What next for Percy Schmeiser? 

Canadian Broadcast Corporation 3apr01

Saskatchewan's Percy Schmeiser got decked last week, knocked clean out of the ring by biotech giant Monsanto. It was a David and Goliath battle, to be sure, and Goliath won this one handily.

A Federal Court judge in Winnipeg ruled that Schmeiser, who grows canola (and wheat, peas and sometimes oats) on his 1,400-acre spread east of Saskatoon, violated Monsanto's patent on its special genetically modified canola seeds.

"I'm not stupid," Schmeiser told CBC News Online. "I knew what I was up against."

He intends to lick his wounds for a week at his farm near Bruno, then decide what to do next.

His choices:

• Appeal the Federal Court's decision.
  
• Continue his $10-million counter-lawsuit against Monsanto.

A nagging problem is money. In his two-year-plus battle with Monsanto, Schmeiser has run up some $200,000 in legal fees. If he's able to get enough support – financial support, he's got tonnes of moral support – he will step back into the ring for another toe-to-toe slugfest. The 70-year-old Schmeiser knows if he loses again he will have to sell the farm, which he has been working for 42 years.

At this point he's leaning to continuing his lawsuit, claiming Monsanto's seeds blew into his canola, contaminating his crop of nongenetically modified canola. There's a principle here that Schmeiser endorses, and it's the time-honoured practice of farmers replanting seeds from the previous year's crop.

The Federal Court judge didn't disagree that the Monsanto seeds may have blown on to Schmeiser's farm. The judge did agree, however, that it was Schmeiser's obligation to destroy whatever Monsanto canola resulted from the blown seeds.

Schmeiser even tried the bull-over-the-fence analogy during his court fight. When I dropped by his place in September 1999, he explained it to me this way:

"What if a farmer has a scrub bull?" he asked. “And his neighbor's got a herd of purebred registered cows? Through negligence, the bull gets over the fence and impregnates his neighbor's cows. Now the guy with the scrub bull says those calves are his. The cows too! Same thing, eh?"

Well, that's not how the Federal Court judge saw it.

As Schmeiser remembers, the judge said, "The bull farmer didn't have a patent on the bull."

Schmeiser wonders what would happen if he patented a poison, then let it fly in the wind to contaminate surrounding farms. "What if I didn't like my neighbor?" he suggested. "What if I tossed a handful of my patented poison in the wind so it contaminated his farm?"

What worries him – he thinks other farmers should be worried, too – is that during severely wet planting seasons, when machinery can't get into the fields, some farmers have seeded their crops by dropping seeds from an airplane. He thinks this could lead to a lot more Schmeiser versus Monsanto confrontations.

Schmeiser has set up a nonprofit trust fund to raise money for his rematch with Monsanto. It's under his name at a CIBC branch in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, towards the Manitoba border. He's getting donations of $20, $50 and $100. After the decision last week a lady in Montana, just south of the Saskatchewan border, sent him a cheque for $1,000 US.

Schmeiser still has three weeks to decide whether to appeal. He won't appeal and continue his lawsuit against Monsanto. "That would be like trying to fight a war on two fronts," he said.

The Federal Court judge said the concentrations of Monsanto canola on Schmeiser's farm were too high to be accidental. Schmeiser admits there have been Monsanto seeds growing in his fields, in patches varying in concentration from zero to eight to 58 per cent. There are even patented genetically modified canola seeds growing by the driveway of his farm equipment dealership outside the town of Bruno.

Schmeiser's been in slugfests before. He has served as a popular local mayor and as an MLA in the Saskatchewan legislature. He's modest about these achievements. As he is about the fact that he made three attempts to climb Mount Everest but "only" got 23,000 feet up.