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Monsanto Wins Supreme Court Case Against Small-Time Farmer

  • Spence Cooper
  • May 14, 2013

Monsanto Wins Supreme Court Case Against Small-Time FarmerLast year, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted an appeal filed by a 75-year-old small time farmer named Vernon Hugh Bowman.

Bowman, who grows wheat and corn along with soybeans on 300 acres of land he inherited from his father, bought a mix of unmarked grain used for animal feed from a grain elevator.

Later he planted the grain on his Midwest farm, but the mix of grain he purchased included Monsanto’s patented herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready.

Farmers that buy Monsanto’s grain are typically forced to sign a contract prohibiting them from saving seeds from the crop planted to prevent farmers from obtaining any new generations of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybean.

But since Bowman bought a mix of grain with no patent technology agreement that was not bagged and branded soybean seeds sold by Monsanto, he assumed he could plant them and create more grain without infringing on Monsanto’s patents.

Bowman points out that farmers have always been allowed to buy elevator grain for seed. “You have no idea what kind of seed you’re buying at an elevator. They claim I’m making a new seed by planting it. But that’s far-fetched reasoning.”

“If they then claim that I can’t use that, they’re forcing their patent on me,” Bowman said.

“No law was ever passed that said no farmers can’t go to the elevator and buy grain and use it, so to me they either forced their patent on me or they abandoned their patent by allowing it to be dumped it with non-Roundup grain.”

Prior to the appeal, in the court transcript, Justice Breyer argued that an infringement occurred when Bowman made generation three, adding that the bean Bowman bought could be used for any other purpose legally, except for making a new crop.

“Now, there’s another law that says you cannot make copies of a patented invention. And that law you have violated when you use it to make generation three, just as you have violated the law against assault were you to use it to commit an assault.”

Bowman insists Monsanto’s claims are absurd. “No Monsanto literature was ever printed that said that I couldn’t go to the elevator and buy commodity grain and plant it if I wanted to.”

But on Monday, Bowman lost the appeal. The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto.

“By planting and harvesting Monsanto’s patented seeds, Bowman made additional copies of Monsanto’s patented invention, and his conduct thus falls outside the protections of patent exhaustion,”the court ruled.

“Were this otherwise, Monsanto’s patent would provide scant benefit. After Monsanto sold its first seed, other seed companies could produce the patented seed to compete with Monsanto, and farmers would need to buy seed only once”

“Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion, the authorized sale of a patented article gives the purchaser, or any sub­sequent owner, a right to use or resell that article. Such a sale, however, does not allow the purchaser to make new copies of the patented invention,”Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court.

“The question in this case is whether a farmer who buys patented seeds may repro­duce them through planting and harvesting without the patent holder’s permission. We hold that he may not”

Over the years, Monsanto has filed a number of frivolous lawsuits against farmers, and at one time Monsanto investigated some 365 farmers for saving seed. Some argue Monsanto has no right to patent plants in the first place.

“Patent law is basically set up for machines and things of that sort, but not things that self-replicate,”said one attorney, who claimed patent law forbids people from recreating a machine or process someone else invented, but it doesn’t pertain to something like a soybean plant that naturally recreates itself.

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