The company maintains that when farmers
like Bowman plant Monsanto’s seeds, they are obligated to harvest only
the resulting crop and not use any of it for planting the following
year. The arrangement means that farmers have to buy new Monsanto seeds
each year.
“[D]espite the vast sums of money involved
in modern farming, it is ironically Bowman’s own lack of cash that has
seen the case end up at the supreme court,” Paul Harris reports at The
Guardian. “Monsanto has a long record of reaching settlements with
commercially pressured farmers it targets for patent infringements. But
when the firm sued Bowman, he was already bankrupt after an unrelated
land deal went wrong. Thus, he had little to lose. ‘I made up my mind to
fight it until I could not fight it anymore,’ he said. ‘I thought: I am
not going to play dead.’ ” Truthdig
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