Farm Litigation Report June 2023
Welcome to the second issue of the GRG Farm Litigation Report. We truly appreciate the good feedback in response to our first issue and look forward to providing you with additional issues periodically as developments warrant. And please keep those comments coming in — we want to make this newsletter as helpful and interesting to you as possible.
Now, turning to a preview of this issue — we feature an interview with one of our farmer clients, Bret Kendrick, a corn farmer in Kansas. Bret served as one of our class representatives in the largest agricultural case in US history — the Syngenta Corn Litigation. He explains what it was like to be at ground zero in this nationally prominent case, from the time he originally became involved all the way through his testimony at trial and the jury’s verdict awarding $217.7 million to our class of Kansas corn farmers. As many of you know, that verdict led to a record $1.51 billion settlement for US corn farmers. You will hear his story from a farmer’s perspective, not from a lawyer’s perspective. You also will hear from farmer clients Richard and Katrina James about dicamba damage to their watermelon crop in 2019 and 2021 and their efforts to obtain compensation for that damage.
GRG attorney Kaitlin Bridges offers tips and reminders on how best to preserve evidence if you believe you have suffered a yield loss from herbicide drift, off-target movement or other man-made crop damage. Preservation of evidence of your herbicide injury and yield loss can be critical to the success of any case you may later choose to bring.
GRG attorney Joan Lockwood, one of our firm’s personal injury attorneys, shares her recollections about a tragic interstate collision case she handled involving a tractor-trailer hitting a vehicle driven by a farmer. The farmer, his wife and their two children lost their lives. Joan explains how the economics of the family’s farming operation played into the compensation ultimately received by the surviving relatives through a settlement.
