Nebraska farmer regarding Monsanto: it used to be mine

(That was) then

When I was a boy growing up here outside of Langdon, everything on the farm belonged to my family.

At about the age of ten, Dad taught me how to raise hogs. The sows we grew from Hampshire gilts were ours. So was the alfalfa field where we grew hay and hog pasture. Planted to Vernal seed (a public variety), it was where piglets played and slept in the warm summer sun. The wheat field we harvested later that summer was planted to Gage seed, another public variety. We harvested that wheat in July, then sold some for seed and some for grain. Dad saved seed for next years crop, and Mother cooked a little into breakfast cereal and even ground some flour.

After the wheat harvest, we mowed the stubble and baled the straw. The same pigs that grazed the alfalfa were farrowed and later bedded in our wheat straw as the days grew cooler, and Dad fed the shoats our own corn.

When we fed the hogs Dad told me about how he used to go to the corncrib and select ears of open pollinated seed corn from the thousands he had there. He told me how he'd sort through them and choose only the very best of what he'd grown.

And then he told me about how single cross seed corn had replaced open pollinated varieties that he had planted since he was a boy on his father's farm, where everything they grew belonged to them.

The open pollinated ears of corn from Dad 's crib were never worth more than about a penny apiece.

The cloth sacks that held the first single cross seeds he planted still rest in the attic of my home. Most of the seed company imprints on the sacks would be unrecognizable to young farmers today, but they tell a story that is very up-to-date. It is a story of progress, a story of consolidation, and a story of control.

Even as privatized seed came into being, competition made it difficult for one seed company to dominate another. Seed sales depended simply on appearance, the hybrid's ability to withstand stress, its harvestability, marketing, and most of all yield.

Those were the basic parameters of operating a successful hybrid seed company. Farmers might spend a little more for the very best hybrid, but the bottom line was always about profit on the farm. For a hybrid to be good, it had to be profitable because, after all, the profits belonged to the farmers who grew the crops.

snip

(Then came) Monsanto

The seed company where I bought my first private soybean variety seed was purchased lock, stock, and barrel, by Monsanto.

Monsanto was the first commercial company to patent seed, and first to aggressively enforce its rights as a patent holder of living things.

Monsanto has actively sued many farmers for seed patent infringement. Given the power of a billion dollars in earnings, Monsanto never loses a case. Right or wrong, the company can afford to maintain lawsuits in the courts for years. Eventually, farmers who may or may not have done what they were accused of are forced to capitulate or spend the farm to defend themselves.

Thanks to higher land costs and higher prices for petroleum, machinery, chemicals, fertilizer and seed, the cost to grow an acre of soybeans now approaches $500 per acre.

The 2008 national average soybean yield is predicted to be 40.5 bushels per acre -- or about the same yield I got from the public varieties I planted nearly 40 years ago.

At today's price of about $12 per bushel, an average acre of soybeans is worth $486 [barely a break-even price before federal subsidies.]

As a commercial grower who produces soybeans for the price of $12 per bushel, I haven't simply lost the right to plant my own seed.

I may also have lost the right to earn a profit.
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What Monsanto is doing to farming and the livelihoods of farmers is nothing less than a crime. And for those who wanted proof of that, there it is straight out of the farmer's pen.