level. However, there is a limit to what we can do alone,” Bayer notes on its online “Fighting Back” page. “We are proud to support these efforts alongside dozens of other agricultural organizations … because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products—determined safe for use by the EPA.”
Since its launch, MAA has served as the public face of Bayer’s all-out crusade to win immunity from Roundup liability, spending millions on print, TV, and online ads and lobbying lawmakers to pass Roundup liability shield laws.
MAA reported paying $13.6 million in 2024 to Penta Group, a DC-based public relations and lobbying firm, for advertising and consulting services. But the group doesn’t pay staff or incur other expenses itself, and since all of its revenue is classified as in-kind or “program services,” the PR bill is paid by some other entity or entities. Penta Group lists Bayer as one of its major clients.
Bayer did not respond to the Center for Media and Democracy’s questions about its financial support for MAA’s operations.
In a podcast last spring produced by PBS Iowa, MAA Executive Director Elizabeth Burns-Thompson attempted to downplay Bayer’s influence on the organization. “Bayer is absolutely one of our partners,” she told PBS, adding the caveat that the company is just one of many interests the group represents. “Their logo on our website is just the same size as all of the rest of the partners so I am just as accountable to each of our corn growers, sugar beet growers, wheat growers, and agribusiness groups.”
At the same time, Burns-Thompson confirmed that MAA has pushed legislators to introduce each of the state immunity bills proposed since 2024. She also applauded the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Monsanto Company v. Durnell case this month, pointing to the need for certainty around federal pesticide labeling and claiming that it’s “important for national security that we have the critical inputs that go into that supply chain.”
During the PBS interview, Burns-Thompson also admitted that “slowing down” failure-to-warn litigation against Bayer is “at the crux” of Modern Ag’s legislative work.
“What … I do each and every day with our partners is proactively work on legislation at the state level,” she said. “We also have some collaborative work that we’re doing [at] the federal level to provide some consistency and clarity to try to slow down … what we would call meritless lawsuits.”
Data on MAA’s direct lobbying spending is difficult to access in each state, but records reveal that the front group spent at least $1.8 million on lobbying in Tennessee alone last year. MAA also paid Burns-Thompson for lobbying efforts in several states, including $10,000 to lobby in Iowa in 2024–25. In addition, it agreed to pay her at least $10,000 to lobby in Georgia, and she is also registered as Modern Ag’s lobbyist in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
Deceiving the Public and Regulators
Litigation in Missouri has shone a rare light on the company’s extensive efforts to conceal “the carcinogenic dangers of a product it made abundantly available at hardware stores and garden shops across the country,” as one court ruling phrased it.
In another court filing early last year, a lawyer for Roundup victims in Missouri accused Bayer and Monsanto (which Bayer acquired in 2018) of waging an extensive propaganda campaign throughout the state in order to “manipulate and mislead the public” and regulators about the health risks of the herbicide.
Such heavy-handed and deceptive practices to “protect its profits, while at the same time, obscuring and minimizing the true harmfulness of its Roundup products and discrediting anyone who disagrees” have been the hallmark of Bayer’s—and previously Monsanto’s—playbook, attorney Matthew Clement argued.
Evidence of those tactics has also been a driving force in convincing juries in at least four cases to award victims billions in punitive damages and a California appeals court to conclude that the company’s conduct “evidenced reckless disregard of the health and safety of the multitude of unsuspecting consumers it kept in the dark.”
In his filing, Clement, who represents roughly 280 plaintiffs, accused Bayer of abusing confidentiality privileges in an attempt to conceal 20,000 documents related to its lobbying and propaganda efforts. The documents purportedly reveal Bayer’s use of “fictitious ‘independent’ third parties” the company paid to push its pro-glyphosate messaging in Missouri.
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