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Fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck Cloudant. "We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership." Th

Fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck Cloudant. "We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership." Thrilled? I guess money is thrilling. "The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions." Key business decisions like which small farmer to sue into oblivion? Or what third world nation's crops to take financially hostage? Thrilling work guys. Really.

vijayr 15y ago
It is one of those companies, that is pretty well documented. From what I've read, Monsanto makes Walmart (and some others) look like angels. Just google for farmers committing suicide in India (especially from Andhra Pradesh). I also read an article about them threatening American farmers, can't remember where. I don't have any experience with them, but from what I've read about them, they seem very very very scary.
glimcat 15y ago
Sounds like a problem to solve with a disruptive startup. Got any actionable ideas?
- WiseWeasel 15y ago
  Smarter and cheaper robots. If the cost of labor for growing food organically on a large scale could be reduced, it would have a disruptive impact on conventional agriculture.
  - william42 15y ago
    But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement. Not saying that undercutting Monsanto is impossible, but any startup will have an uphill battle to win over "organic" supporters.
    - WiseWeasel 15y ago
      > But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement. This is incorrect. There is nothing in the charter of any organic farming organization I've seen regulating the use of automation and machinery in agriculture, nor the scale of the operation. Organic farming is strictly about eliminating the use of chemical and genetic additives (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, chemically-treated fence posts, direct genetic modification, etc.) in our farmed food and textile products. A huge factor limiting the spread of organic farming practices over conventional is the increased production cost and decreased yields due to the difficulty of managing pests and weeds. As an example, an organic farmer in many cases must employ workers at great expense to go through the crops once a week or two with a hoe and manually clear out weeds, rather than being able to drive through with a tractor and spray herbicide every couple months. This adds substantially to the cost and difficulty of growing organically. If robots could be leased or purchased to do this work instead, the viability of organic growing would be significantly improved. In many areas, there is no labor infrastructure allowing farmers to find workers to do such work, and so growing certain crops organically is not even a realistic option for them.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Have you actually worked on a modern farm?
    - WiseWeasel 15y ago
      I have, though not any large-scale intensive farming operations. I'm talking about robots with the dexterity and intelligence to replace human labor all but completely, to allow a large or small farm operator to manage pests and weeds without the use of hazardous chemicals.
sitkack 15y ago
I think if I wanted to round out the mix I would add in BP Halliburton Xe Services (Blackwater Worldwide) The creation of roundup resistent crops is possibly the worst mistakes that the human race has ever made. It took what 3-5 years to make roundup impervious parasites? Terminator seeds that can't actually create a viable organism? You have to go back to the source (Monsanto) every year. Mono-cultures and engineered genetic pollution. Monsanto shouldn't exist.
- davidandgoliath 15y ago
  Missing the RIAA: Same scenario, different product. Though the key difference is Monsanto's evils are !@#$ing with our food supply / chain / system that's happily evolved over thousands of years as they sue farmers into oblivion. The RIAA is merely making 'big music' less important to the majority of us & shooting themselves in the foot in the process while suing their potential clientbase. Both very much similar, and I'd happily support neither given the opportunity.
  - dagw 15y ago
    RIAA isn't even in the same universe. You can certainly debate how many innocent lives Monsanto's,BP,Halliburton and Xe Services have on their concision, but I think it's safe to say that everybody agrees it's greater than zero. I doubt even the most rabid RIAA hater would try to argue that the RIAA had actual blood on their hands. RIAA fucks some bands out of money and use lawsuits to shake down people on dubious legal grounds, that's a far far cry from actually letting people die.
    - Unseelie 15y ago
      Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a different scale. If the RIAA were even better at taking money from people, people would starve. Of course, it makes no sense for the RIAA to starve its working musicians, but the ones who have stopped selling above margin?
kreek 15y ago
+1! If you want to learn more about this watch Food Inc. available on NetFlix streaming. If you have high blood pressure you may want to skip the part where an Indiana man explains how he was sued by Monsanto for inducing farmers to violate patents by seed cleaning - a practice utilized by farmers for thousands of years.
- andylei 15y ago
  from what i understand, seed cleaning is part of a process to extract seeds from a harvested crop. monsanto did not sue that man for cleaning seeds, they sued that guy because he marketed his services to farmers using monsanto seeds, claiming that those farmers could extract seeds from their harvest to avoid buying more monsanto seeds. however, when you buy seeds from monsanto, you sign an explicit agreement saying that you won't do exactly that. the result of the case was that the court barred the indiana man from cleaning monsanto seeds, not all seeds in general. from what i undestand, they didn't even collect any damages from him, conditioned on him not cleaning monsanto seeds in the future.
  - kreek 15y ago
    The main problem I have with Monsanto is that in many areas they are they only game in town. In some cases even following the rules will get you sued http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110927/01185716104/monsanto-wins-patent-dispute-against-farmer-who-bought-legal-seeds.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110927/01185716104/monsan... So yes Monsanto win most of their cases, it does not make them ethical.
  - inconditus 15y ago
    Interestingly, this ties in with the music industry. Just as Monsanto "licenses" their seeds, and puts a prohibitive contract with what they can do with it or not, the music industry, DRM, etc.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
pg 15y ago
It's an unfortunate sign for HN when the top comment on a thread is such a content-free rant. If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you're saying is fuck the entire corporate world, because I'm sure Monsanto buys Apple computers and Chevrolets and Clorox too. It's sort of ridiculous to hold Cloudant to a standard that essentially zero other companies meet. There are frequently inane comments of this type at the bottom of HN threads. What's alarming is to see them at the top.
- Kroem3r 15y ago
  Fair opinion. But I found it refreshing; I was resigned to seeing a lot of preemptory 'separation of ethics and business' discussions.
  - sitkack 15y ago
    I love the idea that ethics should be a hobby one does after their day job. We get angry about things like that because if a small group of really smart people strike out on their own to change the world and do good and yet put out a press release saying how "excited" they are to be working with such an amoral company, it just vacates our idealistic world view. We can't stop Apple selling MacBooks to Monstanto. Apple makes tools and doesn't ask how they get used (nor should it have to). But a small cloud startup, different picture. One is active and one is passive.
- lbrandy 15y ago
  I am -so- glad you said it. I've been resisting the urge for weeks to point out the /r/politics-ization of hacker news for fear of being "that guy" (you know, the one complaining about the good ol' days). Just to be clear about what that means, to me, is that not so much politics is involved, but completely uncritical and tribalist politics, where we just unthinkingly upvote anyone advocating any position in support of the "good guys" and downvote anyone that defends the "bad guys".
- kongqiu 15y ago
  It's an unfortunate sign for everyone that you (and/or Cloudant) wouldn't anticipate this reaction from going into business with Monsanto. As to the "content-free" claim, sometimes a rant is an appropriate reaction. If some YC company partnered with Al Qaida, would we really need to spell out all the heinous things AQ has done before writing, "F- that!"?!? EDIT: And to your "If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you're saying is fuck the entire corporate world, because I'm sure Monsanto buys Apple computers and Chevrolets and Clorox too. It's sort of ridiculous to hold Cloudant to a standard that essentially zero other companies meet." -- It's one thing if Monsanto buys iPhones and Macs from Apple; that would represent ~.0001% of Apple's overall business. It's another thing if Monsanto is responsible for a significant % of your revenue. (Of course, Cloudant's deal with Monsanto could represent only 2% of Cloudant's total revenue; but since it's a startup, the initial reaction people will have is that it's significantly higher than that.)
thepointyhat 15y ago
For reference to the uneducated, possibly the largest criticism section on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Criticism
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
freewil 15y ago
I hate Monsanto, although I don't know if I would blame Cloudant for attracting such a large business. For those not in the know, part of Monsanto's business plan includes creating patented seeds that are genetically altered and "Roundup-ready" so they can be doused with their other business, pesticides. They also aggressively enforce their seed patents by suing local farmers that have their land contaminated, by no fault of their own, by other farms that may use these "Round-Up ready" seeds. I believe Monsanto has also now developed crops that do not create seeds and/or create seeds DOA.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

vijayr 15y ago

It is one of those companies, that is pretty well documented. From what I've read, Monsanto makes Walmart (and some others) look like angels. Just google for farmers committing suicide in India (especially from Andhra Pradesh). I also read an article about them threatening American farmers, can't remember where. I don't have any experience with them, but from what I've read about them, they seem very very very scary.

