6 ms·

Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines

135 points by djoldman 3mo ago

john_strinlai 3mo ago
>locked in a legal battle with a company that claims exclusive rights over the variety of white nectarine he grows. >[...] Fruit patents are becoming more common this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.
- jMyles 3mo ago
  ...and none does. You can grow and sell any peach you want; the tree has no sense of the childish tantrums of the state over its bounty. This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.
  - bluerooibos 3mo ago
    > ..and none does. Monsanto begs to differ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
    - jMyles 3mo ago
      Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission. All this silliness to create a huge complicated regime to pretend that these things are "property" in the same sense as your underwear is just so obviously childish, incoherent, and inconsistent with reality. It's just a really elaborate gown purported to be worn by the manifestly naked emperor.
      - gruez 3mo ago
        >Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission. So you're against any sort of intellectual property?
        PunchyHamster 3mo ago
        Current IP rights are overly stringent and ones designed to protect IP actively detract from progress.
        jMyles 3mo ago
        > So you're against any sort of intellectual property? I observe that the universe in which I live doesn't seem to include the concept of intellectual property, and that there is quite a lot of misery and confusion that arises from efforts to shoehorn it in.
- bluerooibos 3mo ago
  > this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food. Wait until you hear about Monsanto/Bayer - a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights. The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_li...
    - Suppafly 3mo ago
      >The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits. This, the people that don't understand farming and buy into weird anti-gmo propaganda always claim that a simple google search agrees with them, but when you actually read the cases, it's clear that the people being sued are always in the wrong.
- bpodgursky 3mo ago
  This is so simplistic. They made a new varietal. Nobody is saying he can't plant any of the standard heirloom Nectarines. The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it. Honestly, how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? This is how it has worked for half a century and mild gripes aside, the quality of the produce in stores is WAY WAY BETTER than it was before (seriously, what is the last time you ate a Red Delicious apple?) Have like... some awareness of the large functioning important system you are mindlessly breaking with throwaway comments.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - armchairhacker 3mo ago
    > how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public? Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them
    - cyberax 3mo ago
      Well, yes. That's what is happening. The contest is called "market" and "the people" reward competitors by paying them. Patents are used to enforce the rules so that competitors don't cheat. Selective breeding requires sometimes _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work. This is not a good fit for academia and even worse fit for government programs.
      - skeledrew 3mo ago
        > _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work Sounds like it's ripe for AI automation. Need less of this nonsense about restricting access because "effort should be rewarded with exclusivity".
        3mo ago
- werdnapk 3mo ago
  If you spent decades doing selective breeding to obtain a more desirable product, you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product from you and made money off of your hard work. If the products are being bred from tax funded programs, then yes, anybody should have access to the new breeds, but if it's privately funded, then why should it be available for everyone? Without the protection, there isn't much incentive to invest time into developing better foods.
  - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
    But you can't just take a seed and make a new plant of same characteristics. Now I'm not sure if that's the case for nectarines but apples mutate massively between seed and plant that made it so basically all plantations are clones or clones + grafts. You'd have better luck "stealing" it with some wire cutters and cutting some shoots off the trees
  - basilikum 3mo ago
    > you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes. > then why should it be available for everyone? Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >you cannot steal genes. Why not? You can steal bits, unless you think copyright law's bunk as well. You can even steal ideas (patents).
      - basilikum 3mo ago
        You can steal neither of those. You can copy them and in some specific cases copying bits or letters or some other human creative work might be unethical, in a lot more cases it can be illegal, but it is not theft.
- odie5533 3mo ago
  Plant patents incentivize the creation of disease resistant, tasty, and hardy varieties. If you remove the patents, you remove the incentive for private capital. Capital to create new plants has to come from somewhere: public tax funding, grower-funded pools, or patent licensing. We do a mix of all three.
  - moi2388 3mo ago
    Farmers already have plenty of incentive for hardy and resistant varieties. People already have plenty of incentive for tasty varieties. You don’t need patents. The single biggest technology driver has been maths. And it doesn’t have patents. Patents stifle innovation.
- HDThoreaun 3mo ago
  This isnt even a patent case. Its a contracts case. The article says these trees arent under patent, the farmer signed a contract saying he would only sell to one supplier and now wants to sell to others.
aorth 3mo ago
Reminds me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
- cardamomo 3mo ago
