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

321–330 of 371 posts

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

#321

Post by h2odragon »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #316
breput wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us, albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes. If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.

I don’t think brnt’s comment contradicts yours. They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that. The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts. Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a…

Not all farmers understand the depths of the biology they work with, but some probably do.

Not all programmers understand how their instructions influence the circuits that execute them. That does not validate statements like "programmers don't understand electronics."

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

#322

Post by epistasis »

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.

Regenerative agriculture is still a big step down from returning the land to natural ecosystems. Quantifying how big that step is, to the point of being able to pick a point in the pareto curve, is a big political decision. There's definitely a place for a lot lots of regenerative agriculture, but it's one part of a solution.

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

#323

Post by epistasis »

shuntress wrote: post #225
saalweachter wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also a huge pain in the ass to produce, at least in my experience. Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by planting the two varieties in the same field, with one combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of variety B. Then you need to wait until variety A is grown and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn…

Isn't the point of GMO technology that you can use it to accomplish this "in the lab" rather than in the field?

That was the promise, and the fear, around GMO, but it really hasn't had that much of an effect. Biologically, the point editing allowed by generic modification, even with our enhanced skills from CRISPR/Cas9, only allows small changes.

Generic modification by molecular techniques is just another tool, that does not supercede or override any of the past forms of generic modification by breeding that humans have been doing ever since we were humans.

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

#324

Post by xphilter »

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…

Yeah, I don't know why you think farmers are "smart" (taking this meaning to convey that we shouldn't question their practices). If you pump enough water and fertilizer into the already-fertile land you can get things to grow. Wow. If farmers were actually smart they'd start thinking long term on how their practices are destroying their livelihood (draining aquifers, polluting rivers, degrading soil quality) or how their politics are driving future generations from rural US (anti education, anti immigration, anti everything). Credentials: grew up in rural midwest.

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

#325

Post by bob29 »

pfdietz wrote: post #313
bob29 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

So, your objection to patents is that they are enforced when violated?

No. Objection when they are overly broad generic obvious and\or trivial

Am surprised even need to explain on this forum of coders. Many examples of bad boy software patents.

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

#326

Post by denton-scratch »

pfdietz wrote: post #216
StrictDabbler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal to purchase and bulk-spray Round-up to an incompatible crop. It's just stupid. It is expensive and it will kill the plants. The lawsuit alleged that the farmer's behavior was so stupid that he must have known his crop was Roundup-Ready. That's not consistent with accidental pollination. It suggests that he deliberately cultivated or obtained seeds that were Roundup-Ready and that he knew his crop wou…

It's worse than that: the farmer knew there was slight contamination of his field with Roundup Ready plants. So, he deliberately sprayed the field with Roundup to kill all the others, applying artificial selection to concentrate the trace of contamination. I believe he repeated this more than once. So, he was guilty of engaging in deliberate production of not trace, but concentrated patented seeds.

Hang on. He didn't plant the patented seeds; he planted his own seeds, which were then pollinated by his neighbour's Roundup-Ready plants. I can't see anything wrong with that.

So now he has a crop that consists of hybrids. These hybrids are all different; each plant is a different mixture of with Roundup-Ready. Some of those plants will have resistance to glyphosate. Then he sprays with Roundup; the resistant plants survive, the rest die. Now he has a harvest of seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, but in all other respects are a mixture. These seeds are not the ones sold by Bayer/Monsanto.

So is it the strain that is patented, or the gene?

If it's the strain that gets the patent, then the farmer-next-door isn't growing your patented strain, so he's in the clear. So it must be the gene, right?

If it's the gene, then it seems unreasonable to yell "patent violation" if you're spreading patented pollen over the entire midwest. You must either sell seeds that don't make (viable) pollen, or you have to accept that the farmer had his crop involuntarily infected with your IP because of your negligence.

I thought the GMO manufacturers bred sterility into their strains for just that reason.

Meanwhile, the farmer-next-door now has a grain-store full of resistant hybrid seeds, that won't (on the whole) fare as well as Roundup-Ready, because they're all different strains. That is, having the resistant gene isn't the whole story; you need a strain that is resistant AND grows well AND is consistent. That means an F1 hybrid, and you don't get that by just crossing strains; you have to get into selecting and cloning the favourable strain, growing that strain into a crop, and letting it cross with its (identical) siblings to make true-bred seeds.

Have I missed something?

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

#327

Post by elcritch »

cognaitiv wrote: post #320
nine_k wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iceland actually has some trees. But in that climate they don't grow very tall. Also, much of Iceland is a desert of lava, glass, and black sand; some other parts are covered with ice. Not many plants can survive in such a landscape, and those which do are usually not trees.

Deforestation in Iceland predates industrialization. “Deforestation is a major issue that is highly prevalent throughout the world. The country of Iceland has been hit especially hard by this catastrophe. A nation that once had forests covering 40 percent of its countryside began to lose its tree cover, when the Vikings arrived in the 9th century. By the early 20th century, however, this tree cover was reduced to jus…

Does that account for climate changes? IIRC, there was a warmer period around the time the vikings arrived?

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

#328

Post by denton-scratch »

pfdietz wrote: post #250
jmyeet wrote: post #136

I'm very close to the IP abolitionist end of the spectrum. For copyright, give works 20 years of protection. Beyond that you have to start paying hefty fees for 10 year blocks. The fee can double every 10 years. You want a Mickey Mouse ad infinitum copyright? If you're prepared to pay billions for it, go right ahead. Patents should generally not exist. Software patents should absolutely never exist. The fact that com…

GM crops are actually one of the areas (along with pharmaceuticals) where patents are most legitimate. Crop plants are literally things that manufacture themselves; the barrier to entry if patents didn't exist would be negligible. No one could justify the effort to create new plant varieties.

But plant patents are new. People have been breeding new strains since the dawn of farming. Ergo, people were able to justify the effort.

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

#329

Post by denton-scratch »

outworlder wrote: post #180
efitz wrote: post #56

Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.

"Of course, salad is no software, and the work of plant breeders has to be protected. Otherwise they might fare like plant breeder Jim Baggett in Oregon, who in 1966 started breeding broccoli with an extra-long stem so it could be harvested more easily. He shared his novel broccoli with researchers and other breeders — until Monsanto-offspring Seminis patented a broccoli with exactly that trait in 2011. Baggett could…

Yeah; we need plant patents, because without them Baggett couldn't have patented his broccolli.

Oh, wait - he wouldn't have needed to patent his broccolli, because Monsanto wouldn't have been able to patent it against him.

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

#330

Post by hinkley »

zargon wrote: post #287
hinkley wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be selecting with their eyeballs. They're jabbing trees with chestnut blight and seeing which ones succumb. Hence a petri dish for pathogen selection. IE, insane and reckless.

Sounds like they're actively trying to evolve a blight that infects Asian chestnuts as well.

It’s the dumbest Jurassic Park level scientific laziness I’ve heard all century.
Post reply on HN