I’m a family farmer, and I have signed a Monsanto contract. I’m the 4th generation to work this land. Somewhere along the line the idea corporations control farms or farmers are slaves to “Big Ag” came about. People claim that we are beholden to corporations like Monsanto and have to sign unfair contracts to be privileged enough to use their seed. They’ll also claim that the contracts rope us into buying other inputs like insecticides and herbicides from the same company. We get a lot of our seed from agribusinesses like the “evil” Monsanto so I’d like to other you my thoughts on this issue.
Farmer Perspective
The Farm Aid website poses the question “What do GMOs mean for family farmers and our food?” and goes on to say:
Corporate Control. Farmers who buy GE seeds must sign contracts that dictate how their crop is grown – including what chemicals to buy – and forbid them from saving seeds. This has given corporations incredible control over the production of major staple crops in America.
Let’s examine this corporate control a little further and look at it from the family farm level. My farm in particular. When we buy Monsanto’s GMO seeds we sign a Technology/Stewardship Agreement. Section 4 of the 2011 agreement I have on file covers everything the grower must agree to when purchasing these products. Here’s a quick rundown of the requirements.
- If we buy or lease land that is already seeded with Monsanto technology that year we need to abide by the contract. Makes sense to me. If I end up leasing ground in crop for some reason, I should honor the agreements it was planted with. This would be a very odd thing too happen by the way.
- Read and follow the Technology Use Guide and Insect Resistance Management/Grower Guide. So Monsanto has ideas on how best to use their product. Some of it is required by the EPA to make sure farmers like me understand how to steward the technology. No big surprise there. Not to mention if you read the guides you’ll find a ton of good agronomic information. Monsanto and the other companies we purchase seed from send an IPM guide in the mail each year.
- Implement an Insect Resistance Management program. Shocking! Monsanto thinks controlling pests responsibly is a good idea, and if you farm insects are something you deal with regardless of what production method you use or crop you plant. This is important when growing a crop like Bt corn which we do raise on our farm.
- We should only buy seed from a dealer or seed company licensed by Monsanto. I’d want to do that anyway. It’s for my own good. Would you buy a brand new home entertainment system out of the back of some guy’s van parked in an alley? Me neither. I rely on my seed dealers not just for the exchange of money for seed, but for the continued service year after year. They can help us both financially and agronomically. My seed dealers are part of a network of people from our John Deere dealer to our banker that help propel our business forward.
- We agree to use seed with Monsanto patented technology solely for planting a single commercial crop. And don’t sell any to your neighbor either it says. That’s right, we can’t save seed to grow the next year, and frankly I’m not interested in doing that. For the critics who are not sold on GMO crops anyway do they really want farmers holding onto this seed and planting it without any kind of paper trail? Soybeans are a different story, but hybrid corn won’t produce the same seeds you planted anyway. And the modern planting equipment we use is happiest and most accurate when seed is very clean and sorted by size and shape. To maintain our planter’s performance I would need to get equipment to handle the cleaning, sizing, and sorting. Next time you get a chance look at a dried ear of corn. There are several sizes and shapes of kernels on one ear.
This is the kind of seed our equipment cleans out; one reason #farmers may prefer not to save and replant their own! pic.twitter.com/UjyswNzKQr
— HannahNeuenschwander (@hannahaggie2014) December 6, 2016
- If you want to plant seed to be used as seed you need to sign an agreement to do so with a seed company licensed by Monsanto. We do this for two different companies with soybeans. In fact we’ve actually worked with one company through several name changes long before GMO showed up. Back to when I was just a little kid Why? Because we can get a premium price for the soybeans we grow that will be used as seed by other farmers next year. The premium accounts for the extra effort we put in to make sure our planting, harvesting, and storage equipment is extra clean to provide a pure product to the customer.
- We can’t grow seed to be used for breeding, research, or generation of herbicide registration data. That gets back to saving seed. If we wanted to breed our own varieties I’m sure we could get into doing that, but I look at it right now as division of labor. Seed companies are great at coming up with great products, and farmers are great at turning those products into a bounty of food, feed, fuel, and fiber.
- Our farm has agreed to only export and plant these crops in countries that allow them. OK that’s kind of a no brainer. Not to mention we aren’t the ones exporting anything. However, this can be a tricky thing for seed companies gaining approval in various countries. Farmers need to know they don’t have to worry about their seed being accepted at the local elevator or grain terminal. China is known for playing some political games in this arena, and the recent acquisition of Syngenta by a Chinese company will be an interesting case to follow considering what played out with Sygenta’s Viptera corn a couple years ago.
- Here’s the part where some people think family farmers become slaves to the corporations. The part where GMO seeds force us to buy our chemicals from the same company. But if you’ve got a Technology/Stewardship Agreement handy you’ll find that’s not true. If I plant Roundup® Ready (RR) crops Monsanto would sure like me to use Roundup® herbicide on them, but I don’t have to. The agreement says that for RR crops that I should only use Roundup® herbicide…………………OR another authorized herbicide which could not be used in the absence of the RR gene. When I worked off the farm I sold a lot of generic brand glyphosate. It’s just like buying your grocer’s private label brand of cough medicine instead of the name brand. The only catch is if you have a problem you need to talk with the company who provided the herbicide. If we spray Brand X and it doesn’t work it won’t do any good to go crying to Monsanto. That sounds like pretty standard business practice to me. Furthermore, I don’t even have to use glyphosate on my glyphosate tolerant crops. This year we will have waxy corn from Pioneer and waxy from a local dealer who sells Monsanto products. The latter will be RR, but the Pioneer variety won’t. We will likely plant them in the same field side by side to see which one performs better. If we spray glyphosate on those acres all the Pioneer corn will die! Instead we will control weeds with a herbicide that all corn resists naturally. Actually for quite a while now we haven’t sprayed glyphosate on any of our corn acres RR or not. We do use it during the growing season on soybeans, but choose to rotate to other herbicides when a field is in corn.This goes back to that resistant management practice.We don’t want resistant bugs or weeds.This may also be of interest to you
- We have to pay for the seed. Ridiculous isn’t it? Paying for something that gives value in return? Not really out of line is it?
- We may have to provide documents supporting that we are following the agreement within 7 days after getting a request from Monsanto. I’m not worried about that if I’m following the agreement anyway. We’ve never received a request.
- If Monsanto asks to do so they can inspect our land, storage bins, wagons, etc. Again I’m not worried.
- And finally we agree to allow Monsanto to obtain our internet service provider records to validate an electronic signature. If anything on this list is questionable it’s this one. I’m just not sure electronic signatures are the way to go personally, but it’s becoming more common. Even for the President.
The Monsanto Contract
If you want to see the exact wording of the contract, click to view a PDF of my 2011 Monsanto Technology/Stewardship Agreement or enlarge the pictures below.
So there you have it. That’s what we have to agree to in order to make use of Monsanto’s biotechnology on our farm. I don’t see anything in there that hurts my farm. Neither does Iowa farmer Dave Walton. I don’t have to buy their herbicides, and I don’t have to buy anything from them next year if I don’t want to. The biggest problem I have with seed companies is that it seems like they phase out a variety from time to time that is a really strong performer on our farm. I understand the concern organic farms have with GMO crops in close proximity to their own. Those farmers have worked hard and shown patience in getting an organic certification, and they don’t want to start over again. Even though we don’t have any neighbors farming organically, it’s important that we are careful when making field applications. We hope our neighbors do the same because our waxy corn generally isn’t RR and our popcorn definitely is not. You could also have drift from any corn field do damage to soybeans next door, so even guys like me are sympathetic to the practices of other farms. We’ve had corn on the border a field hurt or killed by someone assuming our crop is RR just like theirs. We also have neighbors with a habit of texting me before they spray.
Pioneer sends a similar package each year including the agreement and a product use guide.
Another thing Farm Aid hits on is patents. They say GMO crops are patented and that’s restrictive. Well guess what. Conventional seeds can have patents too as evidenced by the patent info on the seed tags of the wheat we buy. Ornamental plants can have patents. Organic crops can have patents! The idea that only biotech seeds are patented is a misnomer. And patents expire. Arkansas has a public variety of a RR soybean now. Farm Aid also claims Monsanto has “famously sued thousands of individual farmers.” Really? I thought it was only 147 in the last two decades since GMO crops hit the market?
So I’ve laid it all out for you. A lot of people are concerned about these contracts farmers sign. You’ve got my take as a family farmer written here in my own words, and you’ve got a copy of and actual tech agreement pulled from my file drawer. I hope I’ve provided enough info for you to draw your own conclusions. I’d be happy to discuss them in the comment section!
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