[Pilsner]

Monsanto produces seeds that farmers willingly purchase in huge quantities. Do you really believe they do this because there is a gun to their head, and that by choosing Monsanto seeds they are not acting in their best interests?

The penalty for not buying Monsanto seed is being sued into bankruptcy by Monsanto. I had an old AG teacher who talked about when he was a kid, and everyone saved their own seed. His family had a neighbor who was an SOB. They guy ordered popcorn seed, and planted rows of of it along his property lines. The pollen from the popcorn seed pollenated some of the field corn grown on surrounding properties, because it is wind driven.

No problem that year, the field corn plants got pollenated and produced heads of field corn. But the next year the harvest produced field corn, and field corn-popcorn crosses. Popcorn kernels are small, and hard, and considered a pollutant in any thing except popcorn.

So the neighbors, for a long way around, because the field corn-pop corn hybrid seed had been planted (mixed in with pure field corn) by all of his near neighbors, meaning that pop corn pollen had pollenated the corn in the neighbor's neighbor's fields, lost money because their crop was smaller, and contaminated, and they then had to go out ad buy field corn seed because their own saved corn was contaminated with popcorn.

Monsanto is doing the exact same thing. They let their pollen naturally pollenate the neighbor's corn, then sue him for "stealing" their genetic material. You can pay Monsanto for using their seed, or you can pay them a lot more for not using their seed. Either way, you pay.

[Mr. Lucky]

Oh, please. No one in the US saves harvested field corn as seed for next year and hasn't for probably 70 years or so.

Planting open pollinated seed, American farmers were averaging about 25 bushels of corn per acre at the end of the Civil War; by the Second World War, that yield had increased to about 40 bushels per acre. By the 1950's, virtually all field corn planted in the US was either single or double cross hybrid. In the ensuing years, the average yield has increased to almost 160 bushels of corn per acre. Not only are yields dramatically greater, but inputs for fertilizer, herbicides and pesticide are dramatically lower.

Monsanto, by the way, couldn't care less whether you saved and replanted the next generation of their seed corn. Hybrid seeds don't reproduce to type.