Farmer Coalition Offers $250K Prize For Blueberry Picking Robot (robohub.org) 112
Hallie Siegel writes: Having spent many a back breaking hour in deep woods Ontario picking wild blueberries in summer time, I can only imagine the challenge of farming and harvesting these awesome little flavour nuggets. Blueberries are in record demand (probably my son alone accounts for a significant percentage of that!) so it's no surprise, really, that a coalition of farmers has banded together to offer a prize for automated blueberry picking solutions. We've seen competitions and challenges spur innovation in other areas of robotics — think robocar — why not blueberry picking? Can't wait to see the results of this one.
Cost (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck being cheaper than darker skinned humans.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in the home of the Great Wild Maine Blueberry and it is nommy. For starters, you're correct. We have no brown people until harvest season - then we have a lot of them. They stick around for the apple picking season. Then they disappear like the wind. Often, they're Jamaican. I have no idea why. A buddy doesn't hire them, they're from a separate company supplied by Wyman Blueberry or something or other. He hires locals.
Also, blueberries are seldom "picked" per se. Some, very few, are hand-picked and those will cost you a small fortune. The Wild Maine Blueberry (which is nommy) is a low-bush plant and not to be confused with cultivated berries which are larger and, often, on taller plants. The blueberries are raked with a device that is similar to a cranberry rake, they just have less space between the tines. You gently pull the rake up, from beneath the berries, and tilt it forward while pulling gently upwards. You repeat this until the berries fill the back portion. Then, leaving some space for the wind to blow, you dump the berries into your pail. Why? The wind winnows out the berries and your bucket will be heavier and the berries cleaner.
You also do it gently so that you squish fewer berries - berries that are squished are suitable only for the cannery. Berries that go to the cannery don't make as much money. Unfortunately, most berries go to the cannery these days. You need to know the right people to be able to get the good stuff - which I do. I generally get an obscene amount of berries and freeze them after cleaning them. I also make blueberry jelly and blueberry pie. I can't seem to make a good jam, however. I just can't get it so that it's not runny. I'll learn...
There's quite an art to raking them. As I mentioned above, I've a friend who owns around 500 acres of berries. I get some healthy exercise helping him out. In the spring we go and burn the fields every other year. We put chemicals on the fields to kill the Poplar tree saplings. We put hay on the fields after the season is over - that's burned off the following year, in the spring, while the snow is still in the woods but not in the fields - as it is wont to do, most years. They've an automated burning machine but that's set a hill, down in Vienna, ME, ablaze on more than one occasion. He (which also seem to mean me most years) doesn't subscribe to that highfalutin newfangled stuff - it's done the way it was done by his father before and his father before that. Legend says, his grand father was the one to invent the blueberry winnowing machine. I've no idea of the veracity, they're all liars.
Truth be told, I'm not quite sure how I got roped into helping. I started just buying blueberries but soon got asked if I wanted to see how it worked. Not long after, I was invited to give it a shot. Pretty soon, I'd filled my belly and my pail was empty. This meant that I should probably give him money. So, I gave him money but was told I should probably fill a pail. Soon, that turned into a few. Eventually, I figured out that I was paying to work. I'm not quite sure how that state of affairs happened but I did stop paying and now I don't actually pay for my heap of berries but I earn them by helping out. He's offered to pay me, numerous times, but I think he only offers to be polite and knowing that I'll decline.
If you've never had the Nommy Wild Maine Blueberry then you're missing out. They're not as sweet as the cultivated berries and, often times, not as large. However, they're full of flavor and my doctor (another lying bastard) tells me that they're good for me. He's probably a member of the blueberry cartel. There is actually quite a bit of money in blueberries, they're one of the highest paying crops around. They're just finicky and a bitch to harvest. They do have automated raking machines but they don't actually result in berries you'd want to buy unless you were buying them canned. Let's just say, they don't treat the berries right.
So, while someone may develop a machine to autonomously harvest berries,
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
There are, in fact, several species of blueberries. The commercial cultivates in the USA and Europe are nowadays (unfortunately) the American high brush blueberries, but the European wild blueberry tastes far more intensive. They are small berries with violet flesh and red-violet juice and they will colour your tongue to the hue of the tongue of a Chow-Chow dog.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Interesting)
There are indeed. I've tried quite a few of the various species over the years. I love my blueberries. I recently shared a story about them... Lemme see if I can find it... Nope, was more than a few days ago. Basically, as a wee toddler - not much larger - 3 - 5 years old, I ate some blueberries and, as it turns out, they were inside bear poop. Yup... I ate bear poop blueberries. *sighs* I was sharing it when someone was alarmed about their being power lines near their house and worried about their kids.
