I've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then wait a few weeks for them to dry
This is not clear. The article is talking about traditional seeds for which that could be true (I don't know what is traditional in Kenya). Other commenters are talking about Maize which is from America and thus not traditional in Africa and thus there are no traditional seeds in Kenya. Maize also benefits greatly from hybridization, but there are other plants that do not, if we are talking about Maize you are wrong new seeds are much better than traditional, but if we are talking about other seeds who knows.
That is a "city slicker" read on the American farmer. The actually farmers themselves learned long ago that savings seeds isn't worth doing even without the contract. The terms of the contract look bad from the outside, but to the farmer they are "I wouldn't do that anyway"
What is a reasonable price? Hybrid seeds at 3x the price of traditional seeds could well be a great value because at the end of the year you get that much better of a crop.
Of course you have to pay for the seeds up front and get the reward at the end of the year. Investments are like that, a lot of poor farmers could spend 4x their current annual income on modern technology (seeds, fertilizer, tractors) and at the end of the year have more money left over than they had the previous year - but of course they need to get to harvest to get all the money. Worse there will be bad years where they lose money - it works out on average over 20 years but the individual years can be a killer if you start in the wrong year.
> So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well
Absolutely. The first generation of a hybrid seed will produce several times more than either traditional seeds or the second generation. You can't reasonably grow your own hybrid seeds as you need to keep your fields to grow those seeds well separated from any other fields.
Now not all plants can be hybridized, and even of those that can I won't state with confidence that all of them have that property. However Maize (corn in US) which is a major world crop does act like this.
> Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable
Not exactly. There is some of that for sure, but there is also that if you are a seed producer you want to ensure your customers get your good seed and not counterfeit that looks just like yours (if you cannot examine cell DNA you can't tell the difference between a first generation hybrid and any other seed).
However the law was written is clearly too broad. It should protect the hybrid seeds - nobody wants any seed claimed as hybrid that isn't a first generation hybrid. However it shouldn't affect any traditionally saved seeds (though where hybrid is available nobody wants them except museums)
If you lived in the Midwest at any point and heard about high school kids getting “detassling” jobs, they were forcing hybridization of two corn lines in half the crop by removing pollen from the other half. Two strains were planted in the same field in stripes.
Did you go to high school in the country that made this law? In addition, how many farmers in that country get high school education?
From what I read getting grades 1-8 is common in Kenya, but the high school years of education drop off significantly with only around 40% of the population getting that education, and making an educated guess that would target city people more than those that would be farmers.
Technical debt is intentional compromises. It sounds like you are thinking of not intentional compromises, but instead accidents where someone didn't understand the requirements and so did it slightly wrong for the expected future. Cases where the system wasn't designed to handle requirements changing in the way they did so you had to "make an ugly hack" to ship are technical debt.
I understand the distinction, but at some point it's not super helpful, and I would argue even counter productive.
If you have a system that is big enough and has had enough change over time that it's structure is no longer well suited to the current or near future job-to-be-done, then it doesn't really matter how you got there, you need to explain to non-technical stakeholders that current business requests will take longer than it would intuitively take to build if you just look at the delta of the UX that exists today compared to what they want (ie. the "why can't you just..." conversation). This is a situation where the phrase "technical debt" is a useful metaphor that has crossed the chasm to non-technical business leaders, and can be useful (when used judiciously of course).
It actually undermines the usefulness of the metaphor if you try to pedantically uphold the distinction that tech debt is always intentional, because non-technical stakeholders will wonder why engineering would intentionally put us in this situation. I understand we all get to have our techie pet peeves (hacker != black hat), but this is really not a semantic battle I would fight if I'm dealing with anyone non-technical.
The definition of technical debt is the compromises you intentionally make (generally to ship something thus not going bankrupt). Thus by definition nobody made a mistake: this was an intentional decision that was believed correct at the time. You will pay a cost later for the decision, but it is rarely a mistake to make those compromises.
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