  “The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountain. "And the smell of rot fills the country.“ (Chapter 35) This passage had a profound impact on me when I first read it in high school. Only later did I discover that such atrocities still happen regularly today.
- skybrian 3mo ago
  Farms are mostly just businesses nowadays. Either they're heavily automated (and capital intensive) or they hire farm workers to do the work. Or both.
rosegroove 3mo ago
[dead]
efitz 3mo ago
Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food. Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is. Any government functionary that tries to prevent a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. Any lawyer that tries to prevent a farmer from selling food, is doing evil. Any court that enjoins a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. If the farmer is found to have violated some IP claim, then the proper remedy is monetary damages after the fact, not enjoined before the fact.
- efitz 3mo ago
  Oh, and there is a special place in hell reserved for anyone involved in designing food crops that can’t reproduce.
  - ch4s3 3mo ago
    Do you want novel genes propagating throughout the food system by accident? Terminator genes prevent that problem.
  - lukeinator42 3mo ago
    isn't this just a by-product of seed hybridization which has enabled pretty much all of modern agriculture? A lot of testing goes into finding the two strains that combine together to create high-yield seeds, but the next generations of those seeds won't produce well.
    - dbcurtis 3mo ago
      Almost true. For many plants, a hybrid is naturally unstable, and can often be stabilized with one extra cross. (But isn't, as it serves as intellectual property protection for the seed company.) But some plants, soy beans being a biggest cash-crop example, can not be bred to be unstable. (See my comment above about Monsanto Roundup-Ready beans.)
petcat 3mo ago
> In its court filings, Giumarra says all rights to the Monalise variety are owned by Star Fruits Diffusion, a French company that works with plant breeding programs, while Giumarra holds the right to sublicense the variety for testing, production and sale. > French company Enough said. This US admin will nuke that agreement instantly. If it was a fellow American company, let it pass.
- lokar 3mo ago
  But it’s a US company collecting the money from the farmers. If they hold enough trumpcoin they have a pretty good case.
  - petcat 3mo ago
    Oh sure, but go up the chain, which is exactly what these guys are doing. As soon as the US prez hears that some French fops in powdered wigs are preventing USA farmers from selling their nectarines in California, he's going to go ballistic (on his phone, during his toilet break).
em-bee 3mo ago
regardless of how the contract is structured, no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away. this is similar to a law in the EU that forbids producers or distributors of clothing to destroy products they don't want to sell. once you plant a tree to grow fruit you should be allowed to keep harvesting that tree until its natural end. if there is an exclusive contract then the contract must not be allowed to be terminated before that end unless the grower is free to sell on the open market after termination. anything else would allow patent owners to hold growers hostage ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶.̶
- ribosometronome 3mo ago
  >Mora later sought to terminate his relationship with Giumarra, and he sold his nectarines to another fruit packer in 2023 The farmer sought termination and violated the contract.
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    ah, good catch. the question now is whether giumarra accepted the termination or not. i could not find that detail in the article. if they accepted it, then my argument holds (note that i am arguing how things should be, not what the actual current law on the matter is). if giumarra did not accept termination then the exclusive contract should still hold. (whether an exclusive contract is fair or not is another topic)
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away It doesn't, to my knowledge. It requires they not sell them.
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    that's the same thing. if you can't throw it away you need to be allowed to sell it. the point here is sustainable production. the EU is implementing laws around that. if you produce more than what you can sell, then you need to reduce production and stop wasting resources.
leoc 3mo ago
I missed the free potatoes in Berlin https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/4000-tons-of-potatoes-to-be-given-away-for-free/ https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/4000-tons-o... , and now I'm missing this? Once again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618898 all the action eludes me.
ExoticPearTree 3mo ago
Monsanto all over again.
jmalicki 3mo ago
If he donates these to a charity, what are the rules on taking a tax deduction for this unusual situation? Can it have value for the purposes of a donation if you can't sell it? Would taking a tax deduction trigger a patent liability?
- s1artibartfast 3mo ago
  The entire crop cost is already tax dedeuctable by default. Taxes are on profits
  - jmalicki 3mo ago
    Then that leads to the question... is it proper for the farmer to take the deduction for the costs of growing crops he is not legally allowed to sell?
    - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
      Sure. Poor business decisions are entirely tax deductable as long as your intention is to eventually turn a profit. It is extremely common for business to do poorly or fail. Most people dont waste money for fun, and the deductions are basically never worth the cost. (why would someone spend 100k on a business to save 25k on taxes? they would still net $-75k) Also, if you continually loose money over many years, the IRS may question if it is a legitimate business or a hobby for personal gain.
carrychains 3mo ago
Holy astroturf
Teknomadix 3mo ago
White nectarines are gross IMO. Not even for free.

135 points by djoldman 3mo ago

>locked in a legal battle with a company that claims exclusive rights over the variety of white nectarine he grows. >[...] Fruit patents are becoming more common this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.

jMyles 3mo ago
...and none does. You can grow and sell any peach you want; the tree has no sense of the childish tantrums of the state over its bounty. This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.
- bluerooibos 3mo ago
  > ..and none does. Monsanto begs to differ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
  - jMyles 3mo ago
    Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission. All this silliness to create a huge complicated regime to pretend that these things are "property" in the same sense as your underwear is just so obviously childish, incoherent, and inconsistent with reality. It's just a really elaborate gown purported to be worn by the manifestly naked emperor.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission. So you're against any sort of intellectual property?
      - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
        Current IP rights are overly stringent and ones designed to protect IP actively detract from progress.
      - jMyles 3mo ago
        > So you're against any sort of intellectual property? I observe that the universe in which I live doesn't seem to include the concept of intellectual property, and that there is quite a lot of misery and confusion that arises from efforts to shoehorn it in.
bluerooibos 3mo ago
> this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food. Wait until you hear about Monsanto/Bayer - a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.
- gruez 3mo ago
  >a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights. The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_li...
  - Suppafly 3mo ago
    >The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits. This, the people that don't understand farming and buy into weird anti-gmo propaganda always claim that a simple google search agrees with them, but when you actually read the cases, it's clear that the people being sued are always in the wrong.
bpodgursky 3mo ago
This is so simplistic. They made a new varietal. Nobody is saying he can't plant any of the standard heirloom Nectarines. The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it. Honestly, how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? This is how it has worked for half a century and mild gripes aside, the quality of the produce in stores is WAY WAY BETTER than it was before (seriously, what is the last time you ate a Red Delicious apple?) Have like... some awareness of the large functioning important system you are mindlessly breaking with throwaway comments.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- armchairhacker 3mo ago
  > how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public? Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them
  - cyberax 3mo ago
    Well, yes. That's what is happening. The contest is called "market" and "the people" reward competitors by paying them. Patents are used to enforce the rules so that competitors don't cheat. Selective breeding requires sometimes _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work. This is not a good fit for academia and even worse fit for government programs.
    - skeledrew 3mo ago
      > _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work Sounds like it's ripe for AI automation. Need less of this nonsense about restricting access because "effort should be rewarded with exclusivity".
      - 3mo ago
werdnapk 3mo ago
If you spent decades doing selective breeding to obtain a more desirable product, you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product from you and made money off of your hard work. If the products are being bred from tax funded programs, then yes, anybody should have access to the new breeds, but if it's privately funded, then why should it be available for everyone? Without the protection, there isn't much incentive to invest time into developing better foods.
- PunchyHamster 3mo ago
  But you can't just take a seed and make a new plant of same characteristics. Now I'm not sure if that's the case for nectarines but apples mutate massively between seed and plant that made it so basically all plantations are clones or clones + grafts. You'd have better luck "stealing" it with some wire cutters and cutting some shoots off the trees
- basilikum 3mo ago
  > you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes. > then why should it be available for everyone? Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >you cannot steal genes. Why not? You can steal bits, unless you think copyright law's bunk as well. You can even steal ideas (patents).
    - basilikum 3mo ago
      You can steal neither of those. You can copy them and in some specific cases copying bits or letters or some other human creative work might be unethical, in a lot more cases it can be illegal, but it is not theft.
odie5533 3mo ago
Plant patents incentivize the creation of disease resistant, tasty, and hardy varieties. If you remove the patents, you remove the incentive for private capital. Capital to create new plants has to come from somewhere: public tax funding, grower-funded pools, or patent licensing. We do a mix of all three.
- moi2388 3mo ago
  Farmers already have plenty of incentive for hardy and resistant varieties. People already have plenty of incentive for tasty varieties. You don’t need patents. The single biggest technology driver has been maths. And it doesn’t have patents. Patents stifle innovation.
HDThoreaun 3mo ago
This isnt even a patent case. Its a contracts case. The article says these trees arent under patent, the farmer signed a contract saying he would only sell to one supplier and now wants to sell to others.

aorth 3mo ago

Reminds me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

cardamomo 3mo ago
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountain. "And the smell of rot fills the country.“ (Chapter 35) This passage had a profound impact on me when I first read it in high school. Only later did I discover that such atrocities still happen regularly today.
skybrian 3mo ago
Farms are mostly just businesses nowadays. Either they're heavily automated (and capital intensive) or they hire farm workers to do the work. Or both.

rosegroove 3mo ago

[dead]

efitz 3mo ago

Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food. Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is. Any government functionary that tries to prevent a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. Any lawyer that tries to prevent a farmer from selling food, is doing evil. Any court that enjoins a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. If the farmer is found to have violated some IP claim, then the proper remedy is monetary damages after the fact, not enjoined before the fact.

efitz 3mo ago
Oh, and there is a special place in hell reserved for anyone involved in designing food crops that can’t reproduce.
- ch4s3 3mo ago
  Do you want novel genes propagating throughout the food system by accident? Terminator genes prevent that problem.
- lukeinator42 3mo ago
  isn't this just a by-product of seed hybridization which has enabled pretty much all of modern agriculture? A lot of testing goes into finding the two strains that combine together to create high-yield seeds, but the next generations of those seeds won't produce well.
  - dbcurtis 3mo ago
    Almost true. For many plants, a hybrid is naturally unstable, and can often be stabilized with one extra cross. (But isn't, as it serves as intellectual property protection for the seed company.) But some plants, soy beans being a biggest cash-crop example, can not be bred to be unstable. (See my comment above about Monsanto Roundup-Ready beans.)

petcat 3mo ago

> In its court filings, Giumarra says all rights to the Monalise variety are owned by Star Fruits Diffusion, a French company that works with plant breeding programs, while Giumarra holds the right to sublicense the variety for testing, production and sale. > French company Enough said. This US admin will nuke that agreement instantly. If it was a fellow American company, let it pass.

lokar 3mo ago
But it’s a US company collecting the money from the farmers. If they hold enough trumpcoin they have a pretty good case.
- petcat 3mo ago
  Oh sure, but go up the chain, which is exactly what these guys are doing. As soon as the US prez hears that some French fops in powdered wigs are preventing USA farmers from selling their nectarines in California, he's going to go ballistic (on his phone, during his toilet break).

em-bee 3mo ago

regardless of how the contract is structured, no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away. this is similar to a law in the EU that forbids producers or distributors of clothing to destroy products they don't want to sell. once you plant a tree to grow fruit you should be allowed to keep harvesting that tree until its natural end. if there is an exclusive contract then the contract must not be allowed to be terminated before that end unless the grower is free to sell on the open market after termination. anything else would allow patent owners to hold growers hostage ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶.̶

ribosometronome 3mo ago
>Mora later sought to terminate his relationship with Giumarra, and he sold his nectarines to another fruit packer in 2023 The farmer sought termination and violated the contract.
- em-bee 3mo ago
  ah, good catch. the question now is whether giumarra accepted the termination or not. i could not find that detail in the article. if they accepted it, then my argument holds (note that i am arguing how things should be, not what the actual current law on the matter is). if giumarra did not accept termination then the exclusive contract should still hold. (whether an exclusive contract is fair or not is another topic)
JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away It doesn't, to my knowledge. It requires they not sell them.
- em-bee 3mo ago
  that's the same thing. if you can't throw it away you need to be allowed to sell it. the point here is sustainable production. the EU is implementing laws around that. if you produce more than what you can sell, then you need to reduce production and stop wasting resources.

leoc 3mo ago

I missed the free potatoes in Berlin https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/4000-tons-of-potatoes-to-be-given-away-for-free/ https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/4000-tons-o... , and now I'm missing this? Once again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618898 all the action eludes me.

ExoticPearTree 3mo ago

Monsanto all over again.

jmalicki 3mo ago

If he donates these to a charity, what are the rules on taking a tax deduction for this unusual situation? Can it have value for the purposes of a donation if you can't sell it? Would taking a tax deduction trigger a patent liability?

s1artibartfast 3mo ago
The entire crop cost is already tax dedeuctable by default. Taxes are on profits
- jmalicki 3mo ago
  Then that leads to the question... is it proper for the farmer to take the deduction for the costs of growing crops he is not legally allowed to sell?
  - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
    Sure. Poor business decisions are entirely tax deductable as long as your intention is to eventually turn a profit. It is extremely common for business to do poorly or fail. Most people dont waste money for fun, and the deductions are basically never worth the cost. (why would someone spend 100k on a business to save 25k on taxes? they would still net $-75k) Also, if you continually loose money over many years, the IRS may question if it is a legitimate business or a hobby for personal gain.

carrychains 3mo ago

Holy astroturf

Teknomadix 3mo ago

White nectarines are gross IMO. Not even for free.