Great point.

As an extreme example, I'd add -- in some cases, because of market conditions (and perhaps the legal climate as well), within a given financial year a farmer may be forced to choose between purchasing GMO seeds and having to sell the farm, especially if the farm already used licensed GMO seeds in a prior year.

But as you pointed out, without legal and regulatory guardrails, the system at large can become badly suboptimal long before compromise-or-die dichotomies arise.

This is true in the abstract but I don’t see how it applies to this specific case. There are two agents here and the GMO plants will only be planted if planting them is the optimal choice for both.

Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.

1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray

2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate people don't care.

though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so they won't care anyway

>1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops

That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.

Valid points but this seems more simple to address using regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.

Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"

> 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops

Have you ever been on a farm?

> 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit.

Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a paying Patreon subscriber.

Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination. Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at higher-than-market prices.

They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop.

> This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.

Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.

What would stop them from jacking up prices when they have monopoly? It's not like we haven't seen this scenario before..

This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a singular farmer making a singular decision about what to plant on his field.

I think farmers know about the trade war that Trump will create, but they also think he will do other things to help them.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/tru...

I was also curious about this, so I ended up watching a documentary a local politician made where she interviewed local farmers trying to figure out why they would vote against their own best interests, and the short answer was, net, they thought additional bailouts + deregulation of farming would outweigh the potential trade war.

The entire reason almost every modern country massively subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things, like cause the dust bowl.

Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using "industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.

If you are planting hybrid seeds you would never save seeds because their children don't yield well. Hybrid yields so much better that it isn't worth planting anything else if you have the option.

They've allowed for a huge expansion of the use of herbicide but drastically reduced the use of insecticide. I'd much rather have the former than the later.

Behavior follows costs. There is probably some stumbling block regarding millets. That being said, seed companies are very interested in land races, do not be mistaken. They are a good source of phenotypic variation and potential traits that might be favorable to introduce into the elite cultivars.