Biotech Values

[jellybean]

Actually, the other guy is closer to having this correct. Yield in corn is about the seeds and farmers are willing to pay higher costs for the seeds because the yield of seed in those plants is greater than the parent strains or the F2 generations. The reason farmers are locked into buying this from Monsanto is two-fold, first corn is a self pollinator and the effort of maintaining the correct hybrid traits requires laborious destassling and second you have to have the correct set of parents to produce exactly the desired genetic makeup which means planting the parental strains that give lower yield.

In the 1970s, the most popular type of corn had a mitochondrial based infertility bred into the strain to make hybrid production easier. This was the strain that had susceptibility to a specific corn rust that wiped out a large portion of the corn crop that year.