Nematode Control Failure

[JackE]

We've had some really good rain over here yesterday and today. The lake is coming up - some of the stumps are gone. I don't know why, but there must be 100 wood ducks on the lake. Never seen that many before. It's fixin' to get cold now. I hate cool weather - I'd be happy with August year-round.

Jack

[dice]

My guess is that the gentleman was manifestly hostile and combative with Monsanto lawyers at the beginning, bringing all that grief upon himself.

You mean he would not bend over?

"Buy our Roundup Ready seed or else!"

[b54red]

Jack I had heard that Amelia wasn't very tasty so I never tried it myself; but many of the commercial growers use them. I grew Solar Fire one year as did a friend and we neither had that much luck with it. It didn't seem to be particularly nematode resistant for me.

Did you try Big Beef in the past? It has shown the best nematode and fusarium resistance of all the hybrid tomatoes I have tried including some that are TSWV resistant.

[dice]

The thing is, Jack, the one thing to expect when a couple of corporate
lawyers from a company like Monsanto show up on your doorstep with
a subpoena or whatever is arrogance. They may not know how smart
you are, but they are going to figure up front that they are smarter
than any lawyer you could afford. ("If he was as smart as we are, he
would be doing what we do, pulling down six figures and vacationing
in the Bahamas.")

That is the nature of their world view. (It does not occur to them that
some lawyer you find might well know the law as well as they do but
simply finds their job boring.)

Whether the law actually supports their case is an entirely different
question than whether their high opinion of their own legal skills is
justified.

[JackE]

Red, As I said above, Solar Fire has no N Resistance at all - totally vulnerable. Production depends on a lot of variables between growers - soil, climate, pH, general horticultural practices of individual gardeners and especially nutrients. SF is a perfect fit here, as long as we still have N-free soil left!

Our sales rep at Clifton Seed in GA said that the Amelia growers in his SE territory all staked and pruned them (it's a real big plant for a determinate - 5 ft), and got a marginally passable product that way. We didn't prune. These were growers that were devastated by TSWV at the time and they were desperate. Clifton no longer handles Amelia - neither does Twilley. Too may complaints. The breeders (Harris Moran) created an iron-clad disease package, but they lost too much in the process.

I have planted various beefsteak-type varieties in past years - all indeterminates - but my standard in those days was Better Boy, which has good N resistance until the soil gets warm - the resistance breaks down completely at about 85 degrees. It's the same gene in all N varieties and I've never noticed much difference between them in that regard - they all succumb to the nems in July here, and sometimes as early as May before we have picked a single one!.

It's not feasible for us to use vining indeterminates for our project tomatoes because of the horrendous labor demands (support, pruning). I plant some Better Boy for my own family. They are generally better tomatoes, they tell me, but I personally don't eat tomatoes much - maybe a very thin slice on a hamburger.

We had a problem with TSWV a few years back, and that's why we planted Amelia. We also planted Bella Rosa, one called "Top Gun" and Talladega. Top Gun wasn't too good - ripening problems like Amelia. Talledega is, IMO, the best quality of all the TSWV cultivars, but no N resistance. We finally got rid of the Western Flower Thrip that vectors the disease by killing every flowering plant on the place, including neighboring pastures.

Jack

[JackE]

Dice, I don't understand the exact nature of Monsanto's allegation against Mr Schmeiser. He had no contract with them and had not purchased any of their seed. Apparently, they found some of their protected cultivar growing on his land. How did they acquire that evidence without trespassing on his property? Mr. Schmeiser presented a cogent explanation - it blew off passing trucks. Was it only growing near the road?

I would need to read Monsanto's side of the case. However arrogant, their lawyers would not pursue a case they knew they would lose. We're only getting one side here - how do we find Monsanto's brief on the web?

Interesting case.

Jack

[Elizabeth]

Page 33 of this document has a list of some known cases if you wish to look into them further. http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/p...ort1.13.05.pdf

The entire document is quite interesting. I will grant that it is from a group that is all about safe food, and GMOs are at the top of their hit list so it gives pretty much one side of the story, but you may want to glance over it before you sign any agreements to purchase GMO seed.

[JackE]

Dice, I found a little more background info on that case (Raining, 37 degrees outside - no garden work)

One of Schmeiser's hands accidentally, while spraying RU around perimeter areas, discovered that 60% of of his 1000 acres of canola was actually RU ready. It had to have gotten there by the wind, birds etc - Monsanto didn't contest that.

Schmeiser admitted that he instructed his hands to save seeds from the resistant plants, kept them separate and planted them the following year. He contended that, since he had no contract with Monsanto, and that the seeds got on his farm by accident, he had no legal obligation to pay Monsanto for the privilege of planting them.

