Bayer's four-herbicide maize stops being a regulated article today, and the 9,600 comments on its environmental impact statement went to a document the agency later stopped writing

Nine thousand six hundred comments. That is what the public filed on the draft environmental impact statement for a single maize line, and the statement was never finished.

The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has determined that MON 87429 maize is no longer a regulated article under its genetic engineering rules, in a notice filed on Tuesday morning and published today. The line was engineered for resistance to dicamba, glufosinate, quizalofop and 2,4-D, together with a tissue-specific glyphosate resistance the petition presents as a way of producing hybrid maize seed. Monsanto Company, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer Crop Science, filed that petition under number 19-316-01p.

Six years, three comment periods

The dates are all in the notice.

The agency published the petition for comment on 8 May 2020 and received 4,112 comments. It published a notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement on 28 April 2021 and received 3,069 more. On 22 March 2024 it published the draft plant pest risk assessment and the draft environmental impact statement together, and by the close on 6 May it held 9,600 comments on the draft statement and one on the draft assessment. Then, on 18 August 2025, it withdrew the notice of intent, and this week's notice records that work on the environmental impact statement was terminated as a consequence.

What the determination rests on

The operative sentence names its own inputs. They are the data in the petition, available scientific data, the plant pest risk assessment, and the comments received on the petition and on the draft assessment.

That is 4,113 of the 16,782 comments the agency logged across the three rounds. The notice does not say why the environmental impact statement was abandoned, and nothing here should be read as suggesting one.

Kelly Moore, the administrator, signed the determination on 30 July.