This article is not about whether Monsanto seeds are a good thing, enabling for larger crops and better productivity or whether they are genetically modified poison. This article is about Monsanto being a hue company that is trying to change the way in which basic agriculture has worked for years with their monopoly on the supply of pretty much all the most important seeds in the US these days.
Namely, Monsanto does not allow the farmer to reuse the seeds from their last harvest and use them to plant their crops again. In case you have no background in agriculture, we would like to point out that this is one of the staples of agriculture everywhere in the world and that reusing the seeds is a tradition that is as historical as irrigation, if not even older. Well, Monsanto does not allow this and they don’t allow it because they have patented their seeds and the reuse of the seeds you have bought from them is in breach of their patents.
The only way in which you can reuse Monsanto seeds is if you clean them from all the properties that make them Monsanto seeds and that is what seed cleaning is all about. However, if you thought that this is the solution, then you were very much mistaken.
For one, it is a process that is insanely expensive, with ridiculously advanced and expensive machinery being necessary for the entire process. An average farmer would have to spend millions of dollars on this equipment and the problem is that once you get the equipment you are not done.
Another issue is that if you get your seeds cleaned by someone else who has the equipment, the only way to be sure that it has been done right and that Monsanto will not sue you (which they will, no matter how small a farmer you are) is to have it undergo serious and extensive lab tests which are also, as you might have guessed, incredibly expensive.
In short, seed cleaning is not the easiest thing to do and that leaves us where we started, with Monsanto having a monopoly on the US supply of seeds.