[HN Gopher] "Open source" seeds loosen Big Ag's grip on farmers
___________________________________________________________________
"Open source" seeds loosen Big Ag's grip on farmers
Author : dnetesn
Score : 656 points
Date : 2023-02-10 13:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worldsensorium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldsensorium.com)
| [deleted]
| emadehsan wrote:
| > The farmers saved a percentage of the seeds and sowed them
| again the next spring. However, this is not a lucrative model for
| profit-oriented multinational companies, since the seed breeders
| only earn a profit during the first sale and not again every
| year.
|
| Was the "inability of the produced seeds to be sowed again and
| turn into a crop" intentionally baked into the seeds sold by
| these companies, purely for profits?
|
| Or was there a genuine biological / physical limiting factor?
| E.g. crop will be more susceptible to pests?
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| >Was the "inability of the produced seeds to be sowed again and
| turn into a crop" intentionally baked into the seeds sold by
| these companies, purely for profits?
|
| No, it's purely a contractual limitation. Farmers need to sign
| the rights away and performing experiments with seeds blown on
| your land is considered a breech of contact law (i.e. you don't
| even need to purchase the seeds to violate IP regulations).
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
| Metacelsus wrote:
| Nearly all modern crops are hybrid strains, which means the
| offspring won't have the same genotype as the parents. This is
| the real reason why re-planting doesn't work well. It's not
| anything nefarious.
| JamisonM wrote:
| "Nearly all modern crops are hybrid strains" This is a
| "citation needed" situation here, the corn & Canola seed
| markets are certainly dominated by hybrids but very plentiful
| drops like wheat and rice are not to the best of my
| knowledge. If you have sources for this I am very interested
| to read up on it.
| qup wrote:
| Legally baked-in.
| [deleted]
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Can I share a shower thought? Just because this thread made me
| thing about how wealth is accumulating so much at the top yet
| there is so much poverty.
|
| What if we put a limit on inheritance. Let say at most 100M go to
| your kids.
|
| The rest is put on a fund with your name and shares a given to
| kids when they are born. A way to have a legacy that doesn't just
| go to your kids but to every kid in the next generation. Perhaps
| rich people can be remembered that way and they don't have to
| play games trying to be in the in top of forbes, etc.
| tough wrote:
| Love to see it
| epistasis wrote:
| Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the
| entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the
| majority of, say, US agriculture.
|
| The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've
| noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that
| have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a
| huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from
| somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done
| the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are
| patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids
| do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds.
|
| While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those
| that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn
| more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different
| roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less
| land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or
| returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
|
| And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and
| skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example,
| almond farmers in California are far far more productive than
| pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who
| specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard.
| If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps
| California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and
| pecans could replace almonds for many applications.
|
| Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good
| things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely
| advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also
| abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a
| hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago.
| Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will
| thank us.
| thatcat wrote:
| Hybrids aren't stable genetics. You cross two S1 parents and
| get an F1 hybrid with inconsistent traits but hybrid vigor.
| What would the point be in owning ip of a hybrid? Sure you can
| select a good one and propagate it and have copies of that one,
| but then you lose hybrid vigor because they're clones. Ossi is
| for breeders not farmers.
| skratlo wrote:
| > few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected
| or even patented
|
| Government and legislative failure. Just protect the seeds by
| disallowing any protection/patenting, for the public good,
| that's why we pay taxes.
| gleenn wrote:
| It goes beyond country boundaries. There was an interesting
| case where China stole I think it was specialized corn to
| begin producing their own instead of spending large sums by
| buying the product or IP.
| eclipticplane wrote:
| Another interesting case was PepsiCo suing farmers in India
| over a variety of potato. A few years later, PepsiCo
| withdrew their suit... only to have a group of farmers
| continue to press the claim and have the courts rule that
| PepsiCo couldn't patent a seed.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-
| pa...
| badcppdev wrote:
| Hybridisation sounds like a bug not a feature. You get a
| benefit but with quite an extreme tradeoff.
|
| To be clear I understand that hybrids are current best
| practice. But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open
| source agriculture.
|
| BTW would you say that seed producers have no motivation to
| develop non-hybrids that will perform as well as hybrids?
| epistasis wrote:
| > But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source
| agriculture.
|
| I disagree, open source ag is completely compatible with
| hybridization. And if open source couldn't somehow deal with
| the benefits of hybridization, then open source ag is not a
| route we should follow.
|
| Farming is a transformation of inputs into food. It's not
| about seeds and propagating seeds every season... that's just
| an attachment to a practice like being super attached to, say
| FTP as the only way to transfer files and deploy a website.
|
| Open Source Ag is completely compatible with maintaining two
| strains, crossing them, and then distributing those seeds.
| Having widely distributed access to these seeds, and
| information about them, gives the chance for more innovation
| in the crossing, too. The question is whether somebody can
| get compensated for the efforts in discovery...
| lathyrus_long wrote:
| It's not fundamentally incompatible, but non-proprietary
| hybrids are extremely rare. The effort to maintain the two
| parents and do the cross is much greater than that of
| saving seed from an open-pollinated variety, so very few
| growers will undertake that even given the chance. Even if
| multiple growers do, the smaller population of plants in
| each of the pure lines increases the chance of significant
| divergence between sites, at which point the multiple
| production sites implicitly become multiple different
| varieties.
|
| Anyone interested here might also wish to read Carol
| Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". She's a
| Harvard-trained geneticist and amateur vegetable breeder,
| with special interest in open-pollinated varieties derived
| from proprietary F1 hybrids. Her book extensively discusses
| the underlying biology, the practical breeding process, and
| the legal situation of such work.
| hinkley wrote:
| 'hybrid vigor' is when you take two inbred genetic lines and
| cross them together to pick up some of the genes you
| accidentally deleted while selecting for something else.
|
| For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an
| nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't
| been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every
| wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with
| mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while
| maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and
| went from there.
|
| One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is
| doing the same thing, though I think their methods are
| recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut
| populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those
| to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else.
|
| I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to
| identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if
| it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree
| and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making
| a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect
| resistant trees over time.
|
| In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of
| the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic
| surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I assume that the backcross is marker-assisted for SNPs in
| the blight resistance locus.
|
| If that is true it amounts to the same thing you are
| proposing. Sounds just like making a speed-congenic mouse.
|
| Are they not selecting with markers at all?
| hinkley wrote:
| They seem to be selecting with their eyeballs. They're
| jabbing trees with chestnut blight and seeing which ones
| succumb.
|
| Hence a petri dish for pathogen selection. IE, insane and
| reckless.
| zargon wrote:
| Sounds like they're actively trying to evolve a blight
| that infects Asian chestnuts as well.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's the dumbest Jurassic Park level scientific laziness
| I've heard all century.
| pydry wrote:
| >The general public does not understand agriculture well, and
| I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those
| that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs.
|
| This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point.
|
| They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being
| doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true)
| _before_ they are sprayed with massive amounts of the
| (carcinogenic*) roundup.
|
| The "objectors are ignorant anti science types" with the subtle
| mislead renders it an extraordinarily effective talking point.
|
| * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/roundup-ingredient-
| proba...
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't understand, is the talking point what you quotes from
| me, or their taking point about GMOs?
|
| Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in
| general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand
| the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.
| dudeofea wrote:
| [flagged]
| bluGill wrote:
| > (carcinogenic) roundup
|
| Citation needed. Roundup has been studied a lot. Very few of
| those studies find it is carcinogenic - enough that meta
| analysis finds it is not.
| adamthedog wrote:
| There is a little evidence (10.1186/s12940-021-00729-8)
| that a very particular form of non-Hodjkins lymphoma is
| associated with glyphospate exposure (occupationally!), but
| ultimately... it's hard to say. There's evidence of
| genotoxicity in human cell lines
| (10.1007/s13205-018-1464-z), but at possibly an unrealistic
| dose of glyphosphate-based herbicides. They are also
| demonstrably endocrine disruptors
| (10.1016/j.tox.2009.06.006), though again true _in vivo_
| exposure levels to glyphosphate is not well established it
| seems, so these studies are ultimately novel. However, it
| 's clear that they should be given more care than they are
| now. Hell, it took me like.. two months? to get a pesticide
| applicator certification and now I can roundup the hell out
| of anyone's crops, and I barely know anything about the
| stuff.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Specialization and different roles is helping improve
| productivity immensely, which means less land is used by
| farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag
| use for ecological restoration.
|
| There are three problems:
|
| - the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at
| the stranglehold large corporations have over politics -
| Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying
| their employees so much they have to apply for food stamps, and
| local politicians or unions are unable to do anything against
| it because Walmart can at any time decide to just close shop
| and leave an area completely without access to groceries (made
| possible in the first place because Walmart systematically
| undercut local stores on pricing). And people (i.e. voters)
| would not blame Walmart, but local politicians and unions. No
| one wants to add _yet another_ mega-corporation to depend on
| for survival.
|
| - second, concentration of genomics. When everyone and their
| dog sans a couple eco activists and seedbanks raises the same
| variety of crop or the same breed of farm animal, pandemics
| have an incredibly easy game. The best warning sign what can
| happen in such monocultural environments are forests (where
| bark beetles and other pests run rampant and completely destroy
| them) or bananas (Gros Michel famously got wiped out by a
| fungus and Cavendish is at the cliff from another fungus).
|
| - third, the impact of pesticides as a whole. No matter what
| kind of pesticide, they _all_ have serious side effects - most
| notably, they cause bees to die and as a result, all plants
| depending on bees for pollination can 't reproduce any more.
| And ffs it's not just bees. All kinds of insects suffer, just
| compare your windshield after driving a car in the 90s and
| today through a rural area. And all these insects were part of
| the food chain for larger animals... leading to an ever growing
| loss of biodiversity further up the chain.
|
| > But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting
| farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was,
| say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a
| hobby, our backs will thank us.
|
| We don't need to go back that far in time. Like half the food
| produced is wasted instead of reaching a human's mouth -
| spoiled, rejected for missing quality benchmarks, never sold
| because stores require an overabundance of choice for the
| consumer, wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too
| large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/...
| reviews... the list of causes for food waste is immense. Cut
| down on food waste, produce less food in total, and maybe avoid
| the need for intensive agriculture in the first place.
| epistasis wrote:
| > the most obvious, concentration of market power.
|
| The solution to concentrated market power is not to abandon
| the productivity gains, but to use law and regulate to de-
| concentrate market power. We could instead ban specialization
| and the productivity it brings, but that's dealing with the
| wrong thing.
|
| > concentration of genomics
|
| Again, solved not by banning specialization, but rather
| through diversification of the market. Which also helps the
| market be less concentrated, and further improves
| productivity. "Free" markets used to mean those that were
| unconcentrated and allowed easy entry and competition, but
| rally bad market-fundamentalism ideology has twisted the
| meaning, and invited reactionary thinking that "markets in
| general are bad," which is just as wrong as the market
| fundamentalist approach of "markets must always be used and
| always are right." Markets are merely a tool that can be used
| for good or for bad by societies, and markets are socially
| constructed by law and tradition, both of which are
| changeable, as is other parts of society.
|
| > pesticides
|
| This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and
| specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only
| going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag
| tech.
|
| > food waste,
|
| This is a rounding error in comparison to the increase in ag
| productivity that we have created. Also, if you have some
| magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great,
| but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the
| ground solutions that are working.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and
| specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is
| only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our
| ag tech.
|
| Or by restructuring how land is used. When you have miles
| upon miles of corn fields, it's a fucking buffet for corn
| pests. In contrast, land that has a great variety of usages
| - corn, wheat, grass for making hay, marijuana, rice,
| potatoes, berries, tomatoes - makes it difficult for pests
| to explosively sweep over entire swaths of land and leaving
| nothing but total destruction in its wake. Our ancestors
| knew this and changed sequentially what seeds they sowed,
| they even let land sit idle for a season or two so it could
| recuperate nutrients. All of this is extensively
| documented, a lot of it has actual scientific backing, it
| just takes a bit more effort so it isn't worth it under
| capitalism.
|
| Also, California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only
| for the Saudis to feed cows with it. That is a waste of
| water and land that could both be used for something more
| productive than blood money from oil returning home. And
| they're not the only ones doing atrocious wastes of all
| kind of valuable resources.
|
| > Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all
| ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no
| substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are
| working.
|
| Well... France for example forces supermarkets to provide
| leftover food instead of trashing it. That led to a massive
| increase in food that ended up in people's mouths via food
| banks, over 10.000 tonnes a year in fact[1], additionally
| it creates a negative incentive against overstocking.
|
| Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes (which
| might also have side effects to improve public health, aka
| obesity epidemic).
