I enjoy the accusation of bathroom science killing things ‘life force’ (one wonders how a plant manages to grow from a seed to an 8ft high beast of a plant with no life force – of course ignoring that the concept of a ‘life force’ is a neat throwback to a time before we had the vaguest understanding about how life operates)

Yeah, I saw the AP article as well as Monsanto’s response. Working on a thoughtful post about it, should be up before I fly out of Mad Town this weekend.

Of course, this brings us back to wondering if there is any competition, and if not, how to encourage it.

There isn’t any competition, at least according to Monsanto Squeezes Out Seed Business Competition, AP Investigation Finds. I posted the Huff Po source because many of the ideas we debunk here at Biofortified are discussed in the comments, including lots about suicide seeds: “crops that that don’t produce their own seed” and “seeds are dead to the farmer because [they] have been put through a bathroom laboratory process that kills of their life force, making them unable to reproduce the plant”.

Anyway, the article says that Monsanto’s licensing agreements with other seed companies are effectively preventing competition. Is it possible to enact regulations that would allow other companies to compete on a more level playing field? David Koepsell of Who Owns You? argues that we just shouldn’t allow patenting of genes. Would that do it?

when your competition is making the same stuff you are, I don’t know how much incentive there is.

Well in the case of Rootworm resistance, let’s say Company A and B both make rootworm-controlling sprays, and also develop corn varieties. If Company A can develop a GE trait that eliminates the need for the rootworm spray, they could undercut Company B’s sales of both their rootworm spray and their corn seeds. So it is in the interest of Company B to also develop that trait to protect their seed sales. Even if they don’t make a spray, developing the seed trait will still be in their interest. Otherwise they would need to license from the other company to have that trait in their seeds. (Which does happen I suppose)

The reason why I’ve been thinking about this is that people tend to say that GE is all about selling Roundup – and that it is a technique that inherently means that farmers will have to spray more. But in a healthy competition between several seed companies, there’s the potential to have it work to reduce sprays instead.

Perhaps this hypothetical subsidy could give credit to farmers that reduce environmental impact in general, based on the EIQ calculation, for example. Farmers that can currently reduce their impacts would benefit right away, but for those that can’t there would be demand for traits in seeds that will enable them to meet the benchmarks. Let’s call up Tom Vilsack right away!

That’s very true – they do yield test promising cultivars all over the place so they can sell a seed that will do well just about anywhere.

There’s probably some sort of a happy middle, but it occurs to me that breeding for a smaller number of cultivars that can grow in most places has the side effect of selecting for varieties with greater adaptability. The ideal of thousands of cultivars precisely adapted to very specific local growing conditions might be riskier in a world where climate change makes it even more difficult to predict exactly what local growing conditions will be from one year to the next.

With infinite grant money and research time it’d be great sound-bite research to see if the Nested Association Mapping population could be used to map out “adaptability” QTLs.

I hadn’t thought of the companies needing to consider their competition – but when your competition is making the same stuff you are, I don’t know how much incentive there is. Would some sort of a subsidy-type incentive for farmers to adopt certain farming methods affect what seed companies develop? I think so – or at least we’d get new companies to meet that new demand.

I’m not sure to what extent the seed industry is coupled to nitrogen fertilizer production – the article linked is all about Monsanto, and to the best of my knowledge Monsanto isn’t in the fertilizer business, and does invest a lot each year in transgenic NUE traits – I’m unsure as to how much conventional breeding efforts at Monsanto target low input environments – I’d guess that outside of special projects like WEMA there isnt much effort put that way as Monsanto’s target market in the US would I guess be the mainstream higher input farmers (ie where the money’s at) – There are however a lot of other breeders out there who aren’t conglomerate owned (although who may license some conglomerate techs, be that GM or certain germplasms) who could undoubtedly explore that avenue (although if they were highly succesful in doing so I would envision a buyout by one of the big seed manufacturers)

The dichotomy between breeding and genetic engineering is troublesome, and to be expected. While they want to acknowledge the contribution that genetics has to the success of a crop, they are interested in downplaying the potential of GE relative to non-GE techniques. This is to be expected considering the predisposition of the UCS. But it becomes a huge strain to argue that changes in gene expression brought about by one technique shouldn’t be worried about, but changes brought about by another technique should be. Truth is, metabolic engineering – no matter the technique used – can cause undesirable consequences. Breeding for NUE is metabolic engineering, even when you don’t know what those changes are.

I think it is also troublesome that the report only suggests more public funding for breeding, and not genetic engineering as well. Yes, I absolutely agree that we need more public money in breeding, but at the same time there are traits that companies will skip over because the profit margin is not good enough for their trouble, so the public sector should pursue it.

Anastasia, good points. I would like to add that since the big companies test out their cultivars in many locations, rather than being region-specific, there is one potential benefit – broad adaptability. This could be important with variable climatic conditions like we are expecting in this century.

On undercutting their own input sales, an employee from Pioneer once came by UW-Madison and gave a talk which I attended. He mentioned that they are developing corn rootworm beetle resistance even though they sell an anti-rootworm pesticide. He said that this showed that they were transitioning from sprays to genetics, but I had a different thought about it. The reason why they are trying to undercut their own pesticide sales is because someone else could beat them to it. The competition between seed/chemical companies can potentially drive the movement to decreased reliance on inputs. Each crop that requires less sprays, whether pesticides or fertilizers, etc, the more farmers will be interested in them.

The trick is, how do we encourage this to happen more? Incentives for farmers that use fewer inputs?

I think the idea of breeding for the conditions you want to be growing in has some promise, but as you said, advances will be much slower than biotech traits.

While he was at ISU, John Reganold talked a little about how we should be breeding crops for low input conditions in addition to using integrated farming techniques. Conventional crop cultivars are bred under conventional (i.e. relatively high input) conditions, so those are the conditions they do well in. If you take a conventional cultivar and try to grow it under low input conditions, it will do ok – but it won’t do as well as a cultivar that was bred under your particular growing conditions.

In other words, if we want crops that require less water and fertilizer, we need to be breeding in those conditions. I know this all sounds obvious to any plant breeders out there, but I think it’s an important point.

This seems to be a good argument for locally adapted cultivars. However, I don’t think developing hundreds of hundreds or thousands of cultivars is interesting to big seed companies when just a handful of cultivars will do just fine.

Taking this idea further, I wonder how many locally adapted cultivars were available before major consolidation of the seed industry. Does any one have a guess? I wasn’t involved in ag before the consolidation so I don’t know. I also wonder how the number of locally adapted cultivars might change if the anti-trust investigations result in de-consolidation of the seed industry. Will we start to see bags of seed that say things like “adapted for x amount of N”, etc?

And then, taking the idea even further (although I hesitate to even type this because it sounds like borderline conspiracy theory) will it be in the best interest of seed companies that also sell inputs to breed for low input conditions? I think not. If I sold two different products, I wouldn’t want one product to eliminate the need for the other product. Seems like it would be advantageous for farmers and the rest of us if ag companies were a little more free-market and a little less conglomerate. It will sure be interesting to see how these anti-trust investigations turn out.