J. Clarke wrote:
....
This "sterile seeds" business is just plain ignorance. If they were
"sterile" then they wouldn't sprout.

Well, no it isn't. It's the ability to introduce a gene modification
that makes the seeds of the plants that are grown from a specific seed
be sterile when _they_ mature. Afaik, they've not yet been released
commercially but the technology does exist. It was developed as a means
to enforce the ban against using seed from patented hybrids as seed for
next year's crop--rather than requiring detective work and legal action
to enforce the patent holders rights, this eliminates the possibility
the end user could use the seed for planting, hence no enforcement expense.

As a farmer, it's a problematic area--I don't much cotton to the
practice of patenting seed that prevents the hold-back of crop for the
next year's crop as a a personal matter. OTOH, many hybrids don't come
back "true", so one has always bought much seed annually anyway, even
before it was actually patented.

Where one could envision problems here would be if this particular trait
could be one that can be transmitted in the wild by
cross-pollination--there are certainly areas in which there are
concerns; nothing I've written before is to meant to say no concerns
only that imo much is overblown on the edible food end; much more is at
stake in some of the possible interactions in the wild, agreed.

It would be good if there were sufficient resources available that all
of this research could be at the land grant universities w/ their own
research budgets and therefore could be released as public domain, but
that simply isn't a viable economic model. So, if there is private
investment, those who have made the investment and taken the risk need
some manner in which to recoup that or it will cease to happen.


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