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Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

Monsanto have been very, very good at controlling the discussion regarding the negative impact their products have had on the world - they're very well known for the investment made in astro-turfing various and sundry places that Monsantos' crimes are discussed.

I think that, besides the obvious corruption that these court documents reveal, another conversation has to be had about how disingenuous Monsanto and its agents have been in discussing these things - using classic deflection, obfuscation techniques online.

The "Monsanto Field Manual for Internet Representatives" would be a very interesting leak indeed ..

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This is an interesting comment on HN, where the most vociferous defenders of Monsanto are high-karma accounts rather than sockpuppet greenbeans. Are you saying they've been influenced by such techniques in other fora?

I would say so. In a world in which being against corporations is increasingly seen as "passé", defending Monsanto is just the edgiest possible position for someone looking to have the hottest take.

I'm very pro-GMO, but time and time again I see pro-GMO people taunt and belittle anti-GMO people as mean-spirited tinfoil hatters who have zero reason to doubt Monsanto. It's very "Team Red" vs. "Team Blue", and unproductive.

The pro/anti GMO has too little science in the debate imho. I take the Nye position: from a "people starving" vs "GMO boosted yields" perspective, I take GMOs. On "Monsanto, etc make too much money", I realize that creating new strains is hard and expensive.

But. That's not to say I'll defend all their practices (like this one) or will not admit the anti-GMO crowd has some very valid points.

My favorite and most effective pro-GMO take is to talk to people about how cheese is made. Many anti-GMO people are concerned with animal welfare and love cheese, and it's important to make them realize that it's thanks to GMO that you can have cheese without slaughtering a calf.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/you-can-thank-genetic-engineering-fo...

Interesting, I am/was of the understanding that there are also vegetarian rennet's made by extracting enzymes from certain plants; fig, thistle, etc. The place where I buy my cheese making supplies (well, would buy if the first attempt hadn't been such a disaster) has both calf and "vegetarian" rennet available for the home cheese maker.

"Vegetarian cheese". That's cute.

Sure, baby cows aren't being (literally) gutted for the lining of their stomachs, but that's hardly the extent of the misery we inflict upon dairy animals.

EDIT: not directed at you. Just entertained at the semantic hoops people will set up and then jump through.

Sorry dude, don't see the connection.

I am a predator. Predators kill prey animals, including (and sometimes especially) the babies. Cheese is delicious. Im anti-GMO and have been killing animals for food since I was 3.

GMO and monsanto practices are health issues. The pesticides are a problem in terms of chemical pollution.

As for gene editing, it's a question of polluting the gene pool of a life system. Releasing Gene-mod into a complex dynamic self-regulating self-propagating system is like modifying diseases them and releasing them into human society. It may not be a problem, but we can't know if it will be a problem till it's done, and once it's done, it's done. You can't remove or erase your mistakes.

We cant know what any particular gene-mod will do in the wild, if it will be harmful or not, but we do know that monsanto and their cronies at the FDA and EPA don't give a flying fuck about systemic consequences of new technologies.

We do know that the technology is potentially catastrophic, and there are a lot of disincentives to be responsible baked into the system of those holding the keys to this tech.

> As for gene editing, it's a question of polluting the gene pool of a life system.

You mean like life had been doing since its inception?

You can gripe about the speed and power with which we're performing genetic modification (and things like gene drives are powerful), but I can't agree with the "It's something that's never been done before!" angle.

We're just doing so intelligently. With incomplete knowledge, but a hell of a lot more intelligently than random mutation.

Permaculture is a much more wholesome solution. GMOs become a side detail, and even unimportant. Traditional farming is highly inefficient, even with machinery

> Of course if you take two fields and plant each with a monocrop, then the one without pesticides will do worse than the one with, but that isn’t really what organic farming is.

> It is true that the old, control-based methods of agriculture are nearing the peak of their productive potential. Further investments in this kind of technology are bringing diminishing marginal returns – witness the proliferation of Roundup-resistant weeds and the “necessity” of new kinds of herbicides to deal with them.

http://charleseisenstein.net/permaculture-and-the-myth-of-sc...

There's a relevant quote in-between the two you cited. (And noting that the author is obviously a proponent of permaculture farming, rather than a less biased investigator)

> Conventional agriculture doesn’t seek to maximize yield per acre; it seeks to maximize yield per unit of labor. If we had 10% of the population engaged in agriculture rather than the current 1%, we could easily feed the country without petrochemicals or pesticides.

Interestingly, it may be that with coming automation we may be better served by reallocating 9% of our population back to agriculture...

Also, in a similar vein to permaculture, I found this article fascinating if you haven't come across it yet. https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...

Thanks for your reply :) I'm enjoying that article so far. Very good quote and point about automation. There's a forum called permies [1] where I've seen posts about such permaculture automation :D

[1] https://permies.com/

But people starving is not a crop efficiency problem. It's a political problem, every time. There's absolutely no reason to defend GMOs on the basis of feeding the starving: it's rather disingenuous.

Do you have any citation? Ceterus paribus, increasing energy:food conversion rate leads to more food.

Imho, arguing that politics are resulting in people starving is a bit like saying that gravity is too strong.

> But people starving is not a crop efficiency problem. It's a political problem, every time.

Yes, one example of that political problem would be food prices being driven up by creating political barriers to more resource efficient crop technologies.

Got some examples of high-karma, pro-Monsanto accounts?

You don't have to be a sock-puppet to gain karma, nor have high-karma to be qualified as a sock-puppet, but you certainly can be, karma regardless..

(Plus, there's an easy solution to your supposition: Monsanto pays its people to establish reputation that can be utilised to forward Monsanto's positions...)

Seriously though, who are you referring to? I'd be quite interested to know who the potential Monsanto sock-puppets are on HN.

I've historically defended glyphosate as a miracle herbicide on HN.

At the end of the day, Monsanto is just a red herring. Besides just not being that significant - money-wise - in the food industry, glyphosate and the first generation glyphosate-resistant soybeans are no longer under patent. You can buy non-Roundup glyphosate and non-Roundup soybeans that do the same thing for a fraction of the price.

But the point is to not buy or use them at all.

What should we use instead for the times when a weed killer is necessary?

in japan, they put plastic bags on fruit on the vine/branch, but in the US that would require far more exploited immigrants, so that's not perfect either.

How does a plastic bag on fruit help kill weeds that are a completely separate plant?

The crops you want grow trough holes in the plastic lining, the weeds don't get a chance to see the light since they're under the "bag".

sorry, it's an alternative to pesticides, not herbicides. I was confused.

However, i've used plastic sheeting in my garden to keep the soil warm and incidentally block light from weeds.

There are plenty of agricultural techniques that work better than the current system.

The current system has low productivity per acre. It is very input intensive, inefficient, and is subject to volatile price swings. It's only advantage is that it's highly mechanized, so you get economy of scale with high output per worker and per asset, but that mechanization in it's current form is a system that destroys arability(soil health) over time. So your returns over time degrade, but input costs are on a 40 year uptrend... It's a broken system.

There are food systems that are more labor intensive (less return per human and per asset) but you can produce more food more predictably at lower margins for the producers and higher prices for consumers, but the with more stable input and end-user costs. The three added (and in my opinion most important) side-effects of this system are higher quality food, more jobs, and IMPROVED fertility over time. These new systems use science as well. They were developed by ecologists, systems theorists, and soil microbiologists.

Credentials: (i'm the first son of a 6th generation land-owning family in the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas.)

It really depends on the weeds and the situation. I've used citrus-based formulas around the house, but you might check out Holistic Management (Allan Savory, 2016) for advice applicable to agriculture.

Do you have a brand name and an MSDS on one of those citrus based formulas? Just because something is natural doesn't mean it is safe.

> Monsanto is just a red herring

Can you clarify this at all?

My primary objection here isn't to glyphosate, which appears to be in the same fuzzy territory as other chemicals (e.g. food additives) which are legal in Europe/America but banned in America/Europe.

The thing I'm deeply upset by is the rather clear evidence that Monsanto worked with the EPA to prevent a planned review and create misleading evidence of safety. Even of glyphosate is 100% safe that's still frightening regulatory capture with ugly implications for other products, and in that Monsanto isn't a red herring.

People are regularly making claims like "Monsanto has near monopoly on global food supply", apparently because activist web sites repeat such claims and people start believing them when they hear them often enough.

In reality, Monsanto is about 0.2 % of global food business.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12648388

Oh, fair enough. I was thinking about this article very specifically, where Monsanto is deeply tied to what looks like clear regulatory capture - a problem even at small scale.

On Monstanto coverage writ large, I completely agree. The amount of excess attention and paranoia paid there is ridiculous, especially on topics where they have clear competitors like Archer Daniels Midland that people haven't even heard of.

> On Monstanto coverage writ large, I completely agree. The amount of excess attention and paranoia paid there is ridiculous, especially on topics where they have clear competitors like Archer Daniels Midland that people haven't even heard of.

ADM is predominantly a food processing company; they don't really compete with Monsanto, which is a seed and chemical company. They are basically dominant players in different stages of the food supply chain. (They both have some diversification so there is probably some competition but neither is a major player in the others main markets.)

In essence:

Monsanto -> Farmer -> ADM -> food packagers

Thanks for the diagram! Now I know what the farmers mean when they say they're getting it from both ends...

Oh yeah, on this particular news story, it's definitely about Monsanto. Any sort of tampering with a regulatory body is a real black mark on them.

When I say "Monsanto is a red herring", I mean that 90% of the time when people vilify Monsanto, they don't actually care about Monsanto. They're playing a shell game, "Monsanto is evil, therefore we should ban all GMO food crops." Hell, they barely care about glyphosate - they just don't like Roundup-Ready crops, because they're GMO.

Realistically, Monsanto is a large (but not one of the largest) corporations, and some people who work there are trying to save the world, and some people who work there are trying to make all the money by any means necessary, and most of the people are somewhere in between, just working at a job. They've definitely done some things wrong, but they're no Uber.

I have to say that you seem to be uninformed about their practices. You do realize the implications of this very article that you are commenting on, right? Monsanto is no uber, is a misomer. Uber IS a Monsanto is a better characterization. Monsanto is obviously a very evil company. Look at this headline! They did the exaxt same thing with rGBH growth hormone.

> People are regularly making claims like "Monsanto has near monopoly on global food supply"

Which is silly, Monsanto doesn't even sell food.

What it does have is market power in the seed market for certain key global crops, and even more in the GM sector (e.g., 80%+ for GM corn, 90%+ for GM soy.)

Monsanto's relationship to food is sort of like 1990s Microsoft's relation to computers.

>What it does have is market power in the seed market for certain key global crops, and even more in the GM sector (e.g., 80%+ for GM corn, 90%+ for GM soy.

Fortunately, we don't need those seeds. They can try to patent and sue all they want; the people will prevail.

Though yes, I hope ultimately humanity will prevail -

There are cases where farmers in adjacent plots were sued for using monsanto 'patented' plants without a licence because their crops cross-pollenated with Monsanto ones - further, if I recall correctly, Monsanto was illegally stealing crop samples or using some other form of shady tricks to perform the analysis required to determine the plants contained the 'patented' genes..

Also, much like bacterial resistance in other areas, if the monsanto GMO crops facillitate mutation such that their 'patented' genes are essentially required for a crop to be viable, over the long run, the argument that we 'dont need' the seeds becomes moot..

These lawsuits are a myth. See myth number 2: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...

The closest case I recall is that some seed banks were mixing the Monsanto's seeds with other seeds (in a seed vault) and trying to argue that the resulting seed didn't need a license from Monsanto.

Probably the main case that comes up is the Schmeiser case, where Schmeiser claims that his roundup-ready canola came from cross-pollination from a neighbor's field. Schmeiser's account does include the fact that he specifically tested the canola in question and found it to be resistant to Roundup--and subsequently used that in later crops. The court concluded that he had to know that at least some of his crop had the GMO canola, and that his deliberate use of it in the subsequent year constituted infringement.

> the first generation glyphosate-resistant soybeans are no longer under patent.

Sure, they've been off-patent for two years and been replaced with 2nd generation RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend soybeans, which have additional herbicide resistance and better yield (RoundUp Ready 1 apparently had a pretty significant yield-for-herbicide-resistance trade-off.)

While you can get RoundUp Ready 1 off-patent beans for now (IIRC, there are regulatory issues that will become an issue in a couple years unless someone picks up the burden of doing that now that Monsanto has no commercial incentive to do so), but there's little market in commercial ag for them.

As an old account with reasonably high karma, I would certainly be a sock-puppet for Monsanto if they paid me enough.

Just putting it out there, guys. Reasonable rates for reasonable arguments. Rhetorical trickery will cost just a bit more. I am almost certainly not joking about this.

I've been defending GMOs and Monsanto against the anti-GMO crowd so many times at various places over the Internet, that at some point as a joke, I actually sent a job application for "Junior Monsanto Troll" to the local Monsanto branch. After all, why should I do this for free?

Sadly, they didn't reply.

Thomas Ptacek (tptacek) has been quite impatient and dismissive with me when I've expressed concerns about glyphosate.

I don't know if that exactly makes him a "Monsanto sock-puppet", but I do think he's being too credulous toward the claims that glyphosate has been shown to be safe. The problem, as we see here, is when there's this much money involved, actually unbiased research gets to be very difficult to come by.

I fit that bill, I've posted pro-GMO comments in the past. I have a B.S. in Biochemistry, which has led me to see GMOs more as a tool that can either be used poorly or used well. I swear I'm not a socket puppet! waves hand perfectly at the elbow

But you have a domain bias.

Monsanto is deeply involved in the learning side of academia as well.

Slightly off-topic, but do high-karma users comments automatically filter to the top?

I assumed it was just the specific comment's karma that made it go to the top.

Sort of. It also appears to be based on average comment score.

Controlling the discussion would mean just P/R. This is unethical/bodering on illegal and it should be downright illegal with jail terms for execs when this sort of news comes out.

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