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[redwallzyl]

It was my understanding that a lot of commercial farmers really just don't own their own crops. Strict contract laws stating how you can or can't plant them, when and how to harvest, what to do with seeds etc., as well as end clauses that effectively entrap them into renewing the same seed contracts.

Unsurprisingly the farmers get the short end of that stick as they have no power over there own livelihood and no stability, as a side not the suicide rate for farmers is shockingly high. Add that to the awful nature of US agriculture focused on factory farms and that advantages large companies and farmers get shafted even more.

Whoa there, WTF are you talking about? I live in a major farming region (and work for several farmers), and I do not recognize anything either of you are talking about.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/16/611727777/suicide-is-rising-among-american-farmers-as-they-struggle-to-keep-afloat

[milo christiansen]

Must be a regional issue, because things are mostly fine here.

[Reelya]

Factory farming example, John Oliver episode about chicken farmer contracts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9wHzt6gBgI

Article: suicide rate among farmers is double that of war veterans, and 5 times the general population level:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers

Last year, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that people working in agriculture – including farmers, farm laborers, ranchers, fishers, and lumber harvesters – take their lives at a rate higher than any other occupation. The data suggested that the suicide rate for agricultural workers in 17 states was nearly five times higher compared with that in the general population.

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[Dorsidwarf]

In think that the health risks of GMO are subject to hystery, and by that I mean we probably don't know enough to be panicking just yet  .

But in all seriousness, those GMO are sterile clones. It is pretty obvious what threat that causes to biodiversity, and god forbid any of those strains occupying like 15% of the worlds agricultural space, like wheat, corn, rice or potatos ever gets sick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana 

Dependency from seed supply cartels is also a threat to our food supply.

Not the mention the whole pesticides, and "GMO are intellectual property" travesty...

dont worry though, if 15% of the world crop fails, the companies that sell seeds can just modify them a bit and sell replacements to farmers! Of course, its a seller's market, so prices will increase dramatically and the food shortage will still be there that year, but hey thats c a p i t a l i s m b a b y

[Hanslanda]

This is an excellent discussion.

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[Reelya]

However, it's also possible that Monsanto know that there's only a limited window in which to exploit this stuff before rival GMOs come around (e.g. "open-source" project such as Golden Rice), so they're exploiting it heavily for that reason.

e.g. if Monsanto's has some farmer "locked in" that only viable as long as there's not a more cost-effective alternative in existence. So there is in fact a limit on what they can charge for that stuff. e.g. if they keep jacking up the price thinking they have someone locked in, that just drives themselves out of business quicker. e.g. people might grumble about being "locked in" to buying replacement seed from Monsanto, but you're only going to keep doing that as long as the return on the Monsanto seeds exceeds the return on every other alternative seed source, and the value of being able to replant those seeds already factors into that decision.

e.g. the fact that Monsanto gives you seeds that don't regrow, and they're a monoculture, that's actually a good thing. If a blight hits one year's crop, because they're all the one strain of Monsanto crop, the next year nobody buys the Monsanto seeds anymore. e.g. the first time some untreatable disease adapts to GMO Monsanto canola, the next year there's a massive dive in the sale of Monsanto canola seeds, so basically everyone just avoids the issue quicker than they would otherwise, since all the crops get harvested, don't produce seed, then everyone decides to plant a different crop the next year. It could actually work out better than the situation where each farmer is responsible for replanting their own seed, in which if a disease hits the strain you're growing locally, it becomes a multi-year problem.

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[Reelya]

It's hard to work out exactly what the situation is because a lot of the anti-Monsanto articles don't seem to make a lot of sense:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-kucinich/the-enemy-of-family-farmers_b_4064134.html

⦁    GE seeds are very expensive compared to traditional seeds, and have to be repurchased every planting season

⦁    GE crops require much more water to grow, have much higher requirements for fertilizers and pesticide, and provide no increased yield

If that's the case then why the fuck would anyone even buy those seeds in the first place? e.g. they talk about Monsanto prosecuting those who keep their seed for replanting, but ... if the seed suck so bad apparently then who would even bother? If traditional seeds are just an all-round better deal, then it wouldn't be hard to make a farm that just specializes in producing the traditional seeds to sell them to other farms, for less money than the inferior Monsanto seeds. If everything costs more with the Monsanto seeds, and there's no benefit, and they're way more disease-prone, and you need to label them GMO, why would you even? In fact, anyone who touched such seeds should immediately go out of business since they couldn't compete.

Such articles talking about the downside but not also explaining what the benefits are, are clearly just bullshit. I'm no fan of Monsanto, but clearly if everyone's coming back to them for more seed, and trying to illegally re-plant the patented Monsanto seed instead of sourcing regular seed, then clearly there are reasons for that, other than being "forced" by Monsanto to buy their stuff.

e.g. it's like saying there's a new Coca Cola, that costs twice as much as the regular one, and it tastes like raw sewage, has lumpy stuff in it, leaves a sticky film in your mouth, and smells like rotten eggs. And everyone hates the new Coca Cola. Yet everyone is drinking the new one, you can barely find regular Coke in stores anymore, and people are even bootlegging their own versions of the new feces-cola at home, so Coca Cola is cracking down on that. That just wouldn't make any sense, but it's what the story is effectively claiming for the Monsanto seeds vs traditional seed.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Square up thots

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[scourge728]

Also, sometimes those genetically modified crops cross with another farmers normal crops, and now the corp owns those as well IIRC

[Reelya]

Looking for more information on that, I trust NPR as source, came across this article
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted

Myth 2: Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen.

This is the idea that I see most often. A group of organic farmers, in fact, recently sued Monsanto, asserting that GMOs might contaminate their crops and then Monsanto might accuse them of patent infringement. The farmers couldn't cite a single instance in which this had happened, though, and the judge dismissed the case.

The idea, however, is inspired by a real-world event. Back in 1999, Monsanto sued a Canadian canola farmer, Percy Schmeiser, for growing the company's Roundup-tolerant canola without paying any royalty or "technology fee." Schmeiser had never bought seeds from Monsanto, so those canola plants clearly came from somewhere else. But where?

Canola pollen can move for miles, carried by insects or the wind. Schmeiser testified that this must have been the cause, or GMO canola might have blown into his field from a passing truck. Monsanto said that this was implausible, because their tests showed that about 95 percent of Schmeiser's canola contained Monsanto's Roundup resistance gene, and it's impossible to get such high levels through stray pollen or scattered seeds.
...
So why is this a myth? It's certainly true that Monsanto has been going after farmers whom the company suspects of using GMO seeds without paying royalties. And there are plenty of cases — including Schmeiser's — in which the company has overreached, engaged in raw intimidation, and made accusations that turned out not to be backed up by evidence.

But as far as I can tell, Monsanto has never sued anybody over trace amounts of GMOs that were introduced into fields simply through cross-pollination. (The company asserts, in fact, that it will pay to remove any of its GMOs from fields where they don't belong.) If you know of any case where this actually happened, please let me know.

e.g. if your crops accidentally get cross-contaminated with GMO monsanto genes, they don't "own" the crops, they're offering to clean that up for you, as you didn't sign up for that. In the Schmeiser case, their argument was that 95% of the crop was the Monsanto version, so Schmeiser had deliberately planted their seed. It definitely seems like a myth that Monsanto lays claim of ownership over any plant which happens to cross-pollinate with their patented one.

Myth 4: Before Monsanto got in the way, farmers typically saved their seeds and re-used them.

By the time Monsanto got into the seed business, most farmers in the U.S. and Europe were already relying on seed that they bought every year from older seed companies. This is especially true of corn farmers, who've been growing almost exclusively commercial hybrids for more than half a century. (If you re-plant seeds from hybrids, you get a mixture of inferior varieties.) But even soybean and cotton farmers who don't grow hybrids were moving in that direction.

Which kind of makes sense. A farmer's specialty is farming, it's not to be genetics specialists and run a seed-lab / seed processing/drying and storage operation on each and every farm. It just makes more sense that there's one big farm somewhere which specializes in mass-producing seeds, and each other farm buys the seed from them, in convenient bags, and specializes in just producing the food crop. Which also gives you much more flexibility: since you can decide what you're planting every year.

[Loud Whispers]

If that's the case then why the fuck would anyone even buy those seeds in the first place? e.g. they talk about Monsanto prosecuting those who keep their seed for replanting, but ... if the seed suck so bad apparently then who would even bother? If traditional seeds are just an all-round better deal, then it wouldn't be hard to make a farm that just specializes in producing the traditional seeds to sell them to other farms, for less money than the inferior Monsanto seeds. If everything costs more with the Monsanto seeds, and there's no benefit, and they're way more disease-prone, and you need to label them GMO, why would you even? In fact, anyone who touched such seeds should immediately go out of business since they couldn't compete.

