(Missourinet) – The Missouri House Select Committee on Agriculture Chairman says Monsanto will be invited to Wednesday’s hearing in Portageville about pesticide complaints.

The Missouri Department of Agriculture testified Thursday that there have been more than 120 pesticide complaints involving dicamba since late June.

State Rep. Bill Reiboldt (R-Neosho) chairs the House Select Committee on Agriculture, which will hold Wednesday’s hearing at noon at the Portageville Delta Center.

“We’re going to invite Monsanto as well, and we’re going to take some written testimony,” Reiboldt said. “Then we may have a follow-up hearing during (the September) Veto Session up here (Jefferson City) so that some of our Committee members that perhaps can’t come on the 31st we can update them as well, and then we’ll put a final report together.”

The Missouri Department of Agriculture told members of the Missouri House Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources on Thursday that it will take several months to finish their investigation into the complaints. The complaints have come from six counties: five in far southeast Missouri and one in northwest Missouri’s Carroll County.

During Thursday’s testimony at the Statehouse in Jefferson City, State Rep. Jay Houghton (R-Martinsburg) asked MDA Division Director Judy Grundler why the investigations take so long.

“Primarily, it’s the investigation process. We have to go through and each investigator takes statements from any of the individuals that are involved. They summarize all of their statements in a report,” Grundler told Rep. Houghton.

Grundler also told lawmakers that MDA sends samples to an Iowa lab for analysis. Grundler testified that MDA has eight investigators working on the complaints.

State Rep. Don Rone (R-Portageville) will file legislation in January to increase penalties on those who illegally spray pesticides. Rone tells Missourinet he wants to increase the fine from $1,000 per field, to $20,000 per field.

“And the reason being is Arkansas just last week went to $20,000 a field,” Rone said. “And we’re down there (the Bootheel) closer to Arkansas than we are Jefferson City. And so, we need to be kind of looking toward what they do.”

Rone serves on the House Select Committee on Agriculture, which will hold Wednesday’s hearing at the Fisher Delta Research Center. Rone wants to hear from growers, from industry and from the University of Missouri.

Committee Chair Reiboldt said he looks forward to the hearing and getting the information out. He also tells Missourinet he wants EPA to testify Wednesday.

Testing is underway in Canada for a vaccine to protect pigs from Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus, or PEDv. While U.S. made vaccines are available in Canada, the vaccines are only recommended for use if there is an outbreak. The vaccine being tested in Canada is aimed at preventing the disease altogether, according to the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. The University’s prototype vaccine, first announced last year, recently moved into field testing. The PED virus is in the coronavirus group, which includes human diseases such as SARS and MERS, and produces mortality rates of up to 100 percent in infected herds of piglets. Over eight million pigs in North America have died from PED since the disease first appeared in the U.S. in 2013 and Canada in 2014.

Bloomberg reports power-equipment maker Schneider Electric SE is weighing a sale of agriculture news and data service DTN. The price tag could be an estimated $1.5 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter. Schneider, with a market value of more than $40 billion, is a French multinational corporation specializing in electricity distribution. Schneider, like many energy-focused companies, is weathering lower demand stemming from decreased oil and gas prices. Sources tell Bloomberg that Schneider does not consider DTN a “core operation,” despite being a solid, profitable business. DTN would likely attract interest from both information and technology companies as well as private equity firms, and Schneider could decide whether to auction off the unit as soon as next month, according to the report.

Environmental groups are hampering species recovery under the Endangered Species Act, according to the Public Lands Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Tuesday, the Center for Biological Diversity threatened to sue the Department of Interior and Fish and Wildlife Service to force action on 417 proposed listings under the Endangered Species Act. NCBA and the Public Lands Council say the move stems from a massive lawsuit settlement brokered behind closed doors and without stakeholders at the table. The groups, in a joint statement, say “this is precisely why the Endangered Species Act is broken.” The environmental groups, according to Public Lands Council executive director Ethan Lane, hamper species recovery by placing arbitrary listing-decision deadlines that leave no time for sound research or science-based decisions. During the nearly 40 years since the Endangered Species Act was passed, the Act has a recovery rate of less than two percent and has more than 2,000 domestic species listed.

Spending on farm programs by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is projected to increase $1 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO this week projected spending on farm programs to rise from $13 billion in 2015 to $14 billion in 2016, and then to $19 billion in 2017 and 2018. CBO projects farm program spending to then go back down to $16 billion in 2019 and down again to $15 billion per year until 2026. At the same time, payments under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, would decline continually, then rise slightly, presumably due to population growth, according to the Hagstrom Report. CBO did not say why the office projects agriculture spending would go up, but the increase likely stems from payments triggered by low commodity prices.

Merger talks between Monsanto and Bayer AG are advancing after a series of meetings in which the companies have addresses issues including the purchase price and a termination fee, according to Bloomberg News. Sources close to the talks say a deal could be reached in the next two weeks. Bayer CEO Werner Baumann and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant have held “constructive meetings” in recent weeks, but Bloomberg said its sources caution that negotiations “could still fall apart or be delayed. Any potential merger between the two would likely face fierce antitrust approval. Any Bayer-Monsanto deal would follow two other billion-dollar acquisitions in the agricultural industry, ChemChina’s $43 billion takeover of Syngenta AG and Dow Chemical merger with DuPont to create the world’s biggest chemical company. St. Louis, Missouri Based Monsanto rejected Bayer’s previous two attempts to acquire Monsanto.

Beef Products Inc. is not dropping its lawsuit filed in 2012 against ABC and journalists Diane Sawyer and Jim Avila, but it has removed a number of defendants from the complaint. The lawsuit was filed over a series of reports BPI alleges were inaccurate and cost the company a significant chunk of its sales of lean finely textured beef. Politico reports BPI dropped ABC’s news division, ABC correspondent David Kerley, two former USDA microbiologists and a former BPI quality control manager who acted as a whistleblower against the company. The lawsuit seeks more than $1.2 billion in damages. It charges ABC with making more than 200 false and disparaging statements about BPI’s product, a form of beef trimmings injected with ammonia to fight pathogens, and helping to fortify the nickname “pink slime.” BPI claims ABC’s “disinformation campaign” caused sales of the product to decline from five million pounds a week to less than two million pounds, forcing BPI to close three facilities and let go of more than 700 employees.