I really don't like the cultivated berries as much. Sure, they're sweeter but they also feel mealy. They're just not as good. I don't know if I have had the variety you speak of but it's possible. If you ever get to my neck of the woods, I'll share some of my stash with you. We have one subspecies, I'm not even sure if it has a name, that you find in patches. They're dark, almost black. They also tend to grow a bit larger. They are the epitome of heaven in a little package direct from Mother Nature herself. I usually separate those out and gorge myself on them instead of being patient and freezing them.
Man, I'm hundreds of miles from home and my stash of blueberries. Stupid Slashdot...
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It's a blueberry. I'd not get this wrong, trust me on this. ;-) It's one of the ones listed here:
http://umaine.edu/blueberries/... [umaine.edu]
Not all blueberries are blue. They're pink, blue, dark red, some are kind of purple, and some are black - they vary a bit in between the shades. I've also noted your other reply. I'll look into it. ;-) Jams are a pain in my ass. I make a mean jelly, though.
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Absolutely - although the same genus as Blueberries, they're a mile apart.
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There are, in fact, several species of blueberries. The commercial cultivates in the USA and Europe are nowadays (unfortunately) the American high brush blueberries, but the European wild blueberry tastes far more intensive. They are small berries with violet flesh and red-violet juice and they will colour your tongue to the hue of the tongue of a Chow-Chow dog.
And if you get some of their juice on your clothes it will dye them, permantly.
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my second favorite "Taxi" scene https://youtu.be/K_bEXeTwrC8 [youtu.be]
My first being "What does a yellow light mean?" https://youtu.be/1HvmtbZzA40 [youtu.be]
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There are, in fact, several species of blueberries. The commercial cultivates in the USA and Europe are nowadays (unfortunately) the American high brush blueberries, but the European wild blueberry tastes far more intensive
AKA bilberries, winberries or 'llys' in Welsh. Unlike the relatively tasteless blueberry, they stain your fingers and lips purple. You won't find them commercially cultivated, you have to go up the hills to find them, and it takes quite a while to pick enough to make a tart (US pie). Blue
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You are most welcome. I am, shall we say, passionate about my blueberries. It was actually in my top ten reasons for retiring to Maine. I kid you not. (Technically, an abundance of easily accessible foods like fish, deer, and my garden. Some take more work than the others.) I do have some wild blueberries on my property. Some of the land is fields gone fallow (I think that's how it's said - I'm interpreting Mainer-speak as a person who's 'from away') and they're often stolen by the birds and bears before I
I'm a farmer, blah blah blah blah (Score:2)
Re: Cost (Score:2)
It's sugar with added pectin.
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Who the hell is modding this down?!? That there is important information, thank you very much! If you don't like blueberries (and judging by the moderation, you do not!) then pound it in your ear. This here thread's about blueberries now. (Wasn't it always?) How's that off-topic? I mean, compared to all the other posts?
If you've never had blueberry jam, homemade, then you're sorely lacking and I hope you get some before you die - and live long enough to regret moderating that nice, informative, post down. Y
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No, I'd normally not reply but this is blueberries. Nommy means one goes nom nom nom while eating them and they go yummy in your tummy. Dude! Blueberries! I mean, nommy blueberries! They're like little drops of love from Mother Nature.
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I want to know what substance with negative weight was on them.
leaves and twigs are less dense than berries (Score:2)
Fill a bucket with leaves and twigs.
Fill a bucket with berries.
Weigh them.
It's magic.
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Where did it say the basket had to be full?
walking back twice as often would be dumb (Score:2)
It would be silly to walk back from the field to the scale every time your bucket is HALF full. You'd spend half your time walking backing and forth instead of picking berries. The reasonable thing to do is to fill your bucket (with berries) before walking back.
Re: Cost (Score:2)
Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
I think if someone invents such a contraption, they stand to make WAY more than a $250k prize by patenting and manufacturing the thing themselves and selling it to farmers. Really. Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
"Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?"
-1, irrelevant
The conditions of the contest do not involve alienating all rights.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Informative)
Case in point, here's what today's $200k solution looks like. http://www.oxbocorp.com/Produc... [oxbocorp.com] You should be able to add telemetry, control and associated support systems for less than $50k.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. I worked for a small blueberry farmer who was making sorting equipment back in the early 2000s. It didn't take him long before he was making more from the machines (they were much more basic than a picking machine) than his entire blueberry farm. There is big money in reducing the need for seasonal labour and $250k is peanuts.
