Monsanto goes ‘Big Brother’

Monsanto gets a golden goose for chickenfeed

By ALAN GUEBERT
Columbia Daily Tribune

Every week for 19 years, this 170-square-foot, two-dog, one-person office has declared its complete devotion to numbers.

For example, just last week we found it completely fascinating that in just three days this month, 100 U.S. senators offered 302 amendments to an Ag Committee-approved 2012 farm bill that already ran more than 1,000 pages.

In comparison, the 3-by-5-inch booklet on my desk that contains the entire U.S. Constitution runs 38 pages.

More recently, two numbers — $210 million and $40 million — have bounced around this sunlit office.

The first is the price Monsanto paid for Precision Planting, a Tremont, Ill., maker of after-market planting and harvesting equipment that it explains will “help farmers plant, harvest and analyze data from each field to improve yield and productivity.”

(…)According to the May 23 news release that announced the deal, Precision’s “new FieldView technology … offers an application designed to monitor all critical aspects of planter performance and crop data analysis.”

That means Monsanto bought the hardware and software it believes will accurately deliver “the optimum genetics to each square foot of soil.”

It also means that at any point in the growing and harvest seasons, Monsanto likely will know the dates, times, acreages, soil types, weather, seeding rates, yield, moisture content — in short, just about every hard number connected to any field — that uses its Precision technology anywhere in the world.

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