So our speaker today is Frank Morton from Wild Garden Seeds
and Gathering Together Farm.
And I first met Frank MC last year
when I called him to ask about a drama that's going on
in our current food system regarding the allowance
of the planting of canola in the valley.
And I was really impressed by his depth of knowledge
and understanding in these subjects.
He has many years' experience and has been trying to figure out,
you know, as well who the real players are,
who's really calling the shots here and why it is
that we don't get to make choices in our own community.
So today he's going to be speaking about farmers
and food freedom, struggling against those behind the curtain.
And what we don't know about is our constant undoing.
So, Frank.
Thank you.
The way I got involved in this whole thing is I grow seeds.
I breed seeds.
I grow organically.
I sell organic seed companies.
I also have my own catalog that I sell directly to farmers
and sub gardeners, so basically I'm a farm business guy.
And I didn't think that I really mattered very much
to the local seed industry.
I didn't even know that much about the seed industry
in the state of Oregon, to tell you the truth.
When I started being a seed person here, I had no idea
that this is one of the best places in the whole world
to grow certain species of vegetable seeds.
We got just the right climate, just the right temperature ranges,
just the right soil, water, transportation infrastructure,
the intellectual capacity.
And essentially this valley was actually set up to grow seeds
during World War II as a part of the war effort to make sure
that we, the United States, would have a source for sugar
during the war because our supply of sugar came
with being cut off.
So the War Department set up the sugar beet industry here
in the Wyoming Valley because they knew a good place
to grow seeds when they saw them.
So that's how the seed industry actually started here
in a big way.
And it was established as basically two companies were set
up to grow sugar beets here.
One of them got the North Half Valley
and the other one got the South Half Valley.
They never had to compete on any basis.
So right from the beginning,
the U.S. domestic beet sugar industry was set
up as essentially a monopoly.
So about 25 years ago, the industry here had grown
to include a lot of spinach and onions
and brassica seeds especially.
And the growers of these things,
that is the companies who grow these things here,
set up an organization called the Willamette Valley Specialty
Seed Association.
And the purpose of the association was to make sure
that the seeds that came from the Willamette Valley were pure
and not crossed with one another.
It was essentially to set up a system of pinning
and isolation so that companies
who were based here could reliably produce top quality,
pure seed for export to the world.
And the organization created a very sophisticated system
of pinning seed fields so that everybody knew
where everybody else was growing their crops.
So if I was growing white radish and you were growing red radish,
we'd be able to stay far enough away from one another
that our customers wouldn't be getting pink radish
because they don't want pink radish.
So that's the idea and we're so that people
who want Chinese cabbage don't end up with Chinese turnips
because those things are crossed together.
So that's the purpose of the organization.
The next only purpose is to create a region
where seed can be grown economically, pure,
and with cooperation among the seed growers
because the seed industry, as you probably all can figure out,
is remarkably secretive about everything we do.
So I didn't know anything about this
and I had been growing seeds here for 11 years or 12 years,
something like that.
And I kept getting these emails from the WVSSA
as well as messages from my extension agent saying,
you should join the WVSSA, Frank.
And these came at me for, I don't know, a year or so.
Finally, I gave in and I went to my first WVSSA meeting
in December, actually November of 2006.
And really the reason I hadn't gone to any of these meetings
was because I thought I was so small I didn't matter
because my five acres of seed crops at that time
didn't seem very important compared to the people
who were growing on 100 or 200 acre plots.
Well, they saw it differently.
And when I walked in the room and they knew I was strange to me,
I didn't know any of them, but they knew me
and the first thing they said was, what took you so long?
So I was welcomed into this group
and it didn't take me more than about 15 minutes to figure out why.
Well, first of all, they want to know
where all seeds are being grown in the valley.
They would like to know if any of you guys
have little patches of seeds growing.
WVSSA would like to know not to put you out in business
or anything, but essentially to stay away from you
or else work out cooperative arrangements with you
so that if you are growing Chinese cabbage,
their Mizuna patch doesn't ruin your stuff
and your stuff doesn't ruin their stuff.
The thing that's nice about seeds is it really is a two-way street.
The wind blows both ways.
And if they can mess me up, I can mess them up.
