A federal jury has awarded $218 million to 7,300 farmers in Kansas who brought a class action alleging Syngenta AG was negligent in selling a genetically modified strain of corn seed that it knew would produce corn China wouldn’t import.

Friday’s verdict is the first to come out of the multidistrict litigation against Syngenta over claims by U.S. corn producers that they lost more than $5 billion after China refused to import corn grown from the GMO seed.