10 ms·

For some context on why the original law was introduced: When you're making a seed that you want to make the best crop possible, the way to do that is to take

For some context on why the original law was introduced: When you're making a seed that you want to make the best crop possible, the way to do that is to take two great lines of maize that share relatively little genetics, cross them at the last step, and enjoy the hybrid vigour that results. This is one of the most important practical advancements we have for getting good yields from crops: the yields are dramatically better for this seed then if you plant the seed kernels that are made by the hybrid. When you plant saved seed (which many poor people are forced to do through not being able to afford hybrid seeds) you get dramatically worse yields and often even doing things like using fertilizer doesn't make economic sense (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/low-quality-low-returns-low-adoption-evidence-market-fertilizer-and-hybrid-seed-uganda https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/low-quality-low-ret... is frequently cited.) However, to the naked eye, there's basically no distinction between a hybrid seed and stored seed. A lot of seed companies sell seeds that are coated to help protect the seeds from pests/blights, but seed counterfitters have learned how to copy this. To distinguish them, you either need to run genetic testing or plant them and wait a season. If you get scammed, the result can be devestating for a smallholder farmer's family. I don't necessarily think community seed banks should be banned, but I think it's important context to know. There are people for whom they really need any seed, crops which are not served commercially well, and a whole bunch of other use cases I immediately understand for a community seed bank. But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest people. (I'll also just say I'm not up to date on this law, the court case, or how it's been applied in the country.) Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Apollo Agriculture and still serve on the board, which operates in Kenya and a few other countries trying to help smallholders get access to better agtech (which includes hybrid seeds and fertilizer and other high roi agricultural tools.)