Monsanto argued that Schmeiser was getting a free ride while all the other growers were paying the fees, that he did so maliciously and intentionally, and that his action amounted to theft. Just because something accidentally falls on your property, they argued, doesn't mean you can claim it as your own.

The trial judge agreed with Monsanto and the Canadian Supreme Court overturned him by a narrow margin. After losing the case Monsanto told the press that it would be difficult to enforce their patent in the future because all an offending farmer had to say was it "fell from the sky."

I can se Monsanto's motive in pursuing this - it wasn't to persecute this man, but to retain control of their patented cultivar. Completely understandable, IMO. I probably would have paid Monsanto what they wanted, which probably wasn't much at the outset of the incident before things got "ugly", but I do admire Mr Schmeiser for his courage. I couldn't afford to do that.

Jack

[dice]

The final court disputed those figures on how much of his land had gmo
plants growing on it in 1998. Tests by labs independent of Monsanto
found that it varied randomly from 0% to whatever it was on the field
had the highest percentage, and that he had not saved seed of the gmo
plants separately from his other seed.

(The Wikipedia article on the case still has Monsanto's "98% gmo"
figure from their initial lawsuit.)

However arrogant, their lawyers would not pursue a case they knew they would lose.

They do not actually know that, regardless of the actual legal issue.
The other side might run out of money or die before the case reaches
the ultimate court of last appeal.

And it may not have been the Monsanto legal department's call anyway.
Head of legal gets a call from a vice president higher up in the company
or from the CEO:
"You know this Schmeiser case?"
"Roundup Ready Canola?"
"Yes. We want the court to decide that these farmers owe us for growing
seed that contains our patented genes no matter how the genes or
seed got on their property. Schmeiser does not buy from us, so this
is a good test case to see if we can get that ruling from the court."

The lawyer may be thinking, "'the court will never agree with that,"
but what he is going to say is, "Ok, fine." (He is getting paid to argue
whatever case higher management wants him to argue.)

Feel free to Google around on monsanto.com and see if you can find
their legal brief in the Schmeiser case.

Imagine a meeting of farmers in a small village in Africa:

"Look, guys, we have to protect ourselves from this patented seed
the seed distributors are telling us is the greatest thing since cows
were invented. What happens is they come in and sell some seed
to one farmer, then they come back a couple of years later with
a court order to have all of our fields tested for the hoodoo in the
patented seeds. It is spread by the wind blowing over the flowering
grain from one field to another. Where they find it, they sue, and
the judge will decide that the company that produced it paid the bigger
bribe and so will rule in their favor.

The judge levies a judgement against us bigger than we could pay
in a decade, our land goes up for auction when we cannot pay it,
and that cousin of the President with the big agricultural company
ends up owning our land. Anybody that dodged the patent bullet
the first time gets hit a couple of years later when the President's
cousin grows the patented seed himself on the land that he got from
one or more of us. And so on until we are all foot soldiers on the road
to hell, walking down that road with our families and our belongings
in a pushcart.

So here is my plan: we get a couple of wrecked cars that still have
wheels that turn and push them off the side of the road in Shady Grove,
where the road cannot be seen from the air or from the country
around. We put a few of our sons up there with a radio, a small truck,
and a couple of the rpgs that we stole from the rebels when the police
chased them off last year. When one of these patented seed
representatives comes along, we tell him that we want to think it over.
Naturally he will head for the next village, which will put him on the road
through Shady Grove.

We radio ahead and tell the boys to block the road, and when he gets
there, they pull the small truck in behind him to block his escape and
hit his car with the rpgs. This will kill everyone in his car. No one must
escape to tell the tale. Then they push the wrecked cars back into the
bushes.

When some other vehicle comes down the road and finds the blown
up seed distributor's representative, the police seargent will get a
promotion for blaming it on the rebels."

They all nodded their heads.

"Good plan."

[JackE]

Okay, my data is from the Wikipedia version, which says:

" Schmeiser first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[2] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola."

So Schmeiser did indeed use the free seed. I would be more sympathetic with him if he had not used the seed. He has no problem with GMO's - he just didn't want to buy the expensive seed! He would command more respect had he sued Monsanto for contaminating his land with nasty GMO plants - but oh no, no organic purist he, rather he decided to use the seed to make a bigger profit by avoiding expensive cultivation for weed control - and then refused to pay Monsanto what was - arguably - rightfully theirs!.

My problem is, Dice, that I think we should be encouraging these corporations that have the financial capability to develop these new cultivars, rather than demonizing them as "bad guys." Can you imagine what food would cost if we had to return to my grandfather's day!

