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I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. The idea that a farmer would abandon their current

I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. The idea that a farmer would abandon their current crop for GMO crop that they cannot replant without making a cost-benefit analysis in their head just strikes me as very odd. These peoples life depend on making such decisions, we should trust them to make them themselves.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago
If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might happen: 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Or maybe if your neighbor doesn't like you, they spread some GMO seed in your field, then report you to the company. This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent. https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567 https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567
- bootsmann 1y ago
  Valid points but this seems more simple to address using regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    What regulation would you propose to fix either of these issues? Case 2 I suspect could be addressed by a law granting some level of immunity for simply having GMO plants in a field. But how do you fix Case 1 with laws? These are effects of biology and physics.
    - bootsmann 1y ago
      If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source they can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be significantly harder to enable similar regulation for fertilizers and pesticides.
      - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms. (In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link in that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they believed themselves innocent.) A lawsuit is rarely a good remedy to a problem, between legal costs, the time delay to any rewards, and the overloaded court system strongly encouraging people to settle out of court.
      - LunaSea 1y ago
        Yes, that very famously worked for PFAS poisoned waters by DuPont in the US. It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
    - Veserv 1y ago
      Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations that they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in a field" or "accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops" which have been affirmatively held as legally binding [1]. The cases you are referencing are cases where the farmer discovers trace contamination of their field, then deliberately sprays Roundup to kill all non-GMO crops, then deliberately harvest seed from the survivors, then deliberately create a GMO section of their farm where they repeatedly plant and harvest to concentrate seed production until they have multiple thousands of acres of GMO crops they derived from the trace contamination [2]. Or cases where they signed a agreement to not replant their GMO soybeans, so they sold those GMO soybeans to a facility which sells to consumers for consumption, then turned around and rebought from that same facility the GMO soybeans they just sold so they could replant them [3] claiming that the sale to a third party meant they were not "replanting" the soybeans they just produced since they just oopsie-whoopsie bought them from someone not bound by the agreement. If you actually look into it, most of the cases that people imagine were really bad or evidence of Monsanto screwing farmers are actually examples of ridiculously slimy farmers. That is not to say that Monsanto is a saint as they almost surely are hiding evidence of Roundup toxicity and you should be generally distrusting that large corporations are value-aligned with regular people, but specifically in the cases of Monsanto versus farmers, the farmers are almost always hiding how absolutely slimy they are actually being. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/190977225/court-to-monsanto-you-said-you-wont-sue-so-you-cant https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/190977225/co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
  - 8note 1y ago
    this is still based on the idea that farmers are bad businessmen, and couldnt find the seed innovation because it would result in better crops. if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going to make it happen
    - bootsmann 1y ago
      The whole point of the G in GMO is that you don’t get these plants by the usual technique of selecting good strains produced by natural gene variance.
- lm28469 1y ago
  Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"
- bluGill 1y ago
  1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray 2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate people don't care. though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so they won't care anyway
  - Y-bar 1y ago
    > farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly picky about wind conditions. > the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray Putting aside the current grave gutting of the agency in question, do they really inspect each usage on a regular basis or is it a pinky promise? > this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo That's a primary problem which is already happening as linked previously in the discussion, it essentially forces a mono-supplier and a mono-culture.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      It doesn't force a mono-supplier, since existing seeds are not suddenly made unavailable when new seeds are brought to market.
      - Y-bar 1y ago
        It has on multiple occasions as linked elsewhere in this discussion, made usage of anything other than a specific vendor's strain unusable. That is a textbook type 1.B. mono-supplier condition.
        pfdietz 1y ago