pessimizer 10mo ago
You failed to explain why seeds that might fail to make the "best crop possible" would be banned, while leading with a promise to do so. Instead, you explained the concept of "hybrid vigor." Then you talked about the counterfeiting of seeds by imitating a coating, a concept completely unrelated to a law banning sharing seeds, and unlikely to be hindered by it at all. Unless I am missing something.
- MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
  Ole Jeff Monsanto at it again. Testing chemical sprays next to Hawaiian elementary schools just doesn't hit the same anymore.
  - trollbridge 10mo ago
    Smarter to do it where you can buy off an entire national government.
- roenxi 10mo ago
  Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters. I assumed that there was unwritten context where some seed vendor with genetically enhanced seeds was corrupting the legal process to try and protect their IP.
  - dante54 10mo ago
    I am kenyan,let me put it into context since its a bit nuanced. We have a very corrupt parliament, they were bought off way back in 2012 when the law was introduced. Mainly by big corpos like Monsanto & the Apollo guy above. They basically wanted full dependence on these companies for seeds, without giving farmers a choice. Maize is the staple of the country and big bank for anyone who captures the supply chain at whatever level. There has always been contention on GMOs since contrary to what you may have read in your media, kenyan farmers are perfectly capable of feeding their families & the nation at large. Now farmers fought back the law was suspended in court since 2012 but during that period a lot of big seed companies found a way to capture the market. Its a victory since the fines and jail time were really extreme & seed sharing is an age old tradition here, so picture a bunch of foregin companies lobbying your government to criminalize your traditions because its a direct threat to their business model That is why this is a big deal and for more context on why interfering with agricultural sytems at this scale is a doomed excercise; The gates foundation tried this shit in Zambia, and it worked they produced more till covid hit, supply chains were cut and they are still dealing with a famine
cess11 10mo ago
One reason for running these seed banks is that old fashioned seeds actually work better than hybrids and similar in some areas where climate change is rampant.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  This is not clear. The article is talking about traditional seeds for which that could be true (I don't know what is traditional in Kenya). Other commenters are talking about Maize which is from America and thus not traditional in Africa and thus there are no traditional seeds in Kenya. Maize also benefits greatly from hybridization, but there are other plants that do not, if we are talking about Maize you are wrong new seeds are much better than traditional, but if we are talking about other seeds who knows.
  - cess11 10mo ago
    See e.g. https://apnews.com/article/kenya-seed-bank-agriculture-climate-b7169c77126e5c768e3c62653afbcdc1 https://apnews.com/article/kenya-seed-bank-agriculture-clima... , which is linked from TFA.
octocop 10mo ago
> But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest I'm guessing these hybrid seeds you are talking about are probably the reason for the counterfitting to begin with. I don't imagine them being sold at a reasonable price, but with this law maybe you have less competition?
- bluGill 10mo ago
  What is a reasonable price? Hybrid seeds at 3x the price of traditional seeds could well be a great value because at the end of the year you get that much better of a crop. Of course you have to pay for the seeds up front and get the reward at the end of the year. Investments are like that, a lot of poor farmers could spend 4x their current annual income on modern technology (seeds, fertilizer, tractors) and at the end of the year have more money left over than they had the previous year - but of course they need to get to harvest to get all the money. Worse there will be bad years where they lose money - it works out on average over 20 years but the individual years can be a killer if you start in the wrong year.
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    >Worse there will be bad years where they lose money Everyone complains about farm subsidies/insurance in the US (well at least that's not a farmer), but this is the reason they exist. Farming is hard.
- RoyalHenOil 10mo ago
  I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop. You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day. You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower. In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor. Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed. For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.
dante54 10mo ago
Thats a bs explanation & you know it. Where is the direct corelation between seed sharing and counterfeit seeds? Did you do any studies? Any research to back your claims? Why criminalize a practice that existed well before your companies? Farmers that plant every year cant tell good seeds from bad seeds? What kind of disrespect is that though?
lentil_soup 10mo ago
I don't understand the context. The idea of banning seed sharing is to stop counterfeits? That doesn't make much sense. Surely that'll just make it worse, no? Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones? Is it because those get counterfeited the most?
- trollbridge 10mo ago
  Instead of doing things like securing their supply chains, the reaction of the seed companies is to... just make anyone else selling seeds illegal.
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    It worked so well in the War On Drugs... Don't do the hard work of taking down illegal supply chains; simply put the end consumers into jail for several years! /s
    - hinkley 10mo ago
      From Nixon’s standpoint it worked great because they put brown people in jail.
  - Retric 10mo ago
    Not quite, the counterfeit seeds here are dramatically worse to the point where buyers will feel scammed and face significant hardship if they mistakenly use them. Imagine if 90% counterfeit electronics caused house fires, the harm is way beyond the purchase price. At that point customers start caring a great deal, but corruption is difficult to avoid.
    - BigGreenJorts 10mo ago
      But there's nothing stopping the farmer from observing their saved or off brand seed is not as effective and buying from the original breeder again..?
bitfilped 10mo ago
You can look at America to see what happens when seed sharing is outlawed (or made effectively illegal through contracts to acquire seeds that are then ruthlessly enforced.) Neither path is ultimatly friendly to small farmers it seems, so this line of thinking doesn't really hold any water to me.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  That is a "city slicker" read on the American farmer. The actually farmers themselves learned long ago that savings seeds isn't worth doing even without the contract. The terms of the contract look bad from the outside, but to the farmer they are "I wouldn't do that anyway"
  - thechao 10mo ago
    What hurt farmer's the worst is the formation of modern seed trusts (consolidation); well, on the seed side, at least, for small farmers.
oersted 10mo ago
So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well? And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal? That is very hard to believe. EDIT: I see now I was too quick to judge and that my knowledge on the topic was insufficient. Read the excellent comments below , they helped me understand how OP makes sense. Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed. This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.
- estsauver 10mo ago
  Hybrid seeds are ~100 years old and are nearly universally adopted across developed agricultural markets. They’re as controversial as “you should probably use source control” is in programming. You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMOs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed To state once again, I don’t know much about this law or how the government believes it’s preventing counterfeit seed, but bad seed is a huge problem for farmers. I personally want farmers to be able to do whatever they want to with their farms!
  - oersted 10mo ago
    You have a point there, I was using “hybrid” as a catchall for any special seed that comes from a dedicated producer as opposed to stored seed. You are right that I don’t know enough about this, I was just judging your comment on its internal argumentation and some basic red flags caught my eye. Would you care to answer the questions I posed? They were not rhetorical, I would like to be proven wrong and learn. PS: I really admire what you are doing with your company, I don’t want to discount that.
IAmBroom 10mo ago
For some context on why the original law was introduced: $$$.
dogman144 10mo ago
Haha very important disclaimer there, because reading your post sounds a lot like a person who works for big ag. The other reason these laws exist is a long history by Big Ag (Monsanto, Cargill) doing the following, and has been done in the states for a while: 1) gmo/patented seeds in field on the left, community non-big ag seeds on the right field. 2) Cross-pollination occurs because we’re talking crops. Variations on this. 3) Monsanto sues Farmer John and Jane into the ground next season for stealing tech via the crops he’s growing. Add in a little bit of fear (encryption backdoors for the children, laws to prevent dangerous counterfeit seeds!), and you have monopoly on farming run by big corps. Also, US corps have a long history of POC’ing underhanded approaches in Africa. What could be going on here!? Edit - Man, rereading, “forced to plant [dangerous] saved seeds,” guess it’s Big Ag + tech startups now pushing this. Maybe… those farmers just want to control their “IP” (saved seeds) so they don’t have to buy them from a cartel of seed providers? This is such a well known problem in the states, is this marketing really working in Africa? Final edit on the soapbox - other reason why this matters is genetic diversity. Crop blight is a thing. There is no way the natural “herd immunity” of a basket of seed variants in a community is outstripped in effectiveness by a growing monoculture of owned hybrid seeds that stay in front of the blights each season. Coffee rust already jumped the Atlantic from Africa to SA. Often feels like I’ve read this sci-fi novel already (there is a good one - Windup Girl).
- dekhn 10mo ago
  From what I've read, the articles about Monsanto suing innocent farmers is misleading.
  - dogman144 10mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
    - dogman144 10mo ago
      “ The usual Monsanto claim involves patent infringement by intentionally replanting patented seed” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases Edit - Can’t reply again looks like but to the response below, yes many view this approach as effectively leading to enforcing what you state. Which is why it is so horribly underhanded to me, and seeing supporting narratives in hackernews was striking.
banku_brougham 10mo ago
>“My grandmother saved seeds, and today the court has said I can do the same for my grandchildren without fear of the police or of prison,” he said. Unconscionable to support such a law IMO.
teyc 10mo ago
If hybrid seeds provide economic and material benefit then the laws should be written to prevent counterfeits, not specifically banning people from replanting.
asacrowflies 10mo ago
Thanks for the disclaimer at the end ... My god the insanity... "I don't want to ban seed banks ....BUUUT . LMAO replace seed bank with encryption...maybe this isn't the site for you.