glimcat 15y ago

Sounds like a problem to solve with a disruptive startup. Got any actionable ideas?

WiseWeasel 15y ago
Smarter and cheaper robots. If the cost of labor for growing food organically on a large scale could be reduced, it would have a disruptive impact on conventional agriculture.
- william42 15y ago
  But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement. Not saying that undercutting Monsanto is impossible, but any startup will have an uphill battle to win over "organic" supporters.
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    > But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement. This is incorrect. There is nothing in the charter of any organic farming organization I've seen regulating the use of automation and machinery in agriculture, nor the scale of the operation. Organic farming is strictly about eliminating the use of chemical and genetic additives (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, chemically-treated fence posts, direct genetic modification, etc.) in our farmed food and textile products. A huge factor limiting the spread of organic farming practices over conventional is the increased production cost and decreased yields due to the difficulty of managing pests and weeds. As an example, an organic farmer in many cases must employ workers at great expense to go through the crops once a week or two with a hoe and manually clear out weeds, rather than being able to drive through with a tractor and spray herbicide every couple months. This adds substantially to the cost and difficulty of growing organically. If robots could be leased or purchased to do this work instead, the viability of organic growing would be significantly improved. In many areas, there is no labor infrastructure allowing farmers to find workers to do such work, and so growing certain crops organically is not even a realistic option for them.
- protomyth 15y ago
  Have you actually worked on a modern farm?
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    I have, though not any large-scale intensive farming operations. I'm talking about robots with the dexterity and intelligence to replace human labor all but completely, to allow a large or small farm operator to manage pests and weeds without the use of hazardous chemicals.

sitkack 15y ago

I think if I wanted to round out the mix I would add in BP Halliburton Xe Services (Blackwater Worldwide) The creation of roundup resistent crops is possibly the worst mistakes that the human race has ever made. It took what 3-5 years to make roundup impervious parasites? Terminator seeds that can't actually create a viable organism? You have to go back to the source (Monsanto) every year. Mono-cultures and engineered genetic pollution. Monsanto shouldn't exist.

davidandgoliath 15y ago
Missing the RIAA: Same scenario, different product. Though the key difference is Monsanto's evils are !@#$ing with our food supply / chain / system that's happily evolved over thousands of years as they sue farmers into oblivion. The RIAA is merely making 'big music' less important to the majority of us & shooting themselves in the foot in the process while suing their potential clientbase. Both very much similar, and I'd happily support neither given the opportunity.
- dagw 15y ago
  RIAA isn't even in the same universe. You can certainly debate how many innocent lives Monsanto's,BP,Halliburton and Xe Services have on their concision, but I think it's safe to say that everybody agrees it's greater than zero. I doubt even the most rabid RIAA hater would try to argue that the RIAA had actual blood on their hands. RIAA fucks some bands out of money and use lawsuits to shake down people on dubious legal grounds, that's a far far cry from actually letting people die.
  - Unseelie 15y ago
    Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a different scale. If the RIAA were even better at taking money from people, people would starve. Of course, it makes no sense for the RIAA to starve its working musicians, but the ones who have stopped selling above margin?

kreek 15y ago

+1! If you want to learn more about this watch Food Inc. available on NetFlix streaming. If you have high blood pressure you may want to skip the part where an Indiana man explains how he was sued by Monsanto for inducing farmers to violate patents by seed cleaning - a practice utilized by farmers for thousands of years.