        Yeah, I call bullshit on that claim. The only way something like this could become required would be if it's so much more performant that farmers would have no choice. But that would mean it's creating so much extra value the farmers still come out ahead. How is this a bad thing? In no scenario is it possible for the introduction of a new variety to force farmers to make a decision that leaves them worse off than some other decision they could make.
- cyberax 1y ago
  > 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops Have you ever been on a farm? > 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a paying Patreon subscriber. Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination. Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at higher-than-market prices. They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop. > This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent. Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Monsanto Derangement Syndrome got Veritasium? Geez...
- gruez 1y ago
  >1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.
- tptacek 1y ago
  This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.
  - Ancapistani 1y ago
    > If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing. ... or you're trying to exterminate an errant plant, only to end up with it being the only thing remaining in the field.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      That's a thing that can happen, but there's no evidence that anybody has been sued for it. The cases where people have been sued, the record is pretty extensive that they knowingly used the whole system, not just the seeds.
- deleted 1y ago
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sdeframond 1y ago
Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming businesses are businesses too, and may prefer short term profitability over long term sustainability. See for example the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which is at the same time an existential threat to to farming and caused by farming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
- bootsmann 1y ago
  This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a singular farmer making a singular decision about what to plant on his field.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit. Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
    - mothballed 1y ago
      I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down. The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
    - bethekidyouwant 1y ago
      Once mosanto has 90% of the market and they jack up their prices. Farmers can go back to growing non-GMO seeds and not using round up to weed.
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
Are they? Farmers in the US just went a full month without selling a single soy bean to China. The last time it happened was seven years ago. Guess who was president both times it happened. Guess who farmers overwhelmingly voted for? They regularly vote against their own business interests. Perhaps farmers in Nigeria are better educated.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  The entire reason almost every modern country massively subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things, like cause the dust bowl. Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using "industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  I think farmers know about the trade war that Trump will create, but they also think he will do other things to help them. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/trump-reportedly-eyeing-10-billion-farmer-bailout-using-tariffs-heres-what-to-know/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/tru... I was also curious about this, so I ended up watching a documentary a local politician made where she interviewed local farmers trying to figure out why they would vote against their own best interests, and the short answer was, net, they thought additional bailouts + deregulation of farming would outweigh the potential trade war.
  - thinkingtoilet 1y ago
    They do not.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      Wyoming here. The farmers and ranchers are 100% convinced they’ll be bailed out. And honestly? They probably will. ICE basically stopped enforcing around here because the farmers threw a hissy fit.
abdullahkhalids 1y ago
In a multi-agent dynamic system, the optimal actions by each individual agents (based on whatever cost-benefit analysis they do) can evolve the system into a state where every agent is worse off compared to some initial state. This holds even if every individual agent is a "smart businessperson". One main purpose of law and social rules is to prevent multi-agent systems from getting stuck into these global non-optimal states. And arguing that agents are smart is not a counter-argument to this.
- TimTheTinker 1y ago
  Great point. As an extreme example, I'd add -- in some cases, because of market conditions (and perhaps the legal climate as well), within a given financial year a farmer may be forced to choose between purchasing GMO seeds and having to sell the farm, especially if the farm already used licensed GMO seeds in a prior year. But as you pointed out, without legal and regulatory guardrails, the system at large can become badly suboptimal long before compromise-or-die dichotomies arise.
- bootsmann 1y ago
  This is true in the abstract but I don’t see how it applies to this specific case. There are two agents here and the GMO plants will only be planted if planting them is the optimal choice for both.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    I don't think you can arbitrarily leave out all the other parties in the agricultural system: the bank, who the farmer may need to borrow from to buy seed, the politicians, who may or may not accept money from the companies producing GMO seeds to produce favourable legislation, the public, who may vote with their wallets when purchasing the resulting crops, and so on...
  - abdullahkhalids 1y ago
