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[Reelya]

A number of sites state that it's a myth that Monsanto sells terminator seeds.

e.g. it was an idea that was floated in the 1990s and that Monsanto wished to pursue, but the technology never actually eventuated and there was too much public opposition to the concept.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/1999/oct/05/gm.food1

Monsanto has bowed to worldwide pressure to renounce the "terminator" plant technology that had led to accusations the company was trying to dominate world food supplies by forcing farmers to buy fresh seed from it each year.

The multinational seed firm has undertaken not to develop and sell the controversial terminator genes, which use technology that would have made crop seeds sterile.

e.g. it was a proposed technology, but it never actually got developed because the idea made people too angry. There's no evidence it ever worked either. Maybe they had some gene sequences they thought could be developed into actual self-terminating crops, but this doesn't appear to ever have been a mature tech. A story from 2013 reads:

https://www.nature.com/news/seed-patent-case-in-supreme-court-1.12445

A technology called a ‘terminator’ was never going to curry much favour with the public. But even Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology giant in St Louis, Missouri, was surprised by the furore that followed when it announced that it might acquire a method for engineering transgenic crops to produce sterile seed, which would force farmers to buy new seed for each planting. In 1999, Monsanto’s chief executive pledged not to commercialize terminator seeds.

The concept, if not the technology, is now gaining traction again. This week, the US Supreme Court hears arguments that pit Monsanto against 75-year-old Indiana soya-bean farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman, who used the progeny of Monsanto seeds to sow his land for eight seasons. The company says that by not buying seeds for each generation, Bowman violated its patents.

"might" acquire the technology. e.g. it was fantasy tech. Such crops don't actually exist. So instead, they use patent law to sue those who re-use the seeds. It was cheaper and easier to use lawyers than to develop the "terminator" crops, which are pure science-fiction / conspiracy-theory fuel.

The Supreme court cased boiled down to the "patent exhaustion doctrine" also known as the "first sale doctrine". e.g. if you buy a book, then patents/copyrights don't prevent you re-selling the book to someone else, and that was the grower's defense. However, the Supreme Court sided with Monsanto, and their argument was that growing new crops with the patented seeds, outside of the license agreement, was reproducing the patented item, e.g. equivalent to you photocopying a book and making/selling copies, rather than selling the original book itself.

[scourge728]

I mean, terminator type seeds seem quite plausible to me, judging on how we've made seedless varieties of things, and one orange that apparently tries to bud into another orange instead of making proper seeds

[Reelya]

Seedless varieties would be propagated by cuttings, which is why they work for something like grapes or orange trees. Those varieties just don't have seeds at all now, and it would be hard to have a monopoly on any plant that a gardener can replicate with just cuttings. e.g. Monsanto probably doesn't focus on grape varieties for that reason: with cuttings rather than a clear crop/seed cycle, it's hard to say where one plant ends and the next begins.

The problem with doing "seedless" grain crops, is that the seed is the part you eat.

Think about how a "terminator" grain crop would actually work. You have a "progenitor" strain, and the progenitor strain must be able to make two seed types: one grows more progenitors, and the other grows "sterile" plants. Then, the "sterile" plants must grow to maturity and produce seeds (that's what is harvested), but these seeds are sterile, e.g. they're a third seed type. Far from being similar to "seedless" varieties of fruiting plants, the "terminator" grain crop requires you to engineer a crop capable of selectively choosing from three seed types. Generating the seed for farmers would then become a much more complex thing, since you have progenitor->progenitor fields separate to progenitor->crop fields, as well as the crop-fields themselves.

And then, creating a plant that does all this would get in the way of actually growing plants that are good at just being plants, since you'd now have much more arcane shit to go through to get the desired traits in the end crop than you do at the moment. These "terminator" crops would be a genetic nightmare to actually work with and improve. e.g. testing all three phases every time you make any genetic improvement each time you change anything.

