List of seed varieties to keep away from

if you think we owe monsanto any kind of thank you, i give up

They have been hauling bees for years.
The bee keeper at our Farmers Market takes his bees to Texas for the winter. Just to live, not pollinate. He says they do better there than staying in Minnesota for the winter.
Some nut trees in California need bees to produce nuts. But only need the bees for a short time. So they move on to do another crop somewhere.
People should quit commenting on things they know nothing about.
That's how all the troubles start.

My beekeeper friend in Idaho hauls his bees to the Central Valleys of CA for the Almond bloom, and he is like any other livestock farmer. He would never do anything to jeopardize the well being of his bees. He knows he has to protect and take care of them if they are going to take care of him.

People do not always know what they do not know, so i think it is okay for everyone to voice their thoughts or opinions on these wide ranging discussions. Sometimes the responsese or corrections lead to very interesting points being made.

RC, I will miss you, but i am very grateful to Monsanto, because without their help, i would probably still be outside pulling weeds.

Ernie

There are also many beekeepers who have the opinion that hauling bees around the country exposes them to more diseases and weakens their immune systems. Some actually boycott almonds because of the practice. Guess we can't generalize about all beekeepers.

I agree there are many different practices among beekeepers, but the Almond industry in CA, where most of the almonds are grown, could not survive without the transient bee hives, as that area could not support all the bees the Almonds need, for the rest of the year. That is just another good example of where there is a need, some people will step forward to fill it.

Another aspect of it is, with just the 100 day growing period in Idaho, he needs bee pasture somewhere else.

Ernie

Ernie, there are many other companies that produce herbicides BUT I believe that is the only company that has produced patent crops that are immune to it. As far as I know, Monsantos is the only company that puts genetic markers in their genetically engineered seeds. These seeds have been introduced to small farmers in developing countries. Many of these farmers have been sowing the same seeds for generations and are told the "new" seeds are fantastic, only to find out when the marker shows up in the seeds they have been sowing for generations, that their seeds now belong to Monsantos. To a small farmer his seeds are like gold and when they are gone so is his livelihood. I wouldnt thank them for anything. realize that they have done some incredible things but we have managed with out these for centuries.

I realize that they allow more food to be produced but its not as nutritious and it creates a "false niche". The best I can discribe this is with the population of deer in our area. There wouldnt be too many except for people feeding them. Another words, their natural environment could not support this population. There is not enough for them to eat.

Ive always heard that the bee decline was not truly understood but thought to be a fungus.

I cant thank Monasantos either. The only problems theyve managed to fix are the ones they have created.

Lisa, You are much better informed on this GMO matter than i am, but your comments bring up a lot of legal questions. Until those questions are settled, it is hard to say much about whether the GMO actually hurts or helps.

But i remember the little old nubby ears of corn small farmers were growing back in the early 1930's, and then we moved to CA, and i lost direct contact with the corn, but as the corn seed was improved by selecting and crossing, the little nubby ears disappeared. That type of corn is still available down in Mexico. The improved corn and wheat has been of great benefit, and if the GMO is just a continuation of the improvements, but in a different form, it will benefit all of us.

If, as some people are worried about, it actually harms us, then the Courts and the Marketplace will eliminate it. That has been my only point, in that all of us, Individuals and Corporations alike, should have the freedom to try to improve things, knowing that if we mess up and cause damage, we will have to pay for it, and of course we need the freedom to choose whether we want to use it or not. But in order to protect our freedoms, we have to also protect the other person's freedom.

So if Monsanto harms you, join a class action, and there wil be a lot of them, and recover your damages. If Monsanto helps you, be grateful to them, but we realy should allow them the freedom to work on it until we know for sure whether it is good or bad. We should not try to stop them until we see proof that it is bad. There were people protesting the early work that was done in corn breeding, believing seed should be left alone.

I am grateful for Roundup, as it has killed a lot of weeds for me.

Bees have a lot of problems, both with mites and parasites, and fungus, but they have always been controllable before, and i have not talked to my friend for 2 or 3 years about it, but the last time i talked to him, they had not found out the reason for the decline, but it was leveling off.

To go back to your comment on the deer population, i do agree that Deer regulate their population to the amount of available food. But humans do not do that, and without continually increasing the food we grow, there will not be enough to feed the increasing population, so the point you made seems to support the need for improved corn.

