Slashdot Mirror
Plant a Seed, Get Sued?
Friar_MJK writes "Now even traditionally non-tech-savvy farmers are getting the rap for piracy. This isn't your grandma's p2p filesharing, but rather replanting bio-engineered seeds. Somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that replanting seeds grown from your own soil is a crime. A company called Monsanto sells those specially engineered seeds, and according to their license agreements, they make it illegal to replant the seeds harvested from a previous crop. To enforce this, they have brought many hard-working farmers to court and even thrown some in jail. According to the story, the company has not lost a case yet." We've had a couple of stories about Monsanto suing a Canadian farmer, but there hasn't been a lot of U.S. press devoted to the issue.
"I swear, it looked like one of mine", exclaimed Ms. Nature, while being being booked. Several scattered, unharvested seed from a bio-engineered crop sprouted this Spring and the Monsanto Seed Police were right on top of it.
Unrelated to this incident, Peter Rabbit was charged with Intellectual Property theft, after taking a bio-engineered cabbage from Farmer McGregor's garden. "It sure looked good, all big and green, but it tasted like wood pulp", stated the incarcerated rabbit.
In other news, to show it's kind heart, Monsanto was offering assistance to Tsunami victims. "As long as they don't try replanting our seed", said an anonymous source within the company.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
simple for the farmers. Don't buy their seeds.
The company selling the seeds is really just upset because someone defeated the copy protection. I hear holding down the shift key on the tractor whilst sowing the seeds works.
OK, farmer entered into an agreement with Monsanto, got it.
Somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that replanting seeds grown from your own soil is a crime.
No, somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that contracts are legally binding instruments.
What's the story here?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's not "illegal" but a breach of contract. There's no *law* saying you can't replant the seeds.
True enough- except for Monsanto has been successfull in suing farmers who DIDN'T SIGN THE CONTRACT for patent infringement, so it's also illegal.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I may apply this to my daughter.
A blog I run for the wealth
Monsanto is the true farmer's Sauron. Monsanto is about chemical factory farming (in other words, anti-Farming). My best friend is a small farmer. He has some livestock, he leases out his tobacco allotment (this is Virginia), and he raises some small "cash crops" which are all legal and vary from year to year. Unless he's not telling me everything. He steadfastly refuses to use chemicals and accept subsidies (except for that tobacco allotment thing).
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
If they can engineer a seed to resist Roundup, why can't they also engineer a seed that has a lower shelf life not allowing them to be saved for another planting season?
...is why these farmers are buying Monsanto seed at all. They buy it because Monsanto has engineered their seeds to be particularly resistant to their own herbacide, Roundup. Farmers just dump Roundup by the ton on their bean fields, and basically forget about it.
Sweet deal for Monsanto, and it makes growing soybeans very easy and profitable of course, but where does all that Roundup go, do you think? Can you say, Water Table? There are a lot of people very worried about the over use of Roundup by a lot of farmers in the midwest.
First of all, many people maintain that they never used Monsanto seeds. Their plants were very likely cross polinated by Monsanto crops growing nearby. And yet Monsanto is sueing them. Insane.
Second of all, I buy large bags of seed to feed to wild animals all of the time. There is nothing explicit or implicit in my purchase of these seeds that agrees that I will not replant the corn. However, if I were to plant this corn and it so happened to contain Monsanto seed (which I realistically have no way of knowing) how could I be legally lible to Monsanto, who I have had no dealing with? A the very least Monsanto should require that corn produced with their seeds be properly labeled so this does not happen, but instead of requiring it by contract to the farmers that they supply, they have agressive fought the labeling of corn produced by their seed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Ok, #1, genetically engineering seeds for crops is a far cry from engineered steriods or drugs. It is finding the genes that tell a crop when to stop growing, or when to trigger certain events. Once we identify those genes it's just a matter of manipulating. Same thing with "roundup ready" soybeans (the same crop being sued over) which is genetically resistant to a particular herbicide that kills all the other weeds in the field, allowing the beans to grow tall. I grew up on a farm, was in FFA in high school, and go to one of, if not THE top Agriculture schools in the nation/world (though my major is technology at said school). I know people whose majors are horticulture, i've heard lectures from researchers and professors who know this stuff on the genetic level. There is nothing wrong with properly engineering crops for higher yields.
