8个月前

imagine

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They're not sterile, but they will sue you if they find you've been growing seeds from last year's crops.
- Or if your neighbours crops have germinated in your lands
  
  I don't think they've successfully sued anyone for that. The few cases I saw last time I looked people were intentionally germinating or saving/selling seeds.
- or if/when your neighbors pollen blows onto your crops and you grow from those seeds, and then they sue you for being a pirate of their IP
- Why invent technology to control people when you can just use the law?
- No they won't.
  They will sue you if you take your neighbors pesticide resistant seeds, sow them, douse them in pesticide so only the resistant ones survive, and sow your entire field with them.
  
  Yes, they will.
  You're taking the approach of an independent farmer that didn't sign a contract with Monsanto. What you said mostly aligns with that scenario.
  For the farmer that did sign a contract with Monsanto, that is a standard and required clause, and they do enforce it.
  
  Classic piracy. The original product is still there; you're just making a copy.
  
  You should be allowed to do that.

Finally. FINALLY. My ulcer grows every time I hear someone quote that list of evil things Monsanto does. Even though yes, they are evil.
- Yea, they're evil enough with the pesticides, and the hostile takeover of farms. We don't need to make the genetic engineering they're doing, which is actually good work, to also be thrown under the bus
  
  I would agree if they didn't use their non-sterile plants to take over small farms around their huge ones by suing for theft when farmers used part of the previous crop that had been pollinated with the Monsanto GM pollen. They didn't buy that genome so it was stolen... Fucking wankers.
- Monsanto doesn't even exist anymore. It was bought out by the totally not evil company Bayer a while back.
  Of course Bayer has suffered quite a bit of indigestion over gobling up that morsel over the years.
  
  the totally not evil company Bayer
  Ah, yes, the totally not evil company that (together with BASF and Hoechst, forming the cartel IG Farben) developed chlorine gas for use in world war I.
  The same IG Farben which was the single largest donor to Hitler's election campaign, and main contributor to the construction of Auschwitz, where they produced synthetic petrol and rubber for use in the war and performed all manner of human experiments, including testing their own Zyklon B gas.
  The same company that decades after the war was still chaired by well known nazis, and profiting from chemicals developed at Auschwitz.
  Yeah, I'm sure Monsanto is in good hands, and feels right at home there.

The moratorium is actually since 2000, but only since 2006 in its current form. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology
Thankfully, no country, much less any multinational corporation, would ever dare cross the UN's nonbinding, unenforceable moratorium. Can you imagine how stern the tone of the statement of condemnation would be, once it was worded such that a reasonable plurality of countries would agree to back it?
- I’m sure it’s already been done. Just locked away until nothing more than strong concerns can be voiced by ineffective authorities.
- There would totally be an open letter and dozens of people would sign it

GMO skepticism or not, Monsanto is one of the most evil companies in the world and a perfect example of what makes the profit motive such an inefficient organizer of production and distribution

Also, most farmers use hybrid crops, which you already can't save, because they're hybrids. (You can save them, but they're not going to produce the same plants you get them from).
- Whether a plant species is hybridized has little effect on whether it grows true from seed or only via cuttings.
  Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
  
  Apples are a prime example.
  
  Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
  How do they reproduce?
  
  I don't think you quite understand what a hybrid for annual crops is. Hybrids in trees are fundamentally different. Same word different meaning.

Does anyone else feel like this entire post and most of the comments are coming straight from a Monsanto bot/shill factory?
- You've never been on reddit? If someone mentions Monsanto anywhere, the thread gets flooded with shills. There are whole subreddits devoted to finding posts to shill.
- That's what I love about small social media outlets like Lemmy. The big corporations just don't bother monitoring and influencing us, it's not worth it. We can speak freely here. You can just tell me your real name and where you live, without fear of someone abducting your family.

Isn't one argument against GMO that they could spread and outcompete other crops? In that case a terminator gene would even be a good thing?
- That's exactly why the original terminator gene was a joint USDA-ARS /delta-pine effort. The USDA-ARS was looking for ways to prevent GMO species from escaping and causing issues.
  You know the shit that actually happened. For example -
  Creeping Bentgrass
  https://www.opb.org/news/article/gmo-grass-oregon-creeping-bent-scotts-monsanto/
  Wheat -
  https://www.nature.com/articles/499262a
  Corn/teosinte
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880918301075
  
  This sounds like the back of a Crichton novel, and I want to read it

Yeah, except the vast majority of seeds are infertile, meaning they can't be replanted, means the "good ol boys" can't survive.
- Where the fuck do people come up with this shit?
  No the "vast majority" of crops are not infertile. They are hybrids. Farmers buy the seeds because of a genetic phenomenon called heterosis AKA hybrid vigor. It takes expertise and a shit ton of money to make hybrid seed. If growers could get the same performance from saving their own seeds only an absolute dumbfuck would buy seeds from a seed company.
  Now there are a few species that hybrids can only be made by taking advantage of mutants that have male sterility genes. The resulting hybrids are still fertile (produce viable female gametes) but need an outside source of pollen. Examples: onions, sunflowers and carrots.
  The only "sterile" seed sold is seedless watermelon aka triploid seed. Seedless watermelons are only sold because the market demands it thanks to a push by the USDA after being created in Japan pre-WW2. The margins on seedless watermelon seed are often 40-50% less than hybrid diploid seed. And don't get me started on the research cost - 14-15 generations for a new female line versus 7-8 for seeded types.
  
  Most hybrids do not produce fertile seeds. You can test it out if you want but it doesn't work. I used to work for a seed company. Beyond that, without fertilizer the soil itself is dead in the vast majority of farming land.

I'm the guy on the left just because until for-profit corporations are reigned in I don't trust them with control of anything.
- also the 30 bagged lunches...
  
  What kind of monster steals 30 kids' lunches?

They make more money suing farmers for accidentally growing patented crops from natural seed dispersal mechanisms.
- They make their money from royalty payments for GMO traits. It's up to 3x more profit than they get off the seed alone.
- No they don't. There's never been any legal action taken for accidentally growing GM crops.
  
  Google is free
  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/18/171896311/farmers-fight-with-monsanto-reaches-the-supreme-court
  
  I know that you feel that you are correct because by the strict definition of the word suing, there may never have been a lawsuit, but most laymen are going to understand suing to also include being threatened with a lawsuit and settling out of court.

This hard, sugarless, unripe tomato sure is red though
- At this point, I barely even buy tomatoes to put into food anymore. If mom's been growing them in her greenhouse any given year, I'll eat a few off the vine. The stuff in stores? Ehh, it barely has flavour.

Source that research was banned since the 90s? All I'm aware of is that they aren't available commercially and sale and field testing of terminator seeds has been banned since the 00s.
- Yeah they weren't banned in the 90s. They were developed in the mid 90s with a patent filed in 1998. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a moratorium in 2000, recommending that governments block field testing and commercial use of terminator seeds, but didn't yet ban research. In 2006 they expanded the moratorium, explicitly prohibiting field trials and emphasizing risks to biodiversity and farmers rights.

Whatever the case, fuck Monsanto; free the seed.
https://osseeds.org/

Don't we already have enough real shit to worry about tho?

You know that Lemmy has made it when the Monsanto shills from Reddit join.

What about seedless watermelon
- That's treated with a chemical to keep it from making seeds.
  
  Not even close.
  Seedless watermelons are a triploid. These are hybrid between a tetraploid female and a diplod male. The plant has three copies of every chromosome and is unable to produce fertile gametes aka completely sterile.
  Fruit formation is triggered by fertile diploid pollen (planted in the field In a 4:1 ratio). The fruit then continues to grow without embryo formation in the fruit seeds (pips).
  
  So, the same applies to seedless grapes?
  
  Seriously? I assumed sterile hybrid

Companies DO irradiate non organic ginger though, sterilizing it, before shipping it to stores.

Unfortunately terminator seeds very much are a thing North America.
https://cases.open.ubc.ca/monsanto-and-terminator-seeds/
- Fortunately what you linked says nothing of the sort. You are in this meme
- I'm not a native English speaker but that sounds like it's talking about the potential harms of such terminator seeds and not saying they're in the market as of now.
- That entire page says "this would be a bad thing to exist". But it doesn't. There are no commercial terminator seeds.
  
  Well, it says “this would be a bad thing to sell,” my read is that it exists and Monsanto owns the IP.

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