Trust me, Monsanto has researched this thoroughly and found the exact price point at which farmers will pay for the patented seed as opposed to using bin-run or another competing commercial product.

So what that tells me is that yield, in dollars per acre, has increased slightly more than 325% over the same period of time. This gives farmers more profit per acre, if costs per acre have "only" gone up 325%.

What it *doesn't* tell me is whether yield, in soybeans per acre, has gone up at all. That 325% could all be market price, raised entirely by increased production costs. It is not even stated whether that figure is in real terms or nominal (I suspect nominal). Labour and fuel costs go up significantly over time anyway, and now we find out that farmers can't even use one of their normal sources of seed because it is virtually guaranteed to contain patent- encumbered seeds. Inflation, increased real costs and exclusion of seed sources could potentially add up to 325% over 16 years (I haven't done the sums, but that's my engineer's intuition).

So are there any more robust figures on this subject?

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