cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58166654
How can you order a farmer to destroy their trees? I hope he fights in a higher court. Wish I’d heard about the nectarine giveaway. I’d have gone to pick some.
A little more detail into why he lost. The court/jury is likely correctly following as agreements are written. The agreements he signed was stupid and a good lawyer would have told him to never sign it.
Since around 2010 in vegetatively propagated species, PVP or Patent holders have transitioned from a one time fee at the point of sale to licensing agreement with farmers. These licensing agreements ensure a stable income source for breeding companies. Rather than trying to collect 20 years worth of royalties at the time of sale, they split the fee across the first 15 years the crop is in production.
Why they did this and why growers agreed to it? Breeding for these crops have been severely limited by unreliable income to the breeders. Plant breeding burns through money constantly. A “inexpensive” breeding program burns through 2-3 million per year. Traditionally, public land grant universities did the breeding. A decent plant breeder in other crops makes double or more per year in the private sector versus universities. By the late 1990’s the remaining breeders in public universities were a bit subpar. These breeders did not produce many marketable varieties. So their funding quickly dried up. After 30 years the farmers were desperate for some new varieties. So they were willing to sign up to constantly fund a few companies to generate new varieties.
The idea of a royalty based annual fee really took off with the blueberry growers. Since the breeding companies were independent, they stayed out of the marketing side and lots of growers made a shit ton of money off their varieties for over a decade (the market is currently saturated profits are down).
The variety of nectarine he planted was owned by the processor/distributor he was selling too…
So the companies marketing agreement demanded that he only sell the product to them. However they only paid him for product that they sold. If they couldn’t sell it, they dumped the product and he got nothing. Since they dumped 1/2 of his crop one year, the next he sold to somebody else violating his marketing agreement. Since he violated the marketing agreement, the company likely had a clause in their genetic licensing agreement that he had to destroy the orchard.
These contracts are in violation of all sorts of anti-trust/monopoly laws that have not been enforced or completely nerfed over the past few decades.