“Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers
worldsensorium.com
worldsensorium.com
The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds.
While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example, almond farmers in California are far far more productive than pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard. If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and pecans could replace almonds for many applications.
Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.
To be clear I understand that hybrids are current best practice. But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture.
BTW would you say that seed producers have no motivation to develop non-hybrids that will perform as well as hybrids?
I disagree, open source ag is completely compatible with hybridization. And if open source couldn't somehow deal with the benefits of hybridization, then open source ag is not a route we should follow.
Farming is a transformation of inputs into food. It's not about seeds and propagating seeds every season... that's just an attachment to a practice like being super attached to, say FTP as the only way to transfer files and deploy a website.
Open Source Ag is completely compatible with maintaining two strains, crossing them, and then distributing those seeds. Having widely distributed access to these seeds, and information about them, gives the chance for more innovation in the crossing, too. The question is whether somebody can get compensated for the efforts in discovery...
Anyone interested here might also wish to read Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". She's a Harvard-trained geneticist and amateur vegetable breeder, with special interest in open-pollinated varieties derived from proprietary F1 hybrids. Her book extensively discusses the underlying biology, the practical breeding process, and the legal situation of such work.
For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and went from there.
One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is doing the same thing, though I think their methods are recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else.
I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect resistant trees over time.
In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.
If that is true it amounts to the same thing you are proposing. Sounds just like making a speed-congenic mouse.
Are they not selecting with markers at all?
Hence a petri dish for pathogen selection. IE, insane and reckless.
There are three problems:
- the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at the stranglehold large corporations have over politics - Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying their employees so much they have to apply for food stamps, and local politicians or unions are unable to do anything against it because Walmart can at any time decide to just close shop and leave an area completely without access to groceries (made possible in the first place because Walmart systematically undercut local stores on pricing). And people (i.e. voters) would not blame Walmart, but local politicians and unions. No one wants to add yet another mega-corporation to depend on for survival.
- second, concentration of genomics. When everyone and their dog sans a couple eco activists and seedbanks raises the same variety of crop or the same breed of farm animal, pandemics have an incredibly easy game. The best warning sign what can happen in such monocultural environments are forests (where bark beetles and other pests run rampant and completely destroy them) or bananas (Gros Michel famously got wiped out by a fungus and Cavendish is at the cliff from another fungus).
- third, the impact of pesticides as a whole. No matter what kind of pesticide, they all have serious side effects - most notably, they cause bees to die and as a result, all plants depending on bees for pollination can't reproduce any more. And ffs it's not just bees. All kinds of insects suffer, just compare your windshield after driving a car in the 90s and today through a rural area. And all these insects were part of the food chain for larger animals... leading to an ever growing loss of biodiversity further up the chain.
> But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.
We don't need to go back that far in time. Like half the food produced is wasted instead of reaching a human's mouth - spoiled, rejected for missing quality benchmarks, never sold because stores require an overabundance of choice for the consumer, wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews... the list of causes for food waste is immense. Cut down on food waste, produce less food in total, and maybe avoid the need for intensive agriculture in the first place.
The solution to concentrated market power is not to abandon the productivity gains, but to use law and regulate to de-concentrate market power. We could instead ban specialization and the productivity it brings, but that's dealing with the wrong thing.
> concentration of genomics
Again, solved not by banning specialization, but rather through diversification of the market. Which also helps the market be less concentrated, and further improves productivity. "Free" markets used to mean those that were unconcentrated and allowed easy entry and competition, but rally bad market-fundamentalism ideology has twisted the meaning, and invited reactionary thinking that "markets in general are bad," which is just as wrong as the market fundamentalist approach of "markets must always be used and always are right." Markets are merely a tool that can be used for good or for bad by societies, and markets are socially constructed by law and tradition, both of which are changeable, as is other parts of society.
> pesticides
This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag tech.
> food waste,
This is a rounding error in comparison to the increase in ag productivity that we have created. Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
Or by restructuring how land is used. When you have miles upon miles of corn fields, it's a fucking buffet for corn pests. In contrast, land that has a great variety of usages - corn, wheat, grass for making hay, marijuana, rice, potatoes, berries, tomatoes - makes it difficult for pests to explosively sweep over entire swaths of land and leaving nothing but total destruction in its wake. Our ancestors knew this and changed sequentially what seeds they sowed, they even let land sit idle for a season or two so it could recuperate nutrients. All of this is extensively documented, a lot of it has actual scientific backing, it just takes a bit more effort so it isn't worth it under capitalism.
Also, California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for the Saudis to feed cows with it. That is a waste of water and land that could both be used for something more productive than blood money from oil returning home. And they're not the only ones doing atrocious wastes of all kind of valuable resources.
> Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
Well... France for example forces supermarkets to provide leftover food instead of trashing it. That led to a massive increase in food that ended up in people's mouths via food banks, over 10.000 tonnes a year in fact[1], additionally it creates a negative incentive against overstocking.
Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes (which might also have side effects to improve public health, aka obesity epidemic).
Stores could be forced to do regular maintenance on their cooler systems to reduce the amount of food lost there.
Students could get education on how to cook, how to check if food is still edible and other food aspects. It's not like their parents are teaching them...
tl;dr: stopping food waste can be tackled on so many levels and, given 50% food waste ratios, even slashing half of that is equal to provide 25% more food to the world's population.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/lebensmittel-verschwe...
