Open sourcing agriculture one seed at a time - TechRepublic

"While enterprises everywhere rush to gain control over their data, a far more momentous data battle is brewing on the farm. Agriculture giant Monsanto declares it can increase world-wide crop production by about $20 billion a year by using data to optimize seed planting. Meanwhile, farmers worry that they may be ceding control of their crops. In a very real sense, agriculture is reliving the early days of open-source software. And, right on cue, there's an open-source seed initiative designed to give farmer 'developers' perpetual control of their seeds ('code'). Will it work? ... Farmers have long owned their crop and equipment data. While estimates vary as to how much value they individually collect from such data, no one has questioned that it is, in fact, their data. Until now.  Monsanto and other agriculture giants have been steadily improving crop yields for decades with genetically modified seeds, among other innovations like data services derived from farm equipment machinery. Such seeds and services are proprietary, and Monsanto has launched lawsuits against nearly 150 US farmers since 1997 for replanting seeds that contain the company's proprietary characteristics, as the Wall Street Journal reports.  The other problem for farmers is that as much as they may want the data to help their own yields, they worry about aiding their competitors. As John McGuire, an agriculture technology consultant who runs Simplified Technology Services and developed geospatial tools for Monsanto in the late-1990s, tells Salon.com, 'If you inadvertently teach Monsanto what it is that makes you a better farmer than your neighbor, it can sell that information to your neighbor.'  It's a new spin on an old problem: corporate control and proprietization of otherwise open data ... The problem with farmers' efforts to combat the proprietization of agricultural data is that there's simply too much to be gained from big data. But, as happened in software, there is a way to both embrace big data while still hedging against the hegemony of large commercial interests: open source.  Recently, the Open Source Seed Initiative was born, promising to 'open source' the 'code' behind 29 varieties of broccoli, kale, and other seeds. The purpose, as the free seed pledge makes clear, is to 'ensure your freedom to use the seed contained herein in any way you choose, and to make sure those freedoms are enjoyed by all subsequent users.' What does this mean? The pledge goes on: 'By attaching a free seed pledge to packets of open source seed, these genetic resources cannot be patented or otherwise legally protected, making them essentially available in perpetuity in a protected commons.'  Such seeds, in other words, won't become proprietary. Farmers will be able to use these seeds forever free of any corporate interest ... As in open source, I suspect we'll come to welcome both corporate and community interest. Whatever the farmers' worries about behemoth agriculture companies using data against them, the reality is that a balance between individual farmers and corporations likely helps all. The trick is to get that balance right.  In software, this has meant a balance between different licensing strategies, with the more restrictive GNU General Public License (GPL) balancing out the more permissive Apache Software License. Both are needed.  As the agricultural community figures out this balance, we'll see farming get the same benefit that enterprise software has seen. The Open Source Seed Initiative is a great step in the right direction, as Glyn Moody captures: 'The creation of free software 30 years ago has had a profound effect on computing, and helped fuel the rise of the Internet, with which it has a symbiotic relationship. Food and who controls it are arguably even more important issues for the world, and it would be nice to think that, despite its modest beginnings, the Open Source Seed Initiative might one day have as great an impact as its digital forebear' ..."