    The agents are numerous, as pointed out by sibling comment. The farmer agents only make decisions based on personal profitability. The overall system after some years can evolve to a state where some of the following are true: - the GMO seed maker acquires a monopoly over certain types of seeds, which enables it to reduce farmer profits to below what they were when they were planting non-GMO seeds. - the country's food supply becomes dependent on foreign countries/corporations, which can cause severe problems at international negotiating tables. - the GMO crop has long term health impacts, say after 20 years of use. When these are discovered, it is no longer possible to go back to non-GMO because the infrastructure required for non-GMO crops is not easily reconstructable (for instance a country might reduce its pesticide production significantly once enough farmers have switched to GMO). Similarly, farmers have living knowledge about how to grow certain crop varieties learned by long experience. non-GMO and GMO varieties require different techniques, and non-GMO techniques may be forgotten, making it infeasible to switch back to non-GMO. Decisions to prevent these outcomes can only occur at the government/regulatory level, and may possibly be "GMO are banned".
Waterluvian 1y ago
I can’t think of a more complete “Jack of all trades” than the modern farmer.
estimator7292 1y ago
The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO crops are more productive and more profitable. The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not that the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if they can't make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-seeking. Producers have to raise costs which percolates up into increased costs for consumers.
- onemoresoop 1y ago
  What would stop them from jacking up prices when they have monopoly? It's not like we haven't seen this scenario before..
- NoahZuniga 1y ago
  How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more productive? Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices?
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more productive? The farmer cries we've been hearing in the news over the last few months may be a little overblown, but they certainly aren't coming from a place where food costs are rising... > Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices? Not necessarily. Prices are determined by supply _and demand_.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Isn't this an argument against literally any technological advance?
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gnulinux996 1y ago
> I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. I feel like assuming that the farmers are competent businessmen capable of understanding the ups and downs of GMOs is in disagreement with reality and mostly used to drive "free marketeering / deregulation" agendas.
- georgefrowny 1y ago
  It's the same argument they make for why we don't need food safety rules. Intelligent and rational people will be able to work out that the cheap carcinogenic additive is bad and therefore won't buy it and the company will do better and it's just fine. Right? Right? If they don't they're probably too stupid and probably poor and only have themselves to blame. It's just business. Never mind that the the exact same kind of people are simultaneous lobbying for the elimination of (quote) "unjustified trade restrictions or commercial requirements, such as labeling, that affect new technologies, including biotechnology" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/4201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/4201)
nchmy 1y ago
depends on which farmers youre talking about. In much of the world, they're smallholder subsistence farmers with little to no education, and are often at the mercy of middlemen who steal a significant proportion of their (meager, due to not much land that they dont really know how to take care of/take advantage of) crops' value.
RobotToaster 1y ago
Many Indian farmers have been driven to suicide due to debt from buying GMO seeds https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-geno...
- parineum 1y ago
  That's a story of a farmer in debt because he had two consecutive years of crop failure. I'd be less apt to blame the expected cost of seeds than the unexpected crop failures for his misfortune.
- coin 1y ago
  The data doesn’t support your claim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#GM_crops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#G...
  - RobotToaster 1y ago
    > "A 2015 study in Environmental Sciences Europe found that farmer suicide rates in India's rainfed areas were "directly related to increases in Bt cotton adoption." Factors leading to suicide included "high costs of BT cotton" and "ecological disruption and crop loss after the introduction of Bt cotton."" The contradicting studies were mostly produced by "International Food Policy Research Institute, an agriculture policy think tank formed to promote the adoption of innovations in agricultural technology, based in Washington, D.C." which seems like an obvious conflict of interest.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      Isn't gray market Bt cotton widely used in India outside patent protection? (Or was, given patents likely expired by now.)
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
It's not just a question of intelligence or education, but also power. The free market does not always produce good outcomes, hence the need for regulation.
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ZeroGravitas 1y ago
Do any smart business people get locked into software ecosystems? People seem very focused on the science to the expense of the business side. Like it's possible to be pro-database but anti-Oracle. And if the Oracle guys called you anti-database it would be very transparent bullshit. Doubly so if they wrapped it in "databases are going to save the poor" rhetoric.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago

If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might happen: 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Or maybe if your neighbor doesn't like you, they spread some GMO seed in your field, then report you to the company. This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent. https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567 https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567

bootsmann 1y ago
Valid points but this seems more simple to address using regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  What regulation would you propose to fix either of these issues? Case 2 I suspect could be addressed by a law granting some level of immunity for simply having GMO plants in a field. But how do you fix Case 1 with laws? These are effects of biology and physics.
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source they can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be significantly harder to enable similar regulation for fertilizers and pesticides.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms. (In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link in that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they believed themselves innocent.) A lawsuit is rarely a good remedy to a problem, between legal costs, the time delay to any rewards, and the overloaded court system strongly encouraging people to settle out of court.
    - LunaSea 1y ago
      Yes, that very famously worked for PFAS poisoned waters by DuPont in the US. It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
  - Veserv 1y ago
    Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations that they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in a field" or "accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops" which have been affirmatively held as legally binding [1]. The cases you are referencing are cases where the farmer discovers trace contamination of their field, then deliberately sprays Roundup to kill all non-GMO crops, then deliberately harvest seed from the survivors, then deliberately create a GMO section of their farm where they repeatedly plant and harvest to concentrate seed production until they have multiple thousands of acres of GMO crops they derived from the trace contamination [2]. Or cases where they signed a agreement to not replant their GMO soybeans, so they sold those GMO soybeans to a facility which sells to consumers for consumption, then turned around and rebought from that same facility the GMO soybeans they just sold so they could replant them [3] claiming that the sale to a third party meant they were not "replanting" the soybeans they just produced since they just oopsie-whoopsie bought them from someone not bound by the agreement. If you actually look into it, most of the cases that people imagine were really bad or evidence of Monsanto screwing farmers are actually examples of ridiculously slimy farmers. That is not to say that Monsanto is a saint as they almost surely are hiding evidence of Roundup toxicity and you should be generally distrusting that large corporations are value-aligned with regular people, but specifically in the cases of Monsanto versus farmers, the farmers are almost always hiding how absolutely slimy they are actually being. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/190977225/court-to-monsanto-you-said-you-wont-sue-so-you-cant https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/190977225/co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
- 8note 1y ago
  this is still based on the idea that farmers are bad businessmen, and couldnt find the seed innovation because it would result in better crops. if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going to make it happen
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    The whole point of the G in GMO is that you don’t get these plants by the usual technique of selecting good strains produced by natural gene variance.
lm28469 1y ago
Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"
bluGill 1y ago
1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray 2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate people don't care. though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so they won't care anyway
- Y-bar 1y ago
  > farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly picky about wind conditions. > the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray Putting aside the current grave gutting of the agency in question, do they really inspect each usage on a regular basis or is it a pinky promise? > this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo That's a primary problem which is already happening as linked previously in the discussion, it essentially forces a mono-supplier and a mono-culture.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    It doesn't force a mono-supplier, since existing seeds are not suddenly made unavailable when new seeds are brought to market.
    - Y-bar 1y ago
      It has on multiple occasions as linked elsewhere in this discussion, made usage of anything other than a specific vendor's strain unusable. That is a textbook type 1.B. mono-supplier condition.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        Yeah, I call bullshit on that claim. The only way something like this could become required would be if it's so much more performant that farmers would have no choice. But that would mean it's creating so much extra value the farmers still come out ahead. How is this a bad thing? In no scenario is it possible for the introduction of a new variety to force farmers to make a decision that leaves them worse off than some other decision they could make.
cyberax 1y ago
> 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops Have you ever been on a farm? > 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a paying Patreon subscriber. Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination. Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at higher-than-market prices. They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop. > This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent. Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Monsanto Derangement Syndrome got Veritasium? Geez...
gruez 1y ago
>1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.
tptacek 1y ago
This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.
- Ancapistani 1y ago
  > If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing. ... or you're trying to exterminate an errant plant, only to end up with it being the only thing remaining in the field.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    That's a thing that can happen, but there's no evidence that anybody has been sued for it. The cases where people have been sued, the record is pretty extensive that they knowingly used the whole system, not just the seeds.
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sdeframond 1y ago

Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming businesses are businesses too, and may prefer short term profitability over long term sustainability. See for example the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which is at the same time an existential threat to to farming and caused by farming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

bootsmann 1y ago
This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a singular farmer making a singular decision about what to plant on his field.
- michaelt 1y ago
  Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit. Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down. The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
  - bethekidyouwant 1y ago
    Once mosanto has 90% of the market and they jack up their prices. Farmers can go back to growing non-GMO seeds and not using round up to weed.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago

Are they? Farmers in the US just went a full month without selling a single soy bean to China. The last time it happened was seven years ago. Guess who was president both times it happened. Guess who farmers overwhelmingly voted for? They regularly vote against their own business interests. Perhaps farmers in Nigeria are better educated.

mrguyorama 1y ago
The entire reason almost every modern country massively subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things, like cause the dust bowl. Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using "industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.
rpdillon 1y ago
I think farmers know about the trade war that Trump will create, but they also think he will do other things to help them. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/trump-reportedly-eyeing-10-billion-farmer-bailout-using-tariffs-heres-what-to-know/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/tru... I was also curious about this, so I ended up watching a documentary a local politician made where she interviewed local farmers trying to figure out why they would vote against their own best interests, and the short answer was, net, they thought additional bailouts + deregulation of farming would outweigh the potential trade war.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  They do not.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    Wyoming here. The farmers and ranchers are 100% convinced they’ll be bailed out. And honestly? They probably will. ICE basically stopped enforcing around here because the farmers threw a hissy fit.

abdullahkhalids 1y ago

In a multi-agent dynamic system, the optimal actions by each individual agents (based on whatever cost-benefit analysis they do) can evolve the system into a state where every agent is worse off compared to some initial state. This holds even if every individual agent is a "smart businessperson". One main purpose of law and social rules is to prevent multi-agent systems from getting stuck into these global non-optimal states. And arguing that agents are smart is not a counter-argument to this.

