[oersted]

So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well? And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal?

That is very hard to believe.

EDIT: I see now I was too quick to judge and that my knowledge on the topic was insufficient. Read the excellent comments below , they helped me understand how OP makes sense.

Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed.

This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.

[bluGill]

> So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well

Absolutely. The first generation of a hybrid seed will produce several times more than either traditional seeds or the second generation. You can't reasonably grow your own hybrid seeds as you need to keep your fields to grow those seeds well separated from any other fields.

Now not all plants can be hybridized, and even of those that can I won't state with confidence that all of them have that property. However Maize (corn in US) which is a major world crop does act like this.

> Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable

Not exactly. There is some of that for sure, but there is also that if you are a seed producer you want to ensure your customers get your good seed and not counterfeit that looks just like yours (if you cannot examine cell DNA you can't tell the difference between a first generation hybrid and any other seed).

However the law was written is clearly too broad. It should protect the hybrid seeds - nobody wants any seed claimed as hybrid that isn't a first generation hybrid. However it shouldn't affect any traditionally saved seeds (though where hybrid is available nobody wants them except museums)

[hinkley]

If you lived in the Midwest at any point and heard about high school kids getting “detassling” jobs, they were forcing hybridization of two corn lines in half the crop by removing pollen from the other half. Two strains were planted in the same field in stripes.

[miohtama]

Also none of this is new knowledge. This was taught in my high school 30 years ago.

[pixl97]

Did you go to high school in the country that made this law? In addition, how many farmers in that country get high school education?

From what I read getting grades 1-8 is common in Kenya, but the high school years of education drop off significantly with only around 40% of the population getting that education, and making an educated guess that would target city people more than those that would be farmers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Kenya

[geon]

Poor education doesn't make it new knowledge.

If anyone was taught this in highschool, it must have been established practice for decades at least.

[estsauver]

Hybrid seeds are ~100 years old and are nearly universally adopted across developed agricultural markets. They’re as controversial as “you should probably use source control” is in programming. You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMOs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed

To state once again, I don’t know much about this law or how the government believes it’s preventing counterfeit seed, but bad seed is a huge problem for farmers. I personally want farmers to be able to do whatever they want to with their farms!

[oersted]

You have a point there, I was using “hybrid” as a catchall for any special seed that comes from a dedicated producer as opposed to stored seed. You are right that I don’t know enough about this, I was just judging your comment on its internal argumentation and some basic red flags caught my eye.

Would you care to answer the questions I posed? They were not rhetorical, I would like to be proven wrong and learn.

PS: I really admire what you are doing with your company, I don’t want to discount that.

[estsauver]

Sure—I’ll try!

> So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well?

For a lot of crop systems, yes! There are obviously crop systems where you can do clones and some exceptions are always present in biology, but basically yes. Yes for all the big staple crops except Canola.

> And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal?

I probably wouldn’t make it illegal, I think farmers should be allowed to do whatever they want to! (My completely out of the loop guess is the government is trying to help small holder farmers who are reporting that they’re being scammed by these groups and that they lack the resources to do genetic testing to prosecute them for the fraud.)

> That is very hard to believe. Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed.

It’s not really an IP protection thing, it’s an extremely difficult many year process to recover genetics on most hybrid crop systems. I don’t think most seed companies care about folks using saved seed, they know almost all farmers will buy good seed if they can.

> This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.

I think well answered by a parent comment, but the book The Wizard and The Prophet is pretty good reading on Borlaug and the green revolution. If you look at global food capacity vs population, it’s probably the single most important life upgrade for everyone of modernity.

(Small Edit: I should note that I’m not an agronomist, I’m just a guy who codes okay sometimes and that I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time talking to agronomists and smallholder farmers trying to make agriculture for small farmers work better.)

[dogman144]

Universally adopted in part by very well known strong arm business practices from Big Ag vs farmers. This is a bad faith framing imo. Source - live in ag country

[jt2190]

> I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad

Non-farmers really don't understand how human-engineered agriculture has been for the entire history of human civilization. For example, corn (maize) does not really exist in nature, it's a human-developed thing. Hybridized plants still carry the genetic code that allowed them to propagate through the ages before human agriculture, and these survival traits will very quickly express themselves in the offspring (seeds).

[gus_massa]

I agree. Here is a photo of the wild ancestor of maize, compared to a modern one and an hybrid https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/721466

[cguess]

I had a lecture from the main researcher of that paper when I was in undergrad, fantastic lecturer and very interesting topic. The whole class actually applauded him after he finished (that isn't something that happens in US universities usually).

[dekhn]

Do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doebley ? See also https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25creature.html for the story of how maize was traced back to teosinte using hybrids and some literature with more scientific detail: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0168952592...

[cguess]

Yep, I went to UW Madison and he's affiliated with it, so my professor had him do a guest lecture.

[hinkley]

We are still trying to figure out how maize came to be. Last I heard we haven’t found the smoking gun yet.

[zdragnar]

You should do at least a bit of research before you basically accuse someone of being a liar and corporate shill for no more reason than it fits your generic worldview.

F1 and F2 are commonly accepted terms for first generation and second generation seeds from hybrid plants. Because these hybrids are created from two stable lines, they are themselves unstable and will produce, at best, seeds of varying quality and at worst entirely sterile plants.

https://www.parkseed.com/blogs/park-seed-blog/understanding-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/wq3heg/question_why...

https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+first+and...

If you're going to pay more for a hybrid seed, it should be only for a first generation, otherwise you don't know what you're going to get. For some crops, like tomatos, that's survivable. For others like corn, that could easily be devastating. It's like playing russian roulette the slow and expensive way.

Note that OP didn't say the seed banks themselves should be illegal, but when you can't identify by visual inspection, it's very high risk for fraud if they're selling what they claim are premium products but are really F2 seeds.

[oersted]

You are right, my tone was too dismissive. The questions were not rhetorical, I was actually trying to understand the argument because it didn’t make sense from the basic knowledge I had. I appreciate this info, that’s what I wanted.

[hinkley]

If you don’t want to deal with F2 plants, the alternative is “landrace”, which are collected seeds specific usually to a microbiome. They germinate with the most appropriate genes already activated (epigenetics) in the germ line. Instead of getting seeds from some company in Pennsylvania or Oregon you get them from grandpa or the guy at the other end of the valley, where the soil and weather patterns are identical. And you keep it that way.

The F1 person might also want to buy your seeds because he has access to another landrace variety from far away and wants to cross them.