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Comment by trenchpilgrim | Hacker News Reader

If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might happen:

1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops

2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Or maybe if your neighbor doesn't like you, they spread some GMO seed in your field, then report you to the company.

This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.

https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567

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1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray

2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate people don't care.

though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so they won't care anyway

> farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue

Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly picky about wind conditions.

> the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray

Putting aside the current grave gutting of the agency in question, do they really inspect each usage on a regular basis or is it a pinky promise?

> this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo

That's a primary problem which is already happening as linked previously in the discussion, it essentially forces a mono-supplier and a mono-culture.

It doesn't force a mono-supplier, since existing seeds are not suddenly made unavailable when new seeds are brought to market.

It has on multiple occasions as linked elsewhere in this discussion, made usage of anything other than a specific vendor's strain unusable. That is a textbook type 1.B. mono-supplier condition.

Yeah, I call bullshit on that claim. The only way something like this could become required would be if it's so much more performant that farmers would have no choice. But that would mean it's creating so much extra value the farmers still come out ahead. How is this a bad thing? In no scenario is it possible for the introduction of a new variety to force farmers to make a decision that leaves them worse off than some other decision they could make.

It's been mentioned about a dozen times already, you should have read it already. Again: It is the _combination_ of a custom crop and pest/herbicides which has a clear tendency to contaminate nearby farms, making the only viable crop the custom crop which has been engineered to withstand that specific treatment.

The contamination issue was also a ridiculous red herring.

So, no, you don't have any real argument here. It's all the usual rationalization of irrational GMO hatred.

OH MY GOD! Today I learned that I, who generally like GMO, is actually exhibiting "irrational GMO hatred" when I don't even argue against the usage of GMO, but instead argue against the problematic usage of herbicide and pesticide which has externalities which are not properly accounted for and guarded against! You have also convinced me that facts and studies on the subject matters not, and that your, let me count them, zero sources, are better!

Do you have any other wisdom to spare from below the bridge?

We have a small-ish farm in Oregon. We religiously watch the wind before spraying for two reasons:

1) Chemicals are extremely expensive and chemicals that drift off the field are wasted, not to mention that in high winds you can't be confident in good coverage (unless you just dramatically increase your spray amount, which, see again re: cost). 2) Despite our extreme care, we have had regulatory bodies called on us by neighbours about drift (investigation exonerated us).

Thus we have both an internal, selfish reason to not spray during high wands and an external reason to not spray during high winds. I can't speak to other areas of the country (let alone the world) or other kinds of farming.

>Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly picky about wind conditions.

You really think they don't consider how to effectively apply the expensive chemicals that increase their profits by a ton?

You made me looking back at historical wind patterns in my county and last year they sprayed it was 12m/s SSW (Beaufort 6) the day I remember they sprayed.

This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.

> If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.

... or you're trying to exterminate an errant plant, only to end up with it being the only thing remaining in the field.

That's a thing that can happen, but there's no evidence that anybody has been sued for it. The cases where people have been sued, the record is pretty extensive that they knowingly used the whole system, not just the seeds.

>1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops

That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.

Valid points but this seems more simple to address using regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.

What regulation would you propose to fix either of these issues?

Case 2 I suspect could be addressed by a law granting some level of immunity for simply having GMO plants in a field. But how do you fix Case 1 with laws? These are effects of biology and physics.

If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source they can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be significantly harder to enable similar regulation for fertilizers and pesticides.

The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms. (In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link in that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they believed themselves innocent.)

A lawsuit is rarely a good remedy to a problem, between legal costs, the time delay to any rewards, and the overloaded court system strongly encouraging people to settle out of court.

Yes, that very famously worked for PFAS poisoned waters by DuPont in the US.

It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.

Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations that they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in a field" or "accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops" which have been affirmatively held as legally binding [1].

The cases you are referencing are cases where the farmer discovers trace contamination of their field, then deliberately sprays Roundup to kill all non-GMO crops, then deliberately harvest seed from the survivors, then deliberately create a GMO section of their farm where they repeatedly plant and harvest to concentrate seed production until they have multiple thousands of acres of GMO crops they derived from the trace contamination [2].

Or cases where they signed a agreement to not replant their GMO soybeans, so they sold those GMO soybeans to a facility which sells to consumers for consumption, then turned around and rebought from that same facility the GMO soybeans they just sold so they could replant them [3] claiming that the sale to a third party meant they were not "replanting" the soybeans they just produced since they just oopsie-whoopsie bought them from someone not bound by the agreement.

If you actually look into it, most of the cases that people imagine were really bad or evidence of Monsanto screwing farmers are actually examples of ridiculously slimy farmers. That is not to say that Monsanto is a saint as they almost surely are hiding evidence of Roundup toxicity and you should be generally distrusting that large corporations are value-aligned with regular people, but specifically in the cases of Monsanto versus farmers, the farmers are almost always hiding how absolutely slimy they are actually being.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/190977225/co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

The idea that a farmer can ever be sued for saving seeds is horrific, no matter what corporate pr speak you dress it up in

Why is that horrific? Is it because some farmers are smaller operations and have less bargaining power? What about a large farming conglomerate, e.g. Cargill? What in particular is bad about this contract, and makes it different from other contracts?

Is it horrific to be sued for modifying and selling software with a removed GPLv3 notice?

this is still based on the idea that farmers are bad businessmen, and couldnt find the seed innovation because it would result in better crops.

if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going to make it happen

The whole point of the G in GMO is that you don’t get these plants by the usual technique of selecting good strains produced by natural gene variance.

> 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops

Have you ever been on a farm?

> 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit.

Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a paying Patreon subscriber.

Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination. Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at higher-than-market prices.

They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop.

> This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.

Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.

Monsanto Derangement Syndrome got Veritasium? Geez...

Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"

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