They’re not sterile, but they will sue you if they find you’ve been growing seeds from last year’s crops.
I don’t think they’ve successfully sued anyone for that. The few cases I saw last time I looked people were intentionally germinating or saving/selling seeds.
So uhh… hypothetically if one were to live next to a cornfield and acquire some seeds from said field cough somehow cough, would those purely hypothetical seeds grown in one’s garden then constitute corn piracy?
Asking for a friend of course.
No they won’t.
They will sue you if you take your neighbors pesticide resistant seeds, sow them, douse them in pesticide so only the resistant ones survive, and sow your entire field with them.
Yes, they will.
You’re taking the approach of an independent farmer that didn’t sign a contract with Monsanto. What you said mostly aligns with that scenario.
For the farmer that did sign a contract with Monsanto, that is a standard and required clause, and they do enforce it.
Classic piracy. The original product is still there; you’re just making a copy.
I mean, I totally agree with all forms of breaking IP law on ethical grounds. But I also recognise that it’s still breaking the law right now.
Finally. FINALLY. My ulcer grows every time I hear someone quote that list of evil things Monsanto does. Even though yes, they are evil.
Yea, they’re evil enough with the pesticides, and the hostile takeover of farms. We don’t need to make the genetic engineering they’re doing, which is actually good work, to also be thrown under the bus
I would agree if they didn’t use their non-sterile plants to take over small farms around their huge ones by suing for theft when farmers used part of the previous crop that had been pollinated with the Monsanto GM pollen. They didn’t buy that genome so it was stolen… Fucking wankers.
Monsanto doesn’t even exist anymore. It was bought out by the totally not evil company Bayer a while back.
Of course Bayer has suffered quite a bit of indigestion over gobling up that morsel over the years.
the totally not evil company Bayer
Ah, yes, the totally not evil company that (together with BASF and Hoechst, forming the cartel IG Farben) developed chlorine gas for use in world war I.
The same IG Farben which was the single largest donor to Hitler’s election campaign, and main contributor to the construction of Auschwitz, where they produced synthetic petrol and rubber for use in the war and performed all manner of human experiments, including testing their own Zyklon B gas.
The same company that decades after the war was still chaired by well known nazis, and profiting from chemicals developed at Auschwitz.
Yeah, I’m sure Monsanto is in good hands, and feels right at home there.
The moratorium is actually since 2000, but only since 2006 in its current form. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology
Thankfully, no country, much less any multinational corporation, would ever dare cross the UN’s nonbinding, unenforceable moratorium. Can you imagine how stern the tone of the statement of condemnation would be, once it was worded such that a reasonable plurality of countries would agree to back it?
GMO skepticism or not, Monsanto is one of the most evil companies in the world and a perfect example of what makes the profit motive such an inefficient organizer of production and distribution
Also, most farmers use hybrid crops, which you already can’t save, because they’re hybrids. (You can save them, but they’re not going to produce the same plants you get them from).
Whether a plant species is hybridized has little effect on whether it grows true from seed or only via cuttings.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
How do they reproduce?
Sexual reproduction via flowers+seeds.
When self-fertilizing, the offspring are not identical.
