Introduction
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Video written by Ben Doyle
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Video
The other day I was picking seeds out of a tomato, which is what I do in my free time and I was like man, there are more than 200 seeds in here.
This farming stuff is for Chumps.
If I planted these 200 seeds, I would get 200 tomatoes and, if I planted the seeds from those Tomatoes I would have 4 000 tomatoes do that four more times and I'd have 320 billion Tomatoes sell each of those tomatoes for ten dollars at the farmer's market and boom I'm a trillionaire, but then I learned that there was one little hiccup with my plan: Farmers, don't replant their own seeds anymore.
They just throw them out.
Why? Well? According to the official manual for defending billion dollar agriculture companies, saving seeds leads to all sorts of crazy problems like reduced crop, yield susceptibility to disease, and quote you getting dumped by your girlfriend for using seeds every year like a dirty loser.
Farmer, instead of buying monsanto's new tricked out seeds with all the latest features but I'm, not sure that's reliable source, since the last 80 pages are just the words maniacal laughter over and over again.
In truth, there are some practical distance advantages to saving seeds, but the real reason farmers stopped doing it after thousands of years is that a couple of companies figured out a way to make replanting your own seeds illegal, almost anywhere in the world.
How do they do it? Well, it's a little complicated.
You see.
Saving and replanting seeds has been an important part of farming ever since farming was discovered by William Von farming pictured here, but that practice got more complicated in the 1930s when we decided to invent inventing plants.
Of course, humans have been cultivating new breeds of plants for as long as we've been growing them, but there was one huge problem with that: no one had gotten filthy rich off of it.
Yet so in the 1930s, the U.S federal government passed the plant patent act and for the first time anywhere in the world, people could legally claim that a plant was their intellectual property.
Of course, this didn't apply to naturally occurring plants.
You couldn't just walk outside in 1930 and claim that grass was your idea.
God filed that patent 55 million years ago to patent a plant, at least in the United States.
You have to prove that you cultivated a distinct new variety of plant and are capable of making more of it.
Just as example.
Here's the patent for plums, it says Plum and has a picture of a plum I, don't know what more you would need now at first.
This patent law didn't really affect the way that farmers farmed up until the 90s.
There were only 120 patented plants and Farmers didn't generally grow or harvest them, but that all changed when a little mom-and-pop industrial chemical manufacturer called Monsanto had the wise idea to shift their business model from selling plant poison to selling plants that couldn't be killed by their own plant poison.
These Roundup Ready crops, mostly soybeans and corn, quickly took over nearly every Farm in the U.S and many more around the world because it turns out that not dying from Weeds or weed killer is an important trait for crops to have in monsanto's, not the only one.
A massive proportion of crops we eat were invented and patented by some company designed to be more reliable or more resilient than other breeds.
But here's, the kicker growing, a patented plant is legally the same thing as manufacturing any other patented product.
It's like a restaurant, making a Big Mac or a factory making a Rick and Morty body pillow.
Basically, these companies decide who can make their product and exactly how much of it they can make.
Anytime.
A farmer wants to grow a patent plans.
They need to sign a contract, saying they'll only grow the seeds they've purchased and they won't replant or give away the next generation of seeds it's kind of like if you're a can of Pepsi magically refilled with Pepsi after you were done drinking it, and then Pepsi was like hey what the hell you can't drink, that you have to throw that out and buy a brand new can of Pepsi, especially because you're, the only person on Earth who intentionally buys cans of Pepsi, and even though these patents are mostly held in the U.S and Europe articles, something of the thingy Accord means you can't replant patented seeds in any of these countries.
So unless you're trying to get rich growing, genetically modified beets in Eritrea you're pretty much screwed but Sam.
You might be saying if this is such a big problem for Farmers, why don't they just grow? Non-Patented plants I'm a stupid loser and the only way I can make myself feel better is by sewing descent in your comments section well, setting aside the fact that it's pretty hard to keep your Pharma float with corn that dies.
When you look at it the wrong way, there's also the worry that you might end up growing patented plants by accident, after all, Farms accidentally, cross-pollinate nearby, Farms, all the time and it's hard to know how much of that pollen has a big scary contract on it.
That is, of course, unless you're, one of the 100 of private investigators, that these seed companies hire to spy on farms and look for people to drop lawsuits on now.
This accidental patent infringement stuff is a thing that organic farmers seem to worry about a lot and some even sued Monsanto because of the possibility that it could happen, but there don't really seem to be too many cases of seed companies cracking down on unsuspecting Farmers.
There was this one guy in Canada who got sued and claimed it was an accident, but it turns out his field was 95, Monsanto canola, so I don't know about that.
One look sorry, but someone has to defend these giant corporations.
Okay, I mean someone beside their hundreds of lawyers.
Now, even though this racket might have ruined my tomato scheme, here's the Silver Lining patents don't last forever.
Unless you're Disney, in fact, some of monsanto's earliest patents like their soybeans, have already expired and opened Farmers up to sell plant and replant old Monsanto seeds without the seed cops breathing down their necks.
But that is, of course not the end of this story.
This is a really complicated topic, with a lot of far-reaching implications and as a purveyor of the internet's finest six minute joke riddled, half explainers I might not be the best person to get into the nitty-gritty for that.
I'd recommend checking out Bartow elmore's seed money, a book that you can snag for free with a subscription to audible, look I love reading in theory, but these days the only way I can finish a book is by plugging it into my ears, whether I'm driving to work, doing laundry or suffering through a long plane.
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