Hybrid Seeds and GMO Seeds

Marketplace:

Janisse Ray spends a lot of her time with seeds, thinking about them, writing about them and (of course) planting them in the ground. Her new book is called "The Seed Underground."
Ray explains that it's only in the last hundred years that farmers have shifted from caretakers to "renters" of genetic material in the form of high-tech seeds.
"With the advent of patenting laws and the ability to patent life, basically, a patent supercedes the rights of a farmer to save his own seeds," says Ray. Seeds have always had value, but the legal right to plant is a new phenomenon -- thanks to "G.M." or genetically-modified seeds.
"The Seed Underground" also takes readers to farms and neighborhood gardens around the country where people are cataloging and cultivating the seeds their families have planted for generations.  Ray says this underground movement (made up of those she has dubbed "quiet revolutionaries") is one way to preserve varieties of fruits and vegetables for the future.
Ray herself is "not opposed to technology," but she believes science should be used for "the good of all humanity" over the long haul.
"I'm opposed to science or technology being used for short-term profits," she sums up. "I can say that hybrid seeds have brought us a lot of good, and perhaps [genetically-modified seeds] could."

Wait a second:

The 1970s marked the first time when scientists patented methods on their biotechnological inventions with recombinant DNA. It wasn’t until 1980 that patents for whole-scale living organisms were permitted. In Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the U.S. Supreme Court established the patentability of living matter, provided it was truly "man-made." The subject for this particular case was a genetically engineered bacterium that was specifically modified to help clean up and degrade oil spills.
Since that 1980 court case, there has been much patenting of genetically modified organisms. This includes bacteria (as just mentioned), viruses, seeds, plants, and even non-human animals. For example, a genetically modified mouse, dubbed the Oncomouse, that is useful for studying cancer, was patented by Harvard University.

So what happened a little less than 100 years ago?  How about the development of hybrid seed:

 In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is seed produced by cross-pollinated plants. In hybrid seed production, the crosses are specific and controlled. The advantage of growing hybrid seed compared to inbred lines comes from heterosis. To produce hybrid seed, elite inbred varieties with well documented and consistent phenotypes (such as yield) are crossed and the resulting hybrid seed is collected. Another factor that is important in hybrid seed production is the combining ability of the parent plants. Although two elite inbred parent plant varieties may produce the highest yields of their crop, it does not necessarily mean that crossing these inbreds will result in the highest yielding hybrid. Combining ability is the term used to describe the level of heterosis that the parents will generate in the resultant seed. Higher combining ability between the parents results in increased performance in the resulting hybrid seed. Hybrids are bred to improve the characteristics of the resulting plants, such as better yield, greater uniformity, improved color, disease resistance, and so forth. Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid, which causes the first generation of seed from the hybrids planted to be inbred. This is why hybrid seed is generally not saved from subsequent generations and is purchased for each planting. Hybrid seeds are much dearer than normal seeds, due to the technology, time and effort put in to produce them. (emphasis mine)

 Hmm, the 1920s. Let's take a look at a chart:

So farmers could have continued to use open-pollinated varieties of corn they used from the beginning of time until really the mid '30s or so, or they could start buying better yielding hybrid seeds which would yield much more grain, even though they wouldn't be able to reuse the seed. 

It is true that farmers can't reuse the patented GMO soybeans (yet), but they knew that was part of the deal going in.  But considering how much benefit they have seen from the hybrid seeds, I'm not surprised they took that deal.  Saving seed is beneficial, but improved genetics is more beneficial.  Patents weren't the things that killed open variety corn.