[octocop]

> But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest

I'm guessing these hybrid seeds you are talking about are probably the reason for the counterfitting to begin with. I don't imagine them being sold at a reasonable price, but with this law maybe you have less competition?

[bluGill]

What is a reasonable price? Hybrid seeds at 3x the price of traditional seeds could well be a great value because at the end of the year you get that much better of a crop.

Of course you have to pay for the seeds up front and get the reward at the end of the year. Investments are like that, a lot of poor farmers could spend 4x their current annual income on modern technology (seeds, fertilizer, tractors) and at the end of the year have more money left over than they had the previous year - but of course they need to get to harvest to get all the money. Worse there will be bad years where they lose money - it works out on average over 20 years but the individual years can be a killer if you start in the wrong year.

[pixl97]

>Worse there will be bad years where they lose money

Everyone complains about farm subsidies/insurance in the US (well at least that's not a farmer), but this is the reason they exist. Farming is hard.

[RoyalHenOil]

I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop.

You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.

You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.

In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.

Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.

For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.