black farmers were sold fake crop seeds to drive them into bankruptcy

[SaiWa]

I am also puzzled why they are sueing Stine instead of the seed distributor.

Stine probably has way more money than the little distributor. In the game of litigation you sue any and everyone you can for the biggest payday possible. Nothing puzzling about this.

 

[Madmick]

It hasn't been proven the company purposefully switched the seeds in order to sell black farmers a subpar product, and no matter how far fetched it all sounds, people are already claiming racism without due process and a thorough investigation.

If you notice this is the weakness in the story, and I have honed in on that. Nevertheless, these farmers were defrauded. Does that not outrage you? It outrages me.

Profit is the most obvious motive for fraud, but it doesn't rule out other possibilities, and it isn't actually established as the motive, here. Right now I haven't seen any evidence presented towards the assumption of racism, but it is one of the cogent possibilities: even if one much further down the ladder of likelihood.

 

[ObamaPhoneLady]

 

[ObamaPhoneLady]

I don't believe anyone thinks this was the companies idea, (despite people skillfully shooting down that silly idea).

This would have been at point of delivery or sale. Some individual or small group were swapping grain so they could sell the proper stuff and pocket the difference.

My bet is they felt less bad about ripping off black farmers, thus established a pattern and thus we are discussing it now.

Or... The farmers are lying.

 

[Ortegoat]

Fake news

 

[DespicablePeep]

Imagine a corporation or distributor which profits from farming trying to ruin a farmer that uses their products just because o their color lol

President of Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association is claiming the company deliberately targeted them because they're black and the seeds are being used by the company to annihilate the remaining black farmers.

He's claiming banks, distributors and large corporations are discriminating to eradicate the remaining black farmers. That's what I meant by far fetched.

False accusations also happen a lot.

If they did in fact get shit seeds, I'm going to assume it was a mistake until proven otherwise.

 

[Long Dark Blues]

Land grab, IMO. To me that is the main motivation, not racism. Someone in the distribution company most likely has ties to someone who wants the land.

Thinking that the farmer's wouldn't be smart enough or at all able to get the seeds tested is where the racism most likely comes in.

 

[Falsedawn]

Imagine a corporation or distributor which profits from farming trying to ruin a farmer that uses their products just because o their color lol

Are you trying to tell me racism is irrational?

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

http://m.wmcactionnews5.com/story/3...nally-sold-fake-seeds-in-memphis-lawsuit-says



I'll just get this out of the way early, so you-know-who doesn't need to pop in with his usual contribution: "The black farmers were probably just burglars anyways. No big deal."

So anyways, yeah, this is fucking appalling. I hope it's not true for a number of reasons, but mainly because there's probably not going to be any sort of real justice done against a major agriculture company in a farm state.

Thanks for posting this!

Detasseling season has begun, so I was out until 11:30 last night.

I read this article over the radio to everyone that was out working. I also texted this article to my friends that are also in the Ag business.

We were all laughing our asses off at this article.

It's funny to see the utter bullshit that gets spread around my industry sometimes.

@Farmer Br0wn this is your time to shine. Explain what happened here please

Unless you had a forward-thinking plan for the last several years preparing for these lean times, no one's making any money in farming this year on the producer side.

If the allegations are absolutely true (I have some SERIOUS doubts), then the problem lies with the seed salesman and distributor, not the Stein Corporation. The Stein Corporation is being sued because they are the people with the most money in this story.

The logistical costs involved with trying to separate good seed from bad, and trying to make sure that only black people got this bad seed makes this a ridiculous notion in and of itself.

This paragraph right here betrayed the truth of the matter:

"why is it then that white farmers are buying Stine seed and their yield is 60, 70, 80, and 100 bushels of soybeans and black farmers who are using the exact same equipment with the exact same land, all of a sudden, your seeds are coming up 5, 6, and 7 bushels?"

There's another reason that a crop can yield horribly despite its seed quality, it's rainfall, or pestilence.

Soil quality. In that area of the country they've been farming the same soil for almost 150 year. Everything your crop needs you will have to put into the soil yourself before you plant. If a farmer fails to do so that's referred to as "mining the soil", taking nutrients out of the soil without replacing them afterwards.

I suspect that the farmers who are suing the Stein Corporation all applied anhydrous ammonia to their fields for the last several years. I suspect from years and years of anhydrous ammonia use, there soil is now so hard that they have a difficult time putting a disc in the ground.

We have a farmer in my county that does this exact practice, my brother and I drive by and laugh at his field every few weeks. He's applied so much anhydrous ammonia to his fields, that the only way that he can knife in more anhydrous, is to actually turn on his pivot. He has to water his bare soil just to soften it up enough to knife more anhydrous into his soil. His beans on that field look like absolute dog shit this year, and he's applied 6 inches of irrigation water trying to get his crop up. Anhydrous ammonia is a cheap source of nitrogen, but it kills all biological life in your soil. This means that you have no microbes that can break down micronutrients and make them more available for your plant.

My grandfather always said "You make you money off your creepy crawlies in the soil".

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

A Wharton Business School grad, I presume? The white farmers wouldn't buy seed from a seed seller who sells duds. Nobody would. Starting this year. The seed seller would go belly up, quick. And you think the white farmers and the black farmers aren't friends? Don't talk, golf, eat and drink together? Whatever? Absurd as presented, IMO.

People don't understand how essential having a good reputation is in the agriculture community.

That's one of the reasons I'm so skeptical of the narrative coming out of this story.

 

[Madmick]

Or... The farmers are lying.

People don't understand how essential having a good reputation is in the agriculture community.

That's one of the reasons I'm so skeptical of the narrative coming out of this story.

I do, Farmer. Not all of us living the city. It's why it immediately raised my eyebrow. I saw it as a risk of livelihood itself.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

Odds are the main company, Stine, never even had those soybeans on their property. Most of the stuff I sell is grown by me, cleaned by me, and sold by me. I prefer not to bag stuff, but if that's what the farmer wants that's what they get.
I have to send the head company samples and they might come check them when I'm cleaning or probe the bin, but they don't get shipped off somewhere and shipped back to me for sale. In my state, I have to send samples into the Department of Ag to check germ, quality, etc and some companies just go off of that data instead of requiring a sample be sent in.
I'm talking certified seed here. When you get to foundation, they might want to take the seed back and clean it themselves but that's usually not the case.

Bagging is such a pain in the ass. But as you said, that's what the farmer wants, that's what the farmer gets.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

How do you know what their business model is?

Because that's the business model of every seed representative in the country.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

But there are people like the Bundys out there.

I get that you have a personal hatred of the Bundy family, but bringing them up in unrelated topics is starting to border on obsession.

 

[chardog]

how the heck do you differentiate bad seed from good? I dont do big time farming, but have a few plots and we collect our own seeds at end of season. I'de sure like to know how to get "bad" seeds.................

is a corporation going out of it's way to engineer bad strains, then mass farm the seeds? Sounds pretty irrational.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

Would this hurt the distributor's business? No. The people who got legitimate seeds will have no reason to stop using the Stine company or the distributor.

If true, Farmers would abandon that distributor in droves.

It would eliminate the risk of your farm possibly being another one of this Distributors "experiments".

 

[Seano]

how the heck do you differentiate bad seed from good? I dont do big time farming, but have a few plots and we collect our own seeds at end of season. I'de sure like to know how to get "bad" seeds.................

is a corporation going out of it's way to engineer bad strains, then mass farm the seeds? Sounds pretty irrational.

One of the few things I could think of would be if they knew the seeds came from diseased stock but I can't imagine how you'd prove that.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

@Prefect brought up a very possible scenario as well. There’s basically 2 types of soybeans raised, Liberty Link(Bayer) and Round Up ready (Monsanto). Round up as we all know is glyphosate resistant and Liberty Link is glufosinate resistant. If you spray glufosinate on round up ready stuff, or vice versa, it will kill off the plant.
The farmers could have sprayed the wrong chemical or were given the wrong chemical. Even something like not cleaning out your sprayer between chemicals can do lots of damage.
As for it being stored improperly, that’s highly unlikely. Bad soybeans smell horrendous and they would have caught it when seeding. I can’t explain the smell, but it’s rank. They also swell to a noticeable size when wet.
They could have cracked them when handling, but you’d have to do it intentionally because there’s no way you’d crack almost every seed even if you trickled them through multiple augers.

When I read this story, something tells me that the explanation for these exceptionally low yields are somewhere in the soil. My second guess was an improper application of herbicide, just like you said.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

Spot on except it does hurt the business. If there are competitors, those farmers go somewhere else in future and you lose the repeat business. That’s not to say a distributor won’t go after the short term quick gain.

Seed sales is a very competitive business. In the late winter, and early spring seed Representatives come out of the woodwork. They'll drive right up to your shop, offering you the latest and greatest (and annoy you while you're trying to get work done).

They're constantly trying to undercut each other's prices. If a distributor actually tried to pull the scam that was alleged in this news story, the other seed Representatives would relentlessly bury that distributor to any Farmer they talk to, and then seriously undercut their price for that year alone for any farmer that used to do business with that distributor. Seed representatives will do just about anything to grab a bigger chunk of the market share.

The idea that a scam like this wouldn't hurt a seed distributor is so absurd that it could only be said by someone that has minimal interaction with actual customers on a day-to-day basis.

 

[Staph infection]

Why would they harm their business just to screw over some blacks in the south?