Whatever the case, fuck Monsanto; free the seed.
You know that Lemmy has made it when the Monsanto shills from Reddit join.
The moratorium is actually since 2000, but only since 2006 in its current form. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology
Thankfully, no country, much less any multinational corporation, would ever dare cross the UN’s nonbinding, unenforceable moratorium. Can you imagine how stern the tone of the statement of condemnation would be, once it was worded such that a reasonable plurality of countries would agree to back it?
I’m sure it’s already been done. Just locked away until nothing more than strong concerns can be voiced by ineffective authorities.
There would totally be an open letter and dozens of people would sign it
GMO skepticism or not, Monsanto is one of the most evil companies in the world and a perfect example of what makes the profit motive such an inefficient organizer of production and distribution
They make more money suing farmers for accidentally growing patented crops from natural seed dispersal mechanisms.
They make their money from royalty payments for GMO traits. It’s up to 3x more profit than they get off the seed alone.
No they don’t. There’s never been any legal action taken for accidentally growing GM crops.
I don’t see any natural means by which those seeds dispersed. Actually, it looks like he knew he was growing seeds that could get him in trouble
Monsanto is evil enough, we do not have to exaggerate how evil they are.
I know that you feel that you are correct because by the strict definition of the word suing, there may never have been a lawsuit, but most laymen are going to understand suing to also include being threatened with a lawsuit and settling out of court.
I feel that I’m correct because by both the strict definition of the word suing, and the inclusion of out of court settlements, I can’t find any examples of Monsanto pursuing any sort of legal action against farmers who accidentally grew their crops when the seeds were spread by natural means.
Don’t get me wrong, the concept of patenting a living thing is ghoulish and evil, and farmers should absolutely be allowed to grow whatever seeds they want. Just don’t misrepresent someone intentionally breaching a contract as something totally accidental and out of their control
Maybe Monsanto is as forgiving as you say, but I don’t believe it. I think it is a lot more likely that the type of farmers insist on regrowing from their own seed are small independents who are too far in debt to even think about fighting. I think they took the first offer given to them because it was just a smidge under the quote given to them by the lawyer they went to see where they first got a letter from Monsanto.
Monsanto is not stupid, if they ask for too much the people will fight it and go even deeper into debt to pay the lawyer and by the time Monsanto gets their cut of the remaining carcass, they won’t even make enough to cover the cost of their own lawyers. But if they make the price just a bit cheaper than the cost of fighting, the victims will hand over every penny that they can squeeze out and then go off to quietly die the slow death left to them in the NDA they had to sign to get the “deal” Monsanto offered.
Or maybe I am just jaded and a giant multinational corporation is doing the right thing for the right reasons and not taking advantage of anyone.Sure, you’ve just described one of the ways that Monsanto is evil. Keeping a deathgrip on the seed production and making the cost of signing another contract just slightly less than the cost of a potential legal battle is scummy as hell. Instead of making things up to be mad at, let’s be mad at them for that.
I’m the guy on the left just because until for-profit corporations are reigned in I don’t trust them with control of anything.
also the 30 bagged lunches…
What kind of monster steals 30 kids’ lunches?
Does anyone else feel like this entire post and most of the comments are coming straight from a Monsanto bot/shill factory?
You’ve never been on reddit? If someone mentions Monsanto anywhere, the thread gets flooded with shills. There are whole subreddits devoted to finding posts to shill.
That’s what I love about small social media outlets like Lemmy. The big corporations just don’t bother monitoring and influencing us, it’s not worth it. We can speak freely here. You can just tell me your real name and where you live, without fear of someone abducting your family.
They’re not sterile, but they will sue you if they find you’ve been growing seeds from last year’s crops.
Or if your neighbours crops have germinated in your lands
I don’t think they’ve successfully sued anyone for that. The few cases I saw last time I looked people were intentionally germinating or saving/selling seeds.
So uhh… hypothetically if one were to live next to a cornfield and acquire some seeds from said field cough somehow cough, would those purely hypothetical seeds grown in one’s garden then constitute corn piracy?
Asking for a friend of course.
You wouldn’t download a corn would you?
Saving seed for the farms own use is expressly allowed under plant variety protection and patent laws in the U.S.
This is why the seed companies created contracts that they require all growers to sign before being allowed to purchase GMO crops. The prohibition from saving seed is from the signed agreement not from the patent or PVP.
Say if you got grain from the farmer for your bird feeder. Then if you happen to use the grain as seed to plant some for next year’s bird feeder — completely legal. You are not bound by the agreement between the farmer/seed company. Unless you try to sell the grain/seed to another person. Then you are in violation of the seed companies patent in the U.S.
Remember that corn shows a severe amount of inbreeding depression. So the F2 plant will not produce as much as the farmers F1 did the year before.
That is a reason why most farmers like to purchase seeds every season anyways. It’s way more predictable and you may want to change the strain depending on many variables.
Farming, especially commodity crops like wheat, is an extremely risky business. Taking out some risk is often worth it.
Modern farming is way more complicated and scientific than most people realize. The portrayal of farmers as bumbling idiots in popular media is not helping.
It would constitute theft.
or if/when your neighbors pollen blows onto your crops and you grow from those seeds, and then they sue you for being a pirate of their IP
Why invent technology to control people when you can just use the law?
No they won’t.
They will sue you if you take your neighbors pesticide resistant seeds, sow them, douse them in pesticide so only the resistant ones survive, and sow your entire field with them.
Yes, they will.
You’re taking the approach of an independent farmer that didn’t sign a contract with Monsanto. What you said mostly aligns with that scenario.
For the farmer that did sign a contract with Monsanto, that is a standard and required clause, and they do enforce it.
Classic piracy. The original product is still there; you’re just making a copy.
Isn’t classic piracy boarding ships and taking all their shit at gunpoint?
I mean, I totally agree with all forms of breaking IP law on ethical grounds. But I also recognise that it’s still breaking the law right now.
Why “but”? Why are those two statements viewed as contradicting each other in tone?
You getting downvoted for stating what’s factually correct while still disagreeing with it is classic shooting the messenger.
The messenger is getting shot for not bringing receipts. I was about to shoot them too, then I retrieved a receipt: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/01/05/dissecting-claims-about-monsanto-suing-farmers-for-accidentally-planting-patented-seeds/
I have read these receipts and literally the first story is about Percy Schmeiser, a farmer who used seed from plants grown on his own land that had been “contaminated” with genes from a neighboring farm. He had never signed any contract with Mansanto and didn’t take the seeds from his neighbor. Plants on his property were “contaminated” through natural means.
It then ends with a brief note about 700 farmers who settled out of court and lumps them under the guilty umbrella because they settled.
But worst of all, this site that this article is posted on is a propaganda mouth piece for Monsanto. It is owned and funded by the same guy owns and funds Monsanto’s PR company.
You should be allowed to do that.
I agree, but you aren’t. I think all IP law is stupid, but until i’m president of the universe, it’s still the law.
Finally. FINALLY. My ulcer grows every time I hear someone quote that list of evil things Monsanto does. Even though yes, they are evil.
Yea, they’re evil enough with the pesticides, and the hostile takeover of farms. We don’t need to make the genetic engineering they’re doing, which is actually good work, to also be thrown under the bus
I would agree if they didn’t use their non-sterile plants to take over small farms around their huge ones by suing for theft when farmers used part of the previous crop that had been pollinated with the Monsanto GM pollen. They didn’t buy that genome so it was stolen… Fucking wankers.
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Monsanto doesn’t even exist anymore. It was bought out by the totally not evil company Bayer a while back.
Of course Bayer has suffered quite a bit of indigestion over gobling up that morsel over the years.
the totally not evil company Bayer
Ah, yes, the totally not evil company that (together with BASF and Hoechst, forming the cartel IG Farben) developed chlorine gas for use in world war I.
The same IG Farben which was the single largest donor to Hitler’s election campaign, and main contributor to the construction of Auschwitz, where they produced synthetic petrol and rubber for use in the war and performed all manner of human experiments, including testing their own Zyklon B gas.
The same company that decades after the war was still chaired by well known nazis, and profiting from chemicals developed at Auschwitz.
Yeah, I’m sure Monsanto is in good hands, and feels right at home there.