That's how it is.
And so when I came into this room, I was pretty amazed.
I was on equal footing with all these guys.
We don't vote the same way, you know?
Essentially, they're a bunch of Republican business people
and they make a lot of jokes about Democrats.
So I get to make jokes about Republicans.
It's kind of fun.
But at that time in 2006, we were under threat.
When I say we, I was now a part of WVSSA.
WVSSA was fearful.
The canola was going to be allowed to be grown in the valley.
And canola had been kept out of here by administrative rule since 1989.
This valley had been declared a canola or a rapeseed control district.
And you could not grow canola here without a permit
because of cross-pollination issues with all the members of the cabbage family, the brassicas.
Canola has the potential to cross pollinate with, let's say,
red Russian kale and rutabaga straight across.
It can rarely cross pollinate with things related to turnips and Chinese cabbage
or things related to Asian mushrooms.
More important is, is when you grow canola in some place,
the world record on this is that whenever canola starts being grown in an area
where vegetable seeds had previously been grown, vegetable seeds get pushed out
because canola is always grown on a very large commodity scale.
It takes a lot of acres of canola to press oil.
Whereas specialty seed crops are grown on a relatively small acreage.
And so in that situation, there is no two-way street.
All the damage flows one way.
Canola can destroy crops of brassica seed crops.
Brassica seed crops will have no effect whatsoever on oil seed canola.
So there, it is not like having other seed growers around who care about their genetic purity.
All the seed from a canola crop is going to be crushed and turned into oil.
So it doesn't matter if it crosses with Chinese cabbage.
So the organization wanted to keep canola out of here.
It's a life and death situation for these guys.
It really is.
They see it as, are we going to exist or are they going to exist?
That's how it is.
There's no coexistence between canola and brassica seed crop.
There's no coexistence that can happen.
There's not a single example of it anywhere on the planet where it's ever been pulled off.
Always canola takes over, especially seed growers are pushed out.
That's why they wanted me to be a member of the WVSSA because they knew I was an organic seed grower.
I'm the only organic seed grower in the group.
And they are sure that the only reason canola was coming here was because of you guys.
All you greenies.
All you guys driving biodiesel cars.
All you guys converting your, you know, your Pesachs into canola burning vehicles.
And they thought that maybe I could arrange that lunch with the, you know, the green party or something.
And somehow I would be able to convince them that canola was a bad idea and canola would go away.
They thought it was me and my tribe who was causing this problem.
That's why they wanted me there.
Well, that's the second reason they wanted me there.
The other reason is they wanted over all the seeds.
So instantly they put me on the rulemaking committee.
In other words, they gave me power.
And that was pretty amazing to me.
And the rules were going to be rewritten within a month or so.
So I was actually going to exercise this power.
But really they wanted me as a spokesperson to them, to you.
That's what they wanted me there for, to us, I should say.
But what happened next was pretty amazing.
I represented from one of the two sugar BC companies.
This was actually in the next meeting in the December meeting.
A representative from the West Coast BC company based in Salem raised his hand.
And one of the things that the rule committee that I was going to serve on was going to have to take up was
isolation distances for various crops.
And this guy from the sugar beet industry said,
we want to have more isolation for our sugar beet crops.
The standard was four miles at the time because sugar beets are a wind-pulling crop.
Beet pollen is about the lightest pollen in nature.
And it flies a long way.
So they wanted to have not four miles of isolation around their sugar beet fields.
They wanted six miles of isolation.
Well, that was pretty big of them.
Somebody said, why do you want six miles of isolation?
He said, well, we don't want to contaminate other fields with our new GMO sugar beets.
And when the word GMO came out, you could see all these guys looking around at each other saying, what's this mean?
What does this mean?
Because this just popped up out of nowhere.
The seed association had no idea that GMOs were coming.
It just popped out of the hat.
And I just happened to be there.
So the organization didn't really like this idea.
And the reason they didn't like this idea is because if the sugar beet industry suddenly had, I mean,
when I say six miles of isolation, that means that if there's a sugar beet field here,
and a six mile circle around it can't have any other beta crops, any other Swiss chart,
table beets, or conventional sugar beets here, within a six mile radius.
