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Comment by Blahah | Hacker News Reader

We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

I share your moral outrage at the idea of patenting life, and all my own research as well as all the genetic technology produced by our consortium on the C4 rice project will be made free (as in beer and speech).

However, agriculture relies on agricultural companies, and they need some way to make money. If people can just take their technology and grow it again themselves, there is no way for them to recoup their investment and we simply won't have better crops.

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> We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

just to chime in here. for a majority of indian farmers - partly which triggered the mass suicide by pesticide - they turned out to be not at all as high yielding as was claimed.

now you could say, ahhh, but wait a second. they didn't use as much water and pesticide as they were supposed to, and you might be right. but then it depends on your definition of yield.

their own crops had a higher yield given the conditions of the soil, and water.

Great, if the GMO yields less, the farmer doesn't buy it again, and then the market deals with the problem.

Definition of yield? Bushels per acre, or kg per hectare. There's not much of an issue there. The same plant might yield very differently in different fields, just like it yields differently each year. If you are conducting trials, you have to plant a bunch of stuff together vs well known controls. Something that yields 140 bushels per acre on average might give you just 58 in the wrong year. Just look at what happened to most of the US fall crop in 2012.

Now, if you plant a variety of plant that does well in X conditions, and you actually plant it in Y conditions, then yeah, pick between changing the condition or using a different variety.

> Great, if the GMO yields less, the farmer doesn't buy it again, and then the market deals with the problem.

sounds great. you're assuming that most people are critical of these crops. have any means to research what was mentioned(ie. internet). and have the means to recover from these loans, but if they did why would they need the loans to buy these crops to begin with?

The farmers' suicides in India caused by GMO has been debunked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#G... http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/are-gmo-cr... http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/nov/05/gmcrops-i... http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v27/n1/full/nbt0109-9.html

Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

This rest on the assumption that the patent system is the best way to structure a market and incentivize agricultural R&D.

What, in your opinion, is the best way to structure a market and incentivize agricultural R&D?

More accurately, it rests on the assumption that the patent system actually available now is the best way to structure this market activity. But I don't see GMO opponents offering better incentive structures, I see them making up non-scientific arguments that make no sense.

> it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

I'd figure higher crop yields are incentive enough to invest in higher yield seeds. As in, smart farmers would invest profits into developing better seeds to give them more reliable or higher yields. It doesn't require an artificial profit motive attached to the development of seeds themselves if they are a net gain.

That is the same argument I have against big pharma - drugs are useful because they abate symptoms or cure disease. That right there is a motivator to develop drugs - attaching artificial profit motives to their development don't change the fundamentals.

> smart farmers would invest profits into developing better seeds

There are several problems with the economics in your response.

Specialization is good, economically speaking: farmers should concentrate on being good farmers, not on trying to oversee research projects in far-off universities or labs. By having a market, it's also possible for companies to bring new products to market without charging the farmers a dime unless the products are actually any good.

This is also what's known as a coordination problem. Each farmer's profits are probably not that high, so one of them on their own is not going to be able to fund this research. So how do they coordinate their work? Markets provide a pretty good answer.

Also, as Blahah mentions, the lack of patents means that there is a free rider problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods

Thanks for linking - I've thought about all these things, but didn't know the terms. Accessing the literature is basically impossible without knowing to call them 'coordination game' or 'free rider problem'.

I doubt many farmers in the entire world are operating on margins that allow them to invest in anything that doesn't return very soon.

Consider...

Company A spends 5billion developing a new variety that yields high, and sells it at price X. With no protection of the IP, Company B can pirate the technology and sell it for price X/10. A farmer can buy the the pirated version just once, and he'll thereafter have no expense to lay out on seed purchase.

Any farmer who tries to do the right thing and invest in the seeds from the company doing the research will be out of business in a year, outcompeted by those wiling to pirate. Company A loses its 5billion investment and exits the market.

> However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

Are GMO crops really consistently high yielding? I've heard of some statistics that showed this wasn't actually the case. I don't have any source at hand, but I recall reading that in Europe, where GMO crops are far more restricted than in the US, crop yields actually grew faster over the past decades than in the US, where GMO crops are common.

Also, monoculture makes your crop awfully vulnerable to new diseases. Genetic diversity is much more robust.

Generally speaking, GMO crops are lower-yielding than heirloom varieties, unless you apply the requisite fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides. With the addition of those chemicals the GMO crops perform better since they are more tolerant of excess nutrients, and better able to convert the excess nutrients into the desired product.

So if you want to reduce reliance on chemicals (which I do), then GMOs are a bad idea?

Personally I'm a big fan of projects that use more natural ways of fighting weeds and pests. I've read about some very effective programs that reduced pests by planting a specific plant around the crop fields, or (re)introducing a predator of that pest.

What do you mean by chemicals? all food production uses chemicals.

If you want to reduce monoculture, then monoculture is a bad idea :)

Maybe someone could research and patent a fungus or virus that only attacks roundup-ready plants? I wonder how much Monsanto would pay to bury that...

   If people can just take their technology and grow it again themselves, there is no way for them to recoup their investment and we simply won't have better crops.

Thousands of years of selective breeding refutes the above statement.

It's not always about ROI. Some of us just like variety. I do agree with your sentiment, it's just the legal aspects that I dislike.

Oh for a world without money & greed!

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