#2) The entire point of Monsanto suing the farmers is wrong. They pride themselves on helping to feed teh world. Now if any of you tech geeks would have worked a labor-type job at some point in your life, you'd know the extortion they have on the market. Both the round-up you spray to kill the weeds, and the seeds themselves. Chances are the farmers who were reusing their crops were still using MONSANTO BRANDED WEED KILLER. This is a case of straight up greed, no other way around it.
"People, particularly americans, often confuse what is legal/illegal and what is right/wrong. Please don't."
I got a better question for Slashdot. Why should anyone clear up misconceptions, and provide more information? When we all know that it will go in one ear and out the other. So when the next story comes up, we get to listen to the same mistakes, over and over. Apparently there's a lot of talking (as witnessed by the post numbers). but there's absolutely no listening. I don't know about the rest of you. But I always thought that part of the definition of a geek, was someone willing to learn. Not having to be repeatedly told the same things over and over. Always willing to do research. Now it's talk loud, be a rebel, and speak from a position of ignorance.*
*Maybe the old "/." is dead, for all the people that made it was it was, have been driven off, in the pursuit of "karma".
This is one of several big issues that is giving GM crops such a bad name in the rest of the world.
Europeans are well aware of the issue; the anti-GM protesters have used it very effectively to win support. There are stories in the news of non-GM farmers being sued because of cross-polination that they weren't aware of and had no control over, and it has upset a lot of people.
There are African countries that have refused food aid from the US because it would include GM crops. That grain would be useless to a rural African, because the first thing they would want to do would be to keep a portion of it to plant for next year, even if it was intended as food aid (that's how subsistence farming works).
Personally, I avoid engineered food for other reasons, but the legal issues are certainly helping to put a lot of other people off them as well.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Your talk is really troubling..
You talk like Monsanto can allow and disallow anything with their product.
Imagine that extending to every product in the world. Every Single Thing That "You" Own..
Either you're just a troll, or 200% clueless..
Controlling seeds and how other people use "your" product, just to create a higher profit, is unnatural, is not "Right" (whatever that means) and should not be allowed in law and ethics at all.
Monsanto does not have a right for profit, or maximum profit. It's just a company. Never forget that.
Why should seeds be burned just because a company sets arbitrary limits to its customers? Why should we tolerate to be held ransom to large international companies? We're talking about Life itself here.
My only rational conclusion must be that I have fed a troll. Nobody can be this stupid and cynical.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
This is actually a fairly complex deal.
Farmers do not collect their own seed generally- they harvest their corn, and repurchase seed every spring. That's the way it is done. There is no sense in harvesting corn for seed and it is rarely practiced. If you've got good corn you sell it at price It's cheaper and easier to go to the Coop and get more seed each spring.
The genetically engineered corn is actually the life blood of many farmers- yes even the small ones. They plant tracts of corn that are then observed for the quality of the corn. I lived in an area of TN that Monsanto and others used for testing- you've never sen more curious rows of corn.
Monsanto is engineering a seed that produces better product. The result is simple- a farmer sees that he can harvest the engineered corn and create his own seed for less than Monsanto charges for the engneered product. That would be the only reason to replat Monsanto seed- the last thing any farmer wants to do is more work than they have to, but if they can get Monsanto's branded seed for less, they will do so.
In addition, they can at that point actually sell seed that was engineered by Monsanto for their own profit. Monsanto actually engineers the seed to help the farmers bottom line- to make them more productive.
However, I do agree that suing the little guy in this is pointless. the big agriculture corporate farms would be the major players if "seed copying" ever became a huge problem.
Still, you've got to realize that the reseeding farmer is trying to save money by copying superior product. Call it the genetic equivalent of P2P or whatever you like, but trying to use superior seed to grow it to avoid paying- that's not quite kosher.
The farmers would be motivated though because in this day and age, family farming is nearly an impossible adventure- the cost are astronomical and the payoff risky as hell.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
There are many issues here. Perhaps the most important is bio-diversity. Furthermore there is not a whole lot we can do about this other than become aware of what is going on and do our best to raise the issues in the public eye.
I have challenged the supermarkets where I live to label foods that are genetically engineered. They cannot of course do anything but the more noise I make the more aware other people become. So this is the little revolt that I am making.
Now the issue is that Rape (now called canola) has been genetically engineered so it is resistant to roundup. Percy Schmeiser had his feild contaminated with Monsanto genetically altered seeds and rather than the supreme court of Canada finding that Monsanto is to blame for not keeping their experiments in the lab the court instead found Schmeiser to be liable for not being able to keep Monsanto experiments out of his feilds.
The logic of this totally excapes me.
The economics of the agricultural community are such that even a minor percentage inprovment in productivity will be picked up by a select few. The consequence of this is that in the long term no-one wins. The reason farm income is low is because from an economic standpoint there is almost perfect competition so everyone competes to the lowest income people can survive on. This is how commodity markets work.
From the standpoint of sustainable agriculture however - this is a very dangerous development.
First off we end up with only selected strains being planted across vast acerages. Next we end up with Monsanto (95% of the genetically altered seeds come from Monsanto) controlling the distribution of these seeds and to top it off we now have an uninformed court ruling that 100,000 years of workable agriculture where any farmer is free to develope any strain of seed is to be replaced with a regime where Monsanto Labs rule the roost.
Not only this - those genetically altered seeds will form some of the most viralent weeds one can imagine.
But - what if we end up with 100% of the farm land planted with a single strain and some biological vector brings in an infection. This will result in close to a 100% crop failure. Anyone who knows of the consequences of the Irish Potatoe Blight should realise what this will mean.
Genetic alteration is not necessarily bad. What is bad is mono culture. When we get a ruling that the individual farmers are somehow responsible for preventing contamination of their seed then we move into a world where a single corporate interest can control the seeds all farmers use.
This leads directly to mono-culture and all farmers are forced into abandoning their individual strains. The result of this mono-culture will be a massive crop failure at some point in the future.
So the judges may have been well schooled in law but they are ignorant of the biology which provides the food they eat.
As I said before - as a lone voice the only thing I can do is bitch and complain which I do. What we really need to do is get a very strong movement going. Even a million voices are not enough. The disaster mono-culture can precipate can be much larger than the Tsunami that just hit SE asia.
When the BSE story first broke, the UK government tried to convince the British public that British beef was safe (there is wonderful video footage of the environment minister of the time (John Gummer) publically feeding his daughter a beef burger - but she refused to eat it!). Anyway, the whole sorry saga led to two things. Firstly, the British people stopped trusting the government when they said that things were safe. Secondly, people became a lot more aware of what they were eating and sensitive to production methods. Remember, BSE came about because of greedy farmers, with the encouragement of the Thatcher government, feeding dead cows (meat) to living cows (herbivores).
So, sensitised to farming methods, the British public questioned the wisdom of genetically modifying food. Most of the concern was centred around the impossibility of undoing any genetic pollution that would result. The UK government (Blair in particular) have tried to tell everyone that GM is safe - but thanks to BSE, no-one believes them.
Our government has passed laws making GM crops legal, but fortunately, there has been such a strong anti-GM movement here, that supermarkets don't dare stock GM food. Since BSE, the British public have become slightly more aware of the way that food is produced.
This means that there is no profit to be made from GM crops and so no companies are even bothering to apply for licenses to grow them.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
So, if these plants are property of Monsanto, and they happen to start growing on my land with no help from me...
I can charge them with tresspassing...
or maybe illegal dumping???