That's a lot of square miles if you do the PIR square on that.
So the other growers were afraid that this was actually just a land grab by the sugar beet companies.
The other growers don't like the sugar beet companies that much anyway, because they're the biggest players here.
They do cooperate with all the other seed growers, but at the time they weren't attending meetings.
They didn't show up. They didn't participate.
And so there was sort of an antagonism between the rest of the seed industry and the sugar beet companies.
And so when the sugar beet companies did this, it just kind of pissed people off a little bit.
And there was actually a pushback, and they said, no, we don't want to give you six miles.
It's a land grab. You're trying to take over more of the valley.
And if all the sugar beet fields suddenly have six mile circles around them,
some of the other growers who would have been growing Swiss chart and table beets next to them would be pushed out of their production areas.
Because guess what? The sugar beet companies have been here longer than anybody, and they have seniority.
This is a seniority system. Nobody can push me out of where I grow my crops.
No big guy can come in and set down a bunch of crops beside my farm and make me stop producing seeds under the rules.
So it's good for me. I was pretty polite to start with. I was just all years, and I was trying to, and I was a new guy in school.
So I'm just listening.
But within six weeks or so, we actually got into the rule-making thing about this, and the sparks started to fly.
And I argued vehemently that this was a no-win situation for people like me.
I agreed with all my friends, my new friends, that if they had six mile isolations, it was a land grab.
They were going to be taken over space. But if they didn't have six mile isolations, then GMO contamination was going to occur.
Essentially, I had to abstain in the end when they said, the strange thing that happened was, no, they didn't get their six mile isolation.
In fact, the isolation was cut three miles, which made no sense to me. It made no sense to anybody.
But that is what ended up happening.
This was like February of 2007 when this came down.
And what I said to everyone was, this is going to cause GMO contamination of Swiss chard and tableweed.
And then that's going to show up on GMO tests.
And then this valley's reputation for growing pure seed is going to start going down tubes.
And that's what this whole organization is about, is maintaining seed purity.
And some of the people in the organization completely agreed with me, but they wouldn't say so in public.
But they did agree with me.
But essentially, I was out-voted and they proceeded on to basically, GMOs were already here.
When we were told that they were coming, they had already been planted.
In fact, they had been planted the year before and nobody had been informed about it.
By the time we were told, 60% of the sugar beet crop growing here was GMO.
By the time anyone knew it.
And that made a lot of people mad.
That was a violation of our Code of Ethics Act.
For the next eight months, I tried to get the organization to internally do something about this.
I tried to convince them that it was in Oregon's, in the WVSSAs, in organic farmers and conventional farmers' interests
to push back against the introduction of GMOs into the valley.
And I thought that our organization would be a way to do that.
Because I know what federal law is.
If the federal law says GMOs are okay, GMOs are okay.
No, you know, the ODA, the Oregon Department of Agriculture, when I complained to them about this,
they said, Mr. Morgan, if you don't like, if you don't want GMOs in the valley, don't talk to us.
Talk to the USDA and you'll have to sue them.
He said jokingly.
And in fact, I've been told that many times already in meetings of the WVSSAs.
Frank, you can't do a thing about it.
If the USDA says they can grow GMOs, they can grow GMOs.
You can't do a thing about it unless you want to sue the USDA.
So by November of 2007, it was clear that that really was the only thing to do.
And so I contacted the Center for Food Safety, or actually they contacted me.
Because I had put out the feelers that I was looking for some sort of legal support in resisting GMOs coming into the valley.
And the Center for Food Safety called me up and they offered me legal counsel to do this.
And so in January of 2008, we filed a suit in the Ninth Circuit,
trying against the USDA, not against Monsanto, not against the sugar beet industry,
not against the sugar processors, but against the USDA, saying that they had deregulated sugar beets illegally
because they had not done an environmental impact statement.
In fact, no GMO crop had ever undergone an environmental impact statement.
Not one.
So that was the basis of our lawsuit, was that if they had done an environmental impact statement,
they would have realized that cross-contamination would be the result right here.
And that was an environmental impact with a lot of economic consequences.
And we thought that we would be able to get sugar beets deregulated.
In other words, deregulated. That was our strategy.
