Give Farmers Back Their Right to Save Seeds

Seeds used to be a shared resource, free for anyone to save, grow or share.

Now they’re one of the most expensive things farmers have to buy. Up to a quarter of farmers’ annual input costs go to BASF, Bayer, ChemChina, and Corteva.

Seed saving used to be the right of every farmer. 

Now it’s illegal—if the seed is patented, as over 90% of commercial field crops in the US are. In 2025, Missouri farmer Caleb Duffy was ordered to pay Bayer-Monsanto $549,500 for violating the company’s patent rights when he used seeds he had saved from his harvested crops for replanting.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to pass the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act to restore farmers' rights to save, breed, and replant seeds!

The Fair Seeds for Farmers Act prohibits corporate seed companies from contractually prohibiting farmers from saving seeds between seasons or otherwise limiting the use of seeds or plants for research, breeding, experimentation, or propagation.

In addition, the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act would clarify that the only intellectual property protections that apply to seeds and plants are the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) (1970) and the Plant Patent Act (PPA) (1930). 

That would mark a return to how things worked before the courts changed course. Under the PVPA and the PPA, plant breeders were granted an exclusive right to propagate and sell new varieties for 20 years, but researchers could use them for breeding, and farmers could save seeds to replant and sell. 

No company had the right to patent the building blocks of life and the pool of plant genetics remained a common good available to all.

In restoring the primacy of the PVPA and the PPA, the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act would overturn a series of Supreme Court rulings from the 1980s to the 2000s that ended the earlier prohibition on patenting living things and products of nature.

The landmark case in that line was Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), where a five-to-four majority of the Court allowed the first patent on a living organism, a genetically engineered bacterium created for General Electric.

As the dissent argued, patents on the processes by which new living organisms were created were appropriate, but allowing General Electric “to secure a monopoly on the living organism itself, no matter how produced or how used” was not. 

Unfortunately, that logic didn’t win the day. The problem created by Diamond v. Chakrabarty has grown to the extent that multinational companies now feel empowered to bully local seed breeders over potential violations of their patents on traits from tomatoes “having pink fruits” to “drought tolerant plants” and “onions with high storage ability.” (That language is taken from a letter BASF sent to Uprising Seeds. The Organic Seed Alliance confirmed with BASF that it sends letters like this every year to “a large number of U.S. seed companies.”)

The Fair Seeds for Farmers Act would put this harassment to an end.

The only problem with the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act is that it wouldn't act retroactively to strip patent protections from companies claiming dominion over life forms—it would only block companies from doing so in the future.

Nevertheless, it’s a good and important start.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to pass the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act to restore farmers' rights to save, breed, and replant seeds!