Make Agriculture Legal Again

So I'm head down building the corp and my brother sends me a link. No context. He just does this. Usually it's a meme. This time it was the EU.

I open it. Immediately regret it.  

Ok here's the whole thing in one line, because it sounds fake when you say it out loud. Europe basically made it illegal to just own a seed.

Let me explain, it sounds insane, and it is.

A seed used to be yours. It falls off a plant, you keep it, you plant it again next year. Free. Forever. That's farming. That's the entire deal since the beginning of time.

Not anymore. Now a seed can have an owner. And the owners are six companies. Six. Corteva, Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, KWS, Limagrain, Basf. That's the whole list. That's everybody.

How do you "own" a seed? You patent it, like an invention. And these patents don't just cover their fancy lab seeds. They cover normal seeds too, the regular old ones, as long as the plant has some trait they slapped a patent on. The EU had the chance to block this. They had the fix written and ready. They said no. On purpose.

Now my favorite part.

You can owe them money even if you did nothing wrong. The wind blows their pollen into your field, your plants pick it up, and now their thing is in your crop. Somehow that's your problem. Or you grow a plant the old honest way, just planting and crossing like humans have done for ten thousand years, and it happens to have a trait they own. Also your problem. And you have to prove you didn't steal anything. You. The guy who just wanted to grow food. Not them. You.

So now if you're a small farmer or a small seed seller, before you plant a single thing, you're supposed to go check a giant database to make sure nothing you're growing is secretly owned by one of these six. Most of them go, yeah, we can't do that, it's impossible. So they shut down. Or they get bought. By who? By the same six companies. Funny how that works.

Anyway. This one hits home for me. I have olives now. I own trees. And here's the thing, olive trees don't even come from seed, you grow them from a cutting off another tree, basically a clone. So I'm sitting here thinking, give it time, these people will find a way to own that too. A branch. A copy of a branch. Whatever it takes. 

It's getting personal honestly. The EU already nuked my social accounts for posting too many bangers they didn't like. Now they want the olives. So my brother sends me this to ruin my afternoon and yeah. Mission accomplished.

So here's the slogan:

Make agriculture legal again.

Share it. Steal it.

Love,
Francesco