|
| Stores could be forced to do regular maintenance on their
| cooler systems to reduce the amount of food lost there.
|
| Students could get education on how to cook, how to check
| if food is still edible and other food aspects. It's not
| like their parents are teaching them...
|
| tl;dr: stopping food waste can be tackled on so many levels
| and, given 50% food waste ratios, even slashing half of
| that is equal to provide 25% more food to the world's
| population.
|
| [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/lebensmittel-
| verschwe...
| UncleEntity wrote:
| With industrialization comes specialization.
|
| You can't reasonably expect farming families to be able
| to afford all the specialized equipment to be able to
| willy-nilly change the crops they grow and large
| corporations are just going to specialize based on
| economy of scale.
|
| When all you need is a water buffalo and a shitton of
| labor you can diversify crops all you want but if you
| have to compete in a low-margin mechanized market you do
| whatever it takes to keep the farm going even if that
| means diversity gets thrown out the window in favor of
| cash crops.
| dmqctx wrote:
| Correct. Rubber meeting the road comment here. This is
| the reality of most farms in America. Possibilities are
| not "endless" for revolutionizing farm practices, they
| must be profitable and margins are tight.
| cik2e wrote:
| >> Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes
| (which might also have side effects to improve public
| health, aka obesity epidemic).
|
| Pricing out poor fat people from restaurants will not
| solve the obesity epidemic. It will drive them to
| Doritos.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for
| the Saudis to feed cows with it.
|
| Dairy is like the auto industry: every state seems to
| think it needs to have its own protected domestic
| industry, but it's far from a strategic industry when
| every nation ends up with excess capacity.
|
| Canada, an excellent environment for dairy production,
| kneecaps itself in this industry. Could be an export
| juggernaut, but instead, NZ is the biggest dairy product
| exporter. 20th dairy producer in the world despite being
| a top6 barley/oat/wheat/hay producer.
| cik2e wrote:
| >> wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large
| portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/...
| reviews...
|
| Not everybody eats restaurant food for entertainment.
| Sometimes you can't cook and a larger portion means leftovers
| and usually more calories per dollar.
|
| There's nothing wrong with large portions. If you didn't want
| that much food, go to a different restaurant, or a buffet
| where you can select exactly how much food you want.
|
| And what large portions are we talking about anyway? That
| peaked in the 90s just like your bug splattered windshields.
| skzv wrote:
| > which means less land is used by farming, and more land can
| be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological
| restoration.
|
| I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in
| efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing
| resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and
| it's been observed in many real world situations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| brnt wrote:
| > The general public does not understand agriculture well,
|
| Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming.
|
| It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of
| farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming)
| from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get
| an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that
| bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon
| warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to
| execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are
| planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be
| planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's
| too.
|
| Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it
| won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will
| change.
| biorach wrote:
| > Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained
| to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the
| letter, or else.
|
| That's wildly inaccurate
| foreverobama wrote:
| [dead]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
|
| We don't really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the
| land yields more value.
|
| Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy
| loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient
| solar panel, along with lots of inputs).
|
| Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.
| skzv wrote:
| Indeed. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical
| effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as
| Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world
| situations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| epistasis wrote:
| We do that, and actually pay farmers to keep land fallow in
| some cases.
|
| We must have this high leve of productivity before it's even
| a possibility, but once it's a possibility we can expand its
| use.
|
| The current economic system is changeable, one ag technology
| allows us to.
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the goals of regenerative agriculture is to get most
| of the benefits of fallow land while still using the land.
|
| From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less
| yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor
| in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into
| an argument predicated on numbers.
| epistasis wrote:
| Regenerative agriculture is still a big step down from
| returning the land to natural ecosystems. Quantifying how
| big that step is, to the point of being able to pick a
| point in the pareto curve, is a big political decision.
| There's definitely a place for a lot lots of regenerative
| agriculture, but it's one part of a solution.
| nine_k wrote:
| Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a
| granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because
| the crops need to be collected in the few days when they
| are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often
| occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous
| machines.
|
| The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to
| harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the
| risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them
| untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more
| expensive as a result.
| hinkley wrote:
| We are collecting and redistributing grain at a discount
| and using it for anything we can think of. Highly
| processed food, grain alcohol, "corn fed beef" which is
| likely a dietary disaster for humans.
|
| Remember, ethanol in gasoline is predominantly about
| lifting demand for corn in order to court votes from the
| upper Midwest. We don't actually need to use corn for
| fuel.
|
| You can feed pigs on grain and nuts that fell before or
| after harvest. Ten pigs are pretty big harvesting
| machine. Birds as well.
|
| Mark Shepard is claiming about twice the yield per acre
| of conventional farms. He's doing this by getting less
| than half a yield of four+ crops on the same land. The
| trick to being Mark Shepard is putting enough time and
| energy into your job to understand a dozen crops instead
| of hyper specializing in two, as if your neighbors aren't
| doing the exact some thing.
|
| Now at the end of the day, we still need some staple
| crops around. That we can stockpile grain for three years
| and canned food for 18-36 months helps level out boom and
| bust cycles in agriculture. Good year? Rent warehouse
| space. Bad year? Let the warehouse lapse, or do invasive
| maintenance.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I'd totally agree w/ this from the "grow corn and then feed
| cows with it" standpoint.
|
| This is doubly bad if you're displacing natural grasslands
| and grassland grazing with this. I.e. plant corn on your
| previous grasslands and cram the cows into some barn.
|
| This came through HN just recently. Another way to do the
| same though is to go back to what the big buffalo herds were
| naturally doing. I.e. let your cows actually "trample and
| shit on the land" and that's what actually keeps it fertile.
| Then you harvest the cows for meat while keeping their number
| stable.
|
| Win - win
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Then you have a dispute about who owns the 10000s of acres
| and who to pay for the grazing rights. And who is
| responsible for maintaining all that range? And can
| somebody be tried twice for a mistake in their management
| of open range? Then people with and without badges show up
| with guns.
|
| Ok, that hardly ever happens.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Kinda what Iceland does. Multiple sheep per person. They
| tag 'em, let 'em roam free and collect them later in the
| year.
|
| https://www.cntraveler.com/story/iceland-welcomes-
| tourists-t...
|
| Same with many random islands explorers came across: they'd
| leave some livestock so when they came back later they'd
| have some dense and fresh food ready to harvest.
|
| Didn't work so well in Australia. And probably any of the
| islands most likely.
| omeid2 wrote:
| Australia is one of the largest meat exporters.
| jabl wrote:
| The plague of sheep, camels, cows, rabbits, cane toads
| and whatnot isn't such a good deal for the indigenous
| flora and fauna.
| bombolo wrote:
| The reason why iceland can't have trees: sheep owners
| nine_k wrote:
| Iceland actually has some trees. But in that climate they
| don't grow very tall.
|
| Also, much of Iceland is a desert of lava, glass, and
| black sand; some other parts are covered with ice. Not
| many plants can survive in such a landscape, and those
| which do are usually not trees.
| cognaitiv wrote:
| Deforestation in Iceland predates industrialization.
|
| "Deforestation is a major issue that is highly prevalent
| throughout the world. The country of Iceland has been hit
| especially hard by this catastrophe. A nation that once
| had forests covering 40 percent of its countryside began
| to lose its tree cover, when the Vikings arrived in the
| 9th century. By the early 20th century, however, this
| tree cover was reduced to just 0.5 percent. To this day,
| the government of Iceland is working towards reviving the
| lost forests and restoring the land, in order to work
| towards a more sustainable future. This problem relates
| to the course of Sustainability for the Common Good
| because it covers the environmental issue of
| deforestation as well as the solutions that are being put
| into play to make the land more sustainable"
|
| https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a4e20c53ee77427cb587
| cb7...
| elcritch wrote:
| Does that account for climate changes? IIRC, there was a
| warmer period around the time the vikings arrived?
| andruby wrote:
| I didn't know about hybrid seeds:
|
| "In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is produced by
| deliberately cross-pollinated plants which are genetically
| diverse"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
| saalweachter wrote:
| They're also a huge pain in the ass to produce, at least in
| my experience.
|
| Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by
| planting the two varieties in the same field, with one
| combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of
| variety B. _Then_ you need to wait until variety A is grown
| and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels
| fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn
| silk. This is usually done by hand, by a bunch of people
| walking through the field and cutting the stalk between the
| ears and the tassels.
|
| Once that is done, your variety A ears will be pollinated by
| variety B pollen, and all of those kernels will be hybrid.
| But your variety B ears be purebred B, not hybrid, so you now
| you need to harvest the field while keeping the two sets
| separate. This step isn't too bad, if you did a good job
| planting, you just need to first harvest the combine-wide
| strips of hybrid corn before going back to get the B corn.
|
| But yeah, you're looking at a lot of extra work -- and money,
| you need contract labor to detassel a field in the narrow
| window of opportunity -- to produce a hybrid seed for better
| yields next year, and most farmers don't find it a good use
| of time, which is why most farmers were buying most of their
| seed well before seed patents and GMO were a thing.
| shuntress wrote:
| Isn't the point of GMO technology that you can use it to
| accomplish this "in the lab" rather than in the field?
| saalweachter wrote:
| You know, I wonder if GMO technology has advanced enough
| to replace hybridization.
|
| Hybrids give you two different chromosomes, uniformly in
| your population. You take population AA and aa and get
| Aa. The next generation you're back to a mix of AA/Aa/aa.
|
| There's no reason -- in the abstract -- you couldn't
| duplicate your gene and put two copies of it on the same
| chromosome, one A and one a, so that you can skip the
| hybridization. But does that work with current
| technology? I don't know!
| not2b wrote:
| But then the GMO company patents the result, and it's not
| legal for a farmer to do what farmers have been doing for
| ten thousand years: save some of the seeds from the crop
| and plant them the next year, or give some to a
| neighboring farmer. Getting out of that trap is a prime
| motivation for "open source seeds" projects.
| kuhewa wrote:
| > save some of the seeds from the crop and plant them the
| next year, or give some to a neighboring farmer
|
| That hasn't been the predominant practice for the
| majority of farms for coming up on a century. Cross
| pollinated hybrid seeds are just way too productive to
| justify growing your own open pollinated varieties.
|
| That 'trap' didn't arise with GMOs
| pfdietz wrote:
| Aside from, you know, the vast uptake of hybrid seeds,
| which couldn't be saved for reuse either.
|
| Anyway, why exactly is this tradition so important that
| it would swamp the social benefits from improved plants
| obtained from GMOs (and such benefits must exist, or else
| farmers would not use these seeds)? This sounds like
| reflexive conservatism, wanting an old thing just because
| it is old, and damning changes just because they are
| changes.
| epistasis wrote:
| That was the promise, and the fear, around GMO, but it
| really hasn't had that much of an effect. Biologically,
| the point editing allowed by generic modification, even
| with our enhanced skills from CRISPR/Cas9, only allows
| small changes.
|
| Generic modification by molecular techniques is just
| another tool, that does not supercede or override any of
| the past forms of generic modification by breeding that
| humans have been doing ever since we were humans.
| danuker wrote:
| I'd be fine with GMO if it weren't for the pesticides
| that come with it.
|
| https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-monsantos-roundup-
| pestic...
|
| > But pure glyphosate isn't sprayed on crops, Roundup is,
| which contains a variety of adjuvants and surfactants
| meant to help the glyphosate penetrate into tissues. And
| indeed when the study was repeated with what's actually
| sprayed on GMO crops, there were toxic and hormonal
| effects even at doses smaller than the 1 or 2%
| concentration that's used out on the fields.
|
| > Roundup was found to be 100 times more toxic than
| glyphosate itself. Moreover, Roundup turned out to be
| among the most toxic pesticide they tested.
| hinkley wrote:
| At this point any time someone switches from talking
| about Roundup to glyphosate, they either have an agenda,
| or they picked up their argument from people who do. Some
| of the 'inactive' ingredients in Roundup are more toxic
| than glyphosate, and stick around longer. Spraying it
| directly on yourself, the glyphosate may or may not be
| your immediate concern, but touching something that was
| sprayed weeks ago the glyphosate is the least of your
| problems, so making it an argument about glyphosate is
| one you can kind of win.
|
| It's very much like the tobacco lobby playbook. Nicotine
| may not be that bad for you (unless you're a bug) but you
| aren't smoking nicotine. You're smoking a broadleaf plant
| exposed to soil minerals and four kinds of pesticides and
| antifungal compounds (fungi and human livers are
| susceptible to many of the same chemicals) which may or
| may not have prevented fungal volatiles from ending up in
| your lungs alongside the trace amounts of uranium.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And the smoke is fully of polycyclic aromatic
| hydrocarbons, which are strong carcinogens.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I watch Laura Farms on the YouTubes and she goes into great
| depth on growing seedcorn as her family's farm does it
| under contract.
|
| The de-tasseling is mostly automated these days with a
| sprayer attachment chopping off the tops and the legions of
| kids coming behind to get the ones missed.
|
| Then they come along with another specialized attachment to
| 'destroy' the males. Basically just chop them up and leave
| in the rows which later on gets eaten by the cows. The
| outside border rows of males gets harvested and turned into
| winter feed for the cows.
|
| Eventually the remaining corn gets harvested by a crew
| hired by the seed company because they want the full heads
| of corn to do their evil deeds to.
|
| Fascinating stuff this modern farming.
| fencepost wrote:
| I used to hear about "detasseling corn" as an utterly
| miserable short-term summer job option for high school
| students. Walking through cornfields in heavy clothes (to
| avoid getting cut up by the leaves) in summer in Iowa.
| bequanna wrote:
| Miserable indeed! I was in Southern MN and did this job
| for a few weeks in the summer. We started around 5:30am
| and worked 8-10 hrs per day, rain or shine.
|
| Why do this? At the time (early 2000s) it was an
| extremely well-paying, unskilled job at $15/hr!
| breput wrote:
| There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work.
| Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no
| iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because
| of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be
| out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9
| month long harvest.
|
| Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but
| because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil
| conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for
| them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the
| farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-
| worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for
| seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output.
|
| And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although
| they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid
| drift and other factors will make less money.
|
| Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU
| xphilter wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know why you think farmers are "smart" (taking
| this meaning to convey that we shouldn't question their
| practices). If you pump enough water and fertilizer into the
| already-fertile land you can get things to grow. Wow. If
| farmers were actually smart they'd start thinking long term
| on how their practices are destroying their livelihood
| (draining aquifers, polluting rivers, degrading soil quality)
| or how their politics are driving future generations from
| rural US (anti education, anti immigration, anti everything).
| Credentials: grew up in rural midwest.
| seunosewa wrote:
| It looks easy until you face pests, diseases, soil nutrient
| deficiencies, drought, unfavourable market conditions
| leading to losses etc. And it's a low margin business so
| you need to do everything with maximum efficiency to stay
| ahead.
|
| A programming analogy: Anyone can write an hello world
| program in Python after a 10 minute tutorial, but
| delivering software that you can make a living from is
| _much_ harder.
| brnt wrote:
| Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea
| accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using
| all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory,
| not the farming.
|
| Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary.
| Industrial farmers understand the economics of their
| operation, but very little about its biology. They know as
| much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how
| the GPU you ordered is built.
| breput wrote:
| EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us,
| albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes.
|
| If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think
| they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of
| agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the
| game.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| I don't think brnt's comment contradicts yours.
|
| They agree that farmers understand financials. But they
| also restates what you said. Farmers don't understand the
| actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the
| company provided experts for that.
|
| The only real difference between you and the other
| commenter is your definition of the word "smart". You
| both agree on the facts.
|
| Also, "Even a Netflix documentary" is a horrible comeback
| when the original comment's "evidence" is as a YouTube
| video.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Not all farmers understand the depths of the biology they
| work with, but some probably do.
|
| Not all programmers understand how their instructions
| influence the circuits that execute them. That does not
| validate statements like "programmers don't understand
| electronics."
| gtvwill wrote:
| Fixed water requirements from tree crop farming in states where
| water is a concern is the dumbest agri business ever. Tbh most
| of America's farming sucks, bulk corporate welfare keeps most
| of it propped up and is used to buffer against the efficiency
| of global markets and y'all do some incredibly dumb stuff like
| but farms in water restricted areas.
|
| Lol nearly all your beefs feedlot... You do well to feed the
| masses, but the countries process of getting there is like it's
| stuck in 1950s. Lol go watch some of ya broadacre boys and they
| still monocrop tilling thousands of acres by throwing
| fertilizer at it. Bumpkin stuff, hardly advanced.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| And if you could do it better you wouldn't be here throwing
| shade about stuff you only barely understand, you'd be out in
| a field somewhere dunking on the local farmer's co-op. If you
| think modern ag is a bunch of ass-backward hicks then explain
| why some comment section hero hasn't already revolutionized
| the business. We'll wait.
| efitz wrote:
| Most people support patents because they have this romanticized
| notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light
| bulb. That's not representative of the mass offensive and
| defensive patterns of use by modern corporations.
|
| We should just end patents, period.
| jandrese wrote:
| The problem with ending patents is the alternative is medieval
| guilds that jealously guard their knowledge, sometimes using
| lethal force. The great thing about patents is that they force
| people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the
| sands of time when they close up shop.
|
| That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure.
| The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems
| have become too complex for independent patent examiners to
| really understand them, which has allowed many companies to
| amass a huge portfolio of techniques that are obvious to people
| in the field even if they appear novel to an external observer.
|
| At least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time.
| Copyright is in a far worse place.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > The great thing about patents is that they force people to
| publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of
| time when they close up shop.
|
| That works when the patents is some simple thing anyone can
| understand. Nothing is like that anymore. Every interesting
| line of research requires a specialist to understand it, and
| every specialist represents a high opportunity cost. In
| practice only a few people could hope to benefit from the
| publication.
|
| Throw into that the fact that it's actually lawyers who write
| patents, and thus they are written in legalese.
| briantakita wrote:
| > The problem with ending patents is the alternative is
| medieval guilds that jealously guard their knowledge,
| sometimes using lethal force. The great thing about patents
| is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it
| won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
|
| The government & large corporations use force via the justice
| system & jealously guard top secrets, to the point of
| violence as well. Property can be seized. I'd rather have a
| distribution of power than consolidation, which seems to
| attract people who are motivated by controlling other people,
| thereby undermining the supposed benefits.
|
| > The bar for getting a patent has become far too low
|
| The process is also expensive & serves as a barrier to
| innovation via market monopolies. The problem with monopolies
| is that they don't serve the marketplace or consumers.
| Monopoly is pure rent for the entities that control the
| monopoly. It is common for a dominant company to buy the
| rights to a patent only to quash the technology, all to serve
| the dominant company's stranglehold over a market.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _The great thing about patents is that they force people to
| publish the knowledge so it won 't be lost to the sands of
| time when they close up shop._
|
| That's a benefit that depends on the difficulty of reverse
| engineering the knowledge from working samples. As analytical
| instruments and procedures have improved, the relative
| disclosure benefit of patents has diminished. Worse, patents
| are increasingly written to hide the key insight in a hay
| stack of obfuscatory language and irrelevant examples. I can
| learn a lot from reading a typical 1970s-vintage chemistry
| patent. I can't say the same about present chemistry patents.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| My father worked for Pilkingtons when they patented the
| float-glass process.
|
| Lots of companies tried to copy the process (without
| licensing the patent). They couldn't, because the patent
| didn't describe all the know-how needed to make the process
| work. Companies that licensed the patent got the benefit of
| an on-site engineer that would help them get their process
| working. So most "plate" glass was thereafter float glass,
| made by paying licensees.
|
| That is: the invention was really protected not by patents,
| but by trade secrets. And unlike with the mediaeval guilds,
| nobody had to be assassinated.
|
| So it seems to me that in addition to being harmful,
| patents really are unnecessary; as long as there is also
| know-how. If there is no know-how, then I don't think the
| patent should be issued. Therefore, there is no need for
| patents.
| deelowe wrote:
| I personally know several people who were able to start
| successful careers solely based on their inventions and the
| protections afforded to them via patents. This seems extremely
| short sighted. In fact, the bigger issue to me is that patents
| don't matter for companies located in countries where they are
| not recognized (e.g. China). The biggest issue with "some
| little guy in his garage" inventing stuff these days is that
| within weeks of selling it on amazon, it'll be copied, cost
| reduced to a essentially non-functional version, and sold for
| 1/3 the price all while pushing him down in the search results
| via borderline illegal SEO strategies.
|
| The patent system needs to be fixed, not done away with.
| version_five wrote:
| A bigger issue with for the little guy is his garage is that
| if his actually innovation contains some trivial subcomponent
| that's part of a patent troll or large competitors portfolio,
| they can can sued into the ground, either to leech of their
| success or to prevent competition. patents favor big
| companies and trolls, and as a legal instrument it's
| basically impossible to change that because the costs and
| complexity always favor large incumbents. I agree it's time
| to drop them
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Show me where this has happened? You present a theoretical
| against an actual. I know more people who have been enabled
| via patents than have been squashed (I know of zero
| squashed who were actually doing something new/novel).
| namibj wrote:
| Arithmetic coding?
| whichquestion wrote:
| Would it be better to make patents have shorter lifespans
| before entering the public domain from companies of a
| certain size? Maybe that would level out the playing field
| and allow small players to be more competitive against
| behemoth corporations and patent trolls.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Heavily penalize patent trolling with patents that never
| should have been granted, prevent mafia-esque lawsuits
| from districts like east Texas, and drastically reduce
| the cost for someone to defend themselves through some
| form of pre-trial mediation where independent experts
| review the validity of a claim.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Exactly, you have so little leverage as an individual or
| small group. The pack of wolves that are patent trolls
| relentlessly look for small targets who can't afford to
| defend themselves, and larger companies courting a deal or
| a buyout can implicitly threaten a similar situation.
|
| It's also a slightly depressing reason why I refuse to
| publish source for a commercial game I built, despite
| wanting to. The likelihood of being sued is very tiny, but
| why risk it when you've had enough success to be
| noticeable.
| narrator wrote:
| That's why it's good to be an inventor for things that people
| do in America. For example, food processing techniques.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Or patents should be assigned to individuals and not companies.
| wnevets wrote:
| Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from
| much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to
| legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest
| of us.
|
| If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on
| revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully
| "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires
| sooner.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| The https://openinventionnetwork.com/ exists now too, to make
| defensive patents for those who want to open source their
| patents but keep a big corp from attacking after stealing an
| idea/patent.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| >Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies
| from much larger corporations. Allowing these large
| corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things
| worse for the rest of us.
|
| Truly small operations don't have the bandwidth or resources
| to even file for a patent. So it's pretty much only medium
| sized companies or those with the backing of powerful groups
| who take advantage of the patent system.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| The data are readily available.[0] It seems that small
| businesses actually _can_ file patents. Even small teams
| and individuals can file patents, and do. I fact, patents
| per employee seemingly decreases as company size increases.
|
| [0]https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/09/1309...
| outworlder wrote:
| While that's true, have you tried? It's a full time job.
| narrator wrote:
| I successfully patented a product and licensed that patent
| to a small company that does quite well selling a product
| based on that patent. It did cost about $15k, but that's
| business risk. If a megacorp ever infringed the patent, we
| could sue them. Sure, they could try and work around it
| with other designs, but their product wouldn't work as
| well.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| This just isn't true I got my name on patents working at
| small companies.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Compulsory licensing of patents as well. I'm a huge fan of
| compulsory licensing in many industries.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Not a bad line of thought. We also have to solve the problem
| where you have e.g. China and corporations in China blatantly
| flouting any IP laws. If we did have a just IP regime (we
| don't) it would continue to be severely undercut by this
| problem. Somehow, if it's even possible, we need buy-
| in/treaties etc. from the major economies.
| freddref wrote:
| Can you give us an example where a smaller company was
| successful in court against a much larger corp?
| akhosravian wrote:
| This is the business model of patent trolls.
| rowanajmarshall wrote:
| Nearly a decade ago but this:https://www.lexology.com/libra
| ry/detail.aspx?g=54cf4b4f-ccb4...
|
| Nestle has around 276,000 employees today, while Dualit
| seems to have around 100-200 (hard to tell since Dualit is
| private).
| bitcharmer wrote:
| And for one case of a small entity successfully defending
| against a Behemoth there's hundreds of cases where it was
| the exact opposite.
| wnevets wrote:
| You are asking the wrong question IMO.
|
| We really want examples of large companies licensing
| patents or buying smaller companies for their patents. Both
| are examples of patents helping smaller companies against
| those much larger. If patents no longer existed those
| smaller companies would get nothing.
| hammock wrote:
| >maybe it should be based on revenue generated
|
| The pitfall there is that there is no guarantee of revenue.
| You also invite the possibility of predatorily delaying
| revenue generation. _Potential_ revenue generated would be
| more on the nose.
|
| In another sense, sustaining a patent until it generates
| sufficient revenue can be seen as oxymoronic to the idea that
| patents incent products that serve the public interest -
| since, if the patent is not creating value, how can it be in
| the public interest?
|
| Patent lifespans are already sort of considered based on
| potential revenue generated, and use number of years as a
| proxy for that
| wnevets wrote:
| You wouldn't need to get rid of the current limits, just
| expire the patent sooner. If a company generates $10
| Billion dollars in the first 5 years of their 20 year
| patent the reminding 15 years isn't necessary to
| incentivize innovation.
|
| Rewarding innovation has been archived, just skip ahead to
| the part where the public at large benefits.
| hammock wrote:
| So a cap on patent revenues, with ensuing expiration
| wnevets wrote:
| precisely
| gibspaulding wrote:
| I could see a scenario if this were the case where some
| company works out a way to sit on a patent adjacent to
| something they sell so that they keep competitors from using
| the idea, while not actually using the idea itself (or using
| it in a way engineered not to make a profit). That way they
| can maintain their entrenched position longer by squashing
| innovation.
| msla wrote:
| Large companies have patent warchests, and can engage in
| long-term litigation to ensure small companies cannot
| compete. Patents do nothing to protect small companies from
| that. "Ignoring patents" as you say would help level the
| playing field for every company, and ensure companies cannot
| do things like patent XOR and destroy all of their
| competition.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| >Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies
| from much larger corporations. Allowing these large
| corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things
| worse for the rest of us.
|
| why? why does it have to be only larger companies? if its a
| free for all, i copy your product, you copy mine. how is that
| not free market? people will choose so let them.
|
| you could decide to not publicly release a product but you
| risk your competitor "inventing" the same thing in their own
| way so you can only either release it first or make the
| biggest noise.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| In theory, yes.
|
| In practice, the big companies usually have a ton of vague
| questionable defensive patents that cover a huge space of
| "inventions", so even if the smaller companies try to sue,
| they will get avalanched by an array of patent suits that
| could potentially bankrupt the company.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I'm all for reforming patents, but this seems like it's
| more a part of a larger set of problems with how civil
| suits are really only a tool for the big guys, namely:
|
| 1. With inadequate penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits,
| filing frivolous lawsuits becomes a strategy. I've
| unfortunately had a close friend be a victim of this
| strategy. I won't name my friend, but I will name that
| Jared Kushner's companies were the (repeated) plaintiff. If
| we close the loopholes around patents (and we should) it
| will only make the filing of frivolous lawsuits slightly
| less efficient, because the lawsuits will get thrown out
| quicker. Note that even if the lawsuits get thrown out,
| they still cost the defendants money to get them thrown
| out, so patent reform wouldn't even necessarily mean they
| can't file patent lawsuits, it just means the lawsuits
| might get thrown out slightly faster.
|
| 2. Justice isn't possible in civil suits where the
| plaintiff and defendant have disparate resources to pay for
| counsel.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Exactly. Companies file and retain patents that aren't
| defensible or questionable for defensive purposes. Perhaps
| the patents won't hold up in court but given enough of them
| you can bankrupt someone before they can prove them all
| invalid.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Wait that actually makes a ton of sense, at least in theory.
| Never thought about it this way. Though there's probably a
| want to amortize risk of failed research projects, failed as
| in "didn't contribute to a product"?
| strbean wrote:
| When the little person in their garage invents the next light
| bulb, and goes to industry players to try to license it, they
| just steal their idea and legally stonewall them for the
| remainder of their lifespan.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| End intellectual "property" in general. Unfortunately
| resistance seems to be coming from artists and the like just as
| much as big corporations.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> We should just end patents, period._
|
| In the case of seeds, they could still hide behind plant
| breeders' rights[1], though.
|
| [1] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/p-14.6/
| mattwest wrote:
| The real use and value of a patent (or any IP mechanism) is
| during litigation. It's easy to say "just end patents" until
| two parties are in court and have nothing to form arguments
| around.
| evdubs wrote:
| Even researchers at the Fed agree
|
| > The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is
| no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation
| and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that
| patents have many negative consequences.
|
| https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035/
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved
| literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through
| famine reduction. Yes it sucks for farmers, but I can't see how
| it has been anything other than absolute boon for humanity.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Apologies for the excess of links below. I find posts that
| spam links annoying, but if somebody believes GM products
| have saved millions/billions of lives, then they won't (and
| shouldn't) believe rando internet guy, and all the points are
| pretty distinct.
|
| ---
|
| GMOs were first made available in 1994 [1]. You can find data
| on famine deaths over time here [2]. Global famine deaths
| were near zero per 100k before GMOs had been developed. As an
| aside on this, the reason for historic famines was often not
| a lack of food or crops, or even weather - but war, which
| disrupts supply lines and may damage production.
|
| GMO products are also primarily only grown in the USA and
| Brazil. [3] Of the two largest countries in the world, India
| has a complete ban on GM products except cotton, and China
| previously had a complete ban but lately has been in a state
| of flux, in no small part because of trade concessions - the
| US _really_ wants to sell GM soybeans to them.
|
| The vast majority of GMOs are used to feed Americans,
| Brazilians, livestock, and cars. If you don't understand that
| last one - US/Brazilian corn is often turned into heavily
| subsidized ethanol fuel. Which absolutely sucks as a fuel in
| every possible way [4], but has found a place in the market
| thanks to governmental regulation.
|
| ---
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavr_Savr
|
| [2] - https://ourworldindata.org/famine-mortality-over-the-
| long-ru...
|
| [3] - https://sci-
| hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007...
|
| [4] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2016/04/25/
| why-a...
| Anarch157a wrote:
| We don't use that much corn to make ethanol here in Brazil.
| The share of corn in our ethanol production is only 13% of
| the total[1], the rest is from sugar cane. According to the
| research institute Embrapa, most of our corn is for human
| or animal consumption.
|
| As for your affirmation that it sucks for fuel, the growth
| of corn as a competitor for sugar cane in the production of
| ethanol here in Brazil is not "thanks to government
| regulation". In our country, sugar cane farmers have a lot
| more pull with the government than corn farmers. If
| government meddling was an issue, it would make the use of
| corn as a source of ethanol more difficult, not easier.
|
| If ethanol producers here are turning to corn, is because
| it has economical benefits.
|
| --- [1] https://digital.agrishow.com.br/graos/etanol-de-
| milho-como-e...
| sethjgore wrote:
| Absolute boon for "humanity" is a such abstract notion. The
| reality is that farmers are robbed and food we eat are way
| less nutrient dense, etc etc. boon...for whom?
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Would there be another way to feed 7+ billion people? How
| many human lives would you trade for more nutrient dense
| food?
| wazoox wrote:
| > _Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved
| literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives
| through famine reduction._
|
| Sources? References? Sounds like PR bullshit from Syngenta,
| frankly. For a start, half the world population is living off
| subsistence agriculture, i.e. not patented nor GMO seeds.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > half the world population is living off subsistence
| agriculture
|
| Doubt GMOs have yet saved hundreds of millions like the
| green revolution did, but this claim is false.
| Marazan wrote:
| There has not been a single famine since the beginning of the
| 20th century that was not man-made (i.e. due to either people
| in power preventing aid reaching those who needed it or by
| people in power stripping people of their food).
|
| GMO crops have nothing to do with famine reduction.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I doubt we would call any famine post-20th century
| apolitical due to how recent they are but many of them
| likely would not have occurred if food had been easier to
| grow, political dysfunction aside.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >Bad thing is good because it funded good thing
|
| I'm not sure your reasoning makes sense to me.
| Cerium wrote:
| Autocorrect between boon and boondoggle?
| narrator wrote:
| Norman Bourlag is the guy mostly responsible for the huge
| increases in agricultural productivity in the 20th century
| and he gave most of his stuff away.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| I'm not sure that it's so clear cut. I think we should be more
| strict with accepting new patents however wrt prior work and
| extending them. Companies should be able to ignore patents as
| soon as they find prior work. Then it should become the
| responsibility of the patent holder to prove that there really
| isn't prior work. And there really shouldn't be a way to extend
| patents easily if at all. Patents are also benneficial in that
| they serve as a database of sorts of new discoveries (with
| pictures!). I can point to the exact US patent of the field
| effect transistor,[0] for example.
|
| [0]https://patents.google.com/patent/US1745175A/en
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Do they? Any adult I've ever talked to sees patents as anything
| ranging from "a necessary evil" to "literally the worst thing".
| No one thinks it somehow helps the little guy stick it to the
| big players. The little guy isn't interested in sticking it to
| the big players, they're interested in _selling_ to the big
| players.
| GTP wrote:
| I don't think we should end patents, as I think that someone
| that develops an idea has the right to profit from that idea,
| if she chooses so (and the same holdsfor companies doing R&D).
| What I think should be done, is reflecting on patents/copyright
| duration, as in some cases it seems too long for me, to the
| point that in some cases we have that the profits end up in the
| hands of companies that have nothing to do with the original
| inventor/author.
| kahrl wrote:
| Something something baby bathwater.
| efitz wrote:
| I think that baby died a long time ago.
| zellyn wrote:
| Something something giant fire-breathing, acid-spewing,
| tentacle-flinging, city-crushing kaiju bathwater.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| I think the elephant in the room is that China will readily
| ignore any patents and produce competing products anyway. it's
| really tough to make money off of hardware when you are
| immediately undercut by the people you contract out to
| manufacture your product.
| tchalla wrote:
| The other elephant in the room is that almost every other
| country has done the same. Examples : Germany, US and now
| China. Great powers are built on imitation, then innovation.
|
| https://www.discovergermany.com/the-history-of-made-in-
| germa...
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-
| esp...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's unclear in the technological sector whether the patents or
| the exclusive licensing of those patents are the real issue. In
| academic research at universities, patented research is not the
| problem - it's more the exclusive licensing of those patents
| (taxpayer-financed, as well) to private interests. A better
| option would be to allow any interest to use academic patents
| for something like a flat fee / percentage of profits
| arrangement.
|
| In general though, I agree - intellectual property gives too
| much power to the financial sector and the lifetime of patents
| and copyrights should be cut in half.
| outworlder wrote:
| "Of course, salad is no software, and the work of plant
| breeders has to be protected. Otherwise they might fare like
| plant breeder Jim Baggett in Oregon, who in 1966 started
| breeding broccoli with an extra-long stem so it could be
| harvested more easily. He shared his novel broccoli with
| researchers and other breeders -- until Monsanto-offspring
| Seminis patented a broccoli with exactly that trait in 2011.
| Baggett could trace more than a third of the plant material to
| his work. "
|
| Patents at work.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yeah; we need plant patents, because without them Baggett
| couldn't have patented his broccolli.
|
| Oh, wait - he wouldn't have needed to patent his broccolli,
| because Monsanto wouldn't have been able to patent it against
| him.
| ptero wrote:
| To me, a better approach would be to limit the patent time. 5
| years of protection should be plenty of time for a company that
| _intends_ to develop a technology based on its invention to get
| a commanding lead.
|
| Absolutist solutions can backfire in unexpected ways. We should
| take an iterative approach unless a single jump is the only
| option. My 2c.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "Most people support patents because they have this
| romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing
| the next light bulb. That's not representative of the mass
| offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern
| corporations."
|
| I often think that the bigger a company or wealthier a person
| is they should get less things like tax deductions, patent
| protection, subsidies and a lot of others.
| twblalock wrote:
| Penalizing success is a great way to destroy innovation along
| with the rest of the economy.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think in total these big organizations and super wealthy
| people destroy innovation. They produce some cool things
| but at the expense of suppressing a lot of things smaller
| players would produce.
| quantified wrote:
| End patents for anything that lives
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Most people support farmers because they have a romantic idea
| of "Old Macdonald" instead of modern agri-corps. There is no
| real reason for someone to care either way in this case. Not
| that what the average person thinks about a niche, complex,
| uncertain, issue should matter...
| lend000 wrote:
| The main problem is that most patents last 20 years. To fix the
| problem, durations should be dramatically reduced (60%
| reduction would be a good start) and there should be provisions
| to protect against patent trolls, i.e. that your lawsuit if
| frivolous UNLESS you are either the original inventor or can
| prove an active attempt to commercialize the technology.
|
| There is some good to intellectual property -- it's more of a
| tuning problem that is currently tuned for the slow moving
| 1800's.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Easier said then done. Who's "we" here? The handful of
| idealists that actually understand the legal issues? Or think
| they do?
|
| The main issue with patents is not that they exist but that the
| system for filing and enforcing them has been eroded to the
| point where it has become a highly effective tool for big
| corporations to enforce patents they arguably should not have
| received against smaller competitors. That's technically
| illegal but since it is super hard to argue that in a court,
| companies get away with anti competitive behavior. And of
| course they are actively supported in this by bought and payed
| for politicians. In the US that's called lobbying, in much of
| the rest of the world we'd label that corruption, nepotism, and
| graft. Not a good thing. But as old as power and politics is.
