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Yes, if the proprietary seeds are so much better and cheaper that nobody will ever buy legacy seeds, the latter might go out of business. Isn’t it a good thing?
by xyzzyz 4y ago
Yes, if the proprietary seeds are so much better and cheaper that nobody will ever buy legacy seeds, the latter might go out of business. Isn’t it a good thing? It’s not like proprietary seed makers will then be able to rack up prices, as bringing legacy seeds back to market is cheap and doesn’t require large capital investment.
- colechristensen 4y agoDouble yields with more expensive seed, commodity prices halve due to higher yields (you never really gain income long term with increased productivity). But now instead of being able to replant your own seed, you have to buy expensive seed. You can't go back to the old less productive seed because the prices for the yields have gone down significantly.
- xyzzyz 4y agoThis is a fully general argument against any progress: let’s not improve any production processes, because if we make stuff cheaper to make, everyone will have to do it the new, efficient way, which would be terrible. Just try to think of similar proposals in the realm of computing: imagine suggesting that hardware companies shouldn’t make CPUs and memory faster, because this will allow software to do more things and do them faster, which will force people to buy this new, more productive hardware, and will put out of business companies trying to develop software for and run it on old, less productive Pentium 4s. This is extremely silly: with this attitude, we’d never have transformed our economy away from where majority people work in agriculture to where only a small fraction does, and the rest is freed to make other products and services nicer and more affordable.
- nhchris 4y agoThey don't have to be "so much better" - they just have to be the few % better that represents farmer's thin margins.