Public universities once were the major producers of new corn hybrids. They released their seed lines to the public. This university corn helped many small seed companies flourish. This public research has been taken over by private companies large enough to fund world-class research labs. University of Massachusetts corn researcher Garrison Wilkes says this hurts small seed businesses.
Larger companies are able to keep information proprietary - that is secret.
The small seed companies disappear, the university disappears, and that leaves only the large multinationals. Wilkes says nowadays the development of new corn lines is mainly in the hand of a dozen or so large companies. He says this creates another worry. When we have very few suppliers of seed, the gene base becomes more and more narrow. Wilkes says increased gene uniformity heightens the disease risk in the U.S. corn crop.