LolWhy the interest in gavita though? Something in the works to rival led's efficiency?
Or... master evil plan. Lobby to keep cannabis in the hands of big business/big pharma only, develop GMO cannabis that only grows to a DE Hps spectrum and requires a specific general hydro formula, and more lobbying/suing to make GMO cannabis the only cannabis.
guys, please... first of all Scotts is not Monsanto. Neither does Monsanto own Scotts. HGC is a subsidiary of Scotts. HGC took a 75% interest in Gavita. Scotts merely has the marketing rights for roundup in the gardening market. There is no involvement of Monsanto whatsoever. To say Monsanto owns Gavita is like saying Apple owns Microsoft. That is simply not true.
Furthermore: We did not need HGC just for the money. We are a very healthy organisation with a TO in excess of 100 million USD with double digit grow figures, so big money is not the issue either . However, we have grown really fast over the last few years and being part of a group of A-brands opens some doors a lot quicker, helps us to enter markets faster and enables us to expedite our development programs a lot faster. Also, it helps structuring our company a lot faster as we are still growing very fast and need to localize our business. This will result in more local service and support for our horticultural customers, but also for our retailers and end users world wide.
25% of the shares are still in the hands of the Dutch management and they will remain at the helm, which is logical as HGC nor Scotts have a background in horticultural lighting. So we see only very positive developments as we will be able to have a faster time to market and even better products with better support.
As for Jair: Why would we want to get rid of Jair? Jair is responsible for our US sales and he is a shareholder. It would be really stupid to get rid of Jair If we ever wanted to get rid of Jair there would be much easier methods than to partner up with HGC don't you think? Come on guys, less testosterone, more common sense
Lets also not pretend that Scotts relationship with monsanto ends with pushing roundup. They have also shared patented genes, genetic engineering techniques, traded employees and lobbied on each others behalf. Its one giant circle-jerk and you just sat down in the circle.
Ive never owned a Gavita but it seems like they occupy a place in the market as a premium brand. We'll see if they maintain standards while answering to the A-brand bottom line.
Good luck!
And they'll conspire to do evil things with that money.Obviously, it's a big conspiracy, and has nothing to do with a company positioning itself to make money on the impending legalization of cannabis in the world's 6th largest economy.
I felt the need to point out a few observations. I've worked in the herb industry for 2 decades now, but have been growing different crops for decades before. Tomatoes before, thousands of acres. We were a small tomato farm, not a big one. Get used to it, this will happen to pot too. Farms will get bigger and pounds will get cheaper for customers. Time to get professional or work for someone who is.
There is so much anger toward big business from the pot side of the farmers, but I don't think they have the experience or the knowledge to know better. If you never planted a few hundred acres of something don't talk to me about how terrible round up is, you never tried to weed a square mile.
Keep in mind also the big guys may change things for the better, not worse. General hydro sold to Scott's as well. For years GH had been selling paclobutrazol to customers, selling it as an "ornamental only". Talk about poison, that's as dirty as it gets. Cancer and reproductive harm. Illegal to use on food. They knew their customers used it to keep herb short in indoor grow rooms. Scotts took the product off the market almost immediately after they acquired the company, they actually removed the only dangerous product from the lineup.
No tomato farm would ever risk their families future by spraying a yield enhanced like paclo on their tomatoes, because it's tested. And you go to jail if you spray illegal stuff on food crops. The holier than thou attitude I hear from the cannabis farmers toward conventional farms is ludicrous. Without a doubt the pot available in the unregulated market is more loaded with toxins than any product on the shelf at Safeway.
As the big ag guys enter the market I'm looking forward to the professionalism and decades and centuries of farming know how that will be brought to the table. If you think your a better farmer in your basement than the guy who grows your lettuce you better watch out, when he starts to grow what you do he's gonna school you kids. Learn more and preach less, keep in mind it's you who are the newbies.
+100Monsanto tried a few years ago with their company western bio ag. The real bio ag sued them from copy right infringement and won. Monsanto western bio ag was kicked out of the boston maxum yield expo and banned from all of them.
Monsanto is pure evil. Don't forget they have been around for a 100 years and they made most of their money from war profiteering. They're a chemical weapons company. They had a hand in the nazis trying to Wipeout the Jews via ddt . to this day they still make nuclear weapons. plus all the other chemical weapons they made.
They're also responsibly for the growth hormones and antibiotics in farm animals
they're responsible for all the pollution caused by petroleum based fertilizers they make.
I can go on and on.
Yea Monsanto is wonderful,agent orange,roundup and plants that won't give viable seeds,sounds like a bunch of saints.
You make way too much sense for this crowd, brother. I'm still listening, and learning.Monsanto is responsible for much of all selective breeding done in the world for common food crops. Not just Gmo crops, selective breeding by natural means too. Only a small percentage of their seeds are gmo.
I used to do a few hundred test plots for Monsanto tomatoes every year, trying to find the strains that handled fungus and heat the best. We would tag each field, their technicians would test some plants from each field. Mostly kids a few years out of college get the job of collecting samples from fields, they work their way up to lab work. They travel around the country with cases filled with numbered samples of tomato or corn or whathave you.
We never grew a GMO. Monsanto helped develop powdery resistant tomatoes the old fashioned way, getting tomatoes to pollinate each other.
They identified the genes and tracked it through the breeding process, eliminating the vulnerable ones from the variety. Reduced the need to use a fungicides, safer tomato sauces for kids pizza. Is that act evil? Seems like a good job to me.
They are dominant in their industry like apple, or google. Are they absolute saints? No. But a company of over 30 thousand people will have good actors and bad. Their lawyers aren't my favorite but lawyers are sharks. If you ever need a lawyer, you'll want a viscous one too.
I remember when corn yields were half of what they were now per acre.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html
The progress made by real farmers and the people in big ag has allowed America to increase food production while reducing the acres we plant. Try that without the science of big ag. They made that possible, not social justice warriors on a keyboard.
Also, did you know that before herbicides like round up we had to till fields before we planted them. The dust bowl is what ended up as a result of that process. We loose top soil when we do that. Roundup has its flaws but only real farmers and the formally trained seem to remember why herbicides are sometimes preferable to what we used to do.
Nothing wrong with being careful with what you put in your body, I recommend that. But to call companies of thousands of lifelong plant breeders and chemists evil is nonsensical.
War can be evil, Slavery is evil, Breeding plants isn't evil. Using round up to kill weeds certainly isn't "evil". What the government did with agent orange, probably. Did Monsanto spray Vietnamese people? No, Uncle Sam did that. Monsanto makes products for farming, if you want to blame companies for war try Lockheed Martin maybe, but even there, gotta tell ya it's Washington that decides who lives and dies, not some scientist at Monsanto.
You started out so well with that first post...They identified the genes and tracked it through the breeding process, eliminating the vulnerable ones from the variety. Reduced the need to use a fungicides, safer tomato sauces for kids pizza. Is that act evil?
I'm all with you there.We should always have our bullshit meters properly calibrated, but look to take advantage of the advances the tech will bring us.
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The future is gonna be exciting, pot farming is going to get cleaner and more energy efficient, that's a good thing for the consumer and the grower.
You are painting an extreme false dilemma of poor family breeders working with heirlooms vs modern breeders creating varieties that need patenting. There are many decades of conventional breeding between heirlooms and gmo varieties.There are however valid reasons to patent varieties of plants, much like their is to patent medicines. To being a new strain of corn to market can take millions of dollars, no one would bother to do it scientifically if they couldn't recoup their investment. If they couldn't do the get their money back we would still be left with the old heirloom seeds, which while they were crafted were not bred with the same scientific process. Genetic testing of thousands of individuals is expensive, hard for any one family farm to do.
Ownership and control over IP isn't the only way you can make a return by investing in R&D. People said the exact same thing about software development and then GNU came along all on its own... (SUN imploded, and solaris eventually became open source...)no one would bother to do it....