Thanks for your comments,
Ernie

Ernie

>> Ive always heard that the bee decline was not truly understood but thought to be a fungus.

Onc e or t3wic e per year, I read an article that says someone else thinks THEY found "the" answer. It always turns out to be whatever their field of research is.

My intuition says that, when they answer is this hard to find and agreement is non-existent, that "the" answer will turn out to be combination of things.

For example (and I'm purely, purely guessing) a combination of more than 5 of these things :
- fungi (combin ation of species and varieties)
- mites (combin ation of species and varieties)
- sub-lethal doses of insecticides
- sub-lethal doses of other "cide"s
- sub-lethal doses of other pollutants
- sub-lethal doses of chemicals that everyone thinks are beneficial
- climate change
- jet lag
- pollen sources changing faster than "over decades"
- less genetic variety in pollen sources
- more genetic variety in pollen sources
- cell phone radiation
- playing too many video games
- other things I can't think of, even facetiously.

If it's like debugging software or diagnosing disease: if two things are causin g the problem, it's 8 times harder to figure out what they are.

If three things are causing the problem, it's 27 times harder to figure it out.

Or it's like when you ask someone how to do something. If they give you half a dozen different ways t6o do it, the odds are that none of those ways are really effective, easy and cheap. If there was an effective, easy, cheap way to do it, that would be how they do it, and they would have told you only one way!

The corn improvements that you are speaking of don't have anything to do with GMOs as far as I know. Hybridization does. Completely different story. GMOs don't get better with the next generation. The seeds are sterile and must be purchased again every year. The only possible improvement is at the cellular level in a lab.

It's so much more complicated then a class action suit. How can I tell if it has hurt me if they don't have to lable the products that it's in?

I have heard of famines in developing countries so yes, not enough food limits the population. A plant can only produce so much energy and the more times it's divided up between fruits the less nutrition is in each fruit. But that isn't do to GMO either. GMOs are when genetics from one species are put into another species in a way that could never happen in nature.

I highly doubt that some of the small farmers in developing countries even know what a class action suit is. They may not even know what a lawyer is but I bet they know who Monsantos is, now that Monsantos has laid claim to the seeds they have been growing for years.

I, personally, don't have a problem with Round Up and anyother herbicide. I think it could be left out of the conversation there is a lot more to Monsantos and GMOs. There is a thread on DG about Superweeds that naturally have become immune to Round up.

I have nothing else to add to this discussion and see no reason to repeat myself but I will read others comments and insights.

Hybrid corn or tomatoes or watermelons or any other hybrid crop has to be produced from a cross every year. You can not save seed & get a crop true to the original.

Agreed and good point, so it cant improve with each generation and Im sure many years went into getting the parent lines just right.

To be politically correct it is Monsanto, not Monsantos--- no S at the end.

Jo-Thank you for pointing out my mistake. Ive used Monsanto as Monsanto's for so long I didnt know when to stop. lol you are right.

'I highly doubt that some of the small farmers in developing countries even know what a class action suit is. They may not even know what a lawyer is but I bet they know who Monsantos is, now that Monsantos has laid claim to the seeds they have been growing for years.

I would wonder why they would "lay claim" to those seeds. I would also wonder if this is mainly an echo from the Canadian canola situation of many years ago, or is this a real time problem there and now?

You better study up on producing hybrids. A hybrid is a hybrid.
In corn there are F1, two way cross, four way cross & many others.
Pioneer seeds used to raise hybrid seeds in this area.

Sometimes seed from Hybrids come back remarkably true to the parent - it is just that you can't count on it & odds are against it. I should also mention that saving these seeds for propagation is illegal, because most Hybrids have some degree of trademark or patent. But if you like to experiment with seeds, it is something you can try. They probably won't be true to type - and if they are, you can't give the seeds to anyone else using the original name.

I have a flower, I won't mention the name here. It was created by crossing a Midwest native with a Mexican native to get the Midwest cold-hardiness and the larger more abundant flowers of the Mexican type. I bought one plant & I assumed it would be sterile. But it must have been self-pollinating because it seeded itself back and the seedlings look almost exactly like the parent. Unlikely, but it can happen.

Open-pollinated types don't always come back true to type either. If you are serious about saving seed, you need to take some precautions about unintended crosses between varieties. Which brings us full circle back to bees or GMOs or hybrids I guess.

