This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news.

This story was first published by the Center for Media and Democracy.

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.”

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.”

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 Washington D.C.-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.

Additionally, his filing accuses Bayer, Monsanto, and a team of consulting firms with “continu[ing]—to this day—to ghostwrite letters on Monsanto’s behalf that deceptively manipulate public opinion.”

MAA spent $100,000 on an ad blitz in Missouri in early 2025, and another dark money group, the Protecting America Initiative, spent $175,000 on a Super Bowl ad and direct mail targeting nine Republican state senators, according to the Missouri Independent.

“Monsanto’s hope is either that it can influence the potential pool of jurors such that they will make up their minds based on the torrent of misinformation flooding into Cole County (everywhere but the courtroom), or that the legislators will just give in and grant it future protection based on its one-sided, and sometimes outright false, public/media relations blitz—or both,” Clement’s filing argues. “Monsanto’s tactics are antithetical to any sense of justice or the pursuit of truth.”

Many of both the settled and pending lawsuits over Roundup have been filed in Missouri courts, according to Bayer’s 2025 annual report, including a $7.25-billion class action settlement that won preliminary court approval last month.

Others have accused the company of deceptive tactics. In 2023 New York Attorney General Letitia James hit Bayer with a $6.9-million fine for allegedly misleading the public by running Roundup advertisements in the state that framed glyphosate products as “safe and non-toxic” while failing to provide “adequate substantiation” of this claim.

James launched an investigation in 2020 to ensure that after acquiring Monsanto in 2018, Bayer was complying with the terms of Monsanto’s 1996 settlement with the state over similar false advertising claims, which led to a $50,000 fine.

In December, ghostwriting allegations related to Roundup resurfaced after the science journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology issued a rare retraction of a key study led by a researcher from New York Medical College Valhalla 25 years after it was published. The study initially found no link between glyphosate and cancer.

In the retraction notice, the co-editor Martin van den Berg, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, noted that Monsanto employees co-wrote parts of the “hallmark” paper.

“This article has been widely regarded as a hallmark paper in the discourse surrounding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate and Roundup,” the notice states. “However, the lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by Monsanto employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn … It is unclear how much of the conclusions of the authors were influenced by external contributions of Monsanto without proper acknowledgments.”

“The pesticide industry’s decades of efforts to hijack the science and manipulate it to boost its profits is finally being exposed,” wrote Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health science director.

Bayer’s current PR push

As part of its “collaborative work,” MAA is now pushing for Congress to pass the 2026 Farm Bill, which contains a Roundup immunity provision Bayer helped draft. It is also running an online ad campaign to thank Trump for throwing Bayer a lifeline with his pro-Roundup executive order.

“The executive order formally acknowledges what farmers across the country have known for decades,” MAA maintains—that “glyphosate-based herbicides are essential to maintaining America’s agricultural productivity and a healthy, affordable food supply. It also underscores that there is no one-for-one chemical alternative to glyphosate.”

Public statements like this from MAA never acknowledge the potential carcinogenic risk of exposure to glyphosate—nor that MAA was created by Bayer and is led by its chief lobbyist.

Neither the front group nor the biotech behemoth behind it are letting up on their five-part plan to permanently evade all responsibility for Roundup-related health claims. Their ultimate success depends on the outcome of two big decisions this spring: the Supreme Court ruling about state failure-to-warn claims and congressional approval of the long-delayed Farm Bill.

The fate of Bayer’s bestselling glyphosate-based pesticide hangs in the balance, and the company continues to weigh alternatives to costly lawsuits. A few years ago “to further reduce future litigation risk,” it stopped producing Roundup for home use and last fall it began seeking regulatory approval for a new herbicide to replace Roundup for agricultural and commercial use in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

Environmentalists and progressives like Representative Chellie Pingree (D–Maine) have now joined forces with people in the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement who are outraged by both Trump’s executive order glorifying the use of glyphosate and the pending farm bill that would prevent states from issuing their own pesticide warnings.

As Pingree wrote in a recent op-ed aimed at pushing back against Bayer and other “Big Chemical” powerhouses, the argument against using pesticides like Roundup rests on “three simple beliefs: that everyone should be able to eat food that is free of toxic chemicals; that people should have proper warning about possible health risks associated with chemical use; and that giant corporations should not get special immunity when their products pose real health risks.”

“Let’s be clear who is standing with farmers and others impacted by glyphosate exposure: those trial lawyers are litigating on behalf of more than 100,000 people, including farmers and their families, who have suffered devastating health consequences—including death—allegedly linked to the herbicide,” advocates argued in an Environmental Health News op-ed in response to MAA’s ads. “And they’re doing so up against a company with PR moves pulled from the pages of the tobacco industry playbook.”

Read more about Bayer’s efforts to deflect culpability for the risks of using Roundup in the first and second parts of this series.

Editor’s note: A Bayer spokesperson responded after publication: “We have a longstanding relationship with Penta, who helped establish the Modern Ag Alliance. As its website transparently states, the Modern Ag Alliance is a diverse coalition, founded by Bayer, that represents more than 110 agricultural organizations advocating for U.S. farmers’ access to the crop protection tools they need to ensure we have a robust and affordable domestic food supply.” He did not answer CMD’s question as to whether Bayer bankrolls Penta Group’s services for the Modern Ag Alliance.

Wisdom Howell More by this author →

Wisdom Howell is a Staff Writer/Reporter at the Los Angeles & San Francisco Daily Journal, specializing in law. He is based in San Francisco, California.

Arn Pearson More by this author →

Arn Pearson is the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. He previously served as the Vice President for Policy and Litigation at Common Cause.

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