A California jury has found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, 46, a pest control manager for the Benicia Unified School District, in California, near San Francisco. His was the first claim to go to trial alleging that Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed killers cause cancer. The company was ordered to pay $289 million in damages—$39 million compensatory and $250 punitive. Monsanto, recently acquired as a unit of the German conglomerate Bayer, faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the U.S.

This article appears in the November 2018 issue of Natural Awakenings.