Trust me, Monsanto has researched this thoroughly and found
the
exact price point at which farmers will pay for the patented seed as
opposed to
using bin-run or another competing commercial product.
So what
that tells me is that yield, in dollars per acre, has increased slightly
more
than 325% over the same period of time. This gives farmers more profit
per
acre, if costs per acre have "only" gone up 325%.
What it *doesn't* tell me
is whether yield, in soybeans per acre, has gone up
at all. That 325% could
all be market price, raised entirely by increased
production costs. It is not
even stated whether that figure is in real terms or
nominal (I suspect
nominal). Labour and fuel costs go up significantly over
time anyway, and now
we find out that farmers can't even use one of their
normal sources of seed
because it is virtually guaranteed to contain patent-
encumbered seeds.
Inflation, increased real costs and exclusion of seed
sources could potentially
add up to 325% over 16 years (I haven't done the
sums, but that's my engineer's
intuition).
So are there any more robust figures on this subject? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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