|
| The issue is not patents but the corruption around it.
|
| The system in the US is flooded with bull shit patents that
| would not be acceptable else where. A lot of those have issues
| with their claims being overly broad, prior art, or a complete
| and utter lack of novelty. This does not matter. Getting
| patents rubber stamped is a numbers game. You just send more
| patents in and eventually a few will get approved. Of course,
| it costs a money to register and keep patents but once you have
| them the system is rigged in your favor. Challenging a patent
| is super expensive relative to filing one. And since patent
| offices are under staffed, they bias in favor of approving. And
| also they don't like admitting they were wrong to approve.
|
| None of this happened by accident. The system was lobbied into
| the shape it is in today by the largest patent holders in the
| US (i.e. every big mega corporation you can name). They use
| patents as a tool to keep competitors out of the market. And
| they do so very successfully. To the extent that this is
| becoming a problem.
|
| The solution is fixing the system, not getting rid of it. A big
| motivation for this could simply be that patents are not
| globally enforceable. So, you might convince companies in the
| US to not compete but e.g. Chinese companies will happily take
| your patented thing and run with it. Good luck complaining
| about that in a Chinese court of law. And they seem to have
| bootstrapped a pretty nice high tech industry in recent decades
| there. Bad patents actually erode the competitive position of
| US based corporations. While they are tied up in courts being
| sued by patent trolls, their foreign competitors are free to
| compete without concern for such things. Great argument for
| getting politicians off their ass. The problem exists to a
| lesser extent in other jurisdictions of course. But the US is
| the most paralyzed by this.
| dylan604 wrote:
| or end the offensive/defensive patterns used by modern
| corporations?
|
| someone invents a thing, someone else uses thing for evil. what
| to do? we ban the thing!!! yes, of course, that's the solution.
| don't punish the one that did the evil.
| <hangsheadinshameatthenotion>
| paulmd wrote:
| the federal reserve doesn't think there's empirical evidence
| that patents have positive societal benefits and they think
| there are very empirical and measurable harms.
|
| https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035
|
| this isn't "generally good thing that some people abuse",
| this is the entire patent system is fundamentally not
| producing _any explicable benefits_ and _significant
| measurable harm_ , there is no reason to keep it around.
|
| the scenario about the inventor who comes up with the better
| lightbulb in his garage doesn't happen. if it does, somebody
| else copies his idea (it's gotta be fairly trivial for
| someone to make it in a garage) or opens up their own patent
| portfolios and finds an overbroad patent that describes some
| trivial component or practice that is widely used, and drags
| him into litigation that bankrupts him for the rest of his
| life.
|
| in software the example would be that you get dragged by
| someone who has patented "e-commerce on a website" or
| "software updates over the internet" and the money to have
| lawyers fight it while you empty your warchest.
|
| no "I would simply..." or "but a law firm would do that pro-
| bono" is necessary here, either, those are both _real-world
| examples_ , someone tried to shake down Newegg in 2015 with
| the e-commerce patent for example. And it worked for a lot of
| previous victims, none of whom felt like Newegg that it was
| worth fighting on principle or for direct economic benefit
| alone.
|
| Patents literally kill companies, and they don't actually
| produce the intended innovations. And that's _the federal
| reserve_ saying it. There were debates on ending it in the
| 50s, and they made the wrong decision.
|
| > If we did not have a patent system, it would be
| irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its
| economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But
| since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would
| be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to
| recommend abolishing it.
|
| The harms have now clearly exceeded the benefits of keeping
| it. It may not have been worth the trouble of abolishing it
| in 1958, it is now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| [flagged]
| digitallyfree wrote:
| There are two interesting things here from a legal perspective.
|
| 1. Licensing works on the commercial seeds because they are
| patented, and thus the company that makes those seeds can dictate
| license terms on the farmers. As far as I can tell, these open
| seeds are not patented and thus their creators can't really
| impose license terms on the buyers unless they sign a contract
| before sale. That would be treated solely under contract law, not
| patent/copyright law.
|
| 2. Apparently these seeds use some sort of shrink-wrap license
| agreement as quoted below, which attempts to form the contract
| agreement mentioned in #1.
|
| "The license is printed on every OSS seed package in Europe.
| Whoever opens an OSS package agrees to never patent these seeds
| or future breeding of them."
|
| Considering the general dislike for/legal questionably behind
| shrink-wrap agreements, this sounds like a very poor way to
| enforce the OSS license. Also it is uncertain how valid this
| agreement is unless the seeds are patented (in that case the
| buyer's OSS rights can be granted via patent license terms).
| incompatible wrote:
| I suppose a company that wanted to use some of the genes in its
| own patented products would just get somebody else to open the
| packet for them so that they wouldn't be bound by any contract.
| efitz wrote:
| > ...this sounds like a very poor way to enforce the OSS
| license
|
| I thought the same thing, reading the article.
|
| A much more effective way, IMO, would be to establish a trust
| or foundation with the desired openness characteristics (eg
| FRAND) defined in its charter, and then have participants
| assign IP rights to the organization in some contract.
|
| Or, as I said in my other reponse, just end the patent system.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| The other other option aside from having specific contracts
| (as stupid as it sounds) is to patent the seed itself and
| then license out the patented seed using open terms.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| "Open source seeds", or as we used to call them, "seeds".
| linuxftw wrote:
| Open source seeds as in the Open Source Seed Initiate [1] come
| with a GPL-like pledge that you won't restrict creations from
| seeds based on these seeds [2]
|
| > You have the freedom to use these OSSI-Pledged seeds in any
| way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others'
| use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other
| means, and to include this pledge with any transfer of these
| seeds or their derivatives.
|
| [1]: https://osseeds.org/ [2]: https://osseeds.org/ossi-faqs/
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| I'm not against this idea--I'm just frustrated by the fact
| that this is now something we have to spell out explicitly
| and back with the threat of legal action, instead of common
| sense.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Well, you've always had to do this. If you give someone
| seeds, they would be free to use those seeds to develop
| patented varieties.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| I suspect we're actually talking about the same thing
| here, but misunderstanding each other. It happens.
| nullcontext wrote:
| I don't think you should be able to patent life in any form.
| Nature should be inviolable when it comes to man profiting from
| holding its reins.
| davexunit wrote:
| My favorite seed seller, Fedco, has an OSSI section:
| https://fedcoseeds.com/seeds/list-ossi
|
| I have tried and liked Dazzling Blue Kale and Gildenstern
| Lettuce. I'm trying out some other OSSI lettuce varieties this
| year, of which there are many.
| prbs23 wrote:
| If you are interested in more OSSI varieties like those, check
| out Wild Garden Seed: https://www.wildgardenseed.com
|
| The owner, the Frank Morton who was mentioned in article, is
| the original breeder of both Gildenstern and Dazzling Blue (and
| they probably grew the seed being sold by Fedco). All the
| varieties he bread (of which there are many) are released as
| OSSI varieties, plus they sell other OSSI varieties as well.
| topynate wrote:
| Trying to work out what's going wrong in the cases this article
| describes, such that the principle "you can't patent something
| that exists" apparently doesn't apply. Is it that an independent
| breeder develops a certain strain, say red salad, and then a big
| company makes a modification to that strain, and patents the
| modification, such that the independent breeder is prevented
| somehow from continuing to develop red salad? That still doesn't
| make perfect sense to me but it makes more legal sense than
| "company got patent on what you already made, you can't make it
| anymore", which is just not how patents work.
| pacetherace wrote:
| The cases that the article talks about (broccoli and red
| carrot), the researchers shared the seeds/plants with other
| researchers without applying for any patents or open
| disclosures. I don't think Seminis is really saying that they
| can't make it anymore, rather the issue is that for a common
| farmer it is not worth planting something and worrying about a
| lawsuit from Monsanto/Seminis to prove they provence of the
| seeds.
|
| With open source seeds, 1. The farmer knows that they there are
| no legal issues with using specfic seeds 2. The onus is on
| Seminis to prove that their seed is not a derivative of open-
| source seed, which means they have to file a lawsuit against a
| non-profit (hopefully well funded) instead of a lone farmer
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Do plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds have some
| kind of advantage, or is it purely so the seed producers can
| continue selling the seeds?
|
| I remember when I first heard of roundup ready crops as a child,
| that aspect of it completely baffled me both in why and how they
| would make plants not replantable.
| pkphilip wrote:
| The only advantage is that these companies can force the
| farmers to keep buying seeds from them. It is the susbscription
| based revenue model for agriculture :)
|
| https://borgenproject.org/terminator-seeds-threaten-sustaina...
| igvadaimon wrote:
| They get unique characteristics, like all the tomatoes look
| identical and have long shelf life which is important for
| customers because they "eat with their eyes". They also taste
| like shit but who cares, right?
| linuxftw wrote:
| The seeds produced are often plantable. For many seeds,
| especially GMO seeds, the grower needs to acquire a license to
| the seeds and agrees not to save seeds from planted crops (as
| you suspect, to ensure income for the seed producer).
|
| Other seeds are patented varieties. Typically these are
| 'hybrids' which are a cross of two varieties of the same plant
| for whatever specific features they select. These seeds won't
| 'breed true' so the offspring will likely not be identical to
| the parents.
|
| From what I understand, GMO crops won't have a very stable
| lineage. Nature tends to select against the genetic
| modifications, but I do believe most GMOs are replantable
| today.
|
| This is not the case for GMO salmon, which they are trying to
| sterilize.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why would hybrids have to be patented? You are confusing
| separate things here.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Hybrids don't have to be patented, but if they're new
| varieties, they certainly can be. Similarly, new varieties
| that aren't necessarily hybrids (eg, once were hybrids and
| now are stable) can also be patented.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| There are no plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds.
| There's a long-standing moratorium on terminator genes that is
| generally observed.
|
| The reason why you have to rebuy your seeds from the companies
| is because of hybrid vigor:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
|
| It's still not 100% understand how this actually happens (heaps
| models and results exist), but when you cross two reasonably
| distantly related parents, the offspring F1 will outperform
| both. However, if you then backcross the offspring again,
| you'll lose that hybrid vigor, and your F2 behaves like crap
| again (often the F2 is also all over the shop in the phenotype,
| which makes harvesting annoying with different flowering times,
| different sizes etc.)
|
| That's the whole business model of the seed companies: keep on
| remaking F1s, sell them. There's nothing nefarious or GM about
| this, it goes back to the 50s and 60s with Norman Borlaug
| making hybrid F1s in wheat triggering the green revolution.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| It is not just the hybrid vigor. In fact, I would say the
| main advantage of the F1 hybrids is actually lower phenotypic
| variance of the crop.
|
| Sure you will have hybrid vigor in an F1, but you can get
| that vigor with a four-way cross of pure inbred lines too.
| But the four-way progeny will also be highly variable.
|
| If I were a farmer I too would want the consistent low
| variance of F1 isogenic progeny. An inbred line optimized for
| environment X could work. In some (rare) cases engineered
| inbreds can be even better than F1s but they may not work
| well out in the real world of environmental flux.
| bluGill wrote:
| Hybrid was discovered in the 1930s. WWII needed all the farm
| production the US could get to feed the rest of the world, so
| hybrid crops were pushed heavily on all farmers. Since then
| few farmers have gone back.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I never knew about this. That's interesting. So then hybrid
| vigor is the reason farmers don't grow their own seeds, which
| contradicts the article. Obviously the OSS people would know
| this, so then the purpose must be more about encouraging
| plant diversity and allowing more companies to sell these
| varieties to farmers.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Hybrid vigor is also why eugenic nightmares are
| misconstructed. If some nefarious dictator wanted genetic
| supersoldiers, he'd breed them by hybridizing sickly inbred
| strains, and then prohibiting the supersoldiers from
| themselves reproducing.
| trallnag wrote:
| can you explain further or maybe link to something?
| Eugenics can also mean eradicating certain unwanted
| elements like illnesses or black skin.
| bluGill wrote:
| Hybrid vigior is known to apply to plants. It isn't clear
| if it applies to humans. While it is known that marrying
| your sibling (brother/sister) is bad, and near cousins
| are a questionable, is it better (for your children) is
| you are very distant? Should you look to a different
| continent for a spouse? I don't know for sure, but the
| evidence I've seen doesn't support that. Unlike with
| plants, so long as your are more than 5th cousins away
| (I'm not sure where the line is, so I picked something
| distant enough that I think everyone will agree it is too
| far) there doesn't seem to be any advantage in getting
| more distant.
| imtringued wrote:
| What's nefarious is being coerced to take on foreign debt to
| buy these seeds and then watching the country fall apart
| because the food is for domestic consumption and not for
| export, which means there will be a trade deficit as the seed
| exporter is not obliged to import products from your country
| (which violates Say's Law that so many people seem to hang
| onto). So your only option is to send all the bright people
| in your country to the seed exporting country so they can
| earn domestic currency so that your country can afford basic
| food production.
|
| You can then chalk all of this up to corruption and
| incompetence and government mismanagement even though it is
| quite literally just a trade deficit that could be solved by
| having the other country import your products. This is why
| Keynes suggested his Bancor system, because it gets two
| countries to fix their trade imbalances instead of pointing
| fingers and starting a blame game that helps nobody.
| pfdietz wrote:
| [flagged]
| shawn-butler wrote:
| Says someone who I would guess has never been hungry a
| day in his or her privileged life?
|
| There is a valid argument to be made that food scarcity,
| like housing and medical care should not be subject to
| capitalist profit-taking. That some information is so
| beneficial to the common good that it can never be a
| trade secret.
|
| Also your tone is downright disrespectful and should be
| moderated.
| traverseda wrote:
| Lots of "normal" plants don't produce usable seeds. Basically
| every apple you've ever had will produce a crab apple tree when
| planted, if you want to copy that tree you need to take a
| cutting and propogate that.
|
| I suspect that these engineered plants don't have some specific
| "don't produce seeds" gene added in, they're just hybrids like
| a liger or a mule.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| They are hybrids but unlike mules they are generally fertile
| whereas mules are frequently infertile. But the second
| generation produces a range of types with varying growth
| rates, ripening times, yields, etc.; so it is not really
| useful to propagate them.
| pard68 wrote:
| Not quite how apples work and planting an apple seed won't
| make a "crab apple" -- that is a distinct species of tree.
| Getting a crab apple from a seed from a store bought apple
| fruit is the same as planting corn and getting rye.
| bluGill wrote:
| As others pointed out, such plants don't exist.
|
| Plants that don't produce plantable seeds have a big advantage:
| some seed is spilled every harvest. Farmers rotate crops, if
| you have corn gorwing in your soybean field that is one of the
| worst weeds you can have. Not only does the corn take nutrients
| you intend for your soybeans, it is also providing a host for
| any corn disease in your field that you are hoping die off now
| that it doesn't have corn to live in.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >have some kind of advantage
|
| Pretty sure it's so you can't collect the newly produced seeds
| and sell them on the black market to people next season.
| Basically what you said, but it's not just about preventing
| people from 're-using' what they bought, but also preventing
| them from providing it to others.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| They are far less likely to spread novel genes around the
| environment.
| CommitSyn wrote:
| I believe it's the engineering of other aspects (drought
| tolerance, growth factors, etc) that make them incapable of
| producing viable seed - not that the only engineering is to
| make them unable to put out fertile seed.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm very close to the IP abolitionist end of the spectrum. For
| copyright, give works 20 years of protection. Beyond that you
| have to start paying hefty fees for 10 year blocks. The fee can
| double every 10 years. You want a Mickey Mouse ad infinitum
| copyright? If you're prepared to pay billions for it, go right
| ahead.
|
| Patents should generally not exist. Software patents should
| absolutely never exist. The fact that companies game patents so
| we still have insulin under patent 100 years after its invention
| by doing minor changes is not just a bad actor, it's a bad
| system.
|
| GM crops are particularly egregious because seeds don't stay in a
| field. You can infringe a patent because some animal decided to
| eat a plant and then relieve itself on your field.
|
| There's another angle though: not only are seed subscriptions
| (let's face it, that's what this is) just another way to extract
| the last few dollars from farmers, it's downright
| anticompetitive. You think the farms Big Ag are operating are
| paying those fees? Of course not.
| pfdietz wrote:
| GM crops are actually one of the areas (along with
| pharmaceuticals) where patents are most legitimate. Crop plants
| are literally things that manufacture themselves; the barrier
| to entry if patents didn't exist would be negligible. No one
| could justify the effort to create new plant varieties.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| But plant patents are new. People have been breeding new
| strains since the dawn of farming. Ergo, people _were_ able
| to justify the effort.
| pfdietz wrote:
| People were inventing things long before patents existed.
| That doesn't mean patents are worthless. Let's not engage
| in foolishly binary thinking, where "things are invented"
| and "things aren't invented" are the only two states.
| Kalium wrote:
| On the contrary, I would bet a fair amount that ADM and similar
| are scrupulous about paying for hybrid seeds from Bayer and
| similar every year. They may get a better rate for being a very
| large customer, but that's true in almost every arena.
| xwdv wrote:
| There should be an open source label on produce grown from open
| source seeds.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better to labeled protected produce with patent
| numbers? Then you force the cost and overhead on them rather
| than the fledgling open-source seed movement.
| db48x wrote:
| That would be pretty hilarious. I don't think it would really
| work, but what could work is labeling the seeds with precise
| information about what patents they embody. Farmers could
| then collect the seeds and store them against the day the
| patents expire. Once the patents are expired (which can take
| up to 20 years), they can start planting them with no
| restrictions.
| college_physics wrote:
| What headline to expect next?
|
| "Open Source Air molecules Loosen Big Air's Grip on World's
| Breathing Population"
|
| Abusing intellectual property concepts to effectively feudalise
| society is not a good design. "Big Ag" has been granted a license
| to operate. This license could be taken away.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Possibly, there was a time when people wouldn't have imagined
| needing to pay for water
| tpxl wrote:
| You can always walk to the nearest river and get the water
| for free.
| malikNF wrote:
| Lol no you can't. For example
|
| https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-
| wate...
| rblion wrote:
| It's fascinating how everything that make up civilization is
| being reimagined as we speak. This is really just the beginning
| of a new millennium and look at all that's already happened since
| 2000.
| ggm wrote:
| Reddit had "is this a new Linux _kernel_ "
| jimmyechan wrote:
| Side note, unrelated to the main post, but I read "open source",
| "seeds", and "A's and immediately thought farmers are raising big
| VC funding rounds. I think I need to start reading other kinds of
| news.
| mughinn wrote:
| The solution to this would actually be to end the existence of
| Intellectual Property and allowing people to do what they want
| with the things they own.
|
| It would also solve most of the issues with copyright in memes,
| YouTube and the like
| luoc wrote:
| I remember, there was a case where a farmer grew patented plants
| on his field. They spread to his neighbours field who then got
| sued by the patent holding company for not licensing that plant.
| My memory is a bit fuzzy here but you get the idea.
|
| Now, how about reversing that? Think of a GPL-like licensed plant
| that makes all derived plants also inheriting that license.
| Legally poisoning the binary distribution format DNA of all
| inferred works. Wait a few decades and, with a little bit of
| evolutionary luck, wake up in a Stallman garden.
|
| I'm just a naive dude with no clue about genetics or even law.
| Just a thought that came to my mind :^)
| richbell wrote:
| > I remember, there was a case where a farmer grew patented
| plants on his field. They spread to his neighbours field who
| then got sued by the patent holding company for not licensing
| that plant. My memory is a bit fuzzy here but you get the idea.
|
| You are thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Cana
| da_Inc_v_Schmeise.... He is often heralded by anti-GMO
| activists as an example of the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto,
| but the fact of the matter is that the "cross contamination" is
| a myth. He deliberately took cultivars from his neighbour's
| plot and analysis showed that they comprised a significant
| portion of his crops, which wouldn't be possible by cross-
| pollination alone.
|
| Should seeds be patented? Are Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta, and
| agrochemicals companies evil? These are all worth discussing
| (the answer to the second question is yes), but that particular
| myth is not.
| luoc wrote:
| Thanks for the link :)
| skywal_l wrote:
| > He deliberately took cultivars from his neighbour's plot
|
| You mean stole? Where do you see this in the link you
| provided?
|
| That's what I read in the article.
|
| > As established in the original Federal Court trial
| decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in
| Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant
| canola in his crops in 1997.[4] He had used Roundup herbicide
| to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to
| a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed
| that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived.
| Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an
| additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the
| same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived.
| At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest
| the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest
| of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately
| 1,000 acres (4 km2) of canola.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > The court heard the question of whether Schmeiser's
| intentionally growing genetically modified plants
| constituted "use" of Monsanto's patented genetically
| modified plant cells. By a 5-4 majority, the court ruled
| that it did. The Supreme Court also ruled 9-0 that
| Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto their technology use
| fee, damages or costs, as Schmeiser did not receive any
| benefit from the technology.
|
| Used their technology, yes, _barely_. Stole it? Well, the
| courts unequivocally didn 't feel like he damaged
| (deprived?) Monsanto of anything.
| permo-w wrote:
| I did not know about how GPL works until I read this comment.
| I'm glad I do now. thank you!
| tptacek wrote:
| No, he got sued by the patent holding company for using those
| seeds _and then spraying them with Roundup_ , which would have
| killed off his crop had they not been the patented seeds. This
| is true of all the cases of people being sued for cultivating
| "Roundup-Ready" crops: the story they want to tell is that they
| were sued for cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on
| their fields, but the facts established at trial were that,
| however the seeds ended up there, the farmers deliberately
| exploited the patented system.
| luoc wrote:
| Thanks for the insight! Saw this in a documentary and it's
| been a while...
| quantified wrote:
| The farmers were not trying to grow the patented seeds. They
| shouldn't be liable for their neighbor's trash blowing on
| their fields.
|
| The use of Roundup is another travesty.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| The farmer may have claimed they weren't trying to. The
| fact they used Roundup, which would have killed their crop
| if it weren't the GM seeds, indicates otherwise.
| quantified wrote:
| Some other farmer's trash blows into my field, it's mine.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And if you then spray Roundup on that trash to
| concentrate the patented trait, you've deliberately
| violated the patent.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Just like selling a used book violates the copyright?
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, obviously not like that at all. In particular,
| growing plants is copying them. Also, patents are not
| copyrights.
| quantified wrote:
| I entered no contract with the patent holder.
|
| I get what you're saying from that perspective. It's just
| BS.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You don't get out of obeying the law just because you
| didn't sign anything. Nor is really really wanting to a
| justification for violating the law.
|
| Patented seeds are not something you would have come up
| with yourself. This is pure envy creating a sense of
| entitlement.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| All made possible because Monsanto controls the seeds _and_
| the majority of glyphosate production so they could correlate
| consumption with who hadn 't paid the toll.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah, the courts aren't always friendly to clever "hacks" on
| the legal system. Intent matters, and facts can show intent.
| bilsbie wrote:
| But how did he get enough seeds by chance to have his whole
| field be round up ready?
| bluGill wrote:
| He planted a field next to someone else's roundup ready
| crop. He then collected the seeds from the whole field.
| Next year he planted the seeds collected, waiting for the
| crop to start growing and sprayed roundup, which killed all
| seeds not roundup ready. Then the new crop went to seed and
| since all the parents were roundup ready, the seeds also
| were roundup ready (I'm not sure if roundup ready is a
| recessive or dominate trait, which will influence which %
| is roundup ready using basic genetics). Those final seeds
| were collected and were enough to have a whole field that
| was roundup ready next year.
| cnity wrote:
| God forbid the farmers benefit for free in some way from the
| unpredictable and uncontrollable pollination of a plant
| genetically engineered to be a highly successful cultivar.
|
| I'm not attacking you here, but the logic decided by the
| courts may be lawful but it is not moral (in my opinion).
| It's as if a noisy neighbour hosts a late night party and you
| happen to enjoy the music. The neighbour notices and decides
| to charge you for the streaming fee.
| tptacek wrote:
| This argument is completely orthogonal to the narrative
| originally presented, which is that farmers who weren't
| trying to benefit from the patents at all were tangled up
| in Monsanto lawsuits. That narrative is false, and that's
| all I'm here to correct. There's a Motte and Bailey thing
| that happens with these discussions, the bailey being
| "Monsanto will sue you even if their seeds just happen to
| blow onto your property" and the motte being "intellectual
| property isn't real".
| permo-w wrote:
| an argument designed to appeal to a court is not
| necessarily moral or true, and this is generally accepted
| as normal practice
| tptacek wrote:
| It just has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
| The notion that Monsanto is suing farmers for seeds just
| blowing onto their fields false, and thus can't have
| anything to do with whether seeds should be patentable.
| permo-w wrote:
| slow down and understand my words. it's perfectly fine
| and moral to take advantage of the fact that someone
| else's seeds have blown onto your land, but that's not an
| argument you can sell to a court. so publicly making a
| separate legally stronger argument is normal and
| reasonable behaviour that doesn't lessen them whatsoever
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That seems utterly irrelevant. Trying to benefit is
| irrelevant. Trying to steal is what is relevant.
|
| Consider the case where the gene edited crops actually
| implemented a dependency on roundup, and the neighboring
| farms were forced to use round up rather than did so
| because it was simply more useful.
