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Open-Source Technique for GM Crops
a_d_white writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society has developed TransBacter, a new technique for creating genetically modified crops, which is being released as a BioForge project. Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source. Other techniques for creating genetically modified crops rely on Agrobacterium, but this new method allows using bacteria outside this genus. The New York Times and Wired cover the story. The founding of BIOS was mentioned previously. Although the Nature paper is available from the BIOS website, with their emphasis on the free sharing of ideas it's rather ironic that the technique was not reported in an open-access journal."
Imagine my disappointment when I misread the title and thought it was some kind of hack for GM cars...
This is nice to see. Information, free for all. In this casr especially, since it helps all of us.
I wonder how many other things would benefit the 'end user' if things were opened. Auto safety for instance.
Pretty Pictures!
I understand BioForge is a place for scientists to collaborate but is it also a place for funding? Did the scientists who put together this article do so with funds from a University or (less likely) a corporation?
If more of these papers are to come out, and I hope they do, the proper funding channels should be lined up since those who fund a research project tend to be very possessive about the results.
-Teiresias
After this post I'll rush down to my very own genetics lab based out of my garage, and start creating some interesting combinations. Hope it's not confused with a Meth lab.
More precisely, "à la the GPL". I know everyone here has "GM plants", Monsanto, terminator seeds and the RIAA muddled together into a single ball of confusion but it's not like public domain vectors haven't been available for, what, 20 years?
At any rate, it's a nice piece of work. The submitter can sneer at them for their choice of journal, but I'd take the Nature paper if I were them.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source.
This is foolish. They should have released it under a free license for anyone except those who deny the same right to use their bio-patents. Otherwise certain scums are able to use this technique while not being forced to change their behaviour, hurting the industry, hurting the farmers, hurting the scientific progress, with no consequences. A perfect license should be useful for cross-licensing with proprietary patents portfolios but sadly this one while being certainly great in spirit is just too weak in its current form to achieve this goal. In the real world of patent sharks we need to fight a little bit harder.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
There's no contradiction at all. There is a lot of GPL code produced in universities where the underlying theory is published (and republished) in journals such as ACM communications. There are many, many other reasons to select a journal to publish in, than its particular stance on Free-dom. Foremost are (in arbitrary order): fit of your article, prestige of the journal, and political ramifications (knowing someone on the editorial board always helps even when it shouldn't).
That is, the technique can remain free whereas one particular explanation and analysis thereof (the article) is copyrighted and published traditionally. This is confusing only to the utterly daft.
I don't know about every one else, but I've been using Open Source and BIOS technologies together for years now.
i just put in
Still can't do it in my kitche^H^H home lab.
It's still easier to soak seeds in a mutagenic formula, plant them and look for interesting traits later, then clone and reproduce.
GM crops have tremendous potential in regions such as Africa, where also, unfortunately, the governments are too afraid to use GM strains because they risk their agricultural exports with the hysterically-anti-GM nations (because of the fear of cross-polination).
These developing countries can't even compete fairly with unmodified crops because of the unfair subsidies Western governments give their own farmers. Imagine that--taxing your highly advanced industrial complex and then using the money to artificially lower the prices of your products in one of the only markets that people of impoverished nations can compete in!
How long is the developing world going to suffer because technological nations remain sentimental over their own agriculture?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
I remember that a farmer was successfully sued for having GM crops on his farm which were patented by a corporation. It turns out he didn't purposefully plant that strain of crop; wind currents allowed the GM strain to migrate to his farm, where it then began establishing a foothold amongst the farmer's normal crops.
Norman Borlaug inroduced a hybrid wheat strain to India in 1963. It doubled the wheat's yield per acre, leading to a net increase 20 million tons per year from 12 million tons. So obviously, crop strains have a great impact upon the population.
Seems like a way to introduce a harmful gm product as a weapon to destroy a nations food supply. By providing this information so readily it may make the job much easier. Especially as improvements to the techniques are made.
Tomacco will finally become reality
Sorry guys. My modified corn crop not only causes cancer in 90% of all people it also kinda crossbred with the native corn in most of the southwest... so... uh... Sorry Guys.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
When monsanto crops breed with your GPL crops, they have to release the genetic code or they are in violation of the liscense?
After all Cocaine wants to be free too.
GMO are a bad idea - you are polluting the gene pool in a one way direction - no way to get the original gene pool back once you've ruined it with GMOs.
Its even worse that people are doing open source versions.
As you can guess I'm not a US citizen. I'm from the UK, where generally, the population hates GMOs.
Does biodiversity mean a thing to any of you? Having one strain of GM corn dominate all of an an area's crops might be awesome when it comes to raising productivity levels and immunity to pesticides, but when an unforseen disease starts to affect the plants (which can happen a lot) they would be completely wiped out, because they are all the same. Nature does it better, lets not fuck around with it.
Introducing GM plants to an area can be compared to introducing alien species to a place where they do not belong. There is no possible way to forsee all the negative impacts that could arise. Check out all the problems Australia has with feral animals, for instance. here
http://www.thelung.org
If it were so great and all of these GM companies were really concerned with the people in the third world then why are they trying to generate sterile crops which can not be used for next years planting but forces you to buy seeds from the company. See the storey about the farmer
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
Also, read up on Yield vs Output.
There is enough food in the world to feed everyone it is just that the people don't have the money to buy these foods. It's a metter of distribution.
Talk about viral marketing.
--
make install -not war
Personally, I would say that most of the government is as open source as Linux. In other words, the information is there if you bother to look for it and are willing to go through the trouble of interpretting it. The only part that really isn't open is the closed-door meetings and the like. Aren't there any black-box modules in Linux where you only know something goes in and something else goes out? Anyhow, I think the issue is less whether the information is available as it is the complexity of the system. The average politician is unlikely to be able to look at the sourcecode to Linux and understand how it works. The average programmer is unlikely to be able to look at the internal workings of the government and understand how it works.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I wrote this the other day in response to hearing about a professor who is all bent out of shape because some corn variety may be gone forever.
It also touches on some surrounding GMO issues, but it really sums up my position on the matter.
---------
As far as GM crops go, there is no stopping scientific progress.
Instead, we should be dealing with how we are going to deal with
possible consequences. If that professor had instead made a research
project out of preserving the DNA of "irreplaceable native Mexican corn
varieties" they would no longer be irreplaceable.
It is my understanding that there is somewhat of a question in
the law right now about GM crops appearing in other fields, and then the
patent owners then billing the field owner for its use... but that is a
problem with our retarded patent system and the law. Besides, I don't
expect the GM companies are going to kick little old ladies off their
maize fields when they don't pay their GM licensing fee... however, it
is not unimaginable in my mind, so if I read about that I would be
pissed. All this does now is give the people a more robust/pest
resistant/productive corn plant.
Yes there definitely are unforeseen consequences that are going to bite
us in the ass, but man will, nay, MUST conquer genetic engineering. Yes
they should be more careful, but they are not, and it might save all our
lives someday. The lives of countless others, the elimination of
suffering from the failures of our "evolved over time to be just
slightly better than the last blunder of design that caused the previous
in our line of species to disappear into time. I know I am being
extreme and this is all very far off, but the more people screwing with
super science the better.
I don't think the analogy with open source software is quite right. After all, with OSS I have a choice - I download the software, .configure, make install and I have it. Then if it I choose I can delete it.
With this stuff I can still choose whether I want to plant it or eat it, but I cannot choose whether my neighbor's GM'd tomatoes pollinate my tomatoes. I won't find out until I plant the resulting seeds next summer and WHOA! My tomatoes have deformed frog legs on them, but geez, they grow like the dickens in my cat's litter box!
I'll leave them on the front porch - help yourself.
Slashdot never mentions the important stuff when it comes to health. This is not a good thing. This will just make bioengineering easier and cheaper to do. This will make any argument against bovine growth hormones moot. This might even make other countries who do not bio engineer choose to for the cost savings. I at all points in time am ashamed of the FDA and how they have sold to health of Americans to the highest bidder. Come to think of it, the governments has pretty much sold evrything in our best interest to the highest bidder.
Goddamn republicans...
I bet they're bioengineering them now too...
And then when a company selling terminator seeds to a third world country goes out of business, do the people in those countries just starve to death?
Stupidity: it's a renewable resource!
PLoS Biology and the other PLoS journals are good, but even though they're open access, they're not repsected the way Nature is. In addition, Nature is a general subject journal, and has a huge readership - more akin to a magazine than a journal. Putting their article in Nature, while reserving the power to distribute it freely on their site, was probably the best way to have impact. And generating news is something that Robert Jefferson is pretty good at.
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
it's amazing how many supposedly intelligent slashdotters swallow their corporate government's propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
and in any case, adding Open Source to genetic manipulation technology does not make the latter any less evil. GM crops pose unprecedented and -- to quote my favourite war criminal -- "unknowable" risks to the environment at large. they are presented as the 'solution' to problems (famine, malnutrition) which are caused not by 'poor crop yields' or 'technological backwardness' but by fundamentally unjust world food distribution and the aggressive tactics of the megacorporations and governments which push GM in the first place.
do we really want to live in a world where predatory, greed-driven organizations hold the very keys to life?
I believe that GMO technology is not safe and that its use should be banned. GMO technology is the direct manipulation and alteration of the genetic code found in organisms. It can involve "silencing" genes, inserting new genes from totally unrelated species into an organism, etc.
The main reason why this technology should be banned is this: 1) if a GMO technology is found to be harmful at a later time, there must be a way to recall it from the food supply (wild and cultivated) and the environment without collateral environmental risk, 2) Consumers should have the right to avoid the technology by purchasing non-GMO crops. By its nature, GMO endangers both of these. GMO organisms are self replicating and thus can enter the environment and propogate among wild plants and contaminate fields where they are not wanted over long distances via cross pollination and seed transport by wind, birds, insects, etc. By its existance GMO crops threaten consumers rights to choose non-GMO crops and the environment. The terminator seed technology actually introduces even greater risks, since if the terminator genes and traits ended up propogating uncontrollably into the environment, it could cause an environmental disaster of catastrophic porportions. The terminator gene ris supposed to render a plants seeds sterile, yet in nature unusual and unpredictable things could happen, there is a real possibility the unexpected could happen and the terminator genes could propogate in the environment and render crops and wild plants sterile where this affect is not desired and uncontrollably.
The benefits of GMO technologies I believe do not justify these risks. In fact, it has been shown by studies that many of these benefits are over stated, researchers have found that GMO crops will not end world hunger, and in fact while the use of GMO crops have increased reliance on pesticides the crop yields have not risen much at all according to numerious studies. Many of the farmers were sold on GMOs because they were told it would reduce pesticide usage, but it has in fact increased it since GMO encourages monoculture. Farmers would previously choose from dozens or hundreds of subspecies of a crop for one that best tolerates local conditions, even their own custom species they bread themselves through generations in their families by saving seeds from year to year, yet GMOs tend to encourage the use of one or a handful of species everywhere, which have not been breed and acclimated to local conditions, thus they tend to have less natural resistance to those local conditions and require more fertiliser and pesticides. This is wonderful for agribusiness.
This technology is new, it has only been used for the past 10-20 years. Often people get GMO confused with cross breeding of plants, bnut traditional hybridisation and cross breeding still allowed nature to have the final say on how the genes were encoded and utilised the natural conception of organisms via cross breeding allowing nature to integrate the DNA. GMO circumvents the natural processes of conception and thus allows natural rules to be violated, for instance things protected agianst previously by nature, such as placing fish DNA directly into a soybean DNA, was not allowed by natural rules.
We do not fully understand how these organisms work, and why genes are encoded in certian ways, nor will we ever. Nature encodes these genes in certian orders and sequances for reasons we cannot conceve. Removing a gene, while apparently it might not have any major affect apparent to the scientists, might in reality cause major changes throughout the organism, since there may be complex interdependancies throughout the entire organism we do not understand.
...cloning technology under a GPL like license...
:-D
The world badly needs more people like me...
Does it not serve to validate the mischief attempted
by corporations with their licensing schemes?
...and precisly who outside the Commonwealth cares about THAT ?
Many scientists have raised serious questions over the safety of GMOs. Particularly, there is a real risk that the GMO crops may trigger new allergies and reactions to food people have not had before and may not be acceptable to peoples bodies. GMO soybeans have been shown to reduce the nutritional value of the crop, for instance ive seen they have 30% less protien values and more trypsin inhibitor anti-nutrients than non-GMO soybeans. since the introduction of GMOs, the pesticide residue on soybeans has increased. Ive seen studies where the US food borne illness rates have risen dramtically since 1994 when GMOs were introduced in relation to previous years while in countries where they are banned like sweden they have remained fairly constant, a similar rise in those countries has not been seen. It has been shown that the techniques used to engineer crops may actually as well introduce bacteria and virus DNA into them. I do not believe that we should be messing with nature at this level and should stick with traditional cross breeding and hybridisation techniques which have been used for thousands of years and which leave nature with the final say on how plants are coded and prevent the more frankenstienian ideas like putting fish DNA into soybeans, natural processes do not allow such things. The risks to the environment and humans is simply far too great and the damage can be permanent from GMOs.
What about liability issues? When it was discovered that asbestos caused cancer, the company who manufactured it was liable. Who's liable if something goes wrong with open-source GM crops?
www.empiresofsteel.com
I don't have the link on me, but there was a recent report that the "Interim" Iraqi government made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to keep seeds. Not only are they going to be forced to only get GM crops from U.S. agribusinesses (the ones that donated to Bush, of course), but they are not even going to be allowed to replant.
I'm expecting this to happen to Afghanistan as well. They are thinking ahead to control of food and water in the third world, rather than just money. Iraq is important for its water supply as well as its oil.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
While this is obviously beneficial to the farmer and the consumer, it will seriously hinder the survival of this tomato variety in the willd: regular tomato plants will spend less energy on producing fruit and will be able to release their seeds much sooner (because the fruit spoils faster) than the fancy GM variety.
The tomato plants don't have to be able to reproduce themselves in order to spread their genetic code -- all they need to do is release pollen.
And studies have shown that cross-pollination with non-GMO crops can happen, but that often the changes placed in the DNA are dominant traits, meaning that they will be passed down via the pollen.
This has caused a nightmare in the organic farming community, because it's now possible that GMO strains can contaminate their crops, removing their organic status. And once they're contaminated, it's not easy to decontaminate them.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Isn't science supposed to be about open exhange of information?
Aren't most of the open source licenses based on the open exchange of information that is a major component of research? The BSD license is a good example of it, you can use the code as long as you attribute it correctly. GPL is just placing safe guards so that the information cannot be 'locked up'.
It looks like the wheel has come full circle.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I don't really think it's ironic - scientific journals are about prestige, and the impact factor of Nature is very high - over 30. I don't think any of the open access journals even have impact factors yet.
If the purpose of the announcement is to reach as many as the biological sciences community as possible, you want to put the announcement in the journal that most of them read.
Yes, there are women on Slashdot. Deal with it.
Whaaah. I'm a big jerk residing in a rich liberal nation. I always have plenty to eat and it costs next to nothing, thanks to outragous government subsidies to prop up my developed nations faltering agricultural industry, keeping poor developing nations poor in one of the only industries they might possibly compete. I really don't understand GM technology, but due to the social status quo of my liberal country, I think it should be banned. I might have grandchildren with the improper amount of toes! Meanwhile, I will continue to selfishly whine about GM foods and lobby to ban the technology while millions and millions of mal nourished, hungry people in the third world continue their daily struggle to find enough food for themselves and their children. Unlike my country, there is no abundance of food in stores at every street corner. No hundreds of restraunts to choose from at any given time. So while I'm stuffing my face until my belly is full (With only ORGANIC foods by the way), I will continue to selfishly oppose GM technology that could assist in the survival of Millions of people. Millions. I think that they just be forced to starve so GM foods can't possible "ruin" natural strains foods. Hmm, the possibility that the social backlash in my country against GM foods is propogated by our state owned media, reflecting the fact that we have no representatives in this field, therefore garnishing no benefits for our country's economy never occured to me. No, I'm not a sheep, or an elitist liberal fuck. Not at all.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
In free software, we have a long tradition of actors who are half-in, half-out of our community. We benefit from their involvement in some projects, where they are equal participants, even as we may disapprove of their other activities. It gives them the possibility to contribute without making an all-or-nothing committment. In practice, it works out well. IBM, like Monsanto, has been traditionally evil, but they're improving thanks in large part to our community's willingness to work with them. Who knows, maybe we can bring Monsanto around as well. :-)
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
This is not the "open source" way of doing things.
Open source just requires you release your source code. It does NOT require anyone else release their modifications.
This is the GNU model, forcing others to release their changes.
Pay more attention!
Agrobacterium is compress. It's basically the only game in town for gene transfer into plants, which (regardless of your views on GM crops) is critical to agroscience. But it's patented. These guys found an alternative, and are bringing a fundamental technique to the free world. It opens up whole new possibilities, and I bet a lot of scientists are going to choose to be part of the free world in coming years. Let's hope the effect turns out to be as revolutionary as GNU.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Such practices mutate thousands of unknown mutated genes for every beneficial gene they produce. Nobody ever checked if if 1/10 or 1 percent of the general population was allergic to a protein in a mutated food plant.
You're missing the point on the concern about allergies.
It's not that a new allergen might be created. Nearly ANYTHING can be allergenic - either directly or in complex with something else in the body. New compounds are being "invented" by mutation all the time. Forcing some mutations into a few plants in a lab is not even a drop in the bucket.
The concern is that there are a lot of compounds that are allergenic AND PERVASIVE in certain food plants. When someone becomes allergic to them, essentially the only effective treatment is to avoid them. (As of the last time I checked, desensitization does NOT work on the branch of the immune system that mediates food allergies.)
But these protiens are often useful: Some of them are the biological warfare agents the crop plants use against the parisites they are resistant to. Copying them into other species of crop plants can confer the resistance. Very useful.
But if you copy, say, a corn allergen to wheat, and sell the modified wheat AS wheat, how is someone who is allergic to it supposed to avoid it. Look at the label: It says "wheat". No corn ingredients (not even the dozen or so that don't sound like corn but are). Ought to be safe, right?
And with engineered wheat containing this corn allergen (and probably several others) immune to a range of pests (so no expensive pesticides are needed to keep its yeilds up), it will soon displace the non-engineered corn from commercial farming. So people with corn allergies won't be able to eat wheat, either.
Heck, how can they even FIGURE OUT that it's a CORN allergy? Scratch tests don't work. You need to do an elimination diet. Where do they start? Just meat? (What if the cattle were corn-fed? Many plant protiens appear in the meat in enough concentration to affect the taste and smell, which is no more sensitive than the immune system.)
Repeat with transferring wheat allergens into corn. Then play three-way musical genes with potatoes. Then add more plants to the mix.
Eventually, if you're allergic to ANY crop plant you're allergic to ALL crop plants. Then what do you eat?
Or are you trying to breed out people who get food allergies? (I suppose that's one way to reduce the population to the handfull that could be fed without the use of pesticides, fertilizers, OR gene-engineered crops.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
GM products DO have a few down sides, some of which you mentioned.
They do tend to incourage monoculture farming. However this is nothing new. Farmers have been trying to monoculture for the last 10,ooo years. In the last 50-100 years they have gotten to the point of true monocultures. But just like any other plant they will only thrive in the enviroment they were designed for (by nature or man). If farmers see that they are not doing as well with GM crops THEY WILL STOP USING THEM.
GM foods can be health hazards. Especially if you mix organisms that tend to trigger alergic reactions like peanuts. It could be dangerous for people with sever allergies to buy carrots (or any other food) because it has peanut products in it. While this danger is real it is also avoidable. Just like so many prepared foods already have warning labels for food alergies, GM food will probably need labels.
But here are a few errors in you assumptions:
GM products do not necessarily need to "escape." It is very VERY easy to make organisms unable to breed with wild strains. The easiest is to only distribute sterile seeds when they are not being planted in a controlled environment (ie an open field rather than a greenhouse). However the downside to this is that farmers are then FORCED to buy new seeds every year. Now while farmers ALREADY tend to buy most or all of their seeds every year, this forced addiction may be unacceptable.
Probably the best way is to make the GM food unable to mate with wild strains. For insance, plant sperm needs to recognize and attach to plant ova. With out this attachment no fertilization can occcur. Fo the mdification is simple. Replace the two genes necessary for this matching with simlar genes from say a grasshopper....Now the GM plants absolutly cannnot coss with the wild strains and mating with grasshoppers won't be viable (:-))
But your BIGGEST oversight is the assumption that nature does it best.
It has been proven that nature is random. Genes are randomly distributed in each generation. Ever now and then a new gene or combination of genes are created that fundamentally changes the way the organism interacts with its environment...it forms a new species.
Just like introducing bull frogs to australia, this new species will wreak havok on the environment until a new balance is found. This is NO different that what would happen if GM plants got out.
Finally, there is a great deal of evidence that genes ARE transfered between completly unrelated species. This is done through bacteria or cross species virus's. A bacteria or virus picks up DNA from it's first host and the 2nd host incorproates it. Now fish DNA IS in soybean DNA. There is a great deal of evidence that suggests that a similar process triggered our evolution from other primates.
While GM food could be dangerous, it is no more dangerous than any other product we create. While removing a gene can cause changes to an organism, they will have to be very minor changes for a the reserachers not to see them. So long as proper percautions are taken...testing the food produced, checking the plants with varius others in a simulated wild situation etc...GM food can be very safe and a boon to society in general.
This post is modded "Score:2, Insightful" !?!?!? If it doesnt change very fast, I don't like Slashdot anymore :(
Do you blame the Global Warming on Ford? Nobody does. Did he play a key role in it? Well, noone can deny that (thought some might argue about it for long if they bothered).
What is dangerous is greed and foolishness. Like Monsanto rushing out to use a largely uncontrolled new technology on a cornerstone of life on Earth to make money for their share holders. And the people who keep whining about the 'ignorant Europeans' and 'eco-freaks' who are just 'paranoid' and claims that such a brilliant invention should just right away replace what put Homo sapiens here in the first place. (It gets disgusting when some claim that they are merely making the money to save the starving African children though.)
We can also argue for a long time if Microsoft and/or Monsanto are 'evil' in the real meaning of the word. But most will agree that developing Open Source software and now GPL GM crops is a very interesting idea at least.
But thank you for reminding me there are people like you out there - if I knew the word for what you are and used it, I'd propably get modded down to -10 for rudeness.
GM crops have tremendous potential in regions such as Africa
Let's not fall for the myth that there is a world food shortage. Crisis, yes; shortage, no. There's actually plenty of food to feed everyone and more, the problem is in distribution and the international markets (note for example, that even at the height of the famine in 1984, Ethiopia was still a net agricultural exporter; 'course you can't feed your population on coffee beans). You're absolutely right that Western governments have rigged the market in favour of their own agribusinesses, but why would you think that the introduction of GM would do anything but make that situation worse? GM is all about locking in control of the food chain, from the field upwards.
It's bad enough that third world countries have to concentrate on growing cash crops for foreigners rather than food for their own people, in order to service their foreign debts. Now you expect them to be additionally burdened with the licence restrictions ("taxes" might be another word) associated with GM. How exactly does it benefit an African farmer if she now has to pay an annual licence fee in order to be allowed to plant the seed she saved from the crop she grew last year?
(Not that I disagree that the EU's agricultural policy is anything other than scandalous. The Common Agricultural Policy is an anachronism from the post-war period that should have been fixed thirty years ago. I would hardly call it "sentimental" ).
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
is nowhere nearly as efficient as helping none of us.
Laws are for people with no friends.
The farmer I mentioned went bankrupt because he had no way of identifying, or removing, the GM strain of crop from his field.
Note that there is a very simple way for Monsanto to identify whether (in this case) there are Roundup-Ready (in this case) crops present - they simply fly over and spray the field with roundup. If the crops die, then the farmer is innocent. If the crops don't die, then the farmer gets sued. Much like the medieval method for identifying witches.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush