The U.S. Department of Justice said in a May 2026 court filing that patents on seeds are obstructing competition and research in the agriculture industry, according to a report published Tuesday by United Press International. The filing, which came from the DOJ’s Antitrust Division rather than the Civil Division, which usually handles intellectual property issues, signals a potential shift in how the government views the extension of patent rights in the seed industry.
The United States is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties. Researchers say the system allows a small number of corporations to suppress competition, stifle innovation, and divert taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found that two companies control more than 70% of U.S. corn and soybean seed sales, and the top four cottonseed companies control nearly 94% of that market, according to the UPI report.
According to a report from the USDA’s Economic Research Service, the price for genetically engineered seeds has more than quintupled since 1990, rising by 463%. Over the same period, the price farmers have received for their crops has increased by only 56%.
An August 2025 study showed that when farm subsidies increase, seed companies respond by raising their prices, charging based on what farmers can afford to pay rather than their own cost of producing and marketing the seed. Specifically, for every 1% increase in farm subsidies, seed companies raise their prices by 0.5%.
Testifying at an October 2025 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on competition issues in the seed and fertilizer industries, Iowa farmer Noah Coppess said: “The reality in farming today is we’re price takers rather than price makers. That’s especially true when consolidation limits our options. … I have concerns with our input and equipment supply chains and their ability to manipulate our costs.”
The DOJ’s May 2026 court filing came in a legal dispute between two U.S. seed companies. In 2023, multinational agrochemical company Corteva sued a genetic engineering startup, Inari, for infringing its patents by, among other things, obtaining samples of Corteva’s patented seeds from a public repository and analyzing their genetic makeup.
Though the Justice Department did not weigh in favor of either company, its court filing said companies should not be able to restrict the public from sequencing genetic material that was deposited as part of the process of securing patent protection. The department’s filing came from the Antitrust Division, which the researchers said suggests the government sees this extension of patent rights as an illegitimate way for a company to exclude other companies from competing.
The case is still winding its way through the legal process. Researchers said that if the judge agrees, competitors could begin to understand the strengths and weaknesses in seed varieties on the market and find ways to build on that innovation, which is precisely the type of activity the patent system was designed to encourage.
Dominant seed companies prevent competitors from developing new breeding programs through a complex web of patents and restrictive licensing contracts that make it nearly impossible to acquire enough genetic material to get started, the researchers said. Seed companies have also threatened independent researchers with patent-infringement lawsuits, which the researchers said prevents independent researchers from studying the crops that make up the country’s supply of food, feed, fuel and fiber.
The result, according to the researchers, is that no one outside of the dominant companies, not even the U.S. government, knows which economically crucial crops, most of which are grown from patented seeds, might be vulnerable to emerging pests and pathogens. For years, plant breeders have been calling for genetic assessments of these seeds and the crops they grow; to date, no such studies have been conducted, the researchers said.
The report was authored by Julie Dawson, a professor of plant and agroecosystem sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Kiki Hubbard, a researcher at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Paulina Jenney, a research coordinator for the Urban and Regional Food System Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.