seed

Seed companies Monsanto and Dow filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to overturn a voter-approved moratorium on genetically engineered crops in Maui County, Hawaii, said the Maui Times.

Seed and chemical company Monsanto announced an agreement with soft white wheat growers to settle three class-action lawsuits that arose from the discovery that some of its experimental genetically engineered wheat was growing wild in eastern Oregon.

The "slow atrophy of public funding" for plant-breeding programs "means that farmers have been left with fewer and fewer seed choices over the years and are ill-prepared to meet 21st Century needs," says the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Seed company Syngenta says it acted responsibly in selling two strains of genetically engineered corn that are approved for cultivation in the United States although not allowed for import by China, says DTN.

The practice of coating soybean seed with neonicotinoid pesticides as a safeguard against insect damage provides "negligible overall benefits to soybean production in most situations," says an EPA analysis.

Class-action lawsuits asking $1 billion in damages from seed company Syngenta were filed in federal court Iowa, Illinois and and Nebraska.

At least one soybean exporter in Brazil has agreed to collect royalties for Monsanto, the giant seed company, from growers who plant biotech seeds that contain Monsanto's traits, said Reuters, citing industry sources.

Monsanto Co, the giant seed company, expects to begin sales in 2016 of soybeans engineered for tolerance to a wider range of herbicides, says the St Louis Business Journal.

There's buzz about the Corn Belt moving northward into Canada's prairie provinces. Top Producer magazine says, "Leading the charge are Manitoba, where corn acreage has doubled to 380,000 in just two years, and Alberta, which grows almost 25,000 acres of corn."

A softening of seed corn sales was behind an 11 percent drop in DuPont's agriculture sector operating profits in the quarter ending in June, says AgriMoney. It quoted DuPont's chief executive as saying the company has faith in the business over the longer term although big big crop crops this year would "pressure overall economics for corn and soybean farmers."

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton "expressed enthusiasm for biotech seeds" and suggested the industry should stress the benefits of the crops, such as drought resistance, rather than the umbrella description...

Vermont state senators passed, 28-2, a bill to require labels on foods made with genetically modified organisms and sold at retail - one of the final steps toward the first such state law.