| tptacek wrote:
| No such dependency exists. The only rational reason to
| spray a crop with RoundUp is that you know you've sowed
| RoundUp Ready seeds; in any other circumstance you'd
| simply be killing your crop off. If you contrive a
| counterfactual where that's not the case, then obviously
| different fact patterns matter. It's like saying "well,
| sure, he shot the guy, but consider an alternate universe
| where shooting someone with a gun doesn't hurt them but
| instead immediately brings them to their recommended
| daily allowance of thiamine".
|
| The claim that Monsanto sues people for accidentally or
| unwillingly having their patented seeds sown is simply
| false, full stop.
| JamisonM wrote:
| Farmer here, the above is absolutely correct. The notion
| that a farmer would "take a chance" on spraying an non-
| GMO planted crop with Roundup/Liberty is a pure fiction.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That is still irrelevant. You should not be able to sue
| someone for having your stuff. You should be able to sue
| them for stealing it. In this case it was not stolen. It
| was planted and spread naturally. And then the farmers
| chose to keep using the things that things that had
| basically fallen into their laps.
| tptacek wrote:
| I really don't care if you think all patents are bogus.
| That is the most boring conceivable debate to have. There
| is nothing special about seeds to change the argument;
| that's all I'm here to say.
| fragmede wrote:
| What's special about seeds is they reproduce with a bit
| of water, soil, and sunlight. My laptop does not and in
| fact will be very sad if I water it. Thus no matter how
| many patents Intel has on the things inside my laptop,
| there's a limit on how much I can ultimately do with the
| physical device.
| tptacek wrote:
| Nothing you can do with water, soil, and sunlight is
| going to produce RoundUp --- or a RoundUp-Ready seed.
|
| It's perfectly reasonable to oppose all patents. Just
| don't pretend the wind, sun, and dirt somehow invalidate
| seed patents. There's no distinction to draw.
| bob29 wrote:
| People have been sued for growing patented potatoes,
| unrelated to round up . . . Ok?
|
| U take tuber u put it in ground it grows more tubers u
| try to sell BOOM illegal son .
| tptacek wrote:
| Uh huh.
| bob29 wrote:
| [Square bracket number citation link thingy
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-pepsi-
| farmers/pepsi...]
|
| 0
| pfdietz wrote:
| So, your objection to patents is that they are enforced
| when violated?
| bob29 wrote:
| No. Objection when they are overly broad generic obvious
| and\or trivial
|
| Am surprised even need to explain on this forum of
| coders. Many examples of bad boy software patents.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And you evidence that the patents for these potatoes was
| "overly broad generic obvious and/or trivial" is...?
| bob29 wrote:
| Our illiterate ancestors have been doing it for thousands
| of years.
| jiminymcmoogley wrote:
| Wouldn't this actually be an argument in favor of seed
| patents? I've been more or less a complete IP
| abolitionist for so long now that thinking in IP maxi
| terms is basically a foreign language to me now, but
| wouldn't they make the argument that it's necessary to
| allow protections where the good is A. hard to develop
| initially and B. easy to reproduce?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Exactly. GMO seeds are a best case for patent protection,
| in the same league as new drugs.
| RajT88 wrote:
| The ability to patent life itself is a dangerous one.
|
| Imagine where these precedents lead when inevitably we
| start genetically engineering people. If you yourself carry
| genes engineered by a biotech firm (cancer resistance or
| laser eye beams, you can pick according to whim), do you
| have to pay them royalties when you have children?
| Kalium wrote:
| Even without patents, there's a whole system of plant
| breeder's rights. The idea is that even without patents,
| breeding plants for a particular set of characteristics
| is a ton of work and the rights system is a patent-like
| way to commercialize.
|
| If you have a different idea for solving this particular
| financial problem, I expect quite a lot of people would
| love to hear about it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My point is that patents are abused enough already.
|
| We should not allow patenting of genomes/genes. Full
| stop. We should rely on those other systems of breeder's
| rights.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You objection to "patenting life" seems utterly spurious
| and would effectively end GMO seeds (as the effort
| expended creating them could not be recouped.) But
| perhaps that's your ulterior motive. I see no legitimate
| motivation for your position.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| $169 for a HiFi Gibson Assembly kit. Up to 8000bp for
| about $2200-3500. It's not as forbidding as you might
| think.
|
| The insistence on IP law being the only probable,
| legitimate incentive is what's spurious.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's like pointing to the cost of laboratory glassware
| to claim drug discovery isn't expensive.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Let it be abused and let nature take its course.
| Investors can get stiffed.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _the logic decided by the courts may be lawful but it is
| not moral (in my opinion)._
|
| Doubly so when you consider that the patent holding company
| (like Monsanto) has a lot of ability to affect legislation
| and the (presumably) independent farmer has next to none.
| The issues here are systemic and not limited to big ag.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That patents genes spread lightly onto his field didn't
| give him a "get out of patent free card" to then
| concentrate those genes by spraying the field with
| herbicide. The courts properly understood that intent and
| actions matter here. The farmer was in the wrong and
| justice was done.
| [deleted]
| ladyattis wrote:
| It just demonstrates how patents are a form of rent
| seeking. You own the product of your labor but you should
| not be able to assume you own the accidental products
| that are related to your labor (ex. buying tools from a
| tool smith which then you use to make your own tool
| smithy).
| tptacek wrote:
| There is no way that analogy holds in this case. The
| farmer didn't cultivate their own RoundUp to spray, among
| other problems with it.
| f-securus wrote:
| What if the farmer was trying to clear the land with
| roundup and the accidental gmo modified crops prevented
| him from doing so. Could he sue for damages?
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, if he didn't save seeds from crop plants on that
| land. That saving of seeds after spraying was the
| incriminating act.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| How does the doctrine of first sale not apply here?
|
| I could make up some convoluted argument but... the
| neighbor conducted the first sale so this should have
| extinguished any further patent claim. Of course, IANAL.
| pfdietz wrote:
| He is not reselling individual seeds. He is manufacturing
| new seeds. He is not allowed to do that, and particularly
| not allowed to do that with intent.
| gruez wrote:
| From wikipedia:
|
| >A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives
| its owner the legal right to exclude others from making,
| using, or selling an invention for a limited period of
| time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of
| the invention.
|
| In this, letting the plant reproduce arguably falls under
| "making" (ie. manufacture) of the patented thing (the
| genetically modified plant).
| Kalium wrote:
| Perhaps! Though in this case it seems he engaged in the
| behavior over an extended period of time and did not
| consider the patented crops a problem.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In no way was that depiction accurate. Indeed, if an
| innocent farmer were, by no fault of his own, found
| liable for contamination, he could properly sue the
| others for contaminating his land. For this reason,
| Monsanto always said it would never sue just for
| accidental contamination, and never did.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > and justice was done
|
| That's one of the stupidest things I've read on this
| website.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's perfectly clear it was a correct legal decision. The
| farmer was deliberately and intentionally trying to evade
| the patent, as we've explained multiple times in these
| comments.
|
| Perhaps you could explain why the decision was incorrect?
| Or why justice demanded differently?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| But look at the flip side where the court ruled the farmer
| cannot be liable for a plant naturally spreading into his
| field (and the farmer upon learning this using the specific
| herbicide meant for that specific plant strain). You now
| have precedent that if the plant "accidentally" (wink wink)
| spreads to your field you are not liable for the cost of
| the plant
| burkaman wrote:
| Your logic would apply to all seeds, right? If you have
| any plant on your property and you can't provide a
| receipt for its seed or conclusively prove that a bird
| dropped the seed, you should be convicted of theft.
| tptacek wrote:
| No, you can't.
| tarotuser wrote:
| This is another case where patent law superseded physical
| trespass and pollution/littering laws.
|
| Monsanto should have paid the farmer for polluting the
| farmer's field ALONG WITH being required to remove all
| Monsanto-owned plants. And if that means roundup-ing the
| whole field, paying for all damages treble, and then removing
| the living plants, so be it.
| pfdietz wrote:
| But no harm was done to the farmer, had the farmer not
| himself performed an act showing he was violating the
| patent. So, Monsanto didn't owe the farmer anything. The
| farmer had "unclean hands".
| burkaman wrote:
| > the story they want to tell is that they were sued for
| cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on their fields,
| but the facts established at trial were that, however the
| seeds ended up there, the farmers deliberately exploited the
| patented system.
|
| I don't understand the distinction you're making.
| "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented
| system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying them with
| Roundup is how you cultivate them. Do you mean that it's
| illegal to buy Roundup if you haven't already bought the
| seeds that go with it, or something?
|
| Edit: I think maybe you're saying that Monsanto has patented
| the very act of applying Roundup to a Roundup-Ready crop. So
| not only are the seeds and pesticides patented, but the
| method of applying one to the other is patented. If that's
| the case, that's a dumb patent that shouldn't be allowed to
| exist.
| weberer wrote:
| >Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them.
|
| Roundup is a herbicide. It kills normal plants. Monsanto
| sells seeds that were genetically modified to resist it. It
| doesn't make any sense to spray it on natural plants.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| It's not illegal to purchase and bulk-spray Round-up to an
| incompatible crop. It's just stupid. It is expensive and it
| will kill the plants.
|
| The lawsuit alleged that the farmer's behavior was so
| stupid that he must have _known_ his crop was Roundup-
| Ready.
|
| That's not consistent with accidental pollination. It
| suggests that he deliberately cultivated or obtained seeds
| that were Roundup-Ready and that he knew his crop would
| survive the pesticide. Bulk-spraying Roundup establishes
| awareness and intent.
|
| The farmer was unable to provide a convincing explanation
| for why he would attempt to poison his entire crop, year
| after year, so the court concluded he was engaged in
| deliberate patent evasion.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's worse than that: the farmer knew there was slight
| contamination of his field with Roundup Ready plants. So,
| he deliberately sprayed the field with Roundup to kill
| all the others, applying artificial selection to
| concentrate the trace of contamination. I believe he
| repeated this more than once. So, he was guilty of
| engaging in deliberate production of not trace, but
| concentrated patented seeds.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Hang on. He didn't plant the patented seeds; he planted
| his own seeds, which were then pollinated by his
| neighbour's Roundup-Ready plants. I can't see anything
| wrong with that.
|
| So now he has a crop that consists of hybrids. These
| hybrids are all different; each plant is a different
| mixture of <farmer's variety> with Roundup-Ready. Some of
| those plants will have resistance to glyphosate. Then he
| sprays with Roundup; the resistant plants survive, the
| rest die. Now he has a harvest of seeds that are
| resistant to glyphosate, but in all other respects are a
| mixture. These seeds are not the ones sold by
| Bayer/Monsanto.
|
| So is it the strain that is patented, or the gene?
|
| If it's the strain that gets the patent, then the farmer-
| next-door isn't growing your patented strain, so he's in
| the clear. So it must be the gene, right?
|
| If it's the gene, then it seems unreasonable to yell
| "patent violation" if you're spreading patented pollen
| over the entire midwest. You must either sell seeds that
| don't make (viable) pollen, or you have to accept that
| the farmer had his crop involuntarily infected with your
| IP because of your negligence.
|
| I thought the GMO manufacturers bred sterility into their
| strains for just that reason.
|
| Meanwhile, the farmer-next-door now has a grain-store
| full of resistant hybrid seeds, that won't (on the whole)
| fare as well as Roundup-Ready, because they're all
| different strains. That is, having the resistant gene
| isn't the whole story; you need a strain that is
| resistant AND grows well AND is consistent. That means an
| F1 hybrid, and you don't get that by just crossing
| strains; you have to get into selecting and cloning the
| favourable strain, growing that strain into a crop, and
| letting it cross with its (identical) siblings to make
| true-bred seeds.
|
| Have I missed something?
| tptacek wrote:
| You can't use selective breeding to escape a patent.
|
| You can argue that patents of all sorts are invalid and
| shouldn't be granted. That's a totally coherent argument
| and not one you'll get a lot of pushback about on HN. I
| don't agree, but I don't, like, viscerally disagree.
|
| The problem is we have a lot of weird special pleading
| arguments about this particular patent. The most popular
| argument, which I think we've done a pretty good job
| debunking here, is that Monsanto will sue you for
| _unwittingly_ cultivating their seeds, as if they 'll
| just sort of pop out of the woodwork saying "gotcha! you
| didn't realize it but you owe us one million dollars!".
| That never happens. You got in trouble with Monsanto if
| you _quite wittingly_ applied their patented system, full
| stop.