PS - It is true that I don't know anything about bees that live out their entire life on a semi-trailer. We do have bee-keepers that rotate their hives between farms, and take them somewhere for a vacation in the off-season. We just don't do it on as large a scale as the West Coast. I do know a little about bees, though - I intentionally plant stuff to attract pollinators and beneficial insects to my yard. I have fruit trees that need pollinated. About half my bees are honey bees, the other half natives. The honey bees must be feral - there are no domestic hives anywhere close.

This message was edited Dec 14, 2012 12:54 PM

I have not seen it mentioned in this forum, but the US Supreme court has agreed to hear the Monsanto V. Bowman case regarding the replanting and sale of soybean seed. Lower courts found against Bowman, but the Supreme Court does not usually review cases that they totally agree with. I believe it was mentioned that the case will be heard Jan. 13, but probably no one knows just when the decision will be released.

I did not find anything that prohibits the GMO produced second generation seeds from being used by the growers for their own use, such as livestock feed or consumption. If that is true, then Monsanto cannot claim to "Own the Seed".

Ernie

PG, There is a honeybee hive just across the fence from me, and they get quite aggressive when they hear the lawn mower, but the bees i prefer are the Mason bees as they are active in cooler weather than are honeybees, I am encouraging them by making nesting sites for them. I was pleased to see a lot of them working the Buckwheat blooms a week or so ago.

Ernie

We had plenty of bees this summer. Closest hives are about 8 miles cross country. We did pay a beekeeper a number of years ago to bring some bees here. He didn't put them where we wanted & so people were getting stung. 3 times that we know of they swarmed. He came & put them in new boxes. Maybe some others swarmed & went into a hollow tree in our grove or something.
We had 2050 strawberry plants that produced over 1900 pints of berries between May 26 & October. Never an unpollinated berry!
Oh, the strawberries were hybrids by the way. I gave some plants to friend who was going to his winter home in AZ & plant them there. Will I go to jail ?

The word "hybrid" might be used in a variety of ways.

People selling seeds typically make it explicit that they mean an F1 hybrid (which probably includes four-ways). Two diffent parent strains (P1a and P1b) were crossed, and that cross' seed is sold as "F1".

The sense in which "almost all plants are hybrids of SOMETHING even if they are now a stable OP cultivar" is a different use of the word hybrid. Things crossed multiple years ago, or decades ago, or centuries ago, intentionally by human intervention and unintentionally in the wild or in fields.

Even stable, inbred OP cultivars came from that original gene pool, so you could call them hybrids if you don't mind giving one word two very different meanings.

It's true that many OP strains started as a cross between A and B. For example, F1 Sungold tomatoes are eaxctly that: someone crosses A with B and sells you the F1 hybrikd result.

However, many people have crossed their F1 Sungold plants to produce F2 seed, then again for F3 seed, and kept selecting and inbreeding and rogueing until their resulting population is (fairly) stable and produces rather uniform plants that are reasonably close to the original F1 Sungold int he traits that those breeders cared most about.

After multiple generations of inbreding and selection, calling it a 'hybrid' is misleading. It is descended from hybrids

By the way: I knew that there were plants legally protected against asexual propagation (e.g. cuttings). Isn't that what "PP" means? But I thought that you could always propagate those sexually (from seeds) without any legal barrier. And that makes sense becuase their value is in their exact duplication of the unique plant they were cloned from. I thought that seeds from those kind of unusual individuals almost always lost most of the unique traits that made them valuable.

Is there some other law that protects seeds? I only recently read that Monsanto fairly recently gained legal protection against re-use. I thought they had deployed their "Terminator gene" that c aused F2 steriklity (but what I read suggests that is incorrect.)

Maybe that is a spin-off of the MEDICAL research gene engineering explosion, where courts decided that companies could patenmt genes that they discovered (or is it only gen es that they modified?) The argument I recall was that no company would spend years and billions discovering and creating some medical miracle if anyone could clone or reverse enigneer their final product and sell it at 10% the price without having to recoup any investment.

Rich, Google up Supreme Court, Monsanto v Bowman. Monsanto won the case against Bowman in the Appeals Court but the Supreme Court is going to hear it, maybe Jan. 13, so it has not been decided yet.

From what the analysts were saying, it is a pretty close call, on how far down the line Mon can protect the patent. It also seemed to me from what i read that there is no problem with regrowing for your own use, just in the selling or making a profit from it. But as on now, it has not been finalized.