As an aside, one of the things that was common on the blueberry farms was to use a tree shaker to harvest the lower grade fruit. It was only the really high quality fruit that was hand picked. I never enquired as to what the main benefits of this were (whether quality or yield?), but the tree shakers seemed to work pretty well at getting everything out of the tree and weren't exactly complex pieces of equipment. I wonder if that puts more constraints on the economics of such a project that make it less attractive for agricultural equipment manufacturers.
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Well if the problem is seasonal labour than some out of the box thinking would likely be more successful in the long run. So perhaps very low shrub blueberry bushes grown in a floating aquaponic systems under artificial conditions with continuous on rotation cropping. So better labour management combined with maintaining product quality, reduced land use, reduced water use and reduced transport costs. So problem with picking blueberries, come up with a better blueberry bush and better growing systems. This
Re: Good luck with that (Score:1)
Lots of people are that stupid. It's why gamification is a thing now.
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250k to develop a commercial electronics product, let alone a robot is a joke. You need way more than that.
The only way this could (maybe) work is if this was a reward for bringing any such device to the market, no strings attached. No need to hand it over to them for 250k (haha).
Of course, if the goal is to just come up with the best concept, I'd get right on it. Ideas are cheap.
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I wrote develop, not produce.
You need to hire and pay people with high-tech skills, at least some of which should have experience, otherwise you pay more for failed attempts.
You go through multiple iterations of prototypes, each costing much more than your mass produced final product would.
You need to aquire several certifications depending on the product, each requiring a lot of paperwork, pretests and costly official final tests.
Setting up production and QA may also take some rounds until you reach the de
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I think if someone invents such a contraption, they stand to make WAY more than a $250k prize by patenting and manufacturing the thing themselves and selling it to farmers. Really. Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?
It doesn't matter. The farmers still win. The $250k is to get people interested in looking into the problem. By getting published on slashdot, they are already halfway to their goal as their primary goal is publicity. If someone solves the problem and wants to sell them the machine, the farmers can keep their $250k and still come out ahead as they still accomplished the goal of getting someone to create the machine for them.
Re: Good luck with that (Score:2)
Easily done (Score:2)
We've got torque-based break drives, color-based OCR, and super-tiny pressure sensors to match the torque-break drives for finer degree of control and less chance of damaging the harvested product, plus extendable arms and such.
Strap all of that to a bucket and battery on wheels and send it out into the fields.
Will work with any fruit of a different color than the surrounding vegetation, so add strawberries, raspberries, mulberries, grapes of varying cultivars, apples, oranges, tomatoes, peppers, and more t
Re:Easily done (Score:5, Funny)
If you have a special drive just to break the berries, my advice is to skip this contest and build a jam factory.
Re:Easily done (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to assume you know nothing about blueberries. (The vary in color, for starters - quite a bit actually, up to and including pink and black.) Also, they're kind of complicated to harvest. 'Tis not an easy thing to do, I suspect. They also don't all tend to ripen at the same time and may well be mixed in with some other berry in the low bushes. I forget the name of that berry but it's almost identical to the blueberry only it grows on a different plant (coniferous shrub) and is poisonous. It too grows in shallow and acidic soil.
This actually is kind of difficult, I suspect. They have an electric raking machine but it's still needing to be guided by a user. It also mashes the damned things all to hell and anyone who uses it is a spawn of Satan. In fact, for even suggesting such a thing, you're dead to me. You're dead to me Khyber! Dead to me, indeed!
I take my fucking blueberries serious. I'll straight up stab a mother fucker for messing with my blueberries.
You should cut down your blueberry intake there... (Score:2)
...lieutenant. [wikipedia.org]
They may be having an intoxicating effect on you.
For one... you seem to be able to talk about them until you're blue in the face. [youtube.com]
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I grew blueberries of many cultivars in South Carolina. I'm well aware of rabbit-eye and highbush and more cultivars.
Jeeze, you'd think a HORTICULTURAL RESEARCH DIRECTOR wouldn't have already thought about this stuff. It's REALLY easy to pick a blueberry. It's really easy to determine when the appropriate harvest time for any given berry has arrived - it's touch and color-based.
A raking machine? Well no fucking wonder so many get damaged. As I said, WE HAVE PRESSURE-SENSITIVE ROBOTICS, hell they've been fea
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A raking machine? Well no fucking wonder so many get damaged. As I said, WE HAVE PRESSURE-SENSITIVE ROBOTICS, hell they've been featured on slashdot HUNDREDS OF TIMES. Yet you seem to have thrown all that prior knowledge away.
Speaking of knowledge, pressure and flex sensors tend to be imprecise things which require repeated recalibration and replacement. If this were as easy as you say, we'd already have generalized picking robots with laser spectrometers built into their hands for brix content measurement, and they'd be picking grapes, blueberries, strawberries, etc. Why don't you order up two of those pressure sensors, put them on the tips of some robot fingers, and see how good you are at picking fruit with a robot? I guarant
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Have you ever done a single thing with robotics? Like, anything? Computer vision is still very rudimentary, reverse kinematics is still a huge problem (how do you get your end effector where you want it? oh, and make sure you dodge all the branches along the way), and integrating sensing data into precise control loops is something that looks really impressive in the lab and still fails miserably in the field more often than not.
If you don't believe me, just watch the recent DARPA challenge with humanoid ro
If it's easily done, why don't you do it? (Score:3)
I'll take my $250K, now.
You'll take your $250K when you get it working, and not until. Smarter people than you have already been trying.
If it's so easy, why don't you put a robot where your mouth is, and pick some fucking blueberries with it?
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Don't be such a kneebiter. You OBVIOUSLY don't know how tech products are created.
1. Boy Genius Entrepreneur has Great Idea!
2. Boy Genius hires handful of low-wage monkey types to do grunt work (It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is...)
3. Boy Genius becomes billionaire. Monkey types get laid off.
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"If it's so easy, why don't you put a robot where your mouth is, and pick some fucking blueberries with it?"
Because I'm too busy doing LED horticulture, where the REAL money is.
Or do you forget that I can very easily build and program mechanical things to do a fucking given task? [tinypic.com]
OCR is simple as fuck. Pressure-sensitive motor drive is easy as fuck. Wake me up when you can even do HALF of that.
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OCR is simple as fuck.
The blueberries aren't labeled with text. Nobody puts a post-it note on the ripe ones. Or did you mean optical cranberry recognition? We're talking about blueberries.
Pressure-sensitive motor drive is easy as fuck. Wake me up when you can even do HALF of that.
I controlled a servo with a flex sensor ages ago. Whoopeeshit. I don't want a medal. I want to see you pick a blueberry with a robot.
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You'll never get that faggot nutcase filled with shit to do anything of the sort. Oh, he's a wizard at bolting together stuff he buys from eBay and he thinks that makes him an engineer.
With full understanding of the irony inherent to my making the statement, that's still leagues ahead of talking shit on Slashdot.
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Have you seen a dog lick peanut butter off the roof of its mouth? It doesn't seem to be a very efficient method of removing food from what the food is stuck to.
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Indeed, that's kind of, sort of, my point. She'd suddenly be attractive and I'd make a horrible go of it and would end up taking a long time. Also, I'd make the faces that the dog makes. Hopefully that was a given.
Re: Have they asked Yahoo! for help? (Score:2)
I honestly read the title as: (Score:2)
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Farmer Coalition Offers $250K Prize For Blueberry Picking Parrot
The Persistence of Vision: Monty Python Variant.
Did you feel an urge to also argue about it?
Re: Wow good deal (Score:2)
Too little to be serious ... put up real money! (Score:4, Interesting)
Presumably a prototype has to be built, right? Because no one would be stupid enough to give a prize for a plan on paper, right?
So how many decent prototypes would an inventor have to go through before there's a decent working model?
And if each prototype costs $10-20k, the actual reward for the inventor gets smaller and smaller ... so small that only garage builders are likely to give it a try. A bona fide company with resources, say engineers/techs at $60K a year, machine shops, taxes, are unlikely to give the matter any thought. A university might, but then you will have to wait several years.
TL:DR - you get what you pay for. Put up a $1 million dollar prize and you might see some serious interest.
Re: Too little to be serious ... put up real money (Score:2)
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The Thrills of Blueberries (Score:2)
A dying breed (Score:1)
Now you won't need migrant farmers, and the associated leftists to defend them.
Yay capitalism!
Re: A dying breed (Score:2)
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Because farmers are strange people that own guns, buy seeds from Monsanto,
Some do, some don't [nelsonfarm.net].
Do the farmers who supplied you with the straw you used to build that strawman do so?