|
| Similarly, it's kind of a weird special pleading argument
| to say that a Monsanto seed can blow onto your property,
| and then, like, it's just something growing in the
| ground, man, you can't outlaw a plant, and two or three
| growth cycles later you somehow have a Roundup Ready seed
| that is unencumbered by patents. A good rule of thumb is
| that if you've filled in the "???" in the Underpants
| Gnome construction --- here: "1. seeds blow onto field,
| 2. ???, 3. profit", something has gone wrong with your
| logic. The direct conclusion of your logic is that these
| farmers could in fact go into business competing with
| Monsanto selling GM crops. Obviously: no.
| ertian wrote:
| No, the distinction was that the fact that they used
| RoundUp (which would have killed the crops they claimed to
| have planted) suggests a motive. The farmers claimed that
| the seeds had just drifted into their field by chance,
| Monsanto claimed they'd deliberately planted them. The fact
| that they sprayed the resulting crop with a herbicide that
| would have killed their own crop seriously calls the
| farmer's account into question. How would they possibly
| have known that _enough_ seed had just blown over the road
| that it was safe to spray?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The farmer new that some of the seeds in the field were the
| "roundup ready" ones that had blown over from the other
| field. Most of them were normal crops that would die when
| applied with roundup. He then applied the entire field with
| roundup, killing most of the crop in the field, with the
| explicit goal of saving all the remaining seeds so that he
| could plant them next year without paying monsanto.
| zo1 wrote:
| My understanding of OP is that the farmer used Roundup on
| his crops knowing full well that his "natural" and "non
| patented" crops will be killed by Roundup, which the
| patented plants are naturally immune to by design.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| (Matasano / Monsanto confusion intensifies)
| tptacek wrote:
| I've said this before, but we put a sign up on the door of
| our Mountain View office, because people thought we were
| the evil mutant corn company.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| So what? I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want on
| my field as long as I don't use pesticides or processing that
| has been banned by law, without anyone being allowed to sue
| me for that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| He did something that only made sense if it were deliberate
| and intentional violation of the patent. Intent matters.
| randomdata wrote:
| As a farmer with experience growing roundup-ready crops: In
| order to obtain roundup-ready seeds you have to sign a
| contract with the vender. In said agreement, you agree to
| not do such things.
|
| If you want to do whatever you want with your field, don't
| enter into contractual agreements where you agree to follow
| certain rules.
| [deleted]
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| In the case being discussed, the neighboring farmer had
| not signed any agreement with the vendor.
| fastball wrote:
| The farmer _did_ enter into an agreement when he
| purchased Roundup.
| Kalium wrote:
| Then he acted in a way that made it clear he was using
| the patented materials without a license. Specifically,
| spraying his fields with Round-up that would have killed
| everything that _was not_ patented.
|
| You can shrug and say "Oh, it was clearly an accident,
| Monsanto is evil". And Monsanto is certainly evil. It's
| just reasonably clear why the judge would view this
| behavior as deliberate and knowing infringement of a
| patent.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| We shouldn't enforce absurd patents like that in the
| first place. What's the worst that happens? Some old
| people starve because their retirement investments tank?
| stale2002 wrote:
| The original statement was as followed:
|
| "I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want on my
| field as long as I don't use pesticides or processing
| that has been banned by law"
|
| And then someone responded to this by saying that someone
| signed a contract.
|
| And then you responded by going off about something that
| is refuted by the original statement.
|
| So, you need to agree that the original response about a
| contract was wrong, and also that your new statement is
| irrelevant.
| Kalium wrote:
| Yes, the original statement was overly narrow in its view
| of patents and contracts. Not only should you not enter
| into contracts that restrict how you can treat your
| fields, you should also not deliberately act in a way
| designed to infringe the rights of others if you want to
| be free to do as you please within the law without
| incurring liability.
|
| For example, you should not deliberately cultivate a
| patented plant for which you lack a license from your
| neighbor's plot of land and then treat it in a way that
| only makes sense if you're doing that. That will incur
| liability when a judge notices you are trying to dodge
| licensing. To put it another way, using processing banned
| under law.
| [deleted]
| randomdata wrote:
| Yup. That's what the other comment said...
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| So why did you imply he had signed a contract?
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > As a farmer with experience growing roundup-ready
| crops: In order to obtain roundup-ready seeds you have to
| sign a contract with the vender. In said agreement, you
| agree to not do such things.
|
| The farmer had not entered into any contract with anyone,
| that is the point. It's not his fault if pollen from his
| neighbor's field entered his field, even if they
| contained "patented" technology.
| randomdata wrote:
| If you are referring to a case where litigation was
| executed under the terms of patent contract, the farmer -
| being a member of the public who grants such patents -
| has still entered into a contract by virtue of choosing
| to be a member of the public who has agreed that patent
| contracts are desirable to issue. The public had no
| obligation to issue the patent, but chose to. The farmer
| need not be a member of that public, but chose to be.
| progman32 wrote:
| How would one choose not to be a member of that public?
| [deleted]
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The farmer is under no moral obligation to care that the
| uniformed public wants. It only matters to pretend to
| live in a democracy.
| Kalium wrote:
| Then, without a license, he had no right to exploit the
| patented technology. The farmer acted in a way that
| showed a knowing and deliberate exploitation of the
| patented technology. There seems to be a disconnect here,
| but I'm not seeing it. Can you help me with what I've
| missed?
| UncleEntity wrote:
| You need a license to produce and sell patented
| technology.
|
| You don't need a license to use patented technology which
| you either bought from a third party, was given or has
| blown onto your land by the wind.
| gruez wrote:
| This thread is going in circles. As mentioned a few
| comments ago, it's clearly not the case that the
| technology "blown onto your land by the wind". The farmer
| was intentionally engaging in artificial selection to get
| plants with roundup ready traits. I can be sympathetic to
| the claim that a patented program magically appeared on
| your computer because of random bit-flips, but I can't be
| sympathetic if you deliberately set up a system to
| generate bit-flips on your computer in a specific way so
| as to produce the desired program.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And note that this farmer would not have successfully
| obtained glyphosate resistant plants just by spraying his
| field, in the absence of the contamination. If it were
| that easy, GMOs wouldn't have been necessary in the first
| place.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That patent still should be enforced by any sensible court
| system.
| xedrac wrote:
| What is a farmer to do when mother nature infects his crop,
| against his will, with pollen from the GMO crop? I think the
| lawsuit should go the other way. Monsanto should pay for
| destroying the ability to grow heirloom seeds without getting
| infected. They want to keep it protected? Then require it to
| be grown in quarantine.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| All the farmer had to do was not apply roundup to his crop
| when he hadn't planted the roundup resistant seeds.
| xedrac wrote:
| Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that his crop is
| being pollinated against his will, and why should he lose
| the freedom to spray something on his crop because his
| neighbor planted a certain seed? Why does it have to
| infect everyone like a virus?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Because spraying roundup on non-roundup ready crops has 1
| outcome, it kills them. There is no reasonable reason to
| do it other than to avoid the patent.
|
| If roundup ready crops end up in your fields accidentally
| and then you don't spray roundup you don't run afoul of
| litigation.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Spray his crops with something that will 100% kill all of
| his original crop and only keeping the cross contaminated
| crop, which he will then specifically cultivate. Common
| now, it's really a shut and close case. He had no
| explanation as to an alternative valid reason to have
| done so and lost the case.
| tedunangst wrote:
| If you want to keep roundup ready crops from spreading
| among your heirloom crops, I would recommend against
| spraying the heirloom crops with roundup.
| luoc wrote:
| Industry's response, of course, will be plants that
| epigenetically load proprietary genetic material at runtime...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is interesting, why can licenses like GNU GPL3.0 be enforced
| in US courts but not for new plant varieties?
|
| > "Legally, Open Source Seeds (OSS) in Europe works slightly
| differently because of EU seed protection laws. While in the US
| the OSSI pledge would be hard to enforce if challenged in court,
| Johannes Kotschi, the founder of OSS Germany, went with an open
| source licensing model. The license is printed on every OSS seed
| package in Europe. Whoever opens an OSS package agrees to never
| patent these seeds or future breeding of them. OSS cooperates
| with bakeries such as Le Brot in Cologne that offer bread baked
| with OSS wheat and rye, not least to raise awareness."
| wahern wrote:
| > why can licenses like GNU GPL3.0 be enforced in US courts but
| not for new plant varieties?
|
| I don't know enough to be able to address your question
| directly, but it's worth nothing that at least in the U.S. IP
| protections for plant breeding and propagation are often highly
| specialized, both in terms of how patents operate as well as
| extending to non-patent regimes. See, e.g.,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Variety_Protection_Act_o...
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Article really lacks specifics. The reason so much of the USA
| grows "patented" seeds is because they're created specifically to
| be sprayed with herbicide and not die. There's no alternative to
| to patented seeds without making fundamental changes to
| agriculture practices.
|
| Hybrid seeds are also different than open-pollinated in that the
| children do not grow true to parent. Even if we removed the
| patents, they wouldn't be valuable without a way to create them
| again (using two specific parents).
| COGlory wrote:
| 1) There are multiple herbicides and multiple pesticides and
| different ways to skin a cat, not all of which are patented, or
| for many, the patents have expired.
|
| 2) Your second point is more applicable. Who is going to grow
| these seeds? People underestimate how much agriculture is
| devoted solely to seed crops.
| exhilaration wrote:
| _People underestimate how much agriculture is devoted solely
| to seed crops_
|
| Can you explain this further? I never thought about where
| seeds come from. Are there giant Bayer-owned fields devoted
| to growing seeds?
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a lot of those fields around growing just seed.
| Some are Bayer owned, others are regular farmers who
| contract with Bayer to grow seed as their crop. One of the
| most common jobs for young farm kids is "detasseling" where
| they go around to seed fields to cut the tassel (male part
| of the corn plant) off some of the plants. Normally you
| plant 1 row of male plants, and 4 rows of female plants,
| since corn plants are both male and female, they need to
| cut off the male parts of the female plants. (the male
| plants produce corn on the female parts that is not used
| for the seed). You can just assume that every rural kid
| between 15 and 18 does the above job for a couple summers,
| which gives you an idea of the scale.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> You can just assume that every rural kid between 15
| and 18 does the above job for a couple summers_
|
| Interesting assumption. As a corn farmer, I've _never_
| seen anyone growing seed corn in person. It was certainly
| not a job I had when I was a kid of such an age.
| Obviously someone does out there, but you may be
| overestimating just how prevalent it is.
| JamisonM wrote:
| But do people really underestimate how much crop land is
| used to grow seed? What do people think? 1%, 5%? What is
| the reality? I don't actually know... As a farmer I would
| be very surprised to discover it was as 10% or 15%! I
| assume it is more like 0.01%. I regularly grow 70bu/ac
| wheat and seed 2ish bu/ac to produce that.. the
| corn/rice/soybean ratio is better I think but I haven't
| ever considered it in detail.
| incompatible wrote:
| I'd guess that the people wanting unpatented seeds are the same
| people who want to avoid the use of additives such as
| herbicides, pesticides, and fertilisers.
| adamc wrote:
| Certainly there are alternatives. The Congress could make it
| impossible to patent seeds or other organisms. They haven't,
| for reasons involving philosophy, money, and perhaps the deep
| corruption Citizens United has spawned. They probably won't.
| But alternatives do exist.
| [deleted]
| pfdietz wrote:
| Or, because patenting seeds serves a legitimate and valuable
| public service, smears of "deep corruption" notwithstanding.
| aendruk wrote:
| I recently decided to grow hops and was disappointed to learn
| that most of the varieties I've come to prefer are patented and
| simply unavailable.
|
| I'd love to see breweries become more conscientious about this
| and make a point of promoting only "open" varieties.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| GPL-3 seeds that turn other seeds into GPL-3 as they inevitably
| breed around through the wind sounds like an interesting concept
| mminer237 wrote:
| It's an interesting concept, but legally it doesn't make any
| sense. You can't license what you don't own. If the hybrid
| seeds are not available in compliance with the GPL, then you
| would just be violating two licenses.
| [deleted]
| Papychulo0217 wrote:
| [flagged]
| shmerl wrote:
| Patents on plants is an abysmally stupid idea that shouldn't
| exist.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They serve a legitimate public purpose, to allow the creators
| of new plant varieties to earn enough to justify their
| creation. Why are you entitled to the results of this effort
| but deny the creators their due? Do you think these varieties
| just come into existence out of thin air, and those patenting
| them are somehow unfairly exploiting a windfall?
| college_physics wrote:
| If you can bribe a politician, the abyss is legal all the way
| down
| fear_and_coffee wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| pard68 wrote:
| Can the do forage turnips next? I have gotta get a few acres of
| turnips in the ground next month for forage for my cattle come
| drought season. The variety of forage/fodder plants is so sparse.
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