Monsanto soybeans

 what if technology gave us the powers to make the next generation of the human race by powers other than lovemaking?  what if we could take the brains of the smartest geek, the looks of the prom queen and king, the brawn of the most athletic football player?  Wouldn't your kid just be the greatest?
 
Or what if you were a scientist who wanted to mate with a glow in the dark jellyfish so his children would glow in the dark? Why be limited to just the greatest traits found in Human Beings? Lets make a human with snake venom teeth, Leopard jumping power, Frog Limb regeneration, and, of course, being able to emit light.
 
Well, with technology, the Monsanto company was able to snip a protein making gene from a bacteria, who's production within the soybean plant is driven by an accelerator pedal heavy 'promotor' coming from a virus that affects cauliflower, a 'transit' gene from a petunia, and another odd snippet from another bacteria.
 
These Frankenstein pieces were chosen so the soybean could stay alive when the soybean field was sprayed with a certain herbicide, or weed killer.  The weed killer works by knocking out  a normal plant's ability to make protien, but with the new pieces from other species, the soybeans can survive the weed killer.
 
Like the chemical weapons in Syria. The people died cause they did not have gas masks.  Weed killer is like chemical weapons in the plant world.  Monsanto figured out how to put little gas masks inside the soybean plants.
 
This makes farming a lot easier.  You just spray this weed killer, which kills every other living thing out there, if you are a plant, but the Monsanto soybeans thrive.  Other farmers, who try to farm the old ways, constantly have to fight with weeds, and be very careful not to kill off the soybeans themselves.
 
since most farmers have gone with the Monsanto seeds, the Monsanto company has been granted the authority to go around to any farmers soybean fields, and test the soybeans, to see if they had stolen the seeds.  
 
All a farmer has to do to 'steal' Monsanto's seeds, is to go buy the soybeans from the grain suppliers, since most of the farmers used monsanto seeds, and since soybeans, are just the new batch of seeds containing all the genetics of the monsanto parent seeds.
so Monsanto goes into everybodies field, and if you dont have a contract with them, but are growing 'their ' seeds, well they will make you PAY.  Monsanto got Patents on their seeds, which give them the rights to be the only one to make the seeds for the next 17 years.  But since their idea came about in the seventies, how come they still have powers after all these years?  
 
Well, it is because they keep coming out with the 'latest and greatest' seeds. and the newer and better seeds come with a new patent, keeping monsanto safe for another 17 years.  Monsanto can keep this up, as long as they can come up with 'bigger and easier and better' every 17 years or so.  
 
Kind of like computers.   There was Pentium, then pentium II, then III then IV,then Celeron, then Xeon, then Mew-on, oh wait, maybe that was just my cat.
 
Monsanto has done similar gene manipulations with corn and alfalfa.   They also have figured out a way to make the seeds bigger, and the plants make more, so you get more grain per acre, about a hundred pounds more of grain per acre than normal.
 
So since Monsanto offers such an easy life if you are a farmer, and all you have to do is pay the piper, then, well, that is what the vast majority of farmers end up doing.
 
Monsanto has gotten to be the evil bully simply because they have provided a vastly easier way for the farmer to grow his crops than if they did not use monsanto seeds.
 
So the next time you are thinking about how evil the world is out there, at least you know how it got that way.  
 
OK, enough said for now.  Check back later for glow-in-the-dark sheep.