andylei 15y ago
from what i understand, seed cleaning is part of a process to extract seeds from a harvested crop. monsanto did not sue that man for cleaning seeds, they sued that guy because he marketed his services to farmers using monsanto seeds, claiming that those farmers could extract seeds from their harvest to avoid buying more monsanto seeds. however, when you buy seeds from monsanto, you sign an explicit agreement saying that you won't do exactly that. the result of the case was that the court barred the indiana man from cleaning monsanto seeds, not all seeds in general. from what i undestand, they didn't even collect any damages from him, conditioned on him not cleaning monsanto seeds in the future.
- kreek 15y ago
  The main problem I have with Monsanto is that in many areas they are they only game in town. In some cases even following the rules will get you sued http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110927/01185716104/monsanto-wins-patent-dispute-against-farmer-who-bought-legal-seeds.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110927/01185716104/monsan... So yes Monsanto win most of their cases, it does not make them ethical.
- inconditus 15y ago
  Interestingly, this ties in with the music industry. Just as Monsanto "licenses" their seeds, and puts a prohibitive contract with what they can do with it or not, the music industry, DRM, etc.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

pg 15y ago

It's an unfortunate sign for HN when the top comment on a thread is such a content-free rant. If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you're saying is fuck the entire corporate world, because I'm sure Monsanto buys Apple computers and Chevrolets and Clorox too. It's sort of ridiculous to hold Cloudant to a standard that essentially zero other companies meet. There are frequently inane comments of this type at the bottom of HN threads. What's alarming is to see them at the top.

Kroem3r 15y ago
Fair opinion. But I found it refreshing; I was resigned to seeing a lot of preemptory 'separation of ethics and business' discussions.
- sitkack 15y ago
  I love the idea that ethics should be a hobby one does after their day job. We get angry about things like that because if a small group of really smart people strike out on their own to change the world and do good and yet put out a press release saying how "excited" they are to be working with such an amoral company, it just vacates our idealistic world view. We can't stop Apple selling MacBooks to Monstanto. Apple makes tools and doesn't ask how they get used (nor should it have to). But a small cloud startup, different picture. One is active and one is passive.
lbrandy 15y ago
I am -so- glad you said it. I've been resisting the urge for weeks to point out the /r/politics-ization of hacker news for fear of being "that guy" (you know, the one complaining about the good ol' days). Just to be clear about what that means, to me, is that not so much politics is involved, but completely uncritical and tribalist politics, where we just unthinkingly upvote anyone advocating any position in support of the "good guys" and downvote anyone that defends the "bad guys".
kongqiu 15y ago
It's an unfortunate sign for everyone that you (and/or Cloudant) wouldn't anticipate this reaction from going into business with Monsanto. As to the "content-free" claim, sometimes a rant is an appropriate reaction. If some YC company partnered with Al Qaida, would we really need to spell out all the heinous things AQ has done before writing, "F- that!"?!? EDIT: And to your "If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you're saying is fuck the entire corporate world, because I'm sure Monsanto buys Apple computers and Chevrolets and Clorox too. It's sort of ridiculous to hold Cloudant to a standard that essentially zero other companies meet." -- It's one thing if Monsanto buys iPhones and Macs from Apple; that would represent ~.0001% of Apple's overall business. It's another thing if Monsanto is responsible for a significant % of your revenue. (Of course, Cloudant's deal with Monsanto could represent only 2% of Cloudant's total revenue; but since it's a startup, the initial reaction people will have is that it's significantly higher than that.)

thepointyhat 15y ago

For reference to the uneducated, possibly the largest criticism section on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Criticism

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

freewil 15y ago

I hate Monsanto, although I don't know if I would blame Cloudant for attracting such a large business. For those not in the know, part of Monsanto's business plan includes creating patented seeds that are genetically altered and "Roundup-ready" so they can be doused with their other business, pesticides. They also aggressively enforce their seed patents by suing local farmers that have their land contaminated, by no fault of their own, by other farms that may use these "Round-Up ready" seeds. I believe Monsanto has also now developed crops that do not create seeds and/or create seeds DOA.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]