If anyone thinks they have any rights to these seeds that I paid for (as part of the tomatoes), they're wrong on several levels, and if there is legislation that says they're not wrong, that legislation is in dire need of repair.
It's sad to think so, but it may be a wise course to consider the freedom to grow a tomato you found at the supermarket a temporary privilege while the ones who grew it find ways of taking it away and cementing their advantage. Imagine 15 years ago saying "I can take this game and install it on my computer, my kid's computer, and my laptop" or "I'll lend this copy of a movie to a friend." These processes, once simple and impossible to interrupt, are now often carried out only with permission. Other examples, of course, abound.
Open source seeds may be an idea before its time, but should its time arrive, we'll be glad to have nurtured it early!
If you are going to go to the effort of growing a garden it's probably worth spending a buck or two and getting some Heirloom or open pollinated seeds. These will breed true and you can replant the seeds from the fruits and get the same plant as the parent.
As for commercial use though, I think it's wrong for companies to go after farmers who have had seed unwittingly mixed into their own stock. If no theft can be proven. No law has been broken.
>Most commercial vegetable seeds are hybrids, which come with a kind of built-in security lock; if you replant seed from a hybrid, you won't get exactly the same kind of plant.
At first I wondered how much of a difference it could or would make since while in software anyone can code in their free time, how many people can splice a gene? But if they get universities to join the effort so that work at that university has to result in Free seeds, I could see it catching on and working.
As a planter, I'd certainly prefer to have seeds that minimized risks of legal hassle.
I would also be curious to see what would happen when the reverse of one of Monsanto's legal attacks happened -- if Free seeds made their way into Monsanto's stock, could their legal attack on farmers be used against them? Or de-fanged?
That said, I see nothing wrong with the branding, as an education and promotion drive. If it gets more gardens in, all the better.
(I try to beat the "input costs" with my home container drip system, and not abuse the planet by growing $400 vanity tomatoes. Recycle, reuse, buy on closeout.)
Lots of people have the skill, and there are lots of universities and private labs (though probably few private individuals, compared to the parallel case with software) with the required hardware and facilities.
The problem is that molecular biology often doesn't work. So it takes lots of time and experiments to get it right. Which costs money. Lots of money.
So it is great that professional horticulturists recognize the value of that enough to contribute their work to the system. Home-hobbyist gardeners/bakers/zymurgists/etc. simply don't have access to the same techniques used for commercial production.
It would also be great if a professional could curate a biological distribution package for food polycultures. A lot of people are familiar with the "three sisters" polyculture of corn, beans, and squash, but there are presumably others that would work just as well. Additionally, we now know that the microbiota of the soil itself can be as important as the genomes in the seeds. What if you could make your potting soil resemble Iowa corn field topsoil by pouring a few mL of open source dirt juice into it?
There is a vast, vast, vast difference in the quality of soil in a desert, and the places where your food comes from. Most farmers are aware of topsoil management and conservation, most practice some form of both of those things. The local university extension offices are hyper-active in farming communities, and most farmers not only support, but practice sustainability practices including no-till, reducing chemical dependency, proper crop rotation and set-aside practices. Believe it or not, we all understand that there is only so much soil to use, and conserving what we can would be in our best interest.
Large corporations do not, for the most part, that is true.
But, I digress. You want to help your viewpoint? Lose the hyperbole. It causes people to bristle automatically (see this post for an example).
So maybe I should amend my statement to "Iowa dirt before factory farming ruined it"?
We live in a world where doctors can withhold the information on a patients death during a gene therapy treatment due to the genes being proprietary information. There have even been cases were doctors have patented specific genetic information from their patients, unbehest to them during treatments.
It's all a fine, fine line.
Transpose this to software development. Is a modified program correct and without regressions because it "works" ? Until we don't fully understand how all the biochemestry works it's like changing the software code in semi random ways and see if something "better" comes out of it. What fool would do that in software engineering ?
There a great many things that this article gets wrong/not quite right, and yet I'll probably read the next NPR story and think "oh, that is interesting". http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...
2. Not all plants are patent-able, only ones that reproduce asexually. Monansto/DuPont don't patent varieties of corn or soybeans as they don't reproduce asexually, but they DO patent gene insertions (aka BioTech Traits, or BT traits). Getting a gene that kills rootworm or has glyphosate (roundup) resistance is mind bogglingly expensive. When a variety has multiple traits inserted you'll hear it called "a stack". These high cost, high benefit efforts are precisely the kinds of things we would want to be patent-able to encourage companies to invest the huge amount of resources.
Controlling the germplasm for staple crops like soybeans and corn is hugely profitable. As a percentage of crop inputs, the cost of quality seed has been rising at a crazy rate. Allowing patents of genes is one way of directing money to plant breeding. However, I think long term it is a bad policy, much like allowing extremely long copyright terms on creative works. Society will suffer when the available public domain material shrinks.
Very, very strange.
Just to be clear, I'm not opposed to GMO. It could be a valid and safe breeding technique. The campaign to brand it as dangerous or evil is without scientific basis. However, I am very much against the patenting of genes, genetic traits, seeds, etc.
To me, that sounds like the kind of situation that would benefit from being made public. I mean, the theory makes sense: taxpayers share the burden of developing the plants they all consume. Something like the NSF's grant funding for most other science would work really well. This kind of situation would also facilitate a more permissive attitude toward sharing knowledge and seeds to help intellectuals and hobbyists (the same way universities make resources in other fields available to intellectuals and hobbyists).
But this idea isn't new at all.
In fact most of the "cheap" seeds you see on seed racks at stores like the dollar store are "open source". Seeds like Black Seed Simpson Lettuce and Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans for instance.
One has to remember that people have been breeding for thousands of years before seed patents came into being and there are many many patent free varieties. These are seldom are grown commercially because hybrids have preferable characteristics for commercial growers, but for home growers and smaller market gardens they have stood the test of time.
It is neat that people are continuing to do this with new varieties, but the concept is hardly novel and these are not even close to the "first open source seeds".
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-...
It's like fighting stupid with stupid where whoever is the most clever at it "wins".