Ernie

Rick, I was directing that to you, sorry i mixed your name up with Rich, but anyone that has noticed how alarmed some people have been about this matter, will get a better understanding of it.

Ernie

>> no problem with regrowing for your own use, just in the selling or making a profit from it.

That's re-assuring. It even makes sense to the extent that you have to expect to recoup an investment, if you plan to MAKE an investment. But it doesn't make sense from the perspective of "I pollinated your crop against your wishes, now you can't use your own crop."

MAYBE it makes sense to say "you can't SELL seeds with our genes". After all, if developed-world farm ers grow a crop FOR saleable seed, they have to observe separation distances anway.

But I see how a farmer growing a crop to sell as organic food would cinsider that Monsnato pollen as gene pollution and reasonably seek damages.

As I read the "asexual propagation" law, it said "NO asexual peropagation of a protected plant". Not "no COMMERCIAL propagation".

But I never expected Plant Police to break down my garden fence if I took a cutting or divided a rootball.
And what woujld they do if a Protected Plant spread by roots or suckers? Arrest the plant?

(I don't want to give any lawyers any ideas!)

Ok, I never known an O/P to be patented or trademark. When I want to know if something is hybrid or O/P I ask Farmerdill, Ive never had a problem getting a straight answer from him. Plantfiles says O/P or hybrid. I see no reason for it to be anymore confusing. It's either one or the other but that's my real life experience.

I only know about these GMO things from farmers that are my neighbors. They don't plant their own soybean seed because the saved seed is inferior to the seed produced to raise crops.
One neighbor grows soybean seed for one of the seed companies. He plants "Registered" seed & the resulting seed he raises is "Certified".
Seed corn is more complex. 6 rows are planted with female corn, the 1 or 2 rows of a male pollinator. The tassel is pulled out of the female plant before it has pollen. That gets the hybrid cross.

An op plant can be Trademarked or PVPed [Plant Variety Patent]. Some examples are the "tillage radishes�" which are trademarked as a seed line of that cover crop. Legacy watermelon is protected from someone else selling that seed. African violets are often patented.

Thanks Indy, my experience is only with veggies. I never thought about other plants like African Violets and I thought most of those were hybrids.

I know when I buy veggie seeds they are either hybrids (F1) or O/P. Unless otherwise indicated.

I Trademarked a naturally mutated Flowering Cherry, that was much superior to the mother tree we cloned it from. But i found out during that process that i was only able to trademark the name, and that other people could clone my tree and put a different name on it and sell it.
So, as i wanted it to become popular, which it has, i gave the licenses away instead of charging royalties.
Patents are different that Trademarks as the Patents deal with then plant, not just the name. Trademarks are expensive, but not nearly as expensive to get, but not nearly as expensive as Patents.
Ernie

I just read in American Vegetable Grower Magazine, that Proposition 37 was defeated in California in the November election. 53% to 47%.
It would have required labeling of foods with GMO.
California usually is the trend setter for food regulation. Safety, packaging, storing, etc.

Sadly, Prop 37 was defeated. A lot of Big Ag money went into defeating it.

A lot of big money was spent by both sides. Maybe Prop. 37 was defeated because people realize all the labels and other regulations just increase the cost of food without doing any good. Sadly, all the labels on food listing how many calories in each serving has not helped me lose a single pound, which was one of the benefits touted when it was passed.

Ernie

The only label anyone reads is the one for the $, & I am not sure about that.
Recently gas has been going down. I saw an empty station with gas 10� cheaper than the one across the street that was full of cars.

I do read the portions and I've been shocked to see that something was packaged obviously for a single serving was actually 2 servings. My ex MIL is always so proud of herself for being so well info. and health conscience. She was so disgusted with me bc I pointed out that the Bran Muffins she was eating were extremely high in calories and sugar. She let out a huge sigh and got the muffins to show me the package and how utterly stupid I was. I pointed out that each muffin was 2 servings....my ex FIL was very amused. She just put the muffin back and didnt talk to me again. Lol

Hmmm - the increase in the cost of food - only the label needs changing if producers choose not to go non-GMO - not the actual cost of food itself. And producers are always changing labels (usually to reduce the net weight or add the word "natural") and it's not as expensive as you might think. And I do read labels, especially ingredients and nutrients. I'm very interested in what I'm eating and want the option to choose.