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.
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.
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.
In reality, Monsanto is about 0.2 % of global food business.
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.
Fortunately, we don't need those seeds. They can try to patent and sue all they want; the people 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..
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
However, i've used plastic sheeting in my garden to keep the soil warm and incidentally block light from weeds.
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.
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.
Monsanto is deeply involved in the learning side of academia as well.
Sadly, they didn't reply.