See, totally not evil, yep no evil enterprise here, just the happy little aspirin people, no horrific evil history to be seen La de da t… 🎶
Yeah, except the vast majority of seeds are infertile, meaning they can’t be replanted, means the “good ol boys” can’t survive.
Where the fuck do people come up with this shit?
No the “vast majority” of crops are not infertile. They are hybrids. Farmers buy the seeds because of a genetic phenomenon called heterosis AKA hybrid vigor. It takes expertise and a shit ton of money to make hybrid seed. If growers could get the same performance from saving their own seeds only an absolute dumbfuck would buy seeds from a seed company.
Now there are a few species that hybrids can only be made by taking advantage of mutants that have male sterility genes. The resulting hybrids are still fertile (produce viable female gametes) but need an outside source of pollen. Examples: onions, sunflowers and carrots.
The only “sterile” seed sold is seedless watermelon aka triploid seed. Seedless watermelons are only sold because the market demands it thanks to a push by the USDA after being created in Japan pre-WW2. The margins on seedless watermelon seed are often 40-50% less than hybrid diploid seed. And don’t get me started on the research cost - 14-15 generations for a new female line versus 7-8 for seeded types.
Most hybrids do not produce fertile seeds. You can test it out if you want but it doesn’t work. I used to work for a seed company. Beyond that, without fertilizer the soil itself is dead in the vast majority of farming land.
I have planted seeds from round up ready soy beans. They grew just fine for my needs, which wasn’t farming. Farmers have also planted harvested hybrid seeds, Monsanto sues the ones they catch, because it’s a contract violation for those that bought seeds.
Stop your bullshit.
Not only are they fertile, it is standard protocol to purchase competitors hybrid F1 seed and produce F2 seed in most species (except corn). Eventually plant breeders create inbreds (self-pollinating for 6+ generation’s). These inbreds are the used to make new F1 hybrids. In Europe this is referred to as “plant breeders rights”.
In corn they have to get a little bit more creative. Corn breeders have to keep distinct genetically distant breeding pools to maintain heterosis in their the resulting hybrids. They pull traits from a competitors hybrid utilizing backcross breeding into their breeding pools.
Don’t we already have enough real shit to worry about tho?
Source that research was banned since the 90s? All I’m aware of is that they aren’t available commercially and sale and field testing of terminator seeds has been banned since the 00s.
Yeah they weren’t banned in the 90s. They were developed in the mid 90s with a patent filed in 1998. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a moratorium in 2000, recommending that governments block field testing and commercial use of terminator seeds, but didn’t yet ban research. In 2006 they expanded the moratorium, explicitly prohibiting field trials and emphasizing risks to biodiversity and farmers rights.
Isn’t one argument against GMO that they could spread and outcompete other crops? In that case a terminator gene would even be a good thing?
That’s exactly why the original terminator gene was a joint USDA-ARS /delta-pine effort. The USDA-ARS was looking for ways to prevent GMO species from escaping and causing issues.
You know the shit that actually happened. For example -
Creeping Bentgrass
https://www.opb.org/news/article/gmo-grass-oregon-creeping-bent-scotts-monsanto/
Wheat -
https://www.nature.com/articles/499262a
Corn/teosinte
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880918301075
This sounds like the back of a Crichton novel, and I want to read it
Also, most farmers use hybrid crops, which you already can’t save, because they’re hybrids. (You can save them, but they’re not going to produce the same plants you get them from).
Whether a plant species is hybridized has little effect on whether it grows true from seed or only via cuttings.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
I don’t think you quite understand what a hybrid for annual crops is. Hybrids in trees are fundamentally different. Same word different meaning.
Apples are a prime example.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
How do they reproduce?
Sexual reproduction via flowers+seeds.
When self-fertilizing, the offspring are not identical.
Oh OK, that makes sense - you’re talking about clones right? I thought you were saying that they don’t even come out the same species 🤣
This hard, sugarless, unripe tomato sure is red though
At this point, I barely even buy tomatoes to put into food anymore. If mom’s been growing them in her greenhouse any given year, I’ll eat a few off the vine. The stuff in stores? Ehh, it barely has flavour.
