9 ms·

Plant patents sow fear among small growers

122 points by mikro2nd 3y ago

k4runa 3y ago
I spent some time working on a seed swapping startup idea a couple years ago, and it's a fascinating topic. In the UK there is also a law which states you can't sell seeds unless it's registered [1], and out of maybe 4000 tomato varieties the government has approved only a handful. This is terrible for diversity because as the climate change get worse, some tomato varieties might thrive better than others in heat, or drought, or have different disease resistance... but because they are illegal to sell the seeds it's difficult to keep the different species alive and we could run into trouble in the future when we realise these government approved varieties don't work in warmer or colder climates. There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm. Those laws may not exist in other countries but the patents could stop diversity in the same way, but long term it's important to keep these weird varieties of seeds around for diversity. [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/forbidden-fruit-5353568.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...
- whatshisface 3y ago
  >There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm. Will the right honorable gentleman next propose that we create a list of twelve permitted stocks, so that an investor will not purchase 100,000 risky shares only for the company to fail?
  - pintxo 3y ago
    Well, the government ordered the SEC to have a look. It’s not like the stock market is free capitalism.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    This is basically want public equity markets are. You have to be an "accredited investor" (the only requirement is having a lot of money) to invest in all the extra risky things.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      That's a US thing. In the UK there's a KYC type form you fill out, self-certifying that you know what you're doing. And then you can trade CFDs, which are illegal in the US accredited or not. (Or not approved by regulators I suppose I mean, I assume professional US desks trade them OTC 'in' Europe. But I think probably European brokers even can't market them to or allow trades by US retail customers?)
      - graemep 3y ago
        The US has options and futures markets
        OJFord 3y ago
        Yes, contracts for difference are neither.
        graemep 3y ago
        They are very similar. They were different when options and futures are settled by delivery of the underlying. Without, that not so much.
- voakbasda 3y ago
  These kinds of laws are literally inhumane. In this case, I strongly believe the government should be ignored or outright defied. Spread your seeds.
  - 127361 3y ago
    I agree, civil disobedience is the correct thing to do here.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  That's actually an European directive, and each member state has its own adjacent laws, such as Germany [1]. The German seed protection laws and authority is pretty old, predating the EU - the founding year is 1953 [2]. [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/saatverkg_1985/BJNR016330985.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/saatverkg_1985/BJNR016330... [2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundessortenamt https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundessortenamt
  - switch007 3y ago
    EU Directive* (that the UK has been free to ignore since Feb 2020 and legislate however they wish)
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    I was furious when this directive was implemented in UK law. The only plant/seed varieties that could be traded were those on an official list, whose contents would inevitably be dominated by a few huge companies. I don't know how the directive came about, but it smells like heavy commercial lobbying. The UK government has been too busy campaigning against itself since Brexit, to reverse the UK implementation. It's high time.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  It is a law, but one for which there is a simple work around, thankfully. There are several companies that sell 'heritage' seeds, and they exist as a seed swapping 'club'. A penny of your purchase is for club membership. Here is a rather fine example scroll to 'Our Seed Club'. Lovely company to deal with too https://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html https://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html
  - flir 3y ago
    Note: If you're thinking of dealing with Real Seeds this year, get in early - they produce limited amounts of seed, and they do sell out.
- vasco 3y ago
  > There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm That for sure can't be the reason, insurance exists, and the market exists, next year nobody would buy those seeds. Also since there's so many types and farms it's not like whole country production would go to zero for that year.
  - mharig 3y ago
    Such laws exist for animals, too. They have the fast effect, that within a few reproduction cycles after the introduction of the law, the agriculture of a whole country (or like in the case of the EU a whole super-country) concentrates on the production of species with some defined positive characteristics, predominantly yield. The negative effects are, that the selected characteristics not necessarily are what is good for humans, i.e. taste and nutritional values. And it leads to genetic impoverishment. The positive effects dominate only some decades. We are now in a phase, where the negative effects begin to get dominant. It will cost a lot of effort and money to alter course.
- fmbb 3y ago
  As a layman putting zero effort into looking at this law, is there no validity in the reasoning that letting commercial interests sell any kinds of seeds can lead to crises with invasive species everywhere? I mean more than what already happens.
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    > is there no validity in the reasoning that letting commercial interests sell any kinds of seeds can lead to crises with invasive species everywhere? Well that depends on whether there is any evidence at all to support that the current procedures actually help protect against that. Is there any such evidence or are you just baselessly speculating?
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Of course it's UK. The longer I live here the more I find out this country is like the North Korea of western civilization.
