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Comment by canvia | Hacker News Reader

With 80%+ of corn grown in the US being from Monsanto seeds, you can bet that there is going to be a lot of push back against this. Why are taxpayers subsidizing an already profitable industry? How many millions does Monsanto spend on lobbying every year?

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/can-we-feed-our-world-without-mon...

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> With 80%+ of corn grown in the US being from Monsanto seeds

As a grower of corn, I find that pretty hard to believe. Pioneer, a DuPont company, has a presence that is as large as Dekalb, Monsanto's brand. There are also several more smaller players. A quick search of my own suggests that Dekalb and Pioneer own 70% of the market together[1], which seems more realistic based on my experiences of buying corn seed.

[1] http://www.indystar.com/story/money/2013/10/28/agreliant-cor...

> How many millions does Monsanto spend on lobbying every year?

Between 3 and 9 (most years closer to 3), a lot less than Google has spent over the past few years[1][2].

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000005...

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002200...

I doubt it describes the current situation, but it is presumably sensible to subsidize a profitable agricultural industry if the cost of the subsidy is lower than the cost of occasional bust years (and any subsequent food shortages).

(The US market could be of sufficient size and sophistication where it would never actually happen, but that is hard to determine in the abstract)

This Monsanto is evil stuff is our generations "contrails" conspiracy theories.

The audacity of designing a better corn seed knows no bounds!

Designing better corn isn't the reason people have issues with Monsanto.

In the tech world and scientific communities, no. We care about IP abuses, if anything--many, many studies have shown that the products are safe to eat, but Montanto's behavior is occasionally despicable.

The rest of the country, though? The hippie, New Age folks that make up a frighteningly large segment of the population? GMOs are "unnatural Frankenfoods" destroying our DNA and whatnot.

My friend group is definitely skewed toward the hippie spectrum, so I may me over-estimating their numbers, but only 37% of Americans say GMOs are safe to eat[1]. I don't know what percent of those know who Monsanto is, or what percent say Monsanto's business practices are unethical, but I certainly lean toward "designing better corn" being the most common qualm.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/29/chapter-3-attitudes-an...

The problem with GMO's is that most people aren't equipped to have a nuanced discussion about them so the conversation devolves to massive generalities and extremes that aren't useful because both polar extremes turn out to be illogical positions to take, but they are the only two positions that are discussed.

As far as I can tell, the only reason people have issues with Monsanto specifically is because they are explicitly named in Food, Inc. If it were about GMOs or pesticides, there are many other companies, and even larger and more well known companies, that are developing similar and potentially damaging products.

But they don't make it 'better', they just use GE to make corn produce glysophate.

You mean resistant to glyphosate? Is there any GM crop that actually produces glyphosate?

Oops. Yes.

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