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Okay, I grow stuff for a living so one of my obsessions for a long time now has been to throw seeds (particularly food) in to a pot to see if they will germinate. I rarely had any success with old, stored spice seeds or dried beans, peas etc. when I was young, and I guess in some ways that fuelled my obsession - how do I get food to grow without buying special seed packets? I also became interested in breeding new varieties, cross-pollination, storing seed and so on. But when organic seeds became available in quantity in dried form I suddenly started getting huge successes, almost everything I tried that was organic had almost 100% germination. Stuff that isn't organic but grown and dried in traditional ways are also successful. It's only "modern" industrial farming that produces infertile seed. I assume that it's a combination of old seed and / or some kind of sterilsation procedure e.g. irradiation. So it's no small irritation to me that no matter what I try I can't seem to germinate soy beans. Not one soy bean, ever. And I have sown hundreds of them, in all different conditions and substrates. I've tried 4 or 5 different organic sources, some pre-packed, some not. It's making me cranky, and it's making me paranoid. Why won't my food germinate? What's wrong with it? Is it genetically modified monsanto shit that's illegally being sold as organic? Anyway, what brought this on was that my girl chucked a whole bunch of old seeds in to a pot to make sprouts. These seeds are up to three years old and are all organic: Chickpeas Mung Beans Brown Lentils Soy Beans Everything in the pot - 100% !!! - has germinated except for the soy beans. Can some one tell me what's going on?