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A decade ago, salesmen from as many as 50 seed companies would compete for their dollars. Each would promise healthier plants, richer yields or a better discount.
Today the Leakes have little choice: There are four seed companies in their area, and all sell seeds that include genetic traits patented and licensed by Monsanto Co., the world's largest seed firm.
"There's basically nothing else available," said Leake, 48. "You have to use their seeds and pay their prices."
The concerns of farmers such as Leake will take center stage in Ankeny, Iowa, on Friday as the Justice Department and U.S. Department of Agriculture kick off the first of a yearlong series of public meetings to examine whether antitrust practices in agriculture are driving food prices higher.
Strange that an IOWA corn farmer is stating he is being forced to use Monsanto seed.
There is a huge, well respected, seed company in Albert Lea Minnesota ( very near the Iowa border) that distributes seed into Iowa. I am looking at their thick seed catalog, and notice they have 12 pages of seed corn including conventional seed corn.
archiehomesteader----------I think this is a case Broken Tap mentioned earlier on a different threasd. Uninformed people who know little about a subject and scour the internet looking for things they can jump on the bandwagon.
I doubt a " homesteader" from VT knows much about availability of seed corn in Iowa.
If seed corn companies are not offering conventional seed corn, it's because there is not enough farmers who want it to make carrying it profitable.
Don't jump on me, it was posted on another forum so I thought I'd post it here. I'm not an expert on the availability of seed out there. Although shipping of vast amounts of seed may add to their cost, and they may not be aware of a source in MN for seed, FWIW.
I'm not growing much corn myself, but some of my relatives who still have a farm here will be growing about a hundred acres of it this year. No GMO seed either.
Seems your relatives have no problem in finding conventional seed.
Strange that guy from Iowa is crying he can't find any.
True but there's a massive anti-GMO movement here, it's no surprise there's plenty of conventional seed available here...out where primarily GMO's are grown I could imagine non-GMO seed being a bit harder to find locally in large quantities.
And don't forget, hybrid corn is NOT GMO corn and there are plenty of varieties of that, in many, many different seed company names.
My only complaint is that in the state of Maine we are no longer allowed to buy the GMO seed that made growing corn the most profitable. The only GMO seed we can get now and grow legally in Maine is the Round-Up Ready corn though much, much better varieties exist. Is it any wonder Maine dairy farmers have lost 25% of their dairy farmers and Vermont has lost 1/3 in the last few months!
BT: I'm quite aware of the difference between hybrids and GMO's. I've used hybrids on occasion, but never GMO's.
I think the milk prices are a bigger problem than seed restrictions. Even if you used the GMO corn and got more feed corn per acre the milk prices are still much lower than they should be. Something needs to be done about the milk prices to reverse the farm losses.
I'm a layman...but I thought 'hybrid' was altering...and I thought they did that by genetics.
Cross a labrador retriever and a poodle and you have a hybrid. Go into a laboratory, splice the DNA from a labrador retriever and a salmon and you have a genetically modified organism.
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