pessimizer 10mo ago

You failed to explain why seeds that might fail to make the "best crop possible" would be banned, while leading with a promise to do so. Instead, you explained the concept of "hybrid vigor." Then you talked about the counterfeiting of seeds by imitating a coating, a concept completely unrelated to a law banning sharing seeds, and unlikely to be hindered by it at all. Unless I am missing something.

MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
Ole Jeff Monsanto at it again. Testing chemical sprays next to Hawaiian elementary schools just doesn't hit the same anymore.
- trollbridge 10mo ago
  Smarter to do it where you can buy off an entire national government.
roenxi 10mo ago
Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters. I assumed that there was unwritten context where some seed vendor with genetically enhanced seeds was corrupting the legal process to try and protect their IP.
- dante54 10mo ago
  I am kenyan,let me put it into context since its a bit nuanced. We have a very corrupt parliament, they were bought off way back in 2012 when the law was introduced. Mainly by big corpos like Monsanto & the Apollo guy above. They basically wanted full dependence on these companies for seeds, without giving farmers a choice. Maize is the staple of the country and big bank for anyone who captures the supply chain at whatever level. There has always been contention on GMOs since contrary to what you may have read in your media, kenyan farmers are perfectly capable of feeding their families & the nation at large. Now farmers fought back the law was suspended in court since 2012 but during that period a lot of big seed companies found a way to capture the market. Its a victory since the fines and jail time were really extreme & seed sharing is an age old tradition here, so picture a bunch of foregin companies lobbying your government to criminalize your traditions because its a direct threat to their business model That is why this is a big deal and for more context on why interfering with agricultural sytems at this scale is a doomed excercise; The gates foundation tried this shit in Zambia, and it worked they produced more till covid hit, supply chains were cut and they are still dealing with a famine

