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Princeton, MN | Paul, what reason do the public universities have to continue researching seed traits? Farmers have taken all of their support away from public seed lines in favor of the big companies traits, leaving the universities with alot of germplasm and nowhere to to go with it but to possibly sell their lines to a big company. But they have no assurance that a company will pick up a RR line of seed from them since the universities themselves cannot market RR seed.
I am not attacking anyone personally here, but I just find it very funny that farmers in general have a hatred towards monsanto and other large companies, but yet they continue to support them by buying their products. The small seed companies all died out because farmers abandoned their support for them, the university breeding programs are the same way. In corn and soybeans universities cannot market traited seed, so why should they breed it? It would be a colossal waste of resources and research money. Instead they focus on breeding specialty lines like open pollinated corn and food type soybeans because there is a market for them.
It seems like we have created this problem ourselves, and we are the only ones who can fix it. Support your local seed companies that are left. Go back to conventional seeds, weed control is still possible, it might take some higher management, but there are a lot of people in the world that still grow conventional crops well. The next best thing is for farmers to buy up a controlling share of monsanto stock and force them to change their ways and release RR and other traits to the public, and I dont think that will happen anytime soon. | |
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what companies are spending $ for research?
