Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines

Do you want novel genes propagating throughout the food system by accident? Terminator genes prevent that problem.

isn't this just a by-product of seed hybridization which has enabled pretty much all of modern agriculture? A lot of testing goes into finding the two strains that combine together to create high-yield seeds, but the next generations of those seeds won't produce well.

It is preferable if genetically engineered crops cannot reproduce. The impact of their wild propagation should be studied first, not unleashed upon the local ecosystem.

> anyone involved in designing food crops that can’t reproduce

This is a side effect of many clonal varieties of selective-bred crops. It's why they have to be grafted.

Essentially all commercial apple trees are grafted and don't reproduce true to seed. Been this way for almost a century now.

So you want to destroy all the people who create hybrid plants? Isn't that a bit cruel?

Edit: also, Monsanto has never actually used their non-replicating seeds. This is a common trope in the greenie hippie community that "Monsanto wants to own your food forever".

I hope you don't eat any cultivar fruit or vegetable.

Well, as an Iowa farm boy (and farm land owner) I have a more nuanced view. There have been hybrid maizes for many decades. It is possible to create unstable hybrids of normal field corns, which serves as a form of intellectual property protection for seed companies. As a farmer, you certainly can go out and plant heirloom varieties that can self-reproduce if you so choose. At which point, the choice of buying hybrid seed versus planting an heirloom variety is a simple business decision. Now with soy beans, on the other hand, it is not possible to create an unstable hybrid. Even hybrid soy beans can be saved and planted. Which is the direct root of the insanity around Monsanto's Roundup-Ready hybrid seed licensing scheme, and all the notorious law suits around that. We would be better off if Monsanto could sell an unstable soy hybrid. That would eliminate all the craziness that the licensing system creates.

Like seedless grapes?

Between this comment and few of your others above, it's pretty clear you don't have any concept of how farming works and are just angry about things you don't understand.

> If you make patents illegal, no one will breed new stuff. How does that help?

There would still be public, industry-group and philanthropic research. But yes, probably much less.

> You are perfectly free to keep selling what we've been eating. No one is forcing people to plant the new stuff.

This common sense statement should be true, but is wholly ignorant of the lawsuits farmers deal with from seed suppliers

20 years is the max length of nearly all patents. So you really aren't giving them any concession there.

Also, all patents are monopoly. That is actually what a patent provides, it provides a limited government sanctioned monopoly over the invention.

I can go for a month, probably longer, without, say, the internet. I could also go a month without food, maybe, but there are people who can't. Food is different because it is essential to life.

There are inanimate objects that are manually made out of raw materials by humans. It can make sense to grant the inventor of such a thing a time limited monopoly on its production by banning anyone else from manufacturing it for sale and distribution.

Living beings are not inanimate objects that are manually made out of raw materials. They are not human-made. They reproduce and humans only create the environment for this to happen. You cannot invent a living being. You can invent a modification in the genome and thereby create a new breed, but that should not grant you the right to have a monopoly on the reproduction of those living beings.

I appreciate when somebody speaks with conviction about their beliefs.

> Summarily declaring something "evil" means that you're not really interested in hearing any other comments on the topic, and that additional data or analysis of the issue will have no effect on your opinion.

I'd say it is in the end an ethics issue. Sure, the tone may be offputting, but... I think there is value in having people around who actually hold beliefs and aren't as quickly willing to put their beliefs aside. Society as a whole benefits from a corrective to ultra-progressives - even if what the progressives want is a good thing (which, to be clear, it almost always is!), move too fast and you end up losing the masses along the way.

Correct, many people get worked up over the idea of the patents that could be in play here; plenty of good reason when that is a consideration. The court has already decided that the existence of a patent or licensing agreement is not relevant; It’s a contract dispute.

What I don’t understand is, _how_ it doesn’t depend on a patent right. How do you license something that doesn’t depend on a licensable right?

