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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Do plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds have some kind of advantage, or is it purely so the seed producers can continue selling the seeds?

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.

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There are no plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds. There's a long-standing moratorium on terminator genes that is generally observed.

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.

I never knew about this. That's interesting. So then hybrid vigor is the reason farmers don't grow their own seeds, which contradicts the article. Obviously the OSS people would know this, so then the purpose must be more about encouraging plant diversity and allowing more companies to sell these varieties to farmers.

Hybrid vigor is also why eugenic nightmares are misconstructed. If some nefarious dictator wanted genetic supersoldiers, he'd breed them by hybridizing sickly inbred strains, and then prohibiting the supersoldiers from themselves reproducing.

can you explain further or maybe link to something? Eugenics can also mean eradicating certain unwanted elements like illnesses or black skin.

Hybrid vigior is known to apply to plants. It isn't clear if it applies to humans. While it is known that marrying your sibling (brother/sister) is bad, and near cousins are a questionable, is it better (for your children) is you are very distant? Should you look to a different continent for a spouse? I don't know for sure, but the evidence I've seen doesn't support that. Unlike with plants, so long as your are more than 5th cousins away (I'm not sure where the line is, so I picked something distant enough that I think everyone will agree it is too far) there doesn't seem to be any advantage in getting more distant.

What's nefarious is being coerced to take on foreign debt to buy these seeds and then watching the country fall apart because the food is for domestic consumption and not for export, which means there will be a trade deficit as the seed exporter is not obliged to import products from your country (which violates Say‘s Law that so many people seem to hang onto). So your only option is to send all the bright people in your country to the seed exporting country so they can earn domestic currency so that your country can afford basic food production.

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.

Hybrid was discovered in the 1930s. WWII needed all the farm production the US could get to feed the rest of the world, so hybrid crops were pushed heavily on all farmers. Since then few farmers have gone back.

It is not just the hybrid vigor. In fact, I would say the main advantage of the F1 hybrids is actually lower phenotypic variance of the crop.

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.

Lots of "normal" plants don't produce usable seeds. Basically every apple you've ever had will produce a crab apple tree when planted, if you want to copy that tree you need to take a cutting and propogate that.

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.

Not quite how apples work and planting an apple seed won't make a "crab apple" -- that is a distinct species of tree. Getting a crab apple from a seed from a store bought apple fruit is the same as planting corn and getting rye.

They are hybrids but unlike mules they are generally fertile whereas mules are frequently infertile. But the second generation produces a range of types with varying growth rates, ripening times, yields, etc.; so it is not really useful to propagate them.

The seeds produced are often plantable. For many seeds, especially GMO seeds, the grower needs to acquire a license to the seeds and agrees not to save seeds from planted crops (as you suspect, to ensure income for the seed producer).

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.

Why would hybrids have to be patented? You are confusing separate things here.

Hybrids don't have to be patented, but if they're new varieties, they certainly can be. Similarly, new varieties that aren't necessarily hybrids (eg, once were hybrids and now are stable) can also be patented.

As others pointed out, such plants don't exist.

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.

>have some kind of advantage

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.

I believe it's the engineering of other aspects (drought tolerance, growth factors, etc) that make them incapable of producing viable seed - not that the only engineering is to make them unable to put out fertile seed.

They get unique characteristics, like all the tomatoes look identical and have long shelf life which is important for customers because they "eat with their eyes". They also taste like shit but who cares, right?

They are far less likely to spread novel genes around the environment.

The only advantage is that these companies can force the farmers to keep buying seeds from them. It is the susbscription based revenue model for agriculture :)

https://borgenproject.org/terminator-seeds-threaten-sustaina...

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