Can you be arrested for saving seeds?

[seedcorn]

Red, great question. What plant breeders do to assure purity in corn is to cover the silks with a paper bag, use another bag over tassel right before it sheds. Shake the tassel, catch the pollen. Place pollen bag over silk, shake, then replace the silk bag. There are many easy, simple ways to protect yourself which speaks to motives of those that had fields contaminated. Whole fields being contaminated just doesn't happen without man helping. Since you are growing sweet corn, you can easily pick out 100% sweet corn seed versus sweet corn pollinated by field corn. So let it air dry, throw away the cross kernels if any.

Law of nature is corn pollen will move. No one can change that law. In trying to keep seed pure, welcome to the breeders nightmare.

And the answer to the OP's question is NO.

 

[ducks4you]

ANY government that takes away your ability to be self-sufficient by raising your own crops and saving your own seeds is wrong. Do you know that the Soviet Union murdered farmers to cause a famine and built up their socialist government? This happened under Stalin. We're getting a whiff of what that might be like with this legislation in Europe. Honestly, out of control governments will do ANYTHING to make us into criminals. Look at the American in North Korea who has been imprisoned for 15 years bc he was trying to find homes for N.Korean orphans. HE is a North Korean felon. I don't want to be an American felon. RIDICULOUS!!!
PLEASE, PLEASE pay attention to Washington!!!! I KNOW that we have our labors of love and they are time consuming, but you don't know about so many under-the-radar laws that Washington has passed over the last 30 years. Many ridiculous things are now illegal. As an example, you cannot pick up and own a songbird feather. It is illegal to do so, and practically every backyard bird is considered a songbird. If you are charged with a felony and then convicted of it, you are unable to work in most professions. You SEE where this is going.
It is VITAL that we pay attention to and vote out the people who go to D.C. and "party" and play politics with their D.C. friends, then forget about serving US.
This whole story is chilling to me.

 

[897tgigvib]

I'm just the gnarly sort. Comes from going to Cook Junior high, and having my own personal bully. Learned that it is most certainly better to get a bloody lip and head pounded into the concrete while knowing I said the right thing than being a safe suck up.

Anyone want to tell me to accidentally purchase their products or else all product prices will go up, wellp, go ahead, bloody my mouth. Do it good! Observe how the good guy loses. Learn. Go ahead. Raise those prices! All you want!

See? We are not yet extinct. Once all the good guys are extinct, then the rest that are left, wellp, go ahead and do all you want to each other, preferably on another planet. Leave my dust alone on this planet that I love.

Yea, I am glad for seedcorn's input, for sure. Just, how come seedcorn has not been more convinced yet? See? It does no good to try, here, nor anywhere.

 

[hoodat]

I have the right to bare herbs and veggies as I please....

We need to go all Tea Party on Monsanto and start burning fields of GMO corn and destroying any seed we can get our hands on.

Go ahead. When production goes down, prices go skyrocketing, better run for cover from general population when they find out who is responsible. Will be outcry for your life.

What land produces the most food per square foot? Surprisingly, it is the family garden. Small farms come in second and huge farms lag way behind.
The smaller the area being farmed the more productive it is. If they want to increase the food supply small farms are the way to go.

 

[Jared77]

Dang it I go and work on painting my house and I miss a good ole fashioned discussion like this? Man alive I gotta paint faster so I can visit TEG more frequently!

Anyhow I'm with Seedcorn on this. While not working specifically with plants I've had my own breeding projects that I've worked on and know the headache and heartache of trying to make progress with your efforts. I can relate its tough.

If you want to keep your lines pure then your going to have to take the effort and isolate blossoms, and pollinate yourself. Now do you need to do this with all the blossoms? Absolutely not, just some so you have a good crop to save seeds from.

That way your planting pure brandywines, or Black Krims or straight 8s or whatever you want to keep pure so the next years seeds will continue to be safe from GMOs. It takes work but that's the price if you want that purity.

What land produces the most food per square foot? Surprisingly, it is the family garden. Small farms come in second and huge farms lag way behind.
The smaller the area being farmed the more productive it is. If they want to increase the food supply small farms are the way to go.

Compared to what? Sorry but I don't buy that in the least. If that was the case there wouldn't be the big scale operations that we see today. We consume (and I say consume because we are extremely wasteful with our food) so much that I don't think the small farm model would be able to produce enough corn, soybeans etc to meet demand. I believe that per square foot the home garden may grow more total lbs of food but that's based on a diversity of food. The weight of a single pumpkin or a single watermelon is how many ears of corn? How many soybeans does it take to weigh against a cucumber or tomato?

Hunger in America exists for over 50 million people. That is 1 in 6 of the U.S. population including more than 1 in 5 children.

How's that for a statistic? That's the single statistic that just infuriates me. And why when I see all this crap about eating better and how we need to get away from mass produced food I get angry.

