b"BROWN-BAG SEED SALESBuying Seed IllegallyThe repercussions of illegal seed sales can be wide ranging, including impacting future varietal development. PICTURE THIS,flashback to seeding time last year. Youre busy putting your wheat crop in the ground, at the time youre using certified seed you bought from your local seed grower. You made your calculations and thought you had enough seed, but just before the end of the field with a few acres left, you run out.You text your neighbour who you know has the same varietyof wheat seed asking if you can buy a few pounds from them? You think nothing of it because you just need a little more seed to plant those final few acres. They text back that they do, so you jump in your truck and drive over to their farmyard and pick up the seed. An hour later youre back in your tractor seeding those final acres. No harm no foul, right? Actually, thats not the case. What you just did was an illegal seed sale commonly called a brown-bag seed sale.Theres two components to seed. There's the physical seed itself that'll grow a plant, but with that seed theres the intellectual property and the breeder has the exclusive rights, Chris Churko, CEO of FP Genetics, explains in a phone interviews. That intellectual property carries with that variety, no matter where it goes. When people look at seed, they just look at seed as something that will grow a plant, but in reality, if its a protected variety, that intellectual property is always there.It varies on what counts as an illegal or brown-bag seed sale. It can be the above example of buying extra seed from a neighbour or as straight out as buying seed you find advertised by a non-certified seed grower. Brown-bagging seed sales are when someone takes a crop variety protected by Plant Breeders Rights (PBR) and sells the seed, explains Anthony Parker, commissioner of plant breeders rights in Canada. This is different from farm saved seed 10seed.ab.ca"