GM Crop Producer Monsanto Using Data Analytics To Expand Its Footprint

Nerval's Lobster writes "Monsanto is more infamous for growing its genetically modified crops than its use of software, but a series of corporate acquisitions and a new emphasis on tech solutions has transformed it into a firm that acts more like an innovative IT vendor than an agribusiness giant. Jim McCarter (the Entrepreneur in Residence for Monsanto) recently detailed for an audience in St. Louis how the company's IT efforts are expanding. Monsanto's core projects generate huge amounts of bits, especially its genomic efforts, which are the focus of so much public attention. Other big data gobblers are the phenotypes of millions of DNA structures that describe the various biological properties of each plant, and the photographic imagery of crop fields. (All told, there are several tens of petabytes that need storage and analysis, a number that's doubling roughly every 16 months.) With all that tech muscle, the company has launched IT-based initiatives such as its FieldScripts software, which uses proprietary algorithms (fed with data from the FieldScripts Testing Network and Monsanto research) to recommend where to best plant corn hybrids. 'Just like Amazon has its recommendation engine for what book to buy, we will have our recommendations of what and how a grower should plant a particular crop,' said McCarter. 'All fields aren't uniform and shouldn't be planted uniformly either.' Despite its increasingly sophisticated use of data analytics in the name of greater crop yields, however, Monsanto faces pushback from various groups with an aversion to genetically modified food; a current ballot initiative in Washington State, for example, could result in genetically modified foods needing a label in order to go on sale here. The company has also inspired a 'March Against Monsanto,' which has been much in the news lately."

Re:schitzophrenic summary.

[Solandri]

1) The Schmeiser case was a civil trial. The standard of evidence used by the judges was "on the balance" ("a preponderance of the evidence" in the U.S.). Basically, which side convinced the judges slightly more. The Canadian Supreme Court's ruling on it was split 5-4, so it's questionable to claim anything from the decision is "rather damning."

2) The Supreme Court put aside the award of Schmeiser's profits to Monsanto, and fined him just $1. Their reasoning was that while Schmeiser may have used Monsanto's GM seed and either deliberately or unwittingly helped it to spread to his fields, he did not benefit from it in any way for the simple reason that he did not spray Roundup on his crops. He sprayed it in the areas surrounding his fields to kill weeds, and he sprayed it in a small section of one field to determine if it had been contaminated. But he did not otherwise use it on his crop fields. In other words, Monsanto's seed did not benefit him in any way, and there was no motive for him to have acted with malicious intent as Monsanto claimed. Monsanto's hypothesized version of events (where Schmeiser attempted to create a Roundup-resistant canola strain without paying the licensing fees) is most likely baseless for this reason.

3) The court decision you cite took Monsanto's word that resistance to Roundup could not develop naturally. It thus found that Schmeiser "should have known" that the canola which survived Roundup in the ditches had Monsanto's patented gene, and he should have treated it as contraband. However, it's since been shown that Monsanto was wrong [slashdot.org], and Roundup-resistance can arise naturally in plants. Schmeiser's behavior of testing and putting aside seed from the contaminated field can thus be explained as him believing that perhaps he had a new strain of naturally Roundup-resistant canola. It doesn't have to be Monsanto's explanation that he knew he had Roundup Ready seed and was secretly and deliberately trying to incorporate it into his crop.

4) The court accepted Monsanto's explanation that seed which fell off of trucks could not travel the distance from the roadway to the field. It cites testimony from a Monsanto engineer (paragraphs 117-118) that seed which fell from a truck couldn't have fallen and been blown that far. I find that extremely dubious for the simple reason that the roadway is not limited to one truck and the wind. Other cars travel on the same roads. I have seen debris blown for miles along a road as other cars pass by and stir it up over and over. The court also incorrectly pegged 1997 (when Schmeiser first noticed the canola which survived spraying with Roundup) as the year of the contamination, and thus found it difficult to believe so much of Schmeiser's property had been contaminated so quickly merely from seed blown by the wind. But Schmeiser didn't spray Roundup throughout the ditches. He sprayed it only where he saw weeds (mostly around utility poles where workers couldn't keep the vegetation cut). The contamination could have begun years earlier, and only came to his attention in 1997.