[redwallzyl]

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

Oh neoliberalism, fucking things up sense day one. The west really needs to kill the free market obsession it has before we implode.

It's my understanding that the round up ready crops would be sustainable is used on a longer cycle as part of a larger stratify of weed and pest control. Instead companies just pour on the pesticide with though only for profit.

[Doomblade187]

...and one orange that apparently tries to bud into another orange instead of making proper seeds

That sounds really cool, actually.

[Loud Whispers]

A number of sites state that it's a myth that Monsanto sells terminator seeds.

Looking into it, they're right, but there's more to it. This is a pretty neat rundown of proposed genetic restrictions undergoing lab testing

Oh neoliberalism, fucking things up sense day one. The west really needs to kill the free market obsession it has before we implode.
It's my understanding that the round up ready crops would be sustainable is used on a longer cycle as part of a larger stratify of weed and pest control. Instead companies just pour on the pesticide with though only for profit.

It's also not even profitable in the long term tbh, whilst fucking up the environment is not really something anyone can afford. Dead humans make no monies

[Reelya]

From the sounds of it however v-GURT technology wouldn't actually enable the type of growing terminator seeds proposed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology

Variety-level genetic use restriction technologies (V-GURTs): This type of GURT produces sterile seeds, so the seed from this crop could not be used as seeds, but only for sale as food or fodder.

e.g. this tech just mentions mass-producing infertile seeds from plants, and it's not clear that this tech allows you to make fertile seeds that you can then sell to someone else, and those only grow into plants that make infertile seeds. e.g. the proposed final idea would still require being able to choose between three types of seeds: fully fertile ones for the original farm, semi-fertile ones to sell to other farms, and completely-infertile ones that are in the food crop sold to consumers. The complexity of having three inter-related crops for the one crop sounds like it won't ever become a viable alternative to just having crops with a single version.

The idea generally sounds like a pipe-dream that gives some executives a boner thinking about how much money they could make, rather than a thing you could actually make into a practical product. Like the biotech version of flying cars or something.

[Kagus]

Oh hey, I think I remember what the thing was that I was thinking of.

It was during my time at Skiringssal (Sandy Fjord), and our philosophy teacher (a street musician who started each philosophy semester with a showing of The Matrix) decided to introduce us to a little something called "Zeitgeist". Yes, that Zeitgeist.

Now, before hitting play, he took the time to chat with us about how the film specifically used editing and filmography techniques along with concepts from hypnosis in order to lull viewers into a more "receptive" state of mind, which is really what he wanted to explore with the viewing... He just wanted to talk about the methods used by the film and other ideas on propaganda and convincing people over to your side.

So, after the preamble, we all sat down to watch part 1 of Zeitgeist: the Movie.

I was prepped and ready for something that was going to try and pull a fast one on me. So I just sat back and laughed at all the provably wrong and factually incorrect statements being made in the production...


Once part 1 was finished and the class was over, everyone filed up to have a quick chat with the teach... Things like "wow, I'd never thought of it that way!", "I feel like my eyes have really been opened!" and "this was some heavy shit" were proclaimed in front of a respectably silent, sagely nodding teacher (who was getting ready for blues band class afterwards).

Then it was my turn. I walk up to him with a shit-eating grin on my face. He asks me if I've learned anything tonight. I say "not really, but it was certainly entertaining!". He smiles, nods, gives me a wink and sends me on my way.

[redwallzyl]

Oh hey, I think I remember what the thing was that I was thinking of.

It was during my time at Skiringssal (Sandy Fjord), and our philosophy teacher (a street musician who started each philosophy semester with a showing of The Matrix) decided to introduce us to a little something called "Zeitgeist". Yes, that Zeitgeist.

Now, before hitting play, he took the time to chat with us about how the film specifically used editing and filmography techniques along with concepts from hypnosis in order to lull viewers into a more "receptive" state of mind, which is really what he wanted to explore with the viewing... He just wanted to talk about the methods used by the film and other ideas on propaganda and convincing people over to your side.