The problem with the African village analogy is that the scenario of using the patent to unethically acquire farmer's land by bankrupting them with lawsuits would not serve the interests of the corporation. They want to sell seed, not land. It's in their interest that their customers make a profit and prosper. No business, not even in darkest Africa, wants to destroy their customers .
Jack

[dice]

The problem with the African village analogy is that the scenario of using the patent to unethically acquire farmer's land by bankrupting them with lawsuits would not serve the interests of the corporation.

Which corporation? I can easily see African biotech corporations and
multi-national agricultural corporations having the same majority
stockholders. I can also envision a corrupt government setting it up
at the local level so that the farmers get sued by the *distributor* rather
than the company, an in-country enterprise owned by someone with
big land ownership ambitions and an inside track to whoever makes the
laws.

The patents and intellectual property treaties between countries enable
this kind of legal aggression against the assets of small farmers by larger
companies.

What does Monsanto or some African seed producer of cultivars
with patented genes get out of it? They sell a lot of seed to one big
customer who can pay every year instead of to a lot of little customers
who cannot necessarily pay if there was a drought or a war or a plague
of locusts the year before.

(I cannot turn up the document I read that described the distribution
of GMO Canola in his fields in 1998 with a 5-minute Google search,
and that is all the time that I am willing to spend on it.)

I consider the fact that pollen containing patented genes can blow into
your field and pollute the seeds of an open-pollenated crop that you
grow and save seeds from and that can get you sued by a seed
producer to be a fatal economic defect in the technology. They should
not be able to sell it if they cannot control reproduction of it.

edit: It still has be be able to be pollenated from within the same
field and still be glyphosate-resistant, so I guess male-sterile
would not work without jumping through some hoops. The trick
would be to make it so that the Roundup Ready pollen can only
produce seeds when pollenating Roundup Ready flowers.

That would remove the problem with polluting other people's OP
crops with the patented genes and eliminate the patent lawsuits.

[Worth1]

Aw nothing.

Worth

[dice]

I think this really comes back to overall corporate ethics, and in agriculture
I see little evidence that they exist. I am reminded of this particular horror
story from the 1990s in this context:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fateful_Harvest

(Nuclear waste as fertilizer: I am suddenly wondering if Atomic Grow
will kill nematodes.)

[JackE]

They should not be able to sell it if they cannot control reproduction of it.

That's a valid point, Dice, and it presents an interesting dilemma.

Since forced population control doesn't seem to be a viable option in western civilization, our very survival as a species depends upon our ability to produce ever-increasing amounts of food. The only way we can meet that challenge is to utilize all our technological resources to the max.

Like everything in life, compromises will have to be made and success will leave some victims behind. Small farmers are becoming increasingly irrelevant and now serve only narrow niche markets. They are not much of a factor when it comes to large-scale food production and the consolidation of farm land by corporate agriculture is, by any standard, more efficient.

Another unavoidable victim of corporate agriculture is the natural environment - and I think that's what really bothers most of us. But there's no way to preserve it and still feed a population that's growing exponentially - because nature and farming are inherently incompatible. Sounds nutty? Yes, but sadly it's true. The only harvest that's natural is gathering edible plants that grow in the meadow - anything beyond that is ecologically destructive.

When some neolithic caveman first planted a seed from a weed he found especially tasty, he had to protect it from bugs, animals and other competitive plants. At that moment, homo sapiens declared war on Mother Nature. In a more innocent era, my grandmother fed her family by picking hornworms off her tomatoes and pulling nut grass by hand - but she was still fighting nature just as we do today. Only the weapons have changed

Mother Nature herself has been dead for a century, but the ancient war still rages. There are no winners - those of us that rally behind corporate agribusiness are, at best, buying a little more time for mankind's survival - and those idealistic souls, God Bless them, who pine for the past and resist ag technology will die in food riots while we choke on our own toxins.

There are no winners.

Jack

[dice]

but she was still fighting nature just as we do today. Only the weapons have changed

A chemical equivalent of a nuclear bomb is not an appropriate weapon
in this battle.

That land around Quincy, WA was some very productive land. I knew
someone that owned 20000 acres there where the Columbia River
bends from the southeast to the south a little north and west of Quincy.
(They made a couple of million from sugar beets one year in the late
1970s when there was a sugar shortage.)

What do you think land around there is worth now? It is probably not
feeding nearly as many starving peasants anywhere as it did before
American corporate agriculture went to work on it. (This does not seem
"efficient" to me, and I would guess that the touted benefits of big ag for
underdeveloped countries are no more than corporate propaganda.)

So you are telling small farmers to work for multinational agricultural
corporations or be out of town by sundown?