You can’t reasonably expect farming families to be able to afford all the specialized equipment to be able to willy-nilly change the crops they grow and large corporations are just going to specialize based on economy of scale.
When all you need is a water buffalo and a shitton of labor you can diversify crops all you want but if you have to compete in a low-margin mechanized market you do whatever it takes to keep the farm going even if that means diversity gets thrown out the window in favor of cash crops.
Dairy is like the auto industry: every state seems to think it needs to have its own protected domestic industry, but it's far from a strategic industry when every nation ends up with excess capacity.
Canada, an excellent environment for dairy production, kneecaps itself in this industry. Could be an export juggernaut, but instead, NZ is the biggest dairy product exporter. 20th dairy producer in the world despite being a top6 barley/oat/wheat/hay producer.
Pricing out poor fat people from restaurants will not solve the obesity epidemic. It will drive them to Doritos.
Not everybody eats restaurant food for entertainment. Sometimes you can't cook and a larger portion means leftovers and usually more calories per dollar.
There's nothing wrong with large portions. If you didn't want that much food, go to a different restaurant, or a buffet where you can select exactly how much food you want.
And what large portions are we talking about anyway? That peaked in the 90s just like your bug splattered windshields.
"In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is produced by deliberately cross-pollinated plants which are genetically diverse"
Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by planting the two varieties in the same field, with one combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of variety B. Then you need to wait until variety A is grown and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn silk. This is usually done by hand, by a bunch of people walking through the field and cutting the stalk between the ears and the tassels.
Once that is done, your variety A ears will be pollinated by variety B pollen, and all of those kernels will be hybrid. But your variety B ears be purebred B, not hybrid, so you now you need to harvest the field while keeping the two sets separate. This step isn't too bad, if you did a good job planting, you just need to first harvest the combine-wide strips of hybrid corn before going back to get the B corn.
But yeah, you're looking at a lot of extra work -- and money, you need contract labor to detassel a field in the narrow window of opportunity -- to produce a hybrid seed for better yields next year, and most farmers don't find it a good use of time, which is why most farmers were buying most of their seed well before seed patents and GMO were a thing.
Why do this? At the time (early 2000s) it was an extremely well-paying, unskilled job at $15/hr!
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-monsantos-roundup-pestic...
> But pure glyphosate isn’t sprayed on crops, Roundup is, which contains a variety of adjuvants and surfactants meant to help the glyphosate penetrate into tissues. And indeed when the study was repeated with what’s actually sprayed on GMO crops, there were toxic and hormonal effects even at doses smaller than the 1 or 2% concentration that’s used out on the fields.
> Roundup was found to be 100 times more toxic than glyphosate itself. Moreover, Roundup turned out to be among the most toxic pesticide they tested.
It's very much like the tobacco lobby playbook. Nicotine may not be that bad for you (unless you're a bug) but you aren't smoking nicotine. You're smoking a broadleaf plant exposed to soil minerals and four kinds of pesticides and antifungal compounds (fungi and human livers are susceptible to many of the same chemicals) which may or may not have prevented fungal volatiles from ending up in your lungs alongside the trace amounts of uranium.
Hybrids give you two different chromosomes, uniformly in your population. You take population AA and aa and get Aa. The next generation you're back to a mix of AA/Aa/aa.
There's no reason -- in the abstract -- you couldn't duplicate your gene and put two copies of it on the same chromosome, one A and one a, so that you can skip the hybridization. But does that work with current technology? I don't know!
Anyway, why exactly is this tradition so important that it would swamp the social benefits from improved plants obtained from GMOs (and such benefits must exist, or else farmers would not use these seeds)? This sounds like reflexive conservatism, wanting an old thing just because it is old, and damning changes just because they are changes.
That hasn't been the predominant practice for the majority of farms for coming up on a century. Cross pollinated hybrid seeds are just way too productive to justify growing your own open pollinated varieties.
That 'trap' didn't arise with GMOs
Generic modification by molecular techniques is just another tool, that does not supercede or override any of the past forms of generic modification by breeding that humans have been doing ever since we were humans.
The de-tasseling is mostly automated these days with a sprayer attachment chopping off the tops and the legions of kids coming behind to get the ones missed.
Then they come along with another specialized attachment to ‘destroy’ the males. Basically just chop them up and leave in the rows which later on gets eaten by the cows. The outside border rows of males gets harvested and turned into winter feed for the cows.
Eventually the remaining corn gets harvested by a crew hired by the seed company because they want the full heads of corn to do their evil deeds to.
Fascinating stuff this modern farming.
Also, if you miss a couple of plants while de-tasseling it can be very bad. You must also sign contracts with your neighbors where they will refrain from planting the same crop (in exchange for $). Additionally, to get the best yield they usually place beehives to enhance pollination.
This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point.
They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*) roundup.
The "objectors are ignorant anti science types" with the subtle mislead renders it an extraordinarily effective talking point.
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/roundup-ingredient-proba...
Citation needed. Roundup has been studied a lot. Very few of those studies find it is carcinogenic - enough that meta analysis finds it is not.
Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.
We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value.
Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs).
Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.
We must have this high leve of productivity before it's even a possibility, but once it's a possibility we can expand its use.
The current economic system is changeable, one ag technology allows us to.
From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.
The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.
Remember, ethanol in gasoline is predominantly about lifting demand for corn in order to court votes from the upper Midwest. We don’t actually need to use corn for fuel.
You can feed pigs on grain and nuts that fell before or after harvest. Ten pigs are pretty big harvesting machine. Birds as well.
Mark Shepard is claiming about twice the yield per acre of conventional farms. He’s doing this by getting less than half a yield of four+ crops on the same land. The trick to being Mark Shepard is putting enough time and energy into your job to understand a dozen crops instead of hyper specializing in two, as if your neighbors aren’t doing the exact some thing.
Now at the end of the day, we still need some staple crops around. That we can stockpile grain for three years and canned food for 18-36 months helps level out boom and bust cycles in agriculture. Good year? Rent warehouse space. Bad year? Let the warehouse lapse, or do invasive maintenance.
This is doubly bad if you're displacing natural grasslands and grassland grazing with this. I.e. plant corn on your previous grasslands and cram the cows into some barn.
This came through HN just recently. Another way to do the same though is to go back to what the big buffalo herds were naturally doing. I.e. let your cows actually "trample and shit on the land" and that's what actually keeps it fertile. Then you harvest the cows for meat while keeping their number stable.
Win - win
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/iceland-welcomes-tourists-t...
Same with many random islands explorers came across: they'd leave some livestock so when they came back later they'd have some dense and fresh food ready to harvest.
Didn't work so well in Australia. And probably any of the islands most likely.
Also, much of Iceland is a desert of lava, glass, and black sand; some other parts are covered with ice. Not many plants can survive in such a landscape, and those which do are usually not trees.
“Deforestation is a major issue that is highly prevalent throughout the world. The country of Iceland has been hit especially hard by this catastrophe. A nation that once had forests covering 40 percent of its countryside began to lose its tree cover, when the Vikings arrived in the 9th century. By the early 20th century, however, this tree cover was reduced to just 0.5 percent. To this day, the government of Iceland is working towards reviving the lost forests and restoring the land, in order to work towards a more sustainable future. This problem relates to the course of Sustainability for the Common Good because it covers the environmental issue of deforestation as well as the solutions that are being put into play to make the land more sustainable”
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a4e20c53ee77427cb587cb7...
Ok, that hardly ever happens.
But instead of planting lots of corn and feeding your barn full of cattle with it you can also own that same piece of land and sustainably make grass fed beef. Said beef would keep your soil fertile by trampling and shitting on it.
In addition to this your vet and meds bills will be lower to non existent because you don't get the same disease issues you get in cramped barn quarters.
The BLM also employs snipers and gunmen to intimidate ranchers who don't pay the grazing fees. Some ranchers respond with impromptu militias.
Sometimes things escalate to the point that goverment agents kill protesters. Sometimes law enforcement officers get assassinated.
But mostly, cattle graze as you suggest and the BLM collects grazing fees.
[0] https://www.blm.gov/programs/natural-resources/rangelands-an...
Lol nearly all your beefs feedlot... You do well to feed the masses, but the countries process of getting there is like it's stuck in 1950s. Lol go watch some of ya broadacre boys and they still monocrop tilling thousands of acres by throwing fertilizer at it. Bumpkin stuff, hardly advanced.
Government and legislative failure. Just protect the seeds by disallowing any protection/patenting, for the public good, that's why we pay taxes.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-pa...
Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output.
And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money.
Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0].
Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.
If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.
They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that.
The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts.
Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a horrible comeback when the original comment’s “evidence” is as a YouTube video.
Not all programmers understand how their instructions influence the circuits that execute them. That does not validate statements like "programmers don't understand electronics."
A programming analogy: Anyone can write an hello world program in Python after a 10 minute tutorial, but delivering software that you can make a living from is much harder.
I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.
Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming.
It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too.
Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.
That's wildly inaccurate
Now, how about reversing that? Think of a GPL-like licensed plant that makes all derived plants also inheriting that license. Legally poisoning the binary distribution format DNA of all inferred works. Wait a few decades and, with a little bit of evolutionary luck, wake up in a Stallman garden.
I'm just a naive dude with no clue about genetics or even law. Just a thought that came to my mind :^)
I'm not attacking you here, but the logic decided by the courts may be lawful but it is not moral (in my opinion). It's as if a noisy neighbour hosts a late night party and you happen to enjoy the music. The neighbour notices and decides to charge you for the streaming fee.
I could make up some convoluted argument but… the neighbor conducted the first sale so this should have extinguished any further patent claim. Of course, IANAL.
>A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.
In this, letting the plant reproduce arguably falls under "making" (ie. manufacture) of the patented thing (the genetically modified plant).
That's one of the stupidest things I've read on this website.
Perhaps you could explain why the decision was incorrect? Or why justice demanded differently?
Edit for those whose rebuttal is all too predictable: I know this affects the incentive structure for developing new science. But I don't think it's at all clear that the current incentives are actually a good thing in the long run. Alternatives for income could be one of the following: providing a service, producing and selling the seeds, working with local farmers to help them maximise yield from the seeds you developed, securing donations from those who stand to benefit from your research... etc.
Imagine where these precedents lead when inevitably we start genetically engineering people. If you yourself carry genes engineered by a biotech firm (cancer resistance or laser eye beams, you can pick according to whim), do you have to pay them royalties when you have children?
If you have a different idea for solving this particular financial problem, I expect quite a lot of people would love to hear about it.
We should not allow patenting of genomes/genes. Full stop. We should rely on those other systems of breeder's rights.
The insistence on IP law being the only probable, legitimate incentive is what's spurious.
A lot of this shit just happens by accident. LSD, Viagra, Penicillin off the top of my head. All had huge impacts too.
It's everything post, and a bunch of overpaid jackoffs and hullabaloo. You're not going to take an RC with an open license to market because there's a billion dollars in intermediary steps between finding it and proving it's safe and effective.
I don't think it's fair to call it economics when all the costs are derived from legal fictions and stakeholder disinterest.
Snake oil, anyone?
As to working the baseline efficacy benchmark is 30%. Not really a stunning number considering it has already been selected as a remedy for something specific at that point. Curatives aren't marketable when profit motive of stakeholders is involved.
Big pharma peddles snake oil, too, by the way. Serotonin theory is becoming increasingly unpopular and SSRIs are looking increasingly dangerous as a clinical proposition, and they're frequently misused in clinical settings. Despite all of that they're taken by 13% of Americans, and the trend points towards an increasing number. Lest we forget: the pretension of safety Pharma acts under has been dangerous in many instances.
There's plenty of ethnogenic compounds that smack against your theory, too, by the way. In any case, to my knowledge, most of these "drugs" are derivative from known-active compounds, altered then patented (sometimes finding better therapeutic doses, lower toxicity, better dose response). At this point the laborious search is relatively smaller. Not to mention it's currently being offset to molecular dynamics which allows us to engineer hypothetical molecules against simulated proteins including those that are dysfunctional as well as model pathways for synthesis.
AZ Molecular Dynamics: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGS_mv1-94
Doubly so when you consider that the patent holding company (like Monsanto) has a lot of ability to affect legislation and the (presumably) independent farmer has next to none. The issues here are systemic and not limited to big ag.
Consider the case where the gene edited crops actually implemented a dependency on roundup, and the neighboring farms were forced to use round up rather than did so because it was simply more useful.
The claim that Monsanto sues people for accidentally or unwillingly having their patented seeds sown is simply false, full stop.
It's perfectly reasonable to oppose all patents. Just don't pretend the wind, sun, and dirt somehow invalidate seed patents. There's no distinction to draw.
U take tuber u put it in ground it grows more tubers u try to sell BOOM illegal son .
0
Am surprised even need to explain on this forum of coders. Many examples of bad boy software patents.
Here is the patent for the FC5 potato.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6940004B2/en
Read it carefully because while the patent claims that it also would apply if transgenic modifications are added, the variety was developed through just classic breeding techniques, which are described in the patent in case you aren’t familiar.
If everyone who bred a potato patented it, we all suffer as breeders would be limited in what they can work with.
It seems perfectly reasonable to most people that even if you own a patent on a seed that if I obtain it and can grow it I should be able to, in the way that your rights are generally exhausted if you sell a patented part to retail.
Monsanto would lose nothing in case where it was accidental and where the farmer intended it Monsanto would benefit from selling roundup.
Because of this, no plausible damages to Monsanto and that doing nothing is a perfect solution, the lawsuits seem egregious.
If you want to do whatever you want with your field, don't enter into contractual agreements where you agree to follow certain rules.
The farmer had not entered into any contract with anyone, that is the point. It's not his fault if pollen from his neighbor's field entered his field, even if they contained "patented" technology.
You don’t need a license to use patented technology which you either bought from a third party, was given or has blown onto your land by the wind.
You can shrug and say "Oh, it was clearly an accident, Monsanto is evil". And Monsanto is certainly evil. It's just reasonably clear why the judge would view this behavior as deliberate and knowing infringement of a patent.
"I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want on my field as long as I don't use pesticides or processing that has been banned by law"
And then someone responded to this by saying that someone signed a contract.
And then you responded by going off about something that is refuted by the original statement.
So, you need to agree that the original response about a contract was wrong, and also that your new statement is irrelevant.
For example, you should not deliberately cultivate a patented plant for which you lack a license from your neighbor's plot of land and then treat it in a way that only makes sense if you're doing that. That will incur liability when a judge notices you are trying to dodge licensing. To put it another way, using processing banned under law.
I don't understand the distinction you're making. "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them. Do you mean that it's illegal to buy Roundup if you haven't already bought the seeds that go with it, or something?
Edit: I think maybe you're saying that Monsanto has patented the very act of applying Roundup to a Roundup-Ready crop. So not only are the seeds and pesticides patented, but the method of applying one to the other is patented. If that's the case, that's a dumb patent that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
The lawsuit alleged that the farmer's behavior was so stupid that he must have known his crop was Roundup-Ready.
That's not consistent with accidental pollination. It suggests that he deliberately cultivated or obtained seeds that were Roundup-Ready and that he knew his crop would survive the pesticide. Bulk-spraying Roundup establishes awareness and intent.
The farmer was unable to provide a convincing explanation for why he would attempt to poison his entire crop, year after year, so the court concluded he was engaged in deliberate patent evasion.
So now he has a crop that consists of hybrids. These hybrids are all different; each plant is a different mixture of <farmer's variety> with Roundup-Ready. Some of those plants will have resistance to glyphosate. Then he sprays with Roundup; the resistant plants survive, the rest die. Now he has a harvest of seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, but in all other respects are a mixture. These seeds are not the ones sold by Bayer/Monsanto.
So is it the strain that is patented, or the gene?
If it's the strain that gets the patent, then the farmer-next-door isn't growing your patented strain, so he's in the clear. So it must be the gene, right?
If it's the gene, then it seems unreasonable to yell "patent violation" if you're spreading patented pollen over the entire midwest. You must either sell seeds that don't make (viable) pollen, or you have to accept that the farmer had his crop involuntarily infected with your IP because of your negligence.
I thought the GMO manufacturers bred sterility into their strains for just that reason.
Meanwhile, the farmer-next-door now has a grain-store full of resistant hybrid seeds, that won't (on the whole) fare as well as Roundup-Ready, because they're all different strains. That is, having the resistant gene isn't the whole story; you need a strain that is resistant AND grows well AND is consistent. That means an F1 hybrid, and you don't get that by just crossing strains; you have to get into selecting and cloning the favourable strain, growing that strain into a crop, and letting it cross with its (identical) siblings to make true-bred seeds.
Have I missed something?
You can argue that patents of all sorts are invalid and shouldn't be granted. That's a totally coherent argument and not one you'll get a lot of pushback about on HN. I don't agree, but I don't, like, viscerally disagree.
The problem is we have a lot of weird special pleading arguments about this particular patent. The most popular argument, which I think we've done a pretty good job debunking here, is that Monsanto will sue you for unwittingly cultivating their seeds, as if they'll just sort of pop out of the woodwork saying "gotcha! you didn't realize it but you owe us one million dollars!". That never happens. You got in trouble with Monsanto if you quite wittingly applied their patented system, full stop.
Similarly, it's kind of a weird special pleading argument to say that a Monsanto seed can blow onto your property, and then, like, it's just something growing in the ground, man, you can't outlaw a plant, and two or three growth cycles later you somehow have a Roundup Ready seed that is unencumbered by patents. A good rule of thumb is that if you've filled in the "???" in the Underpants Gnome construction --- here: "1. seeds blow onto field, 2. ???, 3. profit", something has gone wrong with your logic. The direct conclusion of your logic is that these farmers could in fact go into business competing with Monsanto selling GM crops. Obviously: no.
Roundup is a herbicide. It kills normal plants. Monsanto sells seeds that were genetically modified to resist it. It doesn't make any sense to spray it on natural plants.
If roundup ready crops end up in your fields accidentally and then you don’t spray roundup you don’t run afoul of litigation.
Monsanto should have paid the farmer for polluting the farmer's field ALONG WITH being required to remove all Monsanto-owned plants. And if that means roundup-ing the whole field, paying for all damages treble, and then removing the living plants, so be it.
The use of Roundup is another travesty.
I get what you're saying from that perspective. It's just BS.
Patented seeds are not something you would have come up with yourself. This is pure envy creating a sense of entitlement.
You are thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise.... He is often heralded by anti-GMO activists as an example of the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto, but the fact of the matter is that the "cross contamination" is a myth. He deliberately took cultivars from his neighbour's plot and analysis showed that they comprised a significant portion of his crops, which wouldn't be possible by cross-pollination alone.
Should seeds be patented? Are Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta, and agrochemicals companies evil? These are all worth discussing (the answer to the second question is yes), but that particular myth is not.
You mean stole? Where do you see this in the link you provided?
That's what I read in the article.
> As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[4] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola.
Used their technology, yes, barely. Stole it? Well, the courts unequivocally didn't feel like he damaged (deprived?) Monsanto of anything.
Patents should generally not exist. Software patents should absolutely never exist. The fact that companies game patents so we still have insulin under patent 100 years after its invention by doing minor changes is not just a bad actor, it's a bad system.
GM crops are particularly egregious because seeds don't stay in a field. You can infringe a patent because some animal decided to eat a plant and then relieve itself on your field.
There's another angle though: not only are seed subscriptions (let's face it, that's what this is) just another way to extract the last few dollars from farmers, it's downright anticompetitive. You think the farms Big Ag are operating are paying those fees? Of course not.
1. Licensing works on the commercial seeds because they are patented, and thus the company that makes those seeds can dictate license terms on the farmers. As far as I can tell, these open seeds are not patented and thus their creators can't really impose license terms on the buyers unless they sign a contract before sale. That would be treated solely under contract law, not patent/copyright law.
2. Apparently these seeds use some sort of shrink-wrap license agreement as quoted below, which attempts to form the contract agreement mentioned in #1.
"The license is printed on every OSS seed package in Europe. Whoever opens an OSS package agrees to never patent these seeds or future breeding of them."
Considering the general dislike for/legal questionably behind shrink-wrap agreements, this sounds like a very poor way to enforce the OSS license. Also it is uncertain how valid this agreement is unless the seeds are patented (in that case the buyer's OSS rights can be granted via patent license terms).
I thought the same thing, reading the article.
A much more effective way, IMO, would be to establish a trust or foundation with the desired openness characteristics (eg FRAND) defined in its charter, and then have participants assign IP rights to the organization in some contract.
Or, as I said in my other reponse, just end the patent system.