This case went on for, I don't know, three years.
I kind of lost track. It went through three phases.
There was sugar beet case one, sugar beet case two, sugar beet case three.
And the reason we ended up having to bring three separate lawsuits was because the USDA kept issuing
as soon as we would get a court judgment against the USDA that would temporarily re-regulate sugar beets,
the USDA would write a special permit that would allow the temporary production of sugar beets to be ongoing
while this whole court case played out and until they got their environmental impact statement done.
We won on a number of important points, including that we made them do an EIS.
That's never been done on any GMO product before.
So that was a victory.
What wasn't a victory, of course, was that the same people that had deregulated the sugar beets in the first place
did an EIS and strangely they came to the same conclusion after doing an EIS
and they concluded that because the Willamette Valley is so well regulated,
thanks to the WVSSL and our pinning system,
that we would be able to prevent cross-pollination between GMO crops and non-GMO crops.
And so all the responsibility fell from the USDA onto us.
Talk about it, dumb.
So we resisted that.
In fact, the WVSSL would eventually come and support me on this fact,
even though nobody there could support me in the court case
and I could not get a single sugar beet grower to support me.
You have to understand these people are working on contracts
and anybody who would bring a lawsuit or join a lawsuit against the industry
won't get no more contracts after that.
So, you know, that was how it worked.
I could not get anyone to support me in court.
But by time we got to sugar beet tube,
the WVSSL did come out and provided us with some declarations
to the effect that say our pinning system was never intended to prevent cross-pollination
at 100%.
We're never intended to stop cross-pollination between GMOs and conventional crops.
Our rules are about producing commercial seed for commercial purposes
for sale on a worldwide market.
We are not the cops.
We are not the ones who, you know, can assure that everybody is following the rules.
All of our rules are voluntary.
There are no regulations.
There are no administrative rules.
There are no laws that support anything that the WVSSL does.
This is a gentleman's agreement, as if we were gentlemen.
So, it didn't matter, USDA, in the end, by time we got to sugar beet three,
which was truly about, you know, who was going to enforce this thing,
who would enforce, because WVSSL would say,
we're not enforcing this, in the end,
the court decision centered on, essentially, the decision in the GMO alfalfa case.
Our case was following that.
And a lot of what we were going through, the precedence for what we were doing,
had already been established in the Roundup Ready alfalfa case.
Well, the judge in the alfalfa case, which was just ahead of us in the beef case, said,
USDA actually has no role to play in preventing cross-pollination between farmers.
Cross-pollination is a problem that's 10,000 years old.
And ever since the first guy started growing some seed crops and wanted to keep them pure,
he's been fighting with his neighbors about their pollen crossing his fence.
And the judge said, the USDA has no role to play in cross-pollination issues.
It doesn't matter whether they involve GMOs or not.
To them, cross-pollination is cross-pollination.
There's nothing special about GMO cross-pollination in the court's view.
Our fight against sugar beets, while we did establish a few important precedents in court,
and it was very satisfying to kick those suckers in the knee for a while,
and to cost them some money.
It cost me a lot too, you know, so it wasn't free.
Meanwhile, Canola had kind of simmered down.
There was a, because there was a three-year process where the Oregon Department of Agriculture,
using federal money, helped fund a study, a scientific study by OSU,
into the effects of growing Canola in the Milan Valley.
This occurred between 2007 and 2009, about the same time we were fighting all this stuff in court.
And I kept saying to our group, you guys, here you are, you wouldn't say anything about sugar beets.
GMO sugar beets.
But now you're just pulling your hair out about Canola.
And it's exactly the same issue. There's no difference.
And some of them got that.
But they wanted to point out, Frank, it doesn't have to be GMO Canola.
Yeah, GMO Canola would be twice as bad.
But Canola is what we don't like.
It's GMO status.
It's its status as a species is the problem.
And so they all also realized, though, that 90% of Canola is GMO Canola.
90% of Canola's ground is GMO Canola.
And what's not GMO Canola is contaminated by GMO Canola.
So any Canola that comes to the Milan Valley will be GMO Canola.
But you don't have to use the GMO word to fight it.
Because Canola, Canola, Canola would be the destruction of this valley.
In terms of being an exporter of Brassica species to foreign markets.
So over these many years, I actually have convinced a few people that this is true.
There's no difference between GMO sugar beets and Canola or GMO Canola.
That it actually is very similar issues.
The biggest deal, though, is that we don't grow that much Swiss shard of tape or beets here.
That would be cross pollinated by sugar beets.
We grow a ton of Brassica seeds here.
90% of the world's hybrid cabbage comes from this valley.
So Canola will affect way more people, way more growers, way more companies, way more acres of land.
And the problem with one of the big differences between Canola and GMO sugar beets.
GMO sugar beets are not going to proliferate long road sites around here.
GMO Canola could.
GMO sugar beets aren't going to pop up in everybody's ditch and fence road.
Because of the biology of the plant, it can't compete.
Canola can do that.
Canola can establish itself along the banks of the William River.
In places that are completely inaccessible to spraying, mowing, pulling, anything else.
And if they're within two miles, three miles of somebody's seed crop, cross pollination is going to happen.
So Canola is a bigger issue, actually, than Roundup Ready Sugar Beets.
And more people agree with that.
So this is convenient for me, for us, actually.
Because fighting Canola is fighting GMO Canola.
And more people get it.
And the effect on the state's economy will be, you know, huge.
Whereas when they brought in Roundup Ready Sugar Beets, it didn't affect the state's economy in any way so far.
Except for the million and a half dollar contract that one seed company had with a European customer.
They got their Swiss chart contaminated.
And this one company lost a million and a half bucks because of that contamination of them.
That company would not write us a declaration in our case against GMO Beets.
But that is the same company that is right now fighting the hardest against Canola.
It's a bunch of strange allies here.
And when I'm sitting in the room with these guys, you know, I expect to be the outlier.
But we agree on a lot of stuff.
And we have mounted a very effective fight against GMO, excuse me, against Canola in the Valley.
We had a very effective fight.
We might still lose.
But we brought together organizations as diverse as friends and family farmers.
And the WVSSA brought a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Agriculture to keep them from allowing Canola planting last September.
And we won. We got an injunction in court to stop them from doing it.
We've essentially held them off for a year.
Right now, the Oregon Department of Agriculture has rewritten the rule that we challenged our court.
And the way the rule is right now, Canola will be planted starting in September,
unless we get a law in the legislature to ban Canola growing in the Valley.
It looked like we might actually get that.
That we might get this legislative ban, which would take it out of the hands of the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
Why the Oregon Department of Agriculture is now insisting that Canola must be grown here.
In 2009, the Oregon Department of Agriculture agreed with the scientists from OSU who said it would be a mistake to plant Canola,
because it would definitely be a threat to the specialty seed industry.
And the Oregon Department of Agriculture signed on with that 2009 conclusion.
But they put a rule in place. They put a big red box around the Lama Valley on a map,
and they said, you cannot grow Canola inside this box, because, if I can quote this properly,
the growing of oils of rape seed and specialty seed are incompatible.
That's what they said.
However, it's possible that something might change in two years,
and so the department will revisit this decision in 2012, by the end of 2012.
In January of 2012, the WVSSA was told, ODA is going to allow Canola growing here by September.
What changed? Did the biology change? Did the science change?
What changed? We don't know. We really don't.
And we can't get a straight answer from them.
And the crooked answer is, well, there's some growers who want to grow Canola in the valley.
And I laughed, and I said, hell, there are growers who want to grow marijuana in the valley too,
but you're not going to let them do that.
But literally, there are no more than six farmers who basically, because they don't have water rights on their land,
they need to have non-irrigated crops. And Canola can be grown as a non-irrigated crop.
And so essentially, six farmers have said, you know, we want to grow Canola.
We don't think that you should be allowed to stop us.
We think that Canola is no worse than growing radish, no worse than growing turnips.
It's no more threatening than Chinese cabbage. That's what we think.
And we're going to sue you, ODA, if you don't let us grow some Canola.
Well, I really don't think ODA is scared of a lawsuit from about six farmers.
But for some reason, ODA's whole strategy changed.
Strangely, there was a board of directors meeting at the ODA on the far side of the state over in Ontario.
And there was nothing about Canola on this agenda. This was last March.
