? who owns seed companies

But, I thought Monsanto didn't sell garden vegetables?
You didn't answer my question on whether they are or are not patented by Monsanto. I'm pretty sure they are although I can't find the patent.

Yea, I know you don't need to sign a contract to buy a seed packet at the hardware store BUT reproducing seeds that are patented for resale or personal use IS illegal. Although it looks like Monsanto has bigger fish to fry than small gardeners. With a $10 million dollar/yr budget to prosecute with you'd better hope they don't get bored.

And yes, it is very unlikely to get the same seeds from a hybridized plant although hybrids do become stabilized and start producing the same genes. Not sure if any of their plants are stabilized but I wouldn't take my chances.

__________________
U.S. Constitution -10th Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The PVP patent protection is only good for so many years. Last year, the PVP status of Dill's Atlantic Giant pumpkin expired.

I received a catalogue from Seigers in Michigan. They are a commercial house selling mostly hybrids (there are some hybrids that I'm not willing to live without). They have applied to patent their line of Warty Pumpkins and Gourds. Warted gourds have been around for a long time so I"m not sure why they think theirs are special.

My Seigers catalogue also has pages and pages of waiver forms in the back that I must sign if I buy certain seeds. The waivers are a contract, outlining their protection from being liable for the spread of certain diseases. The contracts also spell out that I cannot resell either the seeds or plants and that I understand the risks and implications of any implied performance or resistance to disease.


Edit: These contracts are pretty wordy. At the bottom of one, in big bold letters is says " the undersigned specifically agrees to waive its right to a jury and hereby agrees that any such legal action will be tried without a jury"
It is an American company out of Pennsylvania and their business is selling watermelon stock (seeds and pollinators)...hazardous things, those seedless watermelons...
Actually, the potential for disease vectoring is high in seedless watermelons. No one wants to be blamed for any serious crop disease outbreaks.

Baker Creek buys an awful lot of seed from small growers on contract. Great company with bold ideas, but they have lost a great deal of control on how their seed is produced.

I know an Amish family in Michigan who are low priced peddlers of seeds. It is Mom and Pop, with the kids packing the seeds. The packages have little bible verse stickers all over them. It seems very quaint, until you realize that they are offering over 7,000 varieties of seeds and are just repacking seeds shipped in from Europe. Super nice folks tho.

From About.com-
"The USPTO grants a plant patent to whoever invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state.

Asexual Reproduction
The plant must be found stable by asexual reproduction. By definition that means, "Creating a plant using techniques such as grafting, budding, or using cuttings, layering, or division without using seeds. Plant offspring will be substantially identical to the parent."

These patents are only good for twenty years. The patent on the Big Boy tomato ran out in 1969 since it came out in 1949.

While this forum and the heated arguments it seems to generate make us all feel terribly important to ourselves, we must realize that the home garden seed market is only a miniscule part of the total seed industry. The seed growers and the catalog companies are still in place and I'm sure they intend to continue doing their jobs as their customers demand.

Since Monsanto acquired Seminis, the wholesaler of a large percentage of these seeds through the distribution channel, a new element has been introduced into the mix of the seed distribution business. I would take a 'wait and see' attitude whether Monsanto, who now makes the marketing decision, will provide the same level of quality and dedication to the home gardener as others did before. Monsanto just may not need home gardeners on their customer lists any more, if their interests lie in commercial ag production of vegetables. Through profit driven decision, or benign neglect, they may just allow something less than what we have been accustomed to. I can foresee changes like dropping less familiar varieties from the catalogs, perhaps allowing some, but not all catalog suppliers to acquire parts of the chain down to the grower level, perhaps even throwing open the possibility of finding new growers (cheaper) from other foreign countries than before. I can also forsee price hikes, as was the case of RR soybeans. Of course, I usually have a cloudy crystal ball, but the possibility is there, and I think we should be thinking about that.

I think we are argueing about seeds and such, while we are overlooking that Seminis has a very large portion of control over the whole seed production--open-pollinated, named varieties on the USDA database, and patented varities, chain--which extends to the catalog companies, the greenhouse bedding markets, and goes to all the way to the worldwide growers who contract their production to Seminis. This is not Monsanto bashing, rather, I think we should all take a good look at how we home gardeners learn, react, and adjust to a possible new way of obtaining our seeds in the future. Maybe we should all be learning more about home seed saving techniques, co-op/group buying of hybrids, exchanging information instead of arguing point to point, whatever....so we each can stay more self-reliant and not be so foolish as to expect all our eggs to come from the Monsanto basket.

geo

First I am glad you have a mission in life, I am sure that is important to you. I am sorry though that your mission seems to include taking knocks at excellent companies like Baker Creek, strewing disinformation through your posts to make it appear that things are different from reality and that your goal appears to be misleading your fellow gardeners into thinking all seeds are safe when that is simply false.

This is a clever bit of misinformation: "Instead, most assume that if the majority of the gardeners are informed about GMO vegetable seeds, they will also be informed enough to know that there hasn't been one available in over 10 years."

