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 4 more times and I’d have 320 billion tomatoes.
Sell each of those tomatoes for 10 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, “you getting dumped by your girlfriend for reusing seeds every year like
a dirty loser farmer instead of buying Monsanto’s new tricked-out seeds with all the latest
features.”
But, uh…
I’m not sure that’s a reliable source since the last eighty pages are just the words
“maniacal laughter” over and over again.
In truth, there are some practical disadvantages 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 did 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 1930, the US 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 an 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 named 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 US 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.
And Monsanto’s not the only one—a massive proportion of the 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.
Any time a farmer wants to grow a patented plant, they need to sign a contract saying
that 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 your 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 cause you’re the only
person on Earth who intentionally buys cans of Pepsi.”
And even though these patents are mostly held in the US and Europe, article 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 sowing dissent
in your comments section!”
Well, setting aside the fact that it’s pretty hard to keep your farm afloat 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 hundreds 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 the giant corporations, okay?
I mean, someone besides their hundreds of lawyers.
Now even though this racket might’ve 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 the 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 ride, Audible’s massive streaming library of free audiobooks has made the monotonous
moments of my life relaxing and productive.
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