Take it back. This was last May.
There was no Canola on the agenda. And yet, strangely, Canola's components showed up.
They were given 15 or 20 minutes to make a presentation to the board of directors of ODA.
And they said there, apparently, because weak farmer who was on the board, she heard the whole presentation.
She was surprised to see it on there. In fact, she emailed or texted me and said,
Frank, how come there's no one from the WVSSA over here to counter what these Canola guys were saying?
We didn't know that there was a meeting in the first place.
We were farming in the second place. It's May.
It's on the far side of the state. And they're talking about Canola and William Allen.
So what's up with that?
So we asked for the minutes from that meeting.
And they said, well, it'll take about a month because, you know, this is the modern era and everything's digitalized.
Don't think we can just pull this out of our head. We have to get these minutes together.
And we waited, and we waited, and we waited. And Kim here put in a Freedom of Information Act eventually
to get that data or to get those minutes only to be told that, whoops, those minutes have disappeared.
We don't know what happened. We were trying to transfer the digital information and it disappeared.
There's no record of the meeting.
And so my comment was an electronic dog ate their homework.
And my friend Ted at WVSSA said somebody should pull out an electronic newspaper and whip that puppy.
So, I mean, that's really weird. You know, I'm not big on conspiracies.
I mean, well, I am. I love conspiracies.
This is just too strange to me.
And I am virtually certain that somebody somewhere on a golf course around Salem
had a conversation about Canola with somebody on the board of Ag.
And they said, you know, we got a Canola crushing plant here that was underwritten by the state.
Strangely, it was built in about 2006 when there wasn't a Canola being grown here.
This oil crushing plant's in Rick Real.
And it's not been doing anything except hauling in train loads of Canola from eastern Washington and eastern Oregon to crush.
And it's actually been squeezing some organic Canola oil.
And where the hell they find organic Canola seed to crush, I have no idea.
I want to talk to John about that later on.
But the guy who runs the plant, the manager of the plant, his name's Thomas Indicott.
And he is the guy who showed up over in Ontario to give a presentation to the board of directors
about why it's important to grow Canola in the valley.
And why did he show up there?
He flew on an airplane alongside the members of the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
How did that happen?
I swear, I think there's a golf course somewhere in here that explains all of this.
Because there are no official connections between any of these dots.
So as soon as I was done fighting sugar beets, or had been sort of wound down fighting sugar beets,
it's like the Canola thing has been nothing but on my plate every damn month since last January.
And I'm as tired of it as everybody. I'm as tired of it as Kim.
This is ridiculous. This is sucking my hair so bad, I can't believe it.
Anyway, that's been my experience with this.
There's probably a few other things I should say. I can't quite think of what they are right now.
But let's leave it with the Canola thing.
The situation right now is we have a bill to ban Canola growing in the valley.
It's being sponsored by Sarah Gelser from Cornelis.
And we have a Democrat, Brad Witt, who is now the chair of the Agriculture Committee.
He's replaced the Republican who was there before.
We have a number of senators and legislators who are passionately on our side on this bill.
Senator Barnhart from Eugene area is on our side.
Senator Pozanski from, where's he from? You guys know Eugene?
Eugene, thank you. He's strongly on our side.
We have some strong allies in this.
But I don't trust what's going on in the closed rooms.
WVSSA has hired a lobbyist for paying $30,000 or more to have some joker who I'm sure votes differently than I do.
Walk around the state house talking to people on our behalf.
And at the same time, these two bills that were mentioned that would preempt any local action on GMOs or, they don't say GMOs.
Any local actions that affect seeds, they just say seeds. They don't say GMO seeds.
This legislation is being pushed by Oregonians for food and shelter,
AKA the Monsanto Spokes Group in the state.
So, Kim probably knows a lot more about this than I do. In fact, I was just tipped off about this just last week.
You guys knew about it before I did.
But I think that these preemptive legislative moves like this are what has essentially kept the local rights movement out of having influence everywhere from Iowa to, I don't know where else,
like 20 states have now had these preemptive legislative laws put in place that prevent any action on a local level on anything related to GMOs, seeds, or any number of other issues.
And that's what we're going to be tackling here today, I'm sure.
