Why are the seeds produced from crops of genetically-modified plants often not planted the next year by farmers?
There are several different reasons why this could be. For crops such as corn, in which the farmers plant hybrid seed, farmers do not replant the seeds produced from their commercial crops. Crops grown from replanted hybrid seeds will have much lower yields than the original hybrid and will be highly non-uniform due to the segregation of traits (height, maturity, etc) from the parents of the original hybrid. In the case of open pollinated crops, such as soybean and cotton, growers will purchase new planting seed to ensure that the seed meets physical and genetic purity standards and will be truly representative of the variety they want to grow. In the case of hybrids and open pollinated varieties containing genetically-modified traits, the traits are usually patented by the developers to allow them to recover the high costs of developing these traits. When a crop variety contains a patented trait, the company can control how the seed containing that trait is used through a label licens