> "Legally, Open Source Seeds (OSS) in Europe works slightly differently because of EU seed protection laws. While in the US the OSSI pledge would be hard to enforce if challenged in court, Johannes Kotschi, the founder of OSS Germany, went with an open source licensing model. The license is printed on every OSS seed package in Europe. Whoever opens an OSS package agrees to never patent these seeds or future breeding of them. OSS cooperates with bakeries such as Le Brot in Cologne that offer bread baked with OSS wheat and rye, not least to raise awareness."
I don't know enough to be able to address your question directly, but it's worth nothing that at least in the U.S. IP protections for plant breeding and propagation are often highly specialized, both in terms of how patents operate as well as extending to non-patent regimes. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Variety_Protection_Act_o... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930
Hybrid seeds are also different than open-pollinated in that the children do not grow true to parent. Even if we removed the patents, they wouldn’t be valuable without a way to create them again (using two specific parents).
2) Your second point is more applicable. Who is going to grow these seeds? People underestimate how much agriculture is devoted solely to seed crops.
Can you explain this further? I never thought about where seeds come from. Are there giant Bayer-owned fields devoted to growing seeds?
Interesting assumption. As a corn farmer, I've never seen anyone growing seed corn in person. It was certainly not a job I had when I was a kid of such an age. Obviously someone does out there, but you may be overestimating just how prevalent it is.
I have tried and liked Dazzling Blue Kale and Gildenstern Lettuce. I'm trying out some other OSSI lettuce varieties this year, of which there are many.
The owner, the Frank Morton who was mentioned in article, is the original breeder of both Gildenstern and Dazzling Blue (and they probably grew the seed being sold by Fedco). All the varieties he bread (of which there are many) are released as OSSI varieties, plus they sell other OSSI varieties as well.
"Open Source Air molecules Loosen Big Air's Grip on World's Breathing Population"
Abusing intellectual property concepts to effectively feudalise society is not a good design. "Big Ag" has been granted a license to operate. This license could be taken away.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-wate...
> You have the freedom to use these OSSI-Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.
[1]: https://osseeds.org/ [2]: https://osseeds.org/ossi-faqs/
Those who wanted to contribute to welfare wouldn't have tried to patent it. Like those in the above link for example. They contribute to welfare, not the scum like Monsanto and Co.
Was the "inability of the produced seeds to be sowed again and turn into a crop" intentionally baked into the seeds sold by these companies, purely for profits?
Or was there a genuine biological / physical limiting factor? E.g. crop will be more susceptible to pests?
No, it's purely a contractual limitation. Farmers need to sign the rights away and performing experiments with seeds blown on your land is considered a breech of contact law (i.e. you don't even need to purchase the seeds to violate IP regulations). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
I remember when I first heard of roundup ready crops as a child, that aspect of it completely baffled me both in why and how they would make plants not replantable.
Pretty sure it's so you can't collect the newly produced seeds and sell them on the black market to people next season. Basically what you said, but it's not just about preventing people from 're-using' what they bought, but also preventing them from providing it to others.
https://borgenproject.org/terminator-seeds-threaten-sustaina...
Other seeds are patented varieties. Typically these are 'hybrids' which are a cross of two varieties of the same plant for whatever specific features they select. These seeds won't 'breed true' so the offspring will likely not be identical to the parents.
From what I understand, GMO crops won't have a very stable lineage. Nature tends to select against the genetic modifications, but I do believe most GMOs are replantable today.
This is not the case for GMO salmon, which they are trying to sterilize.
The reason why you have to rebuy your seeds from the companies is because of hybrid vigor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
It's still not 100% understand how this actually happens (heaps models and results exist), but when you cross two reasonably distantly related parents, the offspring F1 will outperform both. However, if you then backcross the offspring again, you'll lose that hybrid vigor, and your F2 behaves like crap again (often the F2 is also all over the shop in the phenotype, which makes harvesting annoying with different flowering times, different sizes etc.)
That's the whole business model of the seed companies: keep on remaking F1s, sell them. There's nothing nefarious or GM about this, it goes back to the 50s and 60s with Norman Borlaug making hybrid F1s in wheat triggering the green revolution.
You can then chalk all of this up to corruption and incompetence and government mismanagement even though it is quite literally just a trade deficit that could be solved by having the other country import your products. This is why Keynes suggested his Bancor system, because it gets two countries to fix their trade imbalances instead of pointing fingers and starting a blame game that helps nobody.
Sure you will have hybrid vigor in an F1, but you can get that vigor with a four-way cross of pure inbred lines too. But the four-way progeny will also be highly variable.
If I were a farmer I too would want the consistent low variance of F1 isogenic progeny. An inbred line optimized for environment X could work. In some (rare) cases engineered inbreds can be even better than F1s but they may not work well out in the real world of environmental flux.
I suspect that these engineered plants don't have some specific "don't produce seeds" gene added in, they're just hybrids like a liger or a mule.
Plants that don't produce plantable seeds have a big advantage: some seed is spilled every harvest. Farmers rotate crops, if you have corn gorwing in your soybean field that is one of the worst weeds you can have. Not only does the corn take nutrients you intend for your soybeans, it is also providing a host for any corn disease in your field that you are hoping die off now that it doesn't have corn to live in.
With open source seeds, 1. The farmer knows that they there are no legal issues with using specfic seeds 2. The onus is on Seminis to prove that their seed is not a derivative of open-source seed, which means they have to file a lawsuit against a non-profit (hopefully well funded) instead of a lone farmer
I’d love to see breweries become more conscientious about this and make a point of promoting only “open” varieties.
It would also solve most of the issues with copyright in memes, YouTube and the like
We should just end patents, period.
someone invents a thing, someone else uses thing for evil. what to do? we ban the thing!!! yes, of course, that's the solution. don't punish the one that did the evil. <hangsheadinshameatthenotion>
https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035
this isn't "generally good thing that some people abuse", this is the entire patent system is fundamentally not producing any explicable benefits and significant measurable harm, there is no reason to keep it around.
the scenario about the inventor who comes up with the better lightbulb in his garage doesn't happen. if it does, somebody else copies his idea (it's gotta be fairly trivial for someone to make it in a garage) or opens up their own patent portfolios and finds an overbroad patent that describes some trivial component or practice that is widely used, and drags him into litigation that bankrupts him for the rest of his life.
in software the example would be that you get dragged by someone who has patented "e-commerce on a website" or "software updates over the internet" and the money to have lawyers fight it while you empty your warchest.
no "I would simply..." or "but a law firm would do that pro-bono" is necessary here, either, those are both real-world examples, someone tried to shake down Newegg in 2015 with the e-commerce patent for example. And it worked for a lot of previous victims, none of whom felt like Newegg that it was worth fighting on principle or for direct economic benefit alone.
Patents literally kill companies, and they don't actually produce the intended innovations. And that's the federal reserve saying it. There were debates on ending it in the 50s, and they made the wrong decision.
> If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it.
The harms have now clearly exceeded the benefits of keeping it. It may not have been worth the trouble of abolishing it in 1958, it is now.
The patent system needs to be fixed, not done away with.
It’s also a slightly depressing reason why I refuse to publish source for a commercial game I built, despite wanting to. The likelihood of being sued is very tiny, but why risk it when you’ve had enough success to be noticeable.
In general though, I agree - intellectual property gives too much power to the financial sector and the lifetime of patents and copyrights should be cut in half.
Sources? References? Sounds like PR bullshit from Syngenta, frankly. For a start, half the world population is living off subsistence agriculture, i.e. not patented nor GMO seeds.
Doubt GMOs have yet saved hundreds of millions like the green revolution did, but this claim is false.
I’m not sure your reasoning makes sense to me.
---
GMOs were first made available in 1994 [1]. You can find data on famine deaths over time here [2]. Global famine deaths were near zero per 100k before GMOs had been developed. As an aside on this, the reason for historic famines was often not a lack of food or crops, or even weather - but war, which disrupts supply lines and may damage production.
GMO products are also primarily only grown in the USA and Brazil. [3] Of the two largest countries in the world, India has a complete ban on GM products except cotton, and China previously had a complete ban but lately has been in a state of flux, in no small part because of trade concessions - the US really wants to sell GM soybeans to them.
The vast majority of GMOs are used to feed Americans, Brazilians, livestock, and cars. If you don't understand that last one - US/Brazilian corn is often turned into heavily subsidized ethanol fuel. Which absolutely sucks as a fuel in every possible way [4], but has found a place in the market thanks to governmental regulation.
---
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavr_Savr
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/famine-mortality-over-the-long-ru...
[3] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007...
[4] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2016/04/25/why-a...
As for your affirmation that it sucks for fuel, the growth of corn as a competitor for sugar cane in the production of ethanol here in Brazil is not "thanks to government regulation". In our country, sugar cane farmers have a lot more pull with the government than corn farmers. If government meddling was an issue, it would make the use of corn as a source of ethanol more difficult, not easier.
If ethanol producers here are turning to corn, is because it has economical benefits.
--- [1] https://digital.agrishow.com.br/graos/etanol-de-milho-como-e...
GMO crops have nothing to do with famine reduction.
https://www.discovergermany.com/the-history-of-made-in-germa...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires sooner.
Truly small operations don't have the bandwidth or resources to even file for a patent. So it's pretty much only medium sized companies or those with the backing of powerful groups who take advantage of the patent system.
[0]https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/1309...
In practice, the big companies usually have a ton of vague questionable defensive patents that cover a huge space of "inventions", so even if the smaller companies try to sue, they will get avalanched by an array of patent suits that could potentially bankrupt the company.
1. With inadequate penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits, filing frivolous lawsuits becomes a strategy. I've unfortunately had a close friend be a victim of this strategy. I won't name my friend, but I will name that Jared Kushner's companies were the (repeated) plaintiff. If we close the loopholes around patents (and we should) it will only make the filing of frivolous lawsuits slightly less efficient, because the lawsuits will get thrown out quicker. Note that even if the lawsuits get thrown out, they still cost the defendants money to get them thrown out, so patent reform wouldn't even necessarily mean they can't file patent lawsuits, it just means the lawsuits might get thrown out slightly faster.
2. Justice isn't possible in civil suits where the plaintiff and defendant have disparate resources to pay for counsel.
We really want examples of large companies licensing patents or buying smaller companies for their patents. Both are examples of patents helping smaller companies against those much larger. If patents no longer existed those smaller companies would get nothing.
Nestle has around 276,000 employees today, while Dualit seems to have around 100-200 (hard to tell since Dualit is private).
The pitfall there is that there is no guarantee of revenue. You also invite the possibility of predatorily delaying revenue generation. Potential revenue generated would be more on the nose.
In another sense, sustaining a patent until it generates sufficient revenue can be seen as oxymoronic to the idea that patents incent products that serve the public interest - since, if the patent is not creating value, how can it be in the public interest?
Patent lifespans are already sort of considered based on potential revenue generated, and use number of years as a proxy for that
Rewarding innovation has been archived, just skip ahead to the part where the public at large benefits.
why? why does it have to be only larger companies? if its a free for all, i copy your product, you copy mine. how is that not free market? people will choose so let them.
you could decide to not publicly release a product but you risk your competitor "inventing" the same thing in their own way so you can only either release it first or make the biggest noise.
In the case of seeds, they could still hide behind plant breeders' rights[1], though.
Absolutist solutions can backfire in unexpected ways. We should take an iterative approach unless a single jump is the only option. My 2c.
> The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.
I often think that the bigger a company or wealthier a person is they should get less things like tax deductions, patent protection, subsidies and a lot of others.
That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure. The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems have become too complex for independent patent examiners to really understand them, which has allowed many companies to amass a huge portfolio of techniques that are obvious to people in the field even if they appear novel to an external observer.
At least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time. Copyright is in a far worse place.
The government & large corporations use force via the justice system & jealously guard top secrets, to the point of violence as well. Property can be seized. I'd rather have a distribution of power than consolidation, which seems to attract people who are motivated by controlling other people, thereby undermining the supposed benefits.
> The bar for getting a patent has become far too low
The process is also expensive & serves as a barrier to innovation via market monopolies. The problem with monopolies is that they don't serve the marketplace or consumers. Monopoly is pure rent for the entities that control the monopoly. It is common for a dominant company to buy the rights to a patent only to quash the technology, all to serve the dominant company's stranglehold over a market.
That works when the patents is some simple thing anyone can understand. Nothing is like that anymore. Every interesting line of research requires a specialist to understand it, and every specialist represents a high opportunity cost. In practice only a few people could hope to benefit from the publication.
Throw into that the fact that it's actually lawyers who write patents, and thus they are written in legalese.
That's a benefit that depends on the difficulty of reverse engineering the knowledge from working samples. As analytical instruments and procedures have improved, the relative disclosure benefit of patents has diminished. Worse, patents are increasingly written to hide the key insight in a hay stack of obfuscatory language and irrelevant examples. I can learn a lot from reading a typical 1970s-vintage chemistry patent. I can't say the same about present chemistry patents.
Lots of companies tried to copy the process (without licensing the patent). They couldn't, because the patent didn't describe all the know-how needed to make the process work. Companies that licensed the patent got the benefit of an on-site engineer that would help them get their process working. So most "plate" glass was thereafter float glass, made by paying licensees.
That is: the invention was really protected not by patents, but by trade secrets. And unlike with the mediaeval guilds, nobody had to be assassinated.
So it seems to me that in addition to being harmful, patents really are unnecessary; as long as there is also know-how. If there is no know-how, then I don't think the patent should be issued. Therefore, there is no need for patents.
Patents at work.
Oh, wait - he wouldn't have needed to patent his broccolli, because Monsanto wouldn't have been able to patent it against him.
There is some good to intellectual property -- it's more of a tuning problem that is currently tuned for the slow moving 1800's.
The main issue with patents is not that they exist but that the system for filing and enforcing them has been eroded to the point where it has become a highly effective tool for big corporations to enforce patents they arguably should not have received against smaller competitors. That's technically illegal but since it is super hard to argue that in a court, companies get away with anti competitive behavior. And of course they are actively supported in this by bought and payed for politicians. In the US that's called lobbying, in much of the rest of the world we'd label that corruption, nepotism, and graft. Not a good thing. But as old as power and politics is.
The issue is not patents but the corruption around it.
The system in the US is flooded with bull shit patents that would not be acceptable else where. A lot of those have issues with their claims being overly broad, prior art, or a complete and utter lack of novelty. This does not matter. Getting patents rubber stamped is a numbers game. You just send more patents in and eventually a few will get approved. Of course, it costs a money to register and keep patents but once you have them the system is rigged in your favor. Challenging a patent is super expensive relative to filing one. And since patent offices are under staffed, they bias in favor of approving. And also they don't like admitting they were wrong to approve.
None of this happened by accident. The system was lobbied into the shape it is in today by the largest patent holders in the US (i.e. every big mega corporation you can name). They use patents as a tool to keep competitors out of the market. And they do so very successfully. To the extent that this is becoming a problem.
The solution is fixing the system, not getting rid of it. A big motivation for this could simply be that patents are not globally enforceable. So, you might convince companies in the US to not compete but e.g. Chinese companies will happily take your patented thing and run with it. Good luck complaining about that in a Chinese court of law. And they seem to have bootstrapped a pretty nice high tech industry in recent decades there. Bad patents actually erode the competitive position of US based corporations. While they are tied up in courts being sued by patent trolls, their foreign competitors are free to compete without concern for such things. Great argument for getting politicians off their ass. The problem exists to a lesser extent in other jurisdictions of course. But the US is the most paralyzed by this.
What if we put a limit on inheritance. Let say at most 100M go to your kids.
The rest is put on a fund with your name and shares a given to kids when they are born. A way to have a legacy that doesn't just go to your kids but to every kid in the next generation. Perhaps rich people can be remembered that way and they don't have to play games trying to be in the in top of forbes, etc.