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"Other companies don't feel they can compete, not so much against the plant breeder, but against the lawyers." "That's chased out a lot of competition," Mooney says. farmers since 1997 (including one instance where a farmer collected the seeds from a previous crop of genetically modified soybeans). Now many plant breeders at public universities have shifted to providing direct support to agribusiness, Mooney says. Corporations like Monsanto led the charge in patented plant varieties-meaning they can take anyone who uses their seeds without permission to court, as it has in 147 lawsuits against U.S. The Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service has recorded a 30 percent drop in public-sector agriculture research from 1970 to 2013, due in part to a lack of government investment. What agribusiness has done so far with its clout, Mooney says, is stifle innovation. Of course, agribusiness has its critics: The Organization for Competitive Markets, a non-profit advocacy group made up of farmers and other agriculture experts, has endorsed Warren and Booker's legislation restricting checkoff programs and other policies aimed at leveling what some argue is a "rigged market." "They have more weight and influence with politicians, and they outweigh the influence of the various farming organizations and consumer organizations." "They have enormous political clout," Mooney says. On top of that, the Department of Justice has greenlit several mergers since 2017 that gave three companies control of two-thirds of the global seed market: Dow-Dupont, Monsanto-Bayer, and ChemChina-Syngenta. Mooney says that, as technology has come to play a bigger-and more expensive-role on the farm, smaller firms have not been able to keep up. Right now, that economy is largely structured in a way that traps small farmers, according Patrick Mooney, founder and adviser of the ETC Group, an international organization that has tracked corporate concentration in agribusiness since the 1970s. "People are feeling like they're losing out, in the way the economy is now organized." "There's a renewed interest in rural America, but also I think questions of consolidation, concentration, and monopoly are emerging issues across the board for a lot of people-in manufacturing, retail, and lots of different industries," says Mary Hendrickson, professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri.