A database, and a number that stands out
Mother Jones published a searchable database this month identifying California’s largest users of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the most widely used herbicide in the world. The top sprayer, by a wide margin, was The Wonderful Company — owner of Pom Wonderful, Wonderful Halos, and Wonderful Pistachios — which applied 328,000 pounds in 2023, about 68% more than any other user in the state.
The more striking figure in the same reporting: a survey by state inspectors found glyphosate residue in 100% of the waterways tested in the Central Valley, California’s primary agricultural region. Glyphosate doesn’t stay confined to the field it’s sprayed on — it moves through soil and water into the surrounding ecosystem, which is precisely the exposure pathway that concerns toxicologists and drives municipal buffer-zone rules near waterways.
The legal ground has already shifted
Glyphosate has been the subject of more than $12 billion in lawsuit settlements and verdicts to people who allege it caused their cancer, most commonly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Bayer, which now manufactures the chemical, maintains that glyphosate is safe when used as directed and points to regulatory approvals worldwide.
But the underlying U.S. regulatory finding is weaker than it looks. The EPA reaffirmed glyphosate’s safety in 2020, only to have the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturn that recertification after a challenge led by the Center for Food Safety and allied farmworker and environmental groups. The court found the EPA could not support its conclusion that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer, noting that most of the studies the agency reviewed “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” The court also found the agency had failed to properly assess ecological risk — a separate 2020 EPA analysis had already concluded glyphosate likely harms 93% of endangered species and 96% of their critical habitat.
“It has a well-established toxicity to the environment,” George Kimbrell, an environmental attorney who helped lead that challenge, told Mother Jones. “And, for endangered species, Roundup is a significant risk.” The EPA is now redoing its assessment; in the meantime, the country is still relying on a nearly 35-year-old 1993 safety finding made before glyphosate use reached its current scale.
Public opinion has moved too
A national survey released this year by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found two-thirds of Americans — including 70% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats — now favor banning glyphosate’s use on crops grown in the United States, a rare point of bipartisan agreement. Farmworker advocates describe continued reliance on the chemical as a burden that falls hardest on the people who apply it. “Our workers are being exposed to these risky chemicals,” said Irene De Barraicua of Organización en California de Líderes Campesinas, a farmworker advocacy group that joined the legal challenge to EPA’s recertification.
None of this has stopped use: agricultural producers say glyphosate lets them cut water use and boost yields by controlling weeds that would otherwise compete with crops for water and nutrients, and it remains widely applied by agencies as well as growers — Caltrans and California State Parks both rank among the state’s top 100 users, largely for roadside and fire-line vegetation control.
Why this matters beyond farms
The same pressures that make glyphosate legally and reputationally costly for agriculture apply directly to vegetation management around homes and public land: waterway proximity, endangered-species habitat, and school or park adjacency all trigger the buffer rules and outright restrictions that a growing number of California cities and land agencies have adopted. That’s the whole reason mechanical clearing and grazing keep gaining ground on chemical control for fire-fuel reduction near people, not just in farm fields — it’s not a trend driven by marketing, it’s driven by litigation exposure and lab results like the ones above. We break down that full cost picture — machines, chemicals, and crews — in our guide to the real cost of traditional land clearing.