If it isn’t a patent right, exactly _what_ is he purchasing a license to? If it’s purely an agreement of exclusivity to Giumarra, it can’t be called a “sub license” and the consequence is just a breach of contract (which is what it sounds like). But in that case I’m sure there are mutual termination agreements in the exclusivity contract.

Also, if it’s _not_ a patent, what exactly does the company bring to the table? For what consideration does the farmer give them an exclusive access to his trees?

The heart of the matter is that any licensing and exclusivity rights to our food supply is counter to our interests.

For farmers, the right to grow breeds of crops unencumbered by enforceable contracts is what the public expects.

The exception will be when government forbids certain crops; or encourages certain varieties with incentives.

> So you want to go back hundreds of years and force people to live in hunger with frequent famines?

Sadly, there are theories that this is precisely something that is desired as population control of groups that are "less desirable". It's usually the same groups that say AIDS was designed for the same purpose.

Many yield increases are due more to increased fertilizer availability. You don't want to grow ulta-large-super-crop if it means you suck 95% of the fertilizer from the soil and can't replace it. Even if you could breed the plant 100 years ago, nobody would want to use it if it sucked their topsoil layer away in a few years. Or if it was nutrient limited already, those plants would simply not grow as large or have as much yield.

ah, good catch. the question now is whether giumarra accepted the termination or not. i could not find that detail in the article. if they accepted it, then my argument holds (note that i am arguing how things should be, not what the actual current law on the matter is). if giumarra did not accept termination then the exclusive contract should still hold. (whether an exclusive contract is fair or not is another topic)

that's the same thing.

if you can't throw it away you need to be allowed to sell it.

the point here is sustainable production. the EU is implementing laws around that. if you produce more than what you can sell, then you need to reduce production and stop wasting resources.

yes, there should be no excess that needs to be disposed. if you produce excess you should reduce production.

true. but there is a difference between discarding food that has gone bad because you could not sell it, and discarding it without even trying to sell it because some exclusive contract prevents you from selling, or because you want to keep the price artificially high.

The optimal quantity of food discarded on a farm should be close to 0 I think. Obviously things rot, but that's not the situation here. For staples it can make sense to systematically overproduce so that we dont starve when things go badly, but ideally you find some other use for the excess like we do with ethanol. But I dont think that thought process plays much of a role with nectarines.

Then that leads to the question... is it proper for the farmer to take the deduction for the costs of growing crops he is not legally allowed to sell?

> ..and none does.

Monsanto begs to differ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

>a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.

The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_li...

> how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all?

How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public?

Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them

profit share, royalties, etc. many ways to structure economic benefit

> The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it.

I've read this a couple of times in these comments. However, this "in a while" is meaningless. A quick search suggests plant patents are 20 years from filing of patent. That's not as bad as I was thinking after hearing about the copyright nonsense of 95 years of publication or 120 years from creation depending. That'd be multiple generations of farmers rather than just one.

But you can't just take a seed and make a new plant of same characteristics. Now I'm not sure if that's the case for nectarines but apples mutate massively between seed and plant that made it so basically all plantations are clones or clones + grafts.

You'd have better luck "stealing" it with some wire cutters and cutting some shoots off the trees

> you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product

For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes.

> then why should it be available for everyone?

Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.

If someone grows a new tree from seeds after buying your fruit, their trees will take several years to bear fruit right? Works almost like a patent anyway.

(I don't know fruit growing well so maybe that's not true)

Farmers already have plenty of incentive for hardy and resistant varieties. People already have plenty of incentive for tasty varieties.

You don’t need patents. The single biggest technology driver has been maths. And it doesn’t have patents.

Patents stifle innovation.

Oh sure, but go up the chain, which is exactly what these guys are doing. As soon as the US prez hears that some French fops in powdered wigs are preventing USA farmers from selling their nectarines in California, he's going to go ballistic (on his phone, during his toilet break).