darth_avocado 3y ago
Patents shouldn’t exist that broadly. You shouldn’t be able to patent rectangles as the shape of the phone, making anyone else unable to build a rectangle phone. You shouldn’t be able to patent curly leaves on lettuce so that no one else can have curly leaf lettuce unless they buy from you.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  You can't patent curly leaves, only the specific variety that has them. The problem in the article is how one might tell the patented variety from the free one, without expensive DNA testing. This scared a person away from working with it.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Isn't it possible to claim that the other party let the seeds escape into the wild? And what would the legal status be if the new crop becomes the dominant species in the wild?
    - Maken 3y ago
      Monsanto used to sue anyone whose crops had been cross-pollinated with their own registered varieties, and it was the responsibility of the farmer to demostrate it was not intentional.
      - gruez 3y ago
        Source? Of the cases I've seen, it was pretty clear that the farmer was doing it intentionally, or at the very least was letting it happen "accidentally" but trying to speed it along.
        kennyloginz 3y ago
        That’s basic farming. You choose your best crops for the next season. If Monsanto can’t keep from seeding into non-customers crops, they aren’t allowed to demand the farmer cripple his ability to farm.
HackerThemAll 3y ago
This is the American dream. Software patents, plant patents, patenting straightforward things, patent trolls. Not to mention sick health care system. I once wanted to move to US, but many years ago realized it's a sick country.
- fransje26 3y ago
  I think this illustrates it perfectly: > Goldman Sachs Asks 'Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?' https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/goldman-sachs-curing-patients-health-industry-report/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/goldman-sachs-curing-pa...
  - refurb 3y ago
    It is a viable business model. Look at the cure for hepatitis C. It was the highest selling drug ever before Ozempic came along.
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      I don't think the person you were replying to was literally asking the question. It's a matter of gatekeeping health for a profit and how quickly it becomes infinitely corrupt. We're allowing society to degrade to protect the profit.
      - refurb 3y ago
        > It's a matter of gatekeeping health for a profit and how quickly it becomes infinitely corrupt. Your statement isn't really saying anything. "infinitely corrupt"? What does that even mean?
- happytiger 3y ago
  Ginkgo Bioworks. Syngenta. Bayer. Recombinetics. Heck, JoynBio. The companies leading this charge are global, not just US-based. It’s a mistake to try to pin this on one country. Agribusiness companies are deploying digital on farms everywhere in the world in a very clear effort to gather data on all aspects of farming: soil health, labor, weather, inputs, etc, and specifically including genetics on the world’s most critical crop seeds and livestock. They are quietly vacuuming up and locking up the knowledge of farmers. All the data then gets to be owned and controlled by corporations, analyzed with AI and proprietary algorithms, and then sold back to farmers with “prescriptions” for how to farm and which products to buy. This all happens with very little transparency or explanation. The massively hyper-consolidated food and agriculture systems is a massive issue and I don’t think people realize just how extensive it’s become in just the last 5-10 years. But to call it a “US sickness” denies the very global nature of the companies doing the work. It’s not US specific unfortunately, though certain there is plenty of US company involvement.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
The good news is that patents expire. After that the knowledge becomes public domain. So, once they expire, we all benefit.
- McDyver 3y ago
  So what's the point? To maximise profits while making humanity worse off? Why can't we all benefit from the start? It's a sick system, perpetuated by sick people
  - vdaea 3y ago
    Why would companies spend millions developing the next plant if they knew the second it's out other companies will copy it and compete with them?
    - mirpa 3y ago
      Why would people do anything if they get threats from lawyers?
    - JDEW 3y ago
      Then they just shouldn’t? There’s plenty of universities, cooperatives, and passionate growers who have developed crops and seeds in the past and will surely continue to do so in the future. The patent system is useful to address very specific market failures in very specialized industries where the above systems fail, not to turn the whole world into a rental unit.
      - gruez 3y ago
        >There’s plenty of universities, cooperatives, and passionate growers who have developed crops and seeds in the past and will surely continue to do so in the future. The patent system doesn't prevent those entities from developing their own crops and releasing it for free.
        3y ago
jakub_g 3y ago
> When a company is granted a utility patent on a type of seed, it doesn’t just own the seed. It also owns its traits (color, texture, ... > So, if a plant breeder like Morton develops his own variety of lettuce and the lettuce matches any of the traits of a patented variety – whether it be color, the curliness of the leaf or a trait that makes it conducive to a particular climate – the breeder is technically in violation of patent law and risks getting sued by the patent owner. > "They are essentially just doing obsessive-compulsive descriptions of plants and laying claims to those traits, so if anyone else has those traits, they are in violation"
Dylanfm 3y ago
I love growing (and eating) Frank Morton’s lettuces. If I recall correctly, a lettuce variety he bred was grown in space. Here’s a good podcast interviewing him, also touching on Open Source Seeds and patents: https://osseeds.org/free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumple-waved-lettuce/ https://osseeds.org/free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumpl... there’s another good episode on the Seed Grower podcast too.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
I see corpocracy coming up, and this will be worse than robots taking over the world

