Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines

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• Hacker News
• Monsanto all over again.
  by ExoticPearTree
• > In its court filings, Giumarra says all rights to the Monalise variety are owned by Star Fruits Diffusion, a French company that works with plant breeding programs, while Giumarra holds the right to sublicense the variety for testing, production and sale.

  > French company

  Enough said. This US admin will nuke that agreement instantly. If it was a fellow American company, let it pass.

  by petcat
• But it’s a US company collecting the money from the farmers. If they hold enough trumpcoin they have a pretty good case.
  by lokar
• Holy astroturf
  by carrychains
• White nectarines are gross IMO. Not even for free.
  by Teknomadix
• Reminds me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
  by aorth
• Farms are mostly just businesses nowadays. Either they're heavily automated (and capital intensive) or they hire farm workers to do the work. Or both.
  by skybrian
• “The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountain.

  "And the smell of rot fills the country.“ (Chapter 35)

  This passage had a profound impact on me when I first read it in high school. Only later did I discover that such atrocities still happen regularly today.

  by cardamomo
• >locked in a legal battle with a company that claims exclusive rights over the variety of white nectarine he grows.

  >[...] Fruit patents are becoming more common

  this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.

  by john_strinlai
• This is so simplistic.

  They made a new varietal. Nobody is saying he can't plant any of the standard heirloom Nectarines. The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it.

  Honestly, how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? This is how it has worked for half a century and mild gripes aside, the quality of the produce in stores is WAY WAY BETTER than it was before (seriously, what is the last time you ate a Red Delicious apple?)

  Have like... some awareness of the large functioning important system you are mindlessly breaking with throwaway comments.

  by bpodgursky
• > this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.

  Wait until you hear about Monsanto/Bayer - a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.

  by bluerooibos
• ...and none does. You can grow and sell any peach you want; the tree has no sense of the childish tantrums of the state over its bounty.

  This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.

  by jMyles
• This isnt even a patent case. Its a contracts case. The article says these trees arent under patent, the farmer signed a contract saying he would only sell to one supplier and now wants to sell to others.
  by HDThoreaun
• Plant patents incentivize the creation of disease resistant, tasty, and hardy varieties. If you remove the patents, you remove the incentive for private capital.

  Capital to create new plants has to come from somewhere: public tax funding, grower-funded pools, or patent licensing. We do a mix of all three.

  by odie5533
• If you spent decades doing selective breeding to obtain a more desirable product, you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product from you and made money off of your hard work.

  If the products are being bred from tax funded programs, then yes, anybody should have access to the new breeds, but if it's privately funded, then why should it be available for everyone? Without the protection, there isn't much incentive to invest time into developing better foods.

  by werdnapk
• I missed the free potatoes in Berlin https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/4000-tons-o... , and now I'm missing this? Once again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618898 all the action eludes me.
  by leoc
• If he donates these to a charity, what are the rules on taking a tax deduction for this unusual situation?

  Can it have value for the purposes of a donation if you can't sell it? Would taking a tax deduction trigger a patent liability?

  by jmalicki
• The entire crop cost is already tax dedeuctable by default. Taxes are on profits
  by s1artibartfast
• regardless of how the contract is structured, no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away. this is similar to a law in the EU that forbids producers or distributors of clothing to destroy products they don't want to sell.

  once you plant a tree to grow fruit you should be allowed to keep harvesting that tree until its natural end. if there is an exclusive contract then the contract must not be allowed to be terminated before that end unless the grower is free to sell on the open market after termination.

  anything else would allow patent owners to hold growers hostage ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶.̶

  by em-bee
• > no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away

  It doesn't, to my knowledge. It requires they not sell them.

  by JumpCrisscross
• The optimal quantity of discarded food is not zero.
  by jandrewrogers
• Would you bar a contract for the productivity of a tree for a given period of time, with a clause dictating how excess produce is to be disposed of?
  by maxerickson
• >Mora later sought to terminate his relationship with Giumarra, and he sold his nectarines to another fruit packer in 2023

  The farmer sought termination and violated the contract.

  by ribosometronome
• Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food.

  Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is.

  Any government functionary that tries to prevent a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. Any lawyer that tries to prevent a farmer from selling food, is doing evil. Any court that enjoins a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. If the farmer is found to have violated some IP claim, then the proper remedy is monetary damages after the fact, not enjoined before the fact.

  by efitz
• You are perfectly free to keep selling what we've been eating. No one is forcing people to plant the new stuff.

  If you make patents illegal, no one will breed new stuff. How does that help?

  All that will do is cause people to grow the old stuff, which they still can, even if the patent exists.

  Do you get what I mean? Adding a patent does not reduce anything, it only adds a new option.

  by ars
• > ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding

  And during the last 100 years, the yields for many types of plants have grown several _times_ because of modern selective breeding methods. Here's a nice graph for cereals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Index-of-cereal-productio...

  So you want to go back hundreds of years and force people to live in hunger with frequent famines?

  There are plenty of patent-free crops. So just plant them. And the patents eventually expire.

  by cyberax
• > Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil

  Eh, I'd say it's fair to give them a short window of patent protection. Say 20 years, akin to pharmaceuticals.

  The only exception should be if the protected variety has a monopoly. Then it immediately loses patent protection.

  by JumpCrisscross
• only thing I can say is that patents, unlike copyrights, seem to continue to expire in less than a lifetime (20 years).
  by m463
• Plant variety rights / plant patents exist for the same reason that regular patents do, it's believed that it encourages people to innovate.

  Whether or not that's the case, I'll leave to others to argue.

  by EdwardDiego
• Genetic engineering isn’t the same as selective breeding and I’m sure you know this. Confusing the two is shilly, even if you’re not a paid propagandist people will rightly assume you are if you try to confuse well defined terms like you just did.
  by Glandalf