cess11 10mo ago

One reason for running these seed banks is that old fashioned seeds actually work better than hybrids and similar in some areas where climate change is rampant.

bluGill 10mo ago
This is not clear. The article is talking about traditional seeds for which that could be true (I don't know what is traditional in Kenya). Other commenters are talking about Maize which is from America and thus not traditional in Africa and thus there are no traditional seeds in Kenya. Maize also benefits greatly from hybridization, but there are other plants that do not, if we are talking about Maize you are wrong new seeds are much better than traditional, but if we are talking about other seeds who knows.
- cess11 10mo ago
  See e.g. https://apnews.com/article/kenya-seed-bank-agriculture-climate-b7169c77126e5c768e3c62653afbcdc1 https://apnews.com/article/kenya-seed-bank-agriculture-clima... , which is linked from TFA.

octocop 10mo ago

> But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest I'm guessing these hybrid seeds you are talking about are probably the reason for the counterfitting to begin with. I don't imagine them being sold at a reasonable price, but with this law maybe you have less competition?

bluGill 10mo ago
What is a reasonable price? Hybrid seeds at 3x the price of traditional seeds could well be a great value because at the end of the year you get that much better of a crop. Of course you have to pay for the seeds up front and get the reward at the end of the year. Investments are like that, a lot of poor farmers could spend 4x their current annual income on modern technology (seeds, fertilizer, tractors) and at the end of the year have more money left over than they had the previous year - but of course they need to get to harvest to get all the money. Worse there will be bad years where they lose money - it works out on average over 20 years but the individual years can be a killer if you start in the wrong year.
- pixl97 10mo ago
  >Worse there will be bad years where they lose money Everyone complains about farm subsidies/insurance in the US (well at least that's not a farmer), but this is the reason they exist. Farming is hard.
RoyalHenOil 10mo ago
I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop. You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day. You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower. In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor. Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed. For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.

dante54 10mo ago

Thats a bs explanation & you know it. Where is the direct corelation between seed sharing and counterfeit seeds? Did you do any studies? Any research to back your claims? Why criminalize a practice that existed well before your companies? Farmers that plant every year cant tell good seeds from bad seeds? What kind of disrespect is that though?

lentil_soup 10mo ago

I don't understand the context. The idea of banning seed sharing is to stop counterfeits? That doesn't make much sense. Surely that'll just make it worse, no? Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones? Is it because those get counterfeited the most?

trollbridge 10mo ago
Instead of doing things like securing their supply chains, the reaction of the seed companies is to... just make anyone else selling seeds illegal.
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  It worked so well in the War On Drugs... Don't do the hard work of taking down illegal supply chains; simply put the end consumers into jail for several years! /s
  - hinkley 10mo ago
    From Nixon’s standpoint it worked great because they put brown people in jail.
- Retric 10mo ago
  Not quite, the counterfeit seeds here are dramatically worse to the point where buyers will feel scammed and face significant hardship if they mistakenly use them. Imagine if 90% counterfeit electronics caused house fires, the harm is way beyond the purchase price. At that point customers start caring a great deal, but corruption is difficult to avoid.
  - BigGreenJorts 10mo ago
    But there's nothing stopping the farmer from observing their saved or off brand seed is not as effective and buying from the original breeder again..?

bitfilped 10mo ago

You can look at America to see what happens when seed sharing is outlawed (or made effectively illegal through contracts to acquire seeds that are then ruthlessly enforced.) Neither path is ultimatly friendly to small farmers it seems, so this line of thinking doesn't really hold any water to me.

