The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

210 the world according to monsantoout. Ordered to pay damages of $16,874.28 for patent infringement, Stratemeyercountersued Monsanto for use of forgery.When farmers decide to defend themselves by publicly challenging theprohibition of replanting part of their crop, they leave themselves open toharassment or even a carefully orchestrated campaign of slander in the mediaand in the eyes of all agricultural intermediaries. This is what happenedto Mitchell Scruggs, a Mississippi farmer who had always admitted savingRR soybean and Bt cotton seeds. He saw this as an inalienable right that hedefended on principle, but also because of the financial implications ofMonsanto’s requirement. His calculation was simple: In 2000 he grew soybeanson 13,000 acres, 75 percent of them transgenic. To sow one acre withRR soybean seed, he had to pay $24.50 for a fifty-pound bag, compared to$7.50 for conventional soybean seed. To illustrate the “huge profits earnedby Monsanto,” he pointed out that if he decided to sell legally the surplus ofhis conventional crop as seeds, he would get $4 a bag. 16 For Bt cotton, hesaid, the ratio was one to four between conventional and transgenic seeds.Ordered to pay damages of $65,000 in 2003, Scruggs initiated a class actionsuit accusing Monsanto of antitrust violations and asking that GMOsbe subject to the usual plant variety protection system. Because he hadopenly resisted “Monsanto’s law,” his life became infernal: company agentshad gone so far as to buy an empty lot across the street from his farm supplystore where they set up a surveillance camera, and helicopters frequentlyflew over his property. 17Matters sometimes turned tragic, ending in prison terms. In January2000, for example, Ken Ralph, a Tennessee farmer, was sued for savingforty-one tons of transgenic soybean and cotton seed. Judge Rodney Sippelof the U.S. District Court in St. Louis ordered Ralph to pay preliminarydamages of $100,000 and required that he keep the seed in question so thatthe exact harm suffered by Monsanto could be assessed. At the end of hisrope, even though he maintained that the signature on the agreement presentedby the company was a forgery, Ralph decided to burn the stock.“We’re tired of being pushed around by Monsanto. We are being . . . drugdown a road like a bunch of dogs,” he told the Associated Press. 18 Sippelfinally ordered him to pay $1.7 million in civil damages, and, followinga guilty plea, another judge sentenced him to eight months in prison andfurther damages of $165,469 for “obstruction of justice and destruction ofevidence.”