"Pioneer maintains the industry's largest winter seed production program with a capacity for 1.3 million units. With the recent addition of a fifth dryer our installation at Paine, Chile is the world's largest seed corn production plant."
"Incorporate superior and reliable sources of disease and insect resistance through intensive breeding and use of marker-assisted selection techniques."
"The unique proprietary genetics that make up Pioneer brand seed products are valuable assests of the company. Patenets and plant variety protection laws are tools to protecr germplasm and research knowledge in order to bring new and improved products to the marketplace that provide value to growers. For example, Pioneer wheat varieties introduced contain a genetic package that takes an average of twelve years and over a million dollars a year to develop."
"When a customer purchases a Pioneer wheat variety or trait having the protection of an issued patent, the purchaser is granted a limited license to ONLY PRODUCE A SINGLE CROP OF GRAIN OR FORAGE FOR FEEDING OR PROCESSING. The patent prohibits any unauthorized making, selling, or use of the pateneted variety. NO SEED CAN BE SAVED from this commercial crop and used for planting purposes. Persons willfully infringing on this patent protection are subject to multiple damages and costs."
from the pioneer website. the capitalized passages are theirs, not mine.
sounds like a globalitarian corporate culture to me. far removed form the yeoman farmer who won the war for independence ( americans do not have revolutions...not since hamilton and madison got hold of the government anyway ) "production plants" "proprietary genetics" "limited license"...those don't sound very agrarian to me...okay...there's been a vigorous trade in food as long as there has been agriculture...and generations of farmers have willfully interfered in the reproductive processes of plants and animals to encourage traits they found desirable...artificial selection is genetic engineering...but it took place in fields over generations of human and their domesticates, not in twelve years in a labratory...and there were exchanges of species and landraces of plants between farmers...if farmer brown grew wheat that made a superior flour you might like to buy some of his seed and grow some yourself, so there was some sort of "marketplace" for those genetic enhancements...but once you bought or bartered it, it was yours and you could keep part of the crop back to resow the next year or maybe cross with a somewhat hardier breeed you'd found without the local sheriff hauling you in front of the justice of the peace for doing so...if i go out to the field where i took that photo of that sign later this autumn and flich an ear or two of the corn there ( and let me assure the good people at pioneer that i have absolutely no intention of stealing their genetic secrets...the stuff is inedible and genetically modified corn is somewhat contrary to my evolving food philosophy) and plant it around like some sort of guerilla pirate of intellectual property i could be walloped with some doozies in the way of fines and arbitrary damages...just over some seeds..seed producers sound alot like pharmaceutical companies these days...and i wonder what happens if some of pioneers pollen blows across the road into farmer jones' field and infects his corn with pioneers genes..is farmer jones liable for the actions of the wind and the corn? i'll be he would be if it were detected...maybe pioneer should splice some gene in that makes their corn purple so they could tell more readily...whatever kind of culture agriculture has become it has mostly passed out of the hands of farmers and smallholders and into labs, boardrooms, and courtrooms...when, i wonder, will they start policing my gardens?
