Here's Hoping that The Farmer Wins

An Indiana soybean farmer, bought seeds from the local elevator and replanted them, and was promptly sued by the axis of evil Monsanto, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case:

As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.

On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.

Not that Bowman sees it that way. "I really don't consider it as David and Goliath. I don't think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong," Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.

Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto's opposing legal teams will face off in front of America's most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.

………

As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.

On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.

Not that Bowman sees it that way. "I really don't consider it as David and Goliath. I don't think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong," Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.

Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto's opposing legal teams will face off in front of America's most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.

I really, really, hope that Bowman cleans their clock in the Supreme Court.

The idea that the right of farmers to replant seeds, a right that is literally thousands of years old, and this right should not be, to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan, "Crucified on a cross of patent law."

My guess is that it is likely that Bowman will prevail, as Monsanto prevailed at the district court, and then at the patent court, and these days, the Supreme Court only takes these cases when it wants to throw a brush back pitch at the patent court being nuts.

The case is Vernon Hugh Bowman v. Monsanto.