The fact is that there are plenty of plants being grown on farms that are GMO and are even available to the home gardener that are not technically vegetables (even though the averaqge gardener thinks of them as vegetables) they are grains like corn (Google Syngenta Bt11) we had a market garden farmer grow it last year here locally. So GMO's are out there and yes they can pollute the home garden and you can buy them at your local Farmer's market.

As for Baker Creek they go above and beyond to be sure there are no GMO's in their seed. Sadly because America has done everything to protect the big seed companies and zip to protect the little man we have gmo's floating into fields and there is no way to stop it. But Baker Creek at least cares about the problem and does everything humanly possible to protect us which is why I buy from them.

I'd be curious to know why you would want to try and convince people to be ignorant on GMO's and to feel safe no matter what seed they buy?

I'm not trying to convince people to be ignorant of GMO vegetables and in fact have often mentioned the last one to have been released and also reported its withdrawal from sale. That all happened over a decade ago. I've quit offering rewards for GMO vegetable seeds since it appears that nobody knows where they are. If they are out there, there doesn't appear to be much profit in their sales since we can't find anybody who has bought any.

I want to be the first on this or any other forum to grow a GMO tomato. Nobody will direct me to a source. I also want to grow the tomatoes with the terminator gene which the Iraqis were supposedly ordered to grow. Nobody in Iraq can find any. If you know of a source for either of my quests, perhaps you could share that information with the rest of us?

Martin

The main thing about this is that there is so much misinformation out there that sorting out the truth has become almost impossible for anyone just coming onto the scene. The previous owner of Seminis was in it just for the money. He was already one of the richest men in his country and didn't need more. He was ready to throw it away via bankruptcy or simple abandonment. The only way to keep it together was to set a price on the total package and see if anyone would bite. Monsanto bit. They didn't force the guy to sell, anyone with enough financial backing could have bought it, even you and I. Many seed companies, large and small, have gone out of business because of various factors. Often they simply closed their doors and walked away from the industry, leaving the pieces to be picked over by scavengers. That was an option for Seminis. The subsequent loss in vegetable germ-plasm would have been devastating since only the high end profit material would have been retained. You don't have to like who owns it now but probably would have been equally unhappy with the alternatives.

Martin

Read into it as you wish.

__________________
U.S. Constitution -10th Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

For one, it would be nice if you got off your duff and earned a little more money. I didn't get a pay increase this year and I had become accustomed to that little extra annual reward for living!

There indeed are vegetable varieties on the market which have had their trail through my gardens. It serves no purpose in mentioning which companies are involved since there should be no strings of egotism tying one garden to the next or from seed to plant to seed. And I don't believe that they should have an unfair advantage by my advertising them here.

Challenge still stands to find some GMO garden vegetable seeds for me or anyone else to grow. How about a blue tomato? Too late! I'm already growing two lines of those this year!

Martin

I have been following this thread with interest but have not read enough about the subject to have a good informed decision. I did see on Monsanto's site that they do develop vegetable seeds (other than soy, corn, cotton, etc) but could not find anything there about GM vegetables .
I did find this recent article regarding Monsanto's GM eggplant rejected by India. Monsanto does seem to be tinkering with other vegetable's genetics besides corn and soy beans.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...-update1-.html

As I pointed out before, research and release are only close in a dictionary. Someone can have an umlimited amount of anything and as long as they do not share it, nobody else will ever have one drop of it. Besides, it wasn't Monsanto's labs which developed it but an Indian company in which Monsanto is a minority owner. I'd reject it myself since I'm not overly fond of eggplant no matter what company sells it!

Martin

Well, I'm with you on the eggplant.
Depending on the financial size of the Indian company, a 26% share might be pretty impressive, and possibly one of the biggest shareholders.
As I said, I'm still in the reading and decision making phase of this subject. I do admit to a basic aversion to adding a foreign, non-plant gene to plants that then become a food source. I also think that ethics and morals often disappear when enough money is involved, and human and environmental
safety is just give lip service by the companies making the money.

This isn't garden vegetable related but this news piece about Monsanto's alfalfa is interesting too.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/mone...fight-ban.html

Ah that explains your posts!

There's one little point that one of Sue's replies should have tipped everyone off long ago and why there can be no GMO garden vegetables available in any company mentioned in Who Owns What. Every GMO product must be approved by some governing board and usually a license issued, depending upon the nation's requirement. That is done after considerable debate and study. For food products in the US, any such product must be approved by the FDA. If one wishes to find GMO vegetable seeds in the US, the search must start with the FDA. If they are not found there, they can't be found anywhere else. It is so simple and yet so many fail to understand it. When they can't find them in order to identify them, they have a hard time believing that they've become just another victim of those who don't want you to enjoy gardening or the fruits of your labors.

Martin

GMO corn you can buy right now:

http://www.rogersadvantage.com/produ...rn_Bugsout.asp

No, I can't buy it. Rogers is a brand division of Syngenta. Neither are listed among garden seed companies in the aforementioned "Who Owns What". Their seed is only available to commercial growers, not gardeners. That's why you won't find them listed at http://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/whoownswhat.php

Martin