Roundup’s Surprising Connection to Industrial Meat

This story was originally published by Sentient .

For years , Bayer and the biotech giant it purchased, Monsanto, have faced allegations that glyphosate , the active ingredient in its popular herbicide Roundup, causes cancer. The saga has resulted in over 100,000 lawsuits, billions of dollars in settlement funds, a Supreme Court case and several actions by the Trump administration. But amidst the flurry of legal activity, few have stopped to ask a fundamental question: Why are we spraying so much glyphosate in the first place?

The answer, in many cases, is animal agriculture. In the U.S., a significant amount of applied glyphosate is used to grow crops to feed farm animals , not humans. While President Donald Trump has defended glyphosate as crucial to maintaining food security, that’s an overly broad characterization. In truth, glyphosate has largely made meat production cheaper, as fewer weeds lower the cost of feed production for livestock. Some studies have found glyphosate also reduces greenhouse gas emissions from feed crops by enabling no-till agriculture .

In June, the Supreme Court issued a major ruling in favor of Monsanto regarding glyphosate. A Missouri gardener who’d been using Roundup for about two decades developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and sued Monsanto for not including a cancer risk warning label on its Roundup products, arguing that it breaks a state failure-to-warn law. The lower court ordered the company to pay him over $1 million in damages, but the Supreme Court overturned that ruling , citing the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).

Under FIFRA, the Environmental Protection Agency has final authority, superseding states, over what pesticide product labels are required to say. Because the EPA had already ruled that glyphosate isn’t a carcinogen and therefore doesn’t require a cancer warning, the Supreme Court overturned the state court’s determination that Monsanto erred by not including such a warning on Roundup sold in Missouri.

The glyphosate debate

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It functions by inhibiting plants’ abilities to produce certain amino acids that they need in order to grow. It’s a nonselective herbicide , meaning it’s lethal to most plant species it comes in contact with; however, some important feed crops — namely corn and soybeans — have been genetically engineered to resist glyphosate . This allows farmers of those crops to spray glyphosate on their fields, killing the weeds while leaving the feed crops unharmed. With fewer weeds, the crops flourish and farmers harvest higher yields.

In addition, glyphosate is used as a desiccant on some crops like wheat to accelerate the drying process; this way, the crop can be uniformly dried , which makes it easier to harvest with a combine.

Glyphosate does not build up in the food chain, but whether or not direct glyphosate exposure can lead to cancer in humans is the topic of fervent debate. The EPA concluded over 50 years ago that the answer is no. While trace amounts of glyphosate can remain on crops that have been sprayed with it, the EPA says that it has a low toxicity to humans in these amounts, and has established maximum allowable amounts for food products.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world.

The agency has repeatedly upheld these findings during its subsequent reassessments of the chemical, which it conducts every 15 years per federal law. This determination by the EPA was central to the Supreme Court’s June ruling.

In 2015, however, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), reclassified glyphosate as a Category 2A substance , the category for things that are ”probably carcinogenic to humans .” A 2019 meta-analysis study also found that glyphosate exposure increased one’s chances of developing cancer, specifically non-Hodgkin lymphoma, by 41%, and California regulators classified glyphosate as a carcinogen in 2017.

In its glyphosate ruling, the Supreme Court acknowledged the IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic; however, it still ultimately deferred to the EPA, and noted that the agency commissioned several reviews of glyphosate’s potential carcinogenicity in response to the IARC’s ruling and still came to the same conclusion.

There are several possible reasons why the two organizations arrived at different conclusions. They used different datasets , with the EPA relying mostly on unpublished regulatory studies and the IARC relying mostly on peer-reviewed studies. The EPA focused on the risk glyphosate poses to the general public, whereas the IARC also looked at the risk faced by professionals with higher-than-average exposure to the compound.

It’s worth noting that the IARC doesn’t assess how carcinogenic a compound is , or what level of cancer risk it carries. Rather, it looks solely at how much evidence there is that it’s carcinogenic at all, even if the actual risk level is low. It’s also worth noting that in 2025, one highly cited study purporting to show no link between glyphosate and cancer was retracted after it was discovered that parts of it were ghostwritten by Monsanto employees .

Regardless, Bayer has been hit with over 100,000 lawsuits alleging that glyphosate in Roundup caused cancer in those exposed to it. In 2020, the company paid $10 billion to settle some of these cases , and in February, the company agreed to an additional $7.25 billion proposed settlement for pending and future lawsuits alleging that glyphosate caused cancer. That latter settlement isn’t final and is still making its way through the courts .

The role animal agriculture plays in glyphosate’s proliferation

One element of the glyphosate debate that’s received considerably little attention, however, is the outsized role animal agriculture plays in its usage and popularity.

This may sound counterintuitive; after all, glyphosate is a compound that’s applied to plants, not animals. But in fact, the crops to which glyphosate is applied in the United States are mostly being grown for the purpose of feeding animals on livestock farms. Of the 172 million pounds of glyphosate that’s applied to corn and soy crops in the United States every year, 101 million pounds goes to feed crops .

Whether or not glyphosate causes cancer remains an ongoing debate — but what is undeniable is the massive boost to animal agriculture the controversial herbicide enabled.

There’s another link between glyphosate and animals that’s rarely mentioned in conversations about the chemical: In 2020, the EPA determined that glyphosate is a massive hazard to wild animals , and is likely to injure or kill 93% of the animals and plants covered under the Endangered Species Act.

The Trump administration supports glyphosate

The EPA’s decades-old ruling that glyphosate isn’t a cancer risk to humans has played a central role in public debate surrounding the herbicide. But so has Trump himself, as he’s adopted a strongly pro-glyphosate position during his second term and made several moves to support its production.

Whether or not glyphosate causes cancer remains an ongoing debate.

Last year, the Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court encouraging it to take up the lawsuit that was decided this June. When the high court obliged, the administration sent a lawyer to argue alongside Bayer’s legal team.

In February, Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting glyphosate production, declaring the herbicide “central to American economic and national security.” That order tasked the secretary of agriculture with “ensuring a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides,” and granted legal immunity to producers of glyphosate so long as they act in accordance with the order.

These actions have infuriated members of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, many of whom hoped that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , a longtime opponent of synthetic pesticides, would crack down on their use. He hasn’t.

The bottom line

The glyphosate saga isn’t over. Bayer’s proposed $7.25 billion settlement is still under review by the courts, and while the recent developments will make it more difficult to hold Bayer liable, experts say there may be other legal arguments for those wishing to sue the company. In addition, the EPA’s most recent reassessment of glyphosate’s potentially carcinogenic properties is still in progress after a federal court ruled in 2022 that its previous review of glyphosate’s health effects was inadequate .

But regardless of what the future of glyphosate holds, it’s important to remember what’s driving its usage. Much like the screwworm outbreak , climate change , deforestation and bird flu , glyphosate’s proliferation in the U.S. and beyond is fueled by industrialized livestock production, and our enduring appetite for meat and dairy.

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