So, I'm happy to answer any questions.
But one of the things I want to say before I put down this microphone is,
what we don't know is what is undermining this.
And there's two levels on that. There's what we don't know that's happening behind our backs.
So, that's something that we can't personally do anything about.
But the part of what we don't know that bothers me more is that we in this room don't know enough about what we're talking about.
And that's why I'm here to sort of clue you in that this is very complicated.
It's very complicated. This whole thing, seed purity, maintaining seed purity, you know, how you do it, what sort of structures have to be in place to maintain seed purity.
Most of us don't know a thing about this kind of stuff.
And I spend all my time telling people about the pinning system and how it's supposed to work and things like that.
It's a revelation to most of us, it was to me.
But it's also, I think we really need to get our science right and not make claims about GMOs or other things that are not verifiable.
As soon as we say something to the effect that we worry about growing an extra farm due to eating GMOs,
or as soon as we say that sugar beet pollen falling on my organic garden is contaminating my organic garden,
they just write us off.
Like, they don't know what you're talking about.
GMO pollen in your garden isn't doing damn things except rotting in the fertilizer.
Yeah, if you happen to be growing beets and it lands in your garden, now you've got an effect.
But if you're not growing beets, that pollen is not the issue for you.
It's the way it's permeating the whole food system that is the issue for us.
So I just want us all when we're talking to the press, and even to each other, to slow down a little bit in our thinking.
And it's like, okay, let's make sure we have our facts right.
Don't say things that you read on the internet that sound wacky, because a lot of them are wacky.
We have to do this in a way where we're respected for what we know.
And that's why I was asked to come here, because a lot of people respect what I know.
And I only know it because I've been studying to have a lot of it.
I brought my seed catalog, not because I want to sell seeds to anybody here,
but because there's an article in here, and all my seed catalogs have articles on them.
There's an article in here entitled Patents on Common Vegetables.
And what it's about is how the intellectual property system has gone beyond GMOs.
GMOs opened up seeds to intellectual property protection.
You can read all about it right here, step by step.
But the point is, what has come to pass is that those protections on GMOs and that technology
that can more generalize now, thanks to our Supreme Court in 2001,
so that now seed companies can apply for and make claims on natural traits of plants.
Not just a variety of plant, like a PVP, a plant variety protection,
gives you a copyright-like protection on a variety of lettuce if you breed it,
and you pay for all the testing that USDA has to do on it.
You can get something like a copyright on a whole variety of lettuce or beans or something like that.
And that used to be highly objectionable.
Now, I welcome that level of IP compared to what has been unleashed on us at this point.
Now, seed companies don't have to protect a final work, not a whole variety.
They're getting patents on dally milled in resistance in lettuce, aphid resistance,
the shapes and colors of leaves, the growth habit of the plant.
Maybe you've heard of a Salanova lettuce?
The Salanova lettuce, it's on the cover of the Johnny's catalog.
The Salanova lettuce is a patented lettuce.
You cannot grow that plant even to save seeds for yourself and your own use.
It has a utility patent on it.
Nobody can use any of that material to do any further plant-reading.
This is tying up traits.
Worse is people make claims on the traits, and those claims are not tested.
It's too damn expensive to take these cases to court.
So the gene giants who are making claims on the genetics of lettuce,
they've made claims on like 90% of the traits in lettuce.
And these two gene giants, they look at each other,
and they're to the point now where they know they can't fight over all these traits.
If they go to court and fight about these, all the value would be blown away in court costs.
Because you only grow a variety of lettuce on a small amount of land.
And that small amount of land in the lettuce you grow on that
cannot pay lawyers to defend that intellectual property.
And what's happening now is the gene giants are looking at each other
over this spaghetti plate of claims,
saying, well, I don't know what you own on this plate,
and I don't know what I own on this plate.
And I know one thing, you and I own that plate.
And that guy right there, he doesn't.
If that guy tries to use this plate of traits,
we'll sue his ass, and that'll be easy.
You and me, we're going to share that plate.
So that's where we're at right now.
And that's what bothers me more than anything,
is that the whole plant genome is being privatized.
And we have to find a way to resist that.
And essentially, that we're talking about a mending or patent law.
