The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

the iron law of the patenting of life 209where he took plant samples and photographs. The tone was often threatening,even brutal. Sometimes no agent ever appeared, but the grower wassent a summons on the basis of a “dossier” made up of aerial views andanalyses of plants taken from the farmer’s property without his or her knowledge.Not infrequently, farmers who were sued denied that they could bebound by a technology agreement (twenty-five out of ninety), because thedealer who sold them the seed had never talked about it, because they signedwithout really reading it, or because the practice was so out of the ordinary.This was the case for Homan McFarling, a Missouri farmer sued in 2000 forhaving “saved RR soybean seed,” something he never denied. The trial verdictrequired him to pay 120 times the cost of the saved seed, or $780,000,according to the terms of the agreement, which he didn’t even remembersigning and of which he didn’t have a copy. He appealed and, unusually, wona reduction in damages: the court questioned “the constitutionality of a contractasking for enormous damages for what was a very small actual loss.” 14The amount he finally paid is unknown.Others were penalized even though they didn’t know they were growingGM crops. For example, Hendrik Hartkamp, a native of the Netherlands,bought a ranch in Oklahoma in 1998. On the property he found a store ofsoybean seeds, which he planted. On April 3, 2000, he was sued by Monsantofor “patent law violation,” because some of his seeds were transgenic.After ruining himself in conducting his defense, he sold his ranch at a lossand left the United States for good. “The terrible thing,” Joseph Mendelsontold me, “is that courts don’t distinguish between those who knowingly reusetheir seeds and those who did not plant GMOs intentionally. The only thingthat counts is that the gene was found in a field: whatever the reason, theowner of the field is held liable.” When a farmer claimed that he had neversigned a contract but settled for $100,000 (hence remaining anonymous),a Monsanto representative retorted with remarkable frankness: “We ownyou—we own anybody that buys our Roundup Ready products.” 15The CFS report also reveals that for at least six of the ninety suits filed byMonsanto the agreement presented by the company had a forged signature,“a practice documented as common among seed dealers.” This happened,for example, to Eugene Stratemeyer, an Illinois farmer who fell into a trapset by an “inspector”: in July 1998, a man appeared at his farm and asked tobuy a small quantity of seeds. Since the planting season was over, he explainedthat he wanted to do an erosion test. Stratemeyer agreed to help him