What you people think?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. --E.C. Stanton
When it comes to corn and cotton, all he plants is genetically engineered seed. It just so happens that pest resistant seed is a lot cheaper in the final analysis than "natural" seed + chemical pesticide application. Yes, even taking into consideration the fact that he has to buy the seed every year.
Gee, I sure hope they don't jack up the price when all the non-Monsanto farmers are gone...
The enemies of Democracy are
I grew up on a farm about 200 miles north of Schmeiser's farm. Rapeseed is still grown on my Dad's land. So I have some personal information of the issues and I want to dispel some of the myths that have been postulated here.
A very simple way for the seed to show up is if Schmeiser hauled a load of seed into an elevator for cleaning. This is a very normal practice in Saskatchewan. I have personally done this.
Elevators have rather decent cleaning equipment and it does not cost all that much to run the seeds through.
The issue is that elevator agents will sometimes substitute seed and not tell the farmer. This is so very simple to do and clearly from an efficiency standpoint why not switch the bins instead of making the customer wait?
If Schmeiser hauled a single load into an elevator this is all that would be necesary. He didn't know and the elevator agent also had no idea of the consequences.
That being said - another more sinister explanation is that bees like to spread the genes around. Biological studies have proven that a bee will go to a plant with a different genetic makup for its next load of honey. This is probably built right into the genetics of a bee.
If so - then Monsanto genes would be spread willy nilly all over the place and there is NOTHING a farmer like Schmeiser can do to prevent this. It makes perfect sense that biodiversity will enhance bees' food supplies. 500 million years of evolution will favor bees that maximise the bio-diversity of the plants which produce the honey they consume. Any bee colony practicing mono-culture may well have died out millions of years ago when their food source failed.
Bunch of luddites, not seeing that the future is genetically modified grains, wholly owned and controlled by a foreign company who will bury anyone who tries to grow food without permission...
Haven't we at least learned anything from Microsoft about single-source monopolistic controls? And this is food! I'm starting to think we deserve our new fascist state.
The enemies of Democracy are
This is absolutely sick! Seeds float through the air, and when they land, they grow into plants, by their very nature!
That's like if I were to write a computer worm, then sue people who get infected by it for violating the terms under which I license it!
This is pure evil.
First off, virtually all corn planted in the US is hybred. That means the seeds have to be grown in dedicated fields with the two types of parent corn planted next to eachother, and workers go out and pull all the tasels off the 'female' plants so that they cant selfpolinate and produce only seeds with the male plants as the polinator. the male plants are then killed and the female plants are harvested at the end of the season. They are seeds for planting. The plants they grow produce far more yeild, on stronger healthier plants with less fertilizer and pesticides then any other variety that is self polinating. So farmers buy these seeds and plant them. And they get great yields. But if they were to replant the yield, they would get sickly weak, low producing plants. Nobody plants self polinated corn, only hybred. And the only fields that need to worry about contamination are the hybred fields OWNED BY THE SEED COMPANY! They plant just plant beans around them.
Beans are different. Beans are not hybreds because its just not economical to industrially produce hybred seeds. Beans self polinate, and ONLY SELF POLINATE! Its impossible to get your beans contiminated fron your neighbor's field because they dont disperse pollen. Each flower is contained, and they are not polinated by wind, nor insects. Its impossible to have pollen contamination unless you intentionally do it. This involves getting on your knees with a tiny brush and cutting off the stamen of the mother flower and then brushing on pollen colledted from a father plant flower on the pistil of the mother flower. This single flower will then produce a pod of beans containing a grand total of 3 seeds. You can do it in a lab and it only takes a few hours per plant (1 hour per 100 seeds). But because the plants are selfpolinating, the seeds from a normal farmer's crop are all true. He could simply replant them and never pay the money that was spend to develop the plant. (thousands of tries of combinations of plants crossbreeding them in a lab for an incredible amount of work. So the seed companies require famers not to replant their patented seeds. Some may want to anyway, and like any other form of illegial copying, the companies does, and has the legal right to, prosecute the copyright infringment.
Monsanto always make me thing of the moneylender in the Merchant of Venice:
;)
The moneylender can take one pound of flesh without blood or hair, from the borrower.
Similarly, Monsanto should be able to the protect its magic gene, but not anything more.
If they can enforce their IP just to that gene but not anything else go for it. They are overly greedy and ignore (or forget) the fact that 99.99999% of the plant is contributed by the mother nature and generations of farmers who adopt the selective breeding technique (keep only the seed from a good and strong plant). To me it is a bit like adding a proprietary extension to Linux and claim the whole lot belong to yours. So sad that God forgets to sign GPL with Man
They sued an old man who tested to see if his canola seed (non-Monsanto variety) contained traces of the Roundup Ready canola variety, by spraying a small section with Round-up. It lived, and thus contained Monsanto's patented genetics. He did not ever plant this variety, but instead had gotten these traits from windblown pollen in previous years, from others' fields.
However, it was ruled that he's responsible for these traits appearing in his field, despite never using them, and not having a way to prevent them from appearing. He can't control pollen travelling through the air anymore than anyone else. But he's still responsible for some stupid reason.
However, I don't think this would fly in the US. Why? Well, first of all, Canadians tend to do this type of litigation. You know how there's a premium for CD-R's, DVD-R's and other recordable media that is paid to artists, with the assumption that piracy will occur? Well, it's pretty much the same deal here, and will end up the same way such litigation and legislation has in the US.
Normally I don't reply to ACs, but this deserves comment.
It is patently false that Monsanto's lawsuits only target contract holders. They sue every farmer who saves seed from the same crops as Monsanto-owned crops within the same geographical area.
A quick search turned up Monsanto v Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer kept from growing canola because he chose to save seed from his naturally-produced strains which became crossed with Monsanto-owned strains. It is an impossibility to prevent cross-pollination in most uncontrolled environments, thus the burden should be on Monsanto farmers to prevent pollen drift, rather than those whose crops are infected.
Monsanto puts farmers out of business with their predatory legal practices, plain and simple. They force their way into markets that they otherwise can't access by suing farmers who won't buy seed every year. If they can get one farmer in a geographical area to sign up, pollen and seed end up contaminating all same-species crops in the area, making seed-saving illegal. Shame on anyone who does that.
Monsanto, one of the world's largest producers of GE crops, has been ordered to pay criminal and civil charges totalling US$1.5 million for bribing an Indonesian government official and concealing the payment as consulting fees.
t ails.html?site_id=45&news_id=1581
More at: http://www.greenpeace.org.au/features/features_de
i dont know who told you this, this is completely off base. roundup (glyphosate) degrades over a period of 3 months into ethylamines. many microorganisms will then turn those into CO2, not nitrogen. infact, glyphosate has been found to inhibit anaerobic nitrogen fixation in the soil.
glyphosate is an amino acid analog designed to inhibit enzymes needed for neogenesis (the target supposedly being 5-enolpyruvyl-shikimate-3 phosphate synthase) of the plants amino acids.
while glyphosate has not been found to be harmful to humans, the inactive ingredient surfactant (which makes up 15.0% of roundup), polyoxy-ethyleneamine, IS known to be toxic to humans and is typically contaminated with dioxanes (as a byproduct of the formation of it) which is a known human carcinogen.
--I have some of those "gene bank" type seeds, in a way anyway. Bought several large sealed cans of various open pollinated seeds. I keep those just packed away, and use other open pollinated for my season to season garden crops. some are many years old, lost track of when I started breeding them now.. It's a "just in case" deal, and eventually I hope to be able to build a pretty large tight greenhouse with decent air filtration and airlock styled entrys for it. Just for that purpose. Cross pollination is an extreme threat though,generally speaking, as is cross species contamination (it's happened already) and just wait until they get "terminator" gene modified seeds out on the market. They were going to do it, public outcry got them to back off just a little bit and "just do research" but it's only a matter of time now before they bribe off enough legislators to get it legal to distribute.
I think it's one of the larger threats facing the planet. People think about nukes or terror attacks or whatnot, but I think mucking around with the planets food supply with GM products will eventually result in some rather nasty disasters. I simply *don't* trust those industries spokesmodel scientists to be anywhere nears truthful on the subject. IMO, they are simply too blinded by economic greed to seriously acknowledge the inherent dangers in what they are doing. We've seen the same arrogance and public assurances of "safe" with any number of past "new shiny and improved" products that turned out to be not so swift. Just generally speaking now, could be anything, thinking that just relocating species to brand new areas was a good idea (carp, english sparrows, kudzu, etc). Releasing chemcicals for various purposes, medications that turned out to be more harmful than good or had unintended side effects, etc that were missed in the "scientific testing".
I am sure they are intellectually aware of it,back to these various GM modded plants, but that itch for buckets of scratch is just too strong for them to ignore. I know they are capable of creating most anything now, and I have read some amazing claims on what they can do with them, make new medicines, etc, but still...I just don't know if *they* know way down the road how things will turn out. Here's a good analogy, well, good enough for slashdot purposes. Look at software code, people can look at it and use it for awhile and it seems fine, perfectly ok, then one day someone does something just a tad different and POOF a large vulnerability is exposed. With code (in most cases), it's not that big of a deal, it just gets fixed, but with live growing things? Wind blowing pollen around, trucks hauling stuff hither and yon...it could get messy. Look at down in Louisiana now, the last batch of hurricanes brought up a nasty disease that's spreading all through the soybeans now. Stuff happens, planetary wildcards happen. I think with "food" they should go real s-l-o-w and careful. Wouldn't bother me a bit if they studied their products for decades before even teeny tiny uber controlled trials out in the open.
As to "always be able to purchase non GM.." you should investigate what's going down in a lot of african countries and in india lately on this front. Even in Iraq, we had as thread on Iraq and farmers just a little while ago, like last month. They -monsanto they and others- are actively trying to corner "the market" there with their brands of seeds through the legislative (read:bribes) process. They are as far from playing fair as you can get. They tried to even patent a widely used Indian wheat that's been openly grown and shared around India for thousands of years, and they didn't even invent it! It's a form of wheat that lacks some markers that causes it to be not as "sticky" in baking as regular wheat, it has lower gluten content, that's where Indians get their "flat bread". Monsanto ups and patents it! Just said "ya,we own it, give us a patent" and the freekin patent office rubber stamps it! In india they are fighting it, they had to fight in in england
For the record, that is only an entry point, most of the exchange of genetic material happens much more informally.
Call them tree huggers or whatever, but these are the people that are keeping the world's genetic line available to all, and this started about the same time that the patent madness did. For obvious reasons. Think of this as the ham radio response to the internet.
For the record, I'm not even a botanist, or whatever, but I'm a member. I get requests maybe twice a month for things I'm growing, and I send them off. Kinda cool, right? At least, I think it is.
I don't need Monsanto's crap, and if they infect me, I will be pissed off, and they can count on me making that apparent.
I forget what 8 was for.
If food is marked "contains GM stuff" no one in Europe will buy it. Consequently the supermarkets don't want it. The importers don't want it, and even if the yield is higher, most farmers here don't want it cos they can't sell it. A few farmers have been bribed by Monsanto to try it out for test purposes. Several of those have joined the protest movement, not least because they contaminated their neighbours crops after being told it wouldn't happen. (Most farms in Europe are under 100 acres, so farmers have a lot of neighbours, and they are not very far away!)
Any MP/MEP caught voting for GM stuff risks losing his seat, so there is a tendency for our laws to prohibit it until its adequately tested.
The US has problems selling it to us because of consumer resistance. So they are threatening retaliation on the grounds that it is "illegal interference with free trade". Surely its interference with free trade to force people to sell what their customers won't buy?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII