What Can We Learn From the Potato Blight

 Reading through the fascinating book 1493 by Charles Mann has been a learning experience about how foods like the potato have been influenced by the Colombian Exchange.  Put simply, with the "discovery" of the New World by Columbus, a complicated and world altering exchange of goods, services and ideas from and into Europe, Asia, North and South America was created.

One of the more interesting exchanges was the amazing potato.  Most researchers agree that the potato was cultivated in the Andean area, most likely Peru.  In fact, hundreds of varieties of potatoes exist.  Over the next few hundred years the potato was brought to Europe.  The potato is credited for allowing Europe to grow and not to starve.  For the first time the common man had a surplus of calories.  In a way, you could make an argument that the potato saved Europe.  

Fast forward a few hundred years into the late 1700s and another Columbian Exchange product is becoming worth its weight in gold, guano.  Bird poop.  Guano has been discovered to be the ultimate fertilizer for the soil, for growing better crops.  It is now agreed that somewhere and sometime in the late 1700's a little parasite called P. infestans aka the deadly potato blight, was hitching a ride in the guano.  It was laid into the soil in Europe and slowly spread over the next 50 years to trigger what we now call the Great Famine. 

It is not the potato blight I found interesting though, it was what were the conditions for which allowed such spread.  Why Ireland and what can we learn from this?

First, Ireland was heavily reliant on the potato, more so than many of the other countries.  It had become a mono culture.  The climate of wet cool areas certainly played a part.  The third was the change in growing methods.  This holds the most interest for me.  

Ireland had developed a growing method over the years very similar to the Andean way of growing potatoes called Wacho.  It had become known as Lazy beds in Europe.  They took up the sod and stