Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

worldsensorium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 371 posts

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#291

Post by dmqctx »

UncleEntity wrote: post #248
mschuster91 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag tech. Or by restructuring how land is used. When you have miles upon miles of corn fields, it's a fucking buffet for corn pests. In contrast, land that has a great variety of usages - corn, wheat, grass for making hay, marijuana, rice, potatoes, b…

With industrialization comes specialization. You can’t reasonably expect farming families to be able to afford all the specialized equipment to be able to willy-nilly change the crops they grow and large corporations are just going to specialize based on economy of scale. When all you need is a water buffalo and a shitton of labor you can diversify crops all you want but if you have to compete in a low-margin mechani…

Correct. Rubber meeting the road comment here. This is the reality of most farms in America. Possibilities are not "endless" for revolutionizing farm practices, they must be profitable and margins are tight.

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#292

Post by brnaftr361 »

pfdietz wrote: post #243
RajT88 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that patents are abused enough already. We should not allow patenting of genomes/genes. Full stop. We should rely on those other systems of breeder's rights.

You objection to "patenting life" seems utterly spurious and would effectively end GMO seeds (as the effort expended creating them could not be recouped.) But perhaps that's your ulterior motive. I see no legitimate motivation for your position.

$169 for a HiFi Gibson Assembly kit. Up to 8000bp for about $2200-3500. It's not as forbidding as you might think.

The insistence on IP law being the only probable, legitimate incentive is what's spurious.

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#293

Post by bob29 »

tptacek wrote: post #288
fragmede wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's special about seeds is they reproduce with a bit of water, soil, and sunlight. My laptop does not and in fact will be very sad if I water it. Thus no matter how many patents Intel has on the things inside my laptop, there's a limit on how much I can ultimately do with the physical device.

Nothing you can do with water, soil, and sunlight is going to produce RoundUp --- or a RoundUp-Ready seed. It's perfectly reasonable to oppose all patents. Just don't pretend the wind, sun, and dirt somehow invalidate seed patents. There's no distinction to draw.

People have been sued for growing patented potatoes, unrelated to round up . . . Ok?

U take tuber u put it in ground it grows more tubers u try to sell BOOM illegal son .

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#294

Post by tptacek »

bob29 wrote: post #293
tptacek wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you can do with water, soil, and sunlight is going to produce RoundUp --- or a RoundUp-Ready seed. It's perfectly reasonable to oppose all patents. Just don't pretend the wind, sun, and dirt somehow invalidate seed patents. There's no distinction to draw.

People have been sued for growing patented potatoes, unrelated to round up . . . Ok? U take tuber u put it in ground it grows more tubers u try to sell BOOM illegal son .

Uh huh.

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#295

Post by brnt »

breput wrote: post #277
epistasis wrote: post #14

Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…

There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest. Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale re…

Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory, not the farming.

Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#296

Post by skzv »

Scoundreller wrote: post #64
epistasis wrote: post #14

Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…

> returned from ag use for ecological restoration. We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value. Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs). Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.

Indeed. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#297

Post by skzv »

epistasis wrote: post #14

Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…

> which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.

I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#298

Post by brnt »

epistasis wrote: post #14

Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…

> The general public does not understand agriculture well,

Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming.

It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too.

Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#299

Post by nine_k »

hinkley wrote: post #232
epistasis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do that, and actually pay farmers to keep land fallow in some cases. We must have this high leve of productivity before it's even a possibility, but once it's a possibility we can expand its use. The current economic system is changeable, one ag technology allows us to.

One of the goals of regenerative agriculture is to get most of the benefits of fallow land while still using the land. From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.

Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because the crops need to be collected in the few days when they are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous machines.

The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.

Re: “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

#300

Post by eclipticplane »

gleenn wrote: post #283
skratlo wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected or even patented Government and legislative failure. Just protect the seeds by disallowing any protection/patenting, for the public good, that's why we pay taxes.

It goes beyond country boundaries. There was an interesting case where China stole I think it was specialized corn to begin producing their own instead of spending large sums by buying the product or IP.

Another interesting case was PepsiCo suing farmers in India over a variety of potato. A few years later, PepsiCo withdrew their suit... only to have a group of farmers continue to press the claim and have the courts rule that PepsiCo couldn't patent a seed.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-pa...

Post reply on HN