bluGill 10mo ago
That is a "city slicker" read on the American farmer. The actually farmers themselves learned long ago that savings seeds isn't worth doing even without the contract. The terms of the contract look bad from the outside, but to the farmer they are "I wouldn't do that anyway"
- thechao 10mo ago
  What hurt farmer's the worst is the formation of modern seed trusts (consolidation); well, on the seed side, at least, for small farmers.

oersted 10mo ago

So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well? And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal? That is very hard to believe. EDIT: I see now I was too quick to judge and that my knowledge on the topic was insufficient. Read the excellent comments below , they helped me understand how OP makes sense. Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed. This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.

estsauver 10mo ago
Hybrid seeds are ~100 years old and are nearly universally adopted across developed agricultural markets. They’re as controversial as “you should probably use source control” is in programming. You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMOs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed To state once again, I don’t know much about this law or how the government believes it’s preventing counterfeit seed, but bad seed is a huge problem for farmers. I personally want farmers to be able to do whatever they want to with their farms!
- oersted 10mo ago
  You have a point there, I was using “hybrid” as a catchall for any special seed that comes from a dedicated producer as opposed to stored seed. You are right that I don’t know enough about this, I was just judging your comment on its internal argumentation and some basic red flags caught my eye. Would you care to answer the questions I posed? They were not rhetorical, I would like to be proven wrong and learn. PS: I really admire what you are doing with your company, I don’t want to discount that.

IAmBroom 10mo ago

For some context on why the original law was introduced: $$$.

dogman144 10mo ago

Haha very important disclaimer there, because reading your post sounds a lot like a person who works for big ag. The other reason these laws exist is a long history by Big Ag (Monsanto, Cargill) doing the following, and has been done in the states for a while: 1) gmo/patented seeds in field on the left, community non-big ag seeds on the right field. 2) Cross-pollination occurs because we’re talking crops. Variations on this. 3) Monsanto sues Farmer John and Jane into the ground next season for stealing tech via the crops he’s growing. Add in a little bit of fear (encryption backdoors for the children, laws to prevent dangerous counterfeit seeds!), and you have monopoly on farming run by big corps. Also, US corps have a long history of POC’ing underhanded approaches in Africa. What could be going on here!? Edit - Man, rereading, “forced to plant [dangerous] saved seeds,” guess it’s Big Ag + tech startups now pushing this. Maybe… those farmers just want to control their “IP” (saved seeds) so they don’t have to buy them from a cartel of seed providers? This is such a well known problem in the states, is this marketing really working in Africa? Final edit on the soapbox - other reason why this matters is genetic diversity. Crop blight is a thing. There is no way the natural “herd immunity” of a basket of seed variants in a community is outstripped in effectiveness by a growing monoculture of owned hybrid seeds that stay in front of the blights each season. Coffee rust already jumped the Atlantic from Africa to SA. Often feels like I’ve read this sci-fi novel already (there is a good one - Windup Girl).

dekhn 10mo ago
From what I've read, the articles about Monsanto suing innocent farmers is misleading.
- dogman144 10mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
  - dogman144 10mo ago
    “ The usual Monsanto claim involves patent infringement by intentionally replanting patented seed” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases Edit - Can’t reply again looks like but to the response below, yes many view this approach as effectively leading to enforcing what you state. Which is why it is so horribly underhanded to me, and seeing supporting narratives in hackernews was striking.

banku_brougham 10mo ago

>“My grandmother saved seeds, and today the court has said I can do the same for my grandchildren without fear of the police or of prison,” he said. Unconscionable to support such a law IMO.

teyc 10mo ago

If hybrid seeds provide economic and material benefit then the laws should be written to prevent counterfeits, not specifically banning people from replanting.

asacrowflies 10mo ago

Thanks for the disclaimer at the end ... My god the insanity... "I don't want to ban seed banks ....BUUUT . LMAO replace seed bank with encryption...maybe this isn't the site for you.