[scardine]

I'm OK with GMO products, what I hate is:

* GMO that don't produce viable seeds so I have to buy seeds from you every season.

* GMO that only works with some other supply available only from the same provider (think of a car that only works with gas from Ford).

* Patents on living organisms: a farmer should be allowed to plant the seeds they grew in their own farm, produce hybrids and so on, without paying royalties.

* If GMO strains get accidentally cross-pollinated from a neighbor farm you should not be on the hook for it.

[PyroLagus]

> GMO that don't produce viable seeds so I have to buy seeds from you every season.

This is literally DRM for plants, isn't it?

[inscionent]

Now you are getting it.

[tempguy9999]

Strongly agreed. GM proponents try to confuse the issue with what's natural vs unnatural, that kind of thing, but for me (and you) it's never about that; GM is a tool, like a knife, neither got nor bad but for how you wield it. Monsanto want it as a form of IP and lockin.

But watch shills try to divert you from that.

[dbcurtis]

> * GMO that don't produce viable seeds so I have to buy seeds from you every season.

OK, but unstable hybrids predate GMO by decades. Omitting the last, stabilizing cross for maize seeds has been a thing for, what, 75 years? at least.

[SamBam]

My understanding is that there is a difference. Many hybrids in nature are sterile. What GMO companies like Monsanto do, however, is

a. Artificially make "terminator seeds"[1] that would naturally be fertile but have been made deliberately sterile, and

b. Where seeds don't have that technology, rely on contracts instead that forbid farmers from saving seeds for next year.[2]

1. http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/impact.html#terminat...

2. https://www.agweek.com/opinion/columns/4390497-what-does-tec...