122 points by mikro2nd 3y ago

I spent some time working on a seed swapping startup idea a couple years ago, and it's a fascinating topic. In the UK there is also a law which states you can't sell seeds unless it's registered [1], and out of maybe 4000 tomato varieties the government has approved only a handful. This is terrible for diversity because as the climate change get worse, some tomato varieties might thrive better than others in heat, or drought, or have different disease resistance... but because they are illegal to sell the seeds it's difficult to keep the different species alive and we could run into trouble in the future when we realise these government approved varieties don't work in warmer or colder climates. There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm. Those laws may not exist in other countries but the patents could stop diversity in the same way, but long term it's important to keep these weird varieties of seeds around for diversity. [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/forbidden-fruit-5353568.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...

whatshisface 3y ago
>There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm. Will the right honorable gentleman next propose that we create a list of twelve permitted stocks, so that an investor will not purchase 100,000 risky shares only for the company to fail?
- pintxo 3y ago
  Well, the government ordered the SEC to have a look. It’s not like the stock market is free capitalism.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  This is basically want public equity markets are. You have to be an "accredited investor" (the only requirement is having a lot of money) to invest in all the extra risky things.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    That's a US thing. In the UK there's a KYC type form you fill out, self-certifying that you know what you're doing. And then you can trade CFDs, which are illegal in the US accredited or not. (Or not approved by regulators I suppose I mean, I assume professional US desks trade them OTC 'in' Europe. But I think probably European brokers even can't market them to or allow trades by US retail customers?)
    - graemep 3y ago
      The US has options and futures markets
      - OJFord 3y ago
        Yes, contracts for difference are neither.
        graemep 3y ago
        They are very similar. They were different when options and futures are settled by delivery of the underlying. Without, that not so much.
voakbasda 3y ago
These kinds of laws are literally inhumane. In this case, I strongly believe the government should be ignored or outright defied. Spread your seeds.
- 127361 3y ago
  I agree, civil disobedience is the correct thing to do here.
mschuster91 3y ago
That's actually an European directive, and each member state has its own adjacent laws, such as Germany [1]. The German seed protection laws and authority is pretty old, predating the EU - the founding year is 1953 [2]. [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/saatverkg_1985/BJNR016330985.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/saatverkg_1985/BJNR016330... [2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundessortenamt https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundessortenamt
- switch007 3y ago
  EU Directive* (that the UK has been free to ignore since Feb 2020 and legislate however they wish)
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I was furious when this directive was implemented in UK law. The only plant/seed varieties that could be traded were those on an official list, whose contents would inevitably be dominated by a few huge companies. I don't know how the directive came about, but it smells like heavy commercial lobbying. The UK government has been too busy campaigning against itself since Brexit, to reverse the UK implementation. It's high time.
jimnotgym 3y ago
It is a law, but one for which there is a simple work around, thankfully. There are several companies that sell 'heritage' seeds, and they exist as a seed swapping 'club'. A penny of your purchase is for club membership. Here is a rather fine example scroll to 'Our Seed Club'. Lovely company to deal with too https://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html https://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html
- flir 3y ago
  Note: If you're thinking of dealing with Real Seeds this year, get in early - they produce limited amounts of seed, and they do sell out.
vasco 3y ago
> There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm That for sure can't be the reason, insurance exists, and the market exists, next year nobody would buy those seeds. Also since there's so many types and farms it's not like whole country production would go to zero for that year.
- mharig 3y ago
  Such laws exist for animals, too. They have the fast effect, that within a few reproduction cycles after the introduction of the law, the agriculture of a whole country (or like in the case of the EU a whole super-country) concentrates on the production of species with some defined positive characteristics, predominantly yield. The negative effects are, that the selected characteristics not necessarily are what is good for humans, i.e. taste and nutritional values. And it leads to genetic impoverishment. The positive effects dominate only some decades. We are now in a phase, where the negative effects begin to get dominant. It will cost a lot of effort and money to alter course.
fmbb 3y ago
As a layman putting zero effort into looking at this law, is there no validity in the reasoning that letting commercial interests sell any kinds of seeds can lead to crises with invasive species everywhere? I mean more than what already happens.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  > is there no validity in the reasoning that letting commercial interests sell any kinds of seeds can lead to crises with invasive species everywhere? Well that depends on whether there is any evidence at all to support that the current procedures actually help protect against that. Is there any such evidence or are you just baselessly speculating?
bitcharmer 3y ago
Of course it's UK. The longer I live here the more I find out this country is like the North Korea of western civilization.

darth_avocado 3y ago

Patents shouldn’t exist that broadly. You shouldn’t be able to patent rectangles as the shape of the phone, making anyone else unable to build a rectangle phone. You shouldn’t be able to patent curly leaves on lettuce so that no one else can have curly leaf lettuce unless they buy from you.

jimnotgym 3y ago
You can't patent curly leaves, only the specific variety that has them. The problem in the article is how one might tell the patented variety from the free one, without expensive DNA testing. This scared a person away from working with it.
- amelius 3y ago
  Isn't it possible to claim that the other party let the seeds escape into the wild? And what would the legal status be if the new crop becomes the dominant species in the wild?
  - Maken 3y ago
    Monsanto used to sue anyone whose crops had been cross-pollinated with their own registered varieties, and it was the responsibility of the farmer to demostrate it was not intentional.
    - gruez 3y ago
      Source? Of the cases I've seen, it was pretty clear that the farmer was doing it intentionally, or at the very least was letting it happen "accidentally" but trying to speed it along.
      - kennyloginz 3y ago
        That’s basic farming. You choose your best crops for the next season. If Monsanto can’t keep from seeding into non-customers crops, they aren’t allowed to demand the farmer cripple his ability to farm.

HackerThemAll 3y ago

This is the American dream. Software patents, plant patents, patenting straightforward things, patent trolls. Not to mention sick health care system. I once wanted to move to US, but many years ago realized it's a sick country.

fransje26 3y ago
I think this illustrates it perfectly: > Goldman Sachs Asks 'Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?' https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/goldman-sachs-curing-patients-health-industry-report/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/goldman-sachs-curing-pa...
- refurb 3y ago
  It is a viable business model. Look at the cure for hepatitis C. It was the highest selling drug ever before Ozempic came along.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    I don't think the person you were replying to was literally asking the question. It's a matter of gatekeeping health for a profit and how quickly it becomes infinitely corrupt. We're allowing society to degrade to protect the profit.
    - refurb 3y ago
      > It's a matter of gatekeeping health for a profit and how quickly it becomes infinitely corrupt. Your statement isn't really saying anything. "infinitely corrupt"? What does that even mean?
happytiger 3y ago
Ginkgo Bioworks. Syngenta. Bayer. Recombinetics. Heck, JoynBio. The companies leading this charge are global, not just US-based. It’s a mistake to try to pin this on one country. Agribusiness companies are deploying digital on farms everywhere in the world in a very clear effort to gather data on all aspects of farming: soil health, labor, weather, inputs, etc, and specifically including genetics on the world’s most critical crop seeds and livestock. They are quietly vacuuming up and locking up the knowledge of farmers. All the data then gets to be owned and controlled by corporations, analyzed with AI and proprietary algorithms, and then sold back to farmers with “prescriptions” for how to farm and which products to buy. This all happens with very little transparency or explanation. The massively hyper-consolidated food and agriculture systems is a massive issue and I don’t think people realize just how extensive it’s become in just the last 5-10 years. But to call it a “US sickness” denies the very global nature of the companies doing the work. It’s not US specific unfortunately, though certain there is plenty of US company involvement.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

The good news is that patents expire. After that the knowledge becomes public domain. So, once they expire, we all benefit.

McDyver 3y ago
So what's the point? To maximise profits while making humanity worse off? Why can't we all benefit from the start? It's a sick system, perpetuated by sick people
- vdaea 3y ago
  Why would companies spend millions developing the next plant if they knew the second it's out other companies will copy it and compete with them?
  - mirpa 3y ago
    Why would people do anything if they get threats from lawyers?
  - JDEW 3y ago
    Then they just shouldn’t? There’s plenty of universities, cooperatives, and passionate growers who have developed crops and seeds in the past and will surely continue to do so in the future. The patent system is useful to address very specific market failures in very specialized industries where the above systems fail, not to turn the whole world into a rental unit.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >There’s plenty of universities, cooperatives, and passionate growers who have developed crops and seeds in the past and will surely continue to do so in the future. The patent system doesn't prevent those entities from developing their own crops and releasing it for free.
      - 3y ago

jakub_g 3y ago

> When a company is granted a utility patent on a type of seed, it doesn’t just own the seed. It also owns its traits (color, texture, ... > So, if a plant breeder like Morton develops his own variety of lettuce and the lettuce matches any of the traits of a patented variety – whether it be color, the curliness of the leaf or a trait that makes it conducive to a particular climate – the breeder is technically in violation of patent law and risks getting sued by the patent owner. > "They are essentially just doing obsessive-compulsive descriptions of plants and laying claims to those traits, so if anyone else has those traits, they are in violation"

Dylanfm 3y ago

I love growing (and eating) Frank Morton’s lettuces. If I recall correctly, a lettuce variety he bred was grown in space. Here’s a good podcast interviewing him, also touching on Open Source Seeds and patents: https://osseeds.org/free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumple-waved-lettuce/ https://osseeds.org/free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumpl... there’s another good episode on the Seed Grower podcast too.

p0w3n3d 3y ago

I see corpocracy coming up, and this will be worse than robots taking over the world