TimTheTinker 1y ago
Great point. As an extreme example, I'd add -- in some cases, because of market conditions (and perhaps the legal climate as well), within a given financial year a farmer may be forced to choose between purchasing GMO seeds and having to sell the farm, especially if the farm already used licensed GMO seeds in a prior year. But as you pointed out, without legal and regulatory guardrails, the system at large can become badly suboptimal long before compromise-or-die dichotomies arise.
bootsmann 1y ago
This is true in the abstract but I don’t see how it applies to this specific case. There are two agents here and the GMO plants will only be planted if planting them is the optimal choice for both.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  I don't think you can arbitrarily leave out all the other parties in the agricultural system: the bank, who the farmer may need to borrow from to buy seed, the politicians, who may or may not accept money from the companies producing GMO seeds to produce favourable legislation, the public, who may vote with their wallets when purchasing the resulting crops, and so on...
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  The agents are numerous, as pointed out by sibling comment. The farmer agents only make decisions based on personal profitability. The overall system after some years can evolve to a state where some of the following are true: - the GMO seed maker acquires a monopoly over certain types of seeds, which enables it to reduce farmer profits to below what they were when they were planting non-GMO seeds. - the country's food supply becomes dependent on foreign countries/corporations, which can cause severe problems at international negotiating tables. - the GMO crop has long term health impacts, say after 20 years of use. When these are discovered, it is no longer possible to go back to non-GMO because the infrastructure required for non-GMO crops is not easily reconstructable (for instance a country might reduce its pesticide production significantly once enough farmers have switched to GMO). Similarly, farmers have living knowledge about how to grow certain crop varieties learned by long experience. non-GMO and GMO varieties require different techniques, and non-GMO techniques may be forgotten, making it infeasible to switch back to non-GMO. Decisions to prevent these outcomes can only occur at the government/regulatory level, and may possibly be "GMO are banned".

Waterluvian 1y ago

I can’t think of a more complete “Jack of all trades” than the modern farmer.

estimator7292 1y ago

The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO crops are more productive and more profitable. The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not that the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if they can't make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-seeking. Producers have to raise costs which percolates up into increased costs for consumers.

onemoresoop 1y ago
What would stop them from jacking up prices when they have monopoly? It's not like we haven't seen this scenario before..
NoahZuniga 1y ago
How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more productive? Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices?
- 9rx 1y ago
  > How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more productive? The farmer cries we've been hearing in the news over the last few months may be a little overblown, but they certainly aren't coming from a place where food costs are rising... > Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices? Not necessarily. Prices are determined by supply _and demand_.
pfdietz 1y ago
Isn't this an argument against literally any technological advance?

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gnulinux996 1y ago

> I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. I feel like assuming that the farmers are competent businessmen capable of understanding the ups and downs of GMOs is in disagreement with reality and mostly used to drive "free marketeering / deregulation" agendas.

georgefrowny 1y ago
It's the same argument they make for why we don't need food safety rules. Intelligent and rational people will be able to work out that the cheap carcinogenic additive is bad and therefore won't buy it and the company will do better and it's just fine. Right? Right? If they don't they're probably too stupid and probably poor and only have themselves to blame. It's just business. Never mind that the the exact same kind of people are simultaneous lobbying for the elimination of (quote) "unjustified trade restrictions or commercial requirements, such as labeling, that affect new technologies, including biotechnology" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/4201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/4201)

nchmy 1y ago

depends on which farmers youre talking about. In much of the world, they're smallholder subsistence farmers with little to no education, and are often at the mercy of middlemen who steal a significant proportion of their (meager, due to not much land that they dont really know how to take care of/take advantage of) crops' value.

RobotToaster 1y ago

Many Indian farmers have been driven to suicide due to debt from buying GMO seeds https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-geno...

parineum 1y ago
That's a story of a farmer in debt because he had two consecutive years of crop failure. I'd be less apt to blame the expected cost of seeds than the unexpected crop failures for his misfortune.
coin 1y ago
The data doesn’t support your claim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#GM_crops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#G...
- RobotToaster 1y ago
  > "A 2015 study in Environmental Sciences Europe found that farmer suicide rates in India's rainfed areas were "directly related to increases in Bt cotton adoption." Factors leading to suicide included "high costs of BT cotton" and "ecological disruption and crop loss after the introduction of Bt cotton."" The contradicting studies were mostly produced by "International Food Policy Research Institute, an agriculture policy think tank formed to promote the adoption of innovations in agricultural technology, based in Washington, D.C." which seems like an obvious conflict of interest.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Isn't gray market Bt cotton widely used in India outside patent protection? (Or was, given patents likely expired by now.)

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

It's not just a question of intelligence or education, but also power. The free market does not always produce good outcomes, hence the need for regulation.

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ZeroGravitas 1y ago

Do any smart business people get locked into software ecosystems? People seem very focused on the science to the expense of the business side. Like it's possible to be pro-database but anti-Oracle. And if the Oracle guys called you anti-database it would be very transparent bullshit. Doubly so if they wrapped it in "databases are going to save the poor" rhetoric.