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Okay, its brooklyn, but close: http://newyork.seriouseats.com... [seriouseats.com]
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And when seeds blow onto a neighbouring farm Monsanto will sue both farmers for illegal distribution and use of their generically-engineered seeds. Monsanto is one of the "Great Satans."
I agree that Monsanto is evil, the world is still dealing with the results of their criminal chemical past (e.g. agent orange, contaminated with Dioxin, sprayed all over Viet Nam) but this is not what happened. Someone willfully saved seed he knew to belong to Monsanto, and then he got nailed. It's still wrong, but it's not as simple as you make it out to be. It was one patch, he had the choice of what crop to use as seed crop, and that's the patch he chose.
Now, I think it is horribly wrong to lose your far
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Someone willfully saved seed he knew to belong to Monsanto, and then he got nailed.
That was Percy Schmeiser [wikipedia.org]. He planted canola adjacent to his neighbors Roundup-Ready crop, then saved the seed from that section of his field, and only from that section. The following year, he sprayed his field with Roundup to kill the plants without the Monsanto gene. He now had pure RR canola, which he used and benefited from in the following years. Monsanto asked him to pay a license fee, he refused, so Monsanto sued him. Since this was clearly a case of blatant intentional infringement, and Schmeis
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He planted canola adjacent to his neighbors Roundup-Ready crop, then saved the seed from that section of his field, and only from that section. The following year, he sprayed his field with Roundup to kill the plants without the Monsanto gene. He now had pure RR canola, which he used and benefited from in the following years. Monsanto asked him to pay a license fee, he refused, so Monsanto sued him. Since this was clearly a case of blatant intentional infringement, and Schmeiser openly admitted to it, Monsanto won. Why is it wrong? Or at least any more wrong than enforcing any other patent?
Because that's how agriculture works. By permitting people to insert themselves into the system legally, you cause a whole class of problem that we'd be better off without. What I'd rather see is Monsanto and anyone else who wants to sell GM seed forced to use the terminator gene in all of their products. That way, this can never happen. You have to pay every year; they can provide seed every year. It will serve as a disincentive to use them, which is good, because we shouldn't be depending on one company's
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What I'd rather see is Monsanto and anyone else who wants to sell GM seed forced to use the terminator gene in all of their products.
Monsanto wanted to include the terminator gene in their products. They backed down in the face of vociferous protests from anti-GMO activists and extremely negative press coverage.
Monsanto would love a law making terminator genes mandatory. But there is zero chance of that happening. Anti-GMO groups would fight that the for the same reason that anti-smoking groups fight e-cigarettes: They fix much of the problem, thus giving the protest groups less of a cause, and less of a reason to exist.
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What's so worthy about banning artificial gene combinations?
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Terminator genes easily hop to other specimem.
How do you think you will survive if most 'natural' plants can not spread naturally anymore?
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How do you think you will survive if most 'natural' plants can not spread naturally anymore?
Please explain how a gene that prevents reproduction will "spread naturally".
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By crosspolonization.
By viruses.
By ordinary plasmotic gene transfer.
There are about a dozen mechanisms how plants transfer genes, even between unrelated specimem.
And that is known since ... hm, 1910? Or was it 1930?
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By crosspolonization.
No. The plant doesn't reproduce. It doesn't produce pollen, or viable seeds. That is the whole point.
By viruses.
In which case the gene prevents it own propagation into the following generation.
There are about a dozen mechanisms how plants transfer genes
So? As soon as a plant acquires this gene it will STOP REPRODUCING. That is the whole point. It is conceivable that the gene could somehow get inserted into another plant, via a virus or whatever, but that would be a dead end.
Genes propagate and spread because they enhance the fitness of their hosts. A terminator gene min
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No. The plant doesn't reproduce. It doesn't produce pollen, or viable seeds. That is the whole point.
;D hence the wackoes who hate gMO (that includes me) are against it.
You are mistaken. The plant does not produce viable seeds, but it does produce pollen
In which case the gene prevents it own propagation into the following generation.
No it does not, it leads to an epidemic of plants of different species that are affected by the same virus and hence the same gene transfer (*facepalm*)
So? As soon as a plant
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It is wrong because if I plant a plant and harvest it the harvest is mine. I can do with any part of the harvest however I please.
If he would work under a kind of francising contract and Monsanto would buy everything he produces and supply him with new seeds ... or whatever ... then it would be different.
What is the next thing? You my harvest the apples, but when you cut the tree you have to 'return' the wood to the guy selling you the seeds?
Re: Paying Migrant Workers $3/day is too much? (Score:2)
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