So, after the preamble, we all sat down to watch part 1 of Zeitgeist: the Movie.

I was prepped and ready for something that was going to try and pull a fast one on me. So I just sat back and laughed at all the provably wrong and factually incorrect statements being made in the production...


Once part 1 was finished and the class was over, everyone filed up to have a quick chat with the teach... Things like "wow, I'd never thought of it that way!", "I feel like my eyes have really been opened!" and "this was some heavy shit" were proclaimed in front of a respectably silent, sagely nodding teacher (who was getting ready for blues band class afterwards).

Then it was my turn. I walk up to him with a shit-eating grin on my face. He asks me if I've learned anything tonight. I say "not really, but it was certainly entertaining!". He smiles, nods, gives me a wink and sends me on my way.

I looked it up. Oh my, conspiracy under a clever veneer of real issues. That could certainly manipulate the well meaning but ignorant.


Also, getting the thread back on track some more, if anyone wants to throw some archeological conspiracy at me I can debunk it. People throw all kinds of ignorant shit around. Seriously guys were not covering up anything.

[Egan_BW]

I'll take the easy route here and say that obviously the Egyptian pyramids were grain silos.

[WealthyRadish]

What use would the time travelling aliens who engineered us have for grain?

[redwallzyl]

I'll take the easy route here and say that obviously the Egyptian pyramids were grain silos.

Do you happen to be named Ben Carson by chance?

[Egan_BW]

What use would the time travelling aliens who engineered us have for grain?

To eat, duh.

[Reelya]

What use would the time travelling aliens who engineered us have for grain?

That's like asking what use would people with advanced electrical technology have for oil. Grain is a raw resource. It stores energy, so it's a very basic form of bio-solar energy. You turn it into other stuff. I don't know about the "time travelling" part, but coming up with a scenario involving aliens in general isn't that hard.

e.g. imagine if a survey ship of some aliens got to Earth, and assume they don't have FTL travel. They're not popping in, having lunch and popping out, because that wouldn't make much sense. They'd have evolved/engineered themselves to either live for millennia or just be immortal. And they'd have far more advanced "planet scanners" than we have, so they'd already know that there's a planet teeming with life here to go look at. Such a survey mission to a system might take 1000s of years, but it's not a big deal to them, since anyone that far advanced will clearly have the tech to live as long as they want. And if a small ship full of alien scientists, came all the way here, it's not so that they can "scan" the planet from orbit in their little ship: a big enough sensor array in another system can get you most of that kind of data anyway. They'd come to this system only because then they can go down to the planet's surface and start taking detailed samples, and stay long enough to do scientific research. e.g. 20 alien scientists trying to unlock all Earth's unique scientific value would take a long time since they're basically just one lab, even if they're really smart. But they have the time to satisfy their curiosity.

Now, you'd have to imagine the circumstances in which such a race would interact with the local sentient apes. e.g. say the ship took damage in the atmosphere and needs repairs (e.g. even with high-tech, a stray meteorite in orbit can wreck you), but the parts to do some don't exist here and to "phone home" would take centuries. So they work out that if they tech-up the local apes just enough they can have them producing alloys that are needed. e.g. they might have assumed that once they left and stopped propping up the ape-civilization it would just collapse back into the stone-age, and not actually develop into a high-tech civilization. Or even, the ship wasn't damaged, but their expedition is to spend 1000s of years here but might not carry 1000s of years worth of food on the ship, because it has e.g. suspended animation or other tech for the interstellar part of the journey, so they do in fact have finite food stores, and teching-up the apes just enough to make useful resources was intended to allow the aliens to divert more effort towards research rather than resource acquisition.

[Egan_BW]

Or you'd just pack enough food to get to the planet in question, because you know that you're heading to a life-sustaining planet and will be able to grow enough food for your next trip once you arrive.