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‘Laying claim to nature’s work’: plant patents sow fear among small growers (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 7 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/biodiversity@mander.xyz

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[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 6 points 7 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Using an organic farm system, 68-year-old Morton developed entirely novel lettuce varieties and eventually started the Philomath, Oregon-based Wild Garden Seed company with his wife, Karen.

The customer planned to include “Funny Cut Mix” in their lettuce trials, which plant breeders use to evaluate how well a variety will perform in a specific environment.

A few months later, the customer informed Morton that his “Funny Cut Mix” would be excluded from further trials because it looked like a patented lettuce type called Salanova, owned by the Dutch company Rijk Zwaan.

The system rewards powerful firms with the resources to develop and enforce patents, explained Phil Howard, a professor in the department of community sustainability at Michigan State University.

The company acts as a marketing hub where small-scale farmers can sell packs of seed and receive the majority of the packet sale money in return, minus the cost of production.

Unfortunately, today farmers don’t always have robust choices – a challenge that was recognized in the Biden-Harris executive order on competition,” Jenny L Moffitt, under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said in an email statement.

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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024

105 points (100.0% liked)

Biodiversity

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A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.

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Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.

Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...

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