Farmers don't really need to buy traditional seeds from other farmers, since they can just reuse them. People have to continually buy seeds from Monsanto because they sell terminator seeds, which won't yield fertile seeds (if all goes right at least - means bad business for Monsanto and a high likelihood of GMO crops propagating in the wild, affecting natural biodiversity). The business models aren't really comparable. The ostensible advantage that Monsanto's GMO crops provide is not increased yield per plant (I'm being very specific here, as other biotech companies are explicitly pursuing increased yield), but resistance to roundup herbicide. You can spray a field of Monsanto's GMO cotton with roundup and it'll wipe out every plant that's competing with it, increasing overall yield.

Which kind of makes sense. A farmer's specialty is farming, it's not to be genetics specialists and run a seed-lab / seed processing/drying and storage operation on each and every farm. It just makes more sense that there's one big farm somewhere which specializes in mass-producing seeds, and each other farm buys the seed from them, in convenient bags, and specializes in just producing the food crop. Which also gives you much more flexibility: since you can decide what you're planting every year.

Doesn't make sense to me at all, especially when it comes to European farmers who are highly educated agronomists, not uneducated subsistence farmers; nor does it make sense when understanding how farmers started the green revolution with selective breeding and infrastructure alone. The move from farmers saving their own seed and sharing it with their neighbours to a world where this basic practice we've been doing since the dawn of agrarian civilization is illegal or liable to incur government taxation which renders the very cheapness of it pointless, to a world where seed supplies are dominated by three corporations who sell infertile seed where the fragility of an entire global farming system is measured in the time it takes for one disease to eliminate the sole dominant industrial variety in lieu of the innumerable local varieties - strikes me as senseless obedience to a harmful trend. I am enthusiastic about biotech firms seeking to increase yields of useful shit like cotton, but the manner of mass adoption renders desired benefits... Problematic. Much like how the mass adoption of Monsanto's GMO cotton in India got fucked when all the various local varieties were replaced by one industrial variety, seeing an initial rise in yield followed by a crisis after it emerged that the cotton adopted by millions of farmers had no resistance to white fly.

In developing countries, saving food plant seed - a traditional practice for which farmers and growers have been criminalised - is tied to the politics of globalisation through issues such as food sovereignty and intellectual property rights: whoever controls seeds controls a people's ability to feed themselves. In Europe and America, vegetable seed conservation is more about the custodianship of genetic and cultural heritage.
"Seed conservation is important, but if we keep growing these old varieties - many of which have adapted to very local conditions - we will understand more about their adaptability to changes in climate, pests and diseases," Slack says. "For example, peas prefer cooler conditions, and if you're growing them in the north of England and the climate is warming, you might find that varieties such as Glorious Devon or Kent Blue will do better in the future than Lancashire Lad. We are losing older and tougher varieties before we understand their adaptation to climate change.

Seems that everyday we go backwards, poisoning our environment with roundup just to get a comparable yield from crops better adapted to the locality. Also doesn't help that the one advantage of plants immune to roundup disappears when weeds develop immunity to it

To that end this kinda stuff will pose a big problem for biotech seed companies, and is a very interesting read, highly recommend

“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

Pretty much the whole debate in a nutshell.

There's also a rather painful note of how many European nations had their own public services dedicated to the impartial breeding and testing of crop varieties - conducted with total transparency, they earned public trust by serving public interest, with no conflicts of interest requiring the greasing of palms or lining the pockets of politicians, it's easy to see why they were popular. This makes more sense to me too, not to leave such a vital strategic sector of the nation in the hands of the private sector; rather pitifully, the UK had arguably the world's best public institute in Cambridge for the study, development and experimentation of plant breeds. Margaret Thatcher privatized the Cambridge Plant Breeding Institute, selling it to Unilever on the argument that this would provide greater funds and the magic of market efficiency in developing new strains - the PBI was then sold from Unilever to Monsanto, who had the PBI demolished.

Basically bring back integrated public biotech, deregulate farm saved seed oversight & taxation, seize the means of seed production