How many heirloom tomatoes does it take to combat that kind of hunger? How many grass fed beef cows? How many free range chickens? With an average class size of 30 GMOs and selectively bred food helps keep the food prices low enough by volume to make feeding those 6 kids at lunch possible. A lunch which could be the ONLY meal they get. And that's just one class. Think about how many teachers are at your local school. Each with a class, I bet we could easily fill a whole classroom of hungry kids with those kinds of numbers. So what are you going to pay more in taxes to feed them? Or are we going to cut the music program? No more theater classes? No more art classes? That money has to come from somewhere. Those things are nice but don't hold a candle to starving children.

Are you going to donate more money if you can't grow crops year round to the shelters and soup kitchens so people can eat? GMOs make the shelters dollar go farther.

I've seen hungry kids. I've seen hungry adults. Veterans, single mothers, addicts, people who had a real bad run of luck, and the those people who are locked up in their own minds. They don't give a 500 acre field worth of organic cucumbers if their foods from GMOs or not. They are hungry. They need to eat. And the shelters and soup kitchens need to stretch every single penny the can to make as many meals as they can.

Sure they'll take every donation they can but I have serious doubts that there are enough people growing enough food to keep the shelters pantries stocked.

Its about priorities. I hear it all the time. GMOs are bad for the body. They cause damages etc people who eat them are going to die. If they don't eat they'll die a lot sooner. So which is worse?

pssst............pssst! Wanna know a little secret? We've been slowly dying since the day we were born.

 

[ducks4you]

Jared, I think you've missed the point. We don't want our government to tell us it is illegal for us to save our own seeds.

 

[Jared77]

Just read what EU trying to pass. EU wants to control what is SOLD as seed. Sounds sane to me. Has NOTHING to do with home gardeners that want to save their own seed. Selling it enters a different arena.

Thank you Seedcorn from making me retype this out.

My reply was to the whole Monsanto = the devil mentality. Granted I prefer my veggies home grown but I'm not 100% organic either. Just how I feel about this. Often times the organic movement comes off as preaching. I grow much of my own food and I hunt. I feed my family well however I'm not going to get down on those who lack the space/ability to grow their own because of circumstances, or demand that organics are the only way to go because its not realistic.

To me those a a luxury that many folks simply can't afford. So when people get all preachy about it I don't always keep my comments to myself.

 

[hoodat]

So far as the family garden is concerned organic gardening is actually cheaper. There is waste everywhere you look once you learn to see things like Fall leaves, grass and hedge trimmings etc. as free fertilizer rather than something to be hauled to the land fill. Rabbits and/or chickens plus a family garden is a perfect fit. I spend absolutely nothing on fertilizer and very little on bug spray (under $20 per year). My rabbits see very little manufactured rabbit food. I feed them mostly on greens I gather wild and weeds and trimmings from the garden. My ground keeps getting better every year because I use the rabbit manure to feed the plants. By gathering wild greens I am actually bringing in nutrients from off my land and from places where they would otherwise be wasted. My vegetables,meat and some of my grain are almost free. You can't get much cheaper than that.
Your neighbors would be thrilled if you offered to rake their leaves and haul off their lawn clippings free.
I hasten to add that I do all this on a postage stamp sized tract house lot.

 

[seedcorn]

Jared, I think you've missed the point. We don't want our government to tell us it is illegal for us to save our own seeds.

Duck, I would join you if they outlawed saving your own seed.

I will also support breeders (both corporate and individual) in their right to control their work.

 

[seedcorn]

So far as the family garden is concerned organic gardening is actually cheaper. There is waste everywhere you look once you learn to see things like Fall leaves, grass and hedge trimmings etc. as free fertilizer rather than something to be hauled to the land fill. Rabbits and/or chickens plus a family garden is a perfect fit. I spend absolutely nothing on fertilizer and very little on bug spray (under $20 per year). My rabbits see very little manufactured rabbit food. I feed them mostly on greens I gather wild and weeds and trimmings from the garden. My ground keeps getting better every year because I use the rabbit manure to feed the plants. By gathering wild greens I am actually bringing in nutrients from off my land and from places where they would otherwise be wasted. My vegetables,meat and some of my grain are almost free. You can't get much cheaper than that.
Your neighbors would be thrilled if you offered to rake their leaves and haul off their lawn clippings free.
I hasten to add that I do all this on a postage stamp sized tract house lot.

On getting cheaper produce/meat by doing what you are doing, ok-no disagreement. Try to live doing this-no SS, no disability, etc, you would starve or at the least lose all power and not be able to afford anything.

On small farm, homestead being able to produce more and cheaper than large farms, not even close. If it were so, we'd still have large numbers of small farmers--see the attrition of small farmers in last 20 years. To compare a 30' X 60' garden to a farm of 1,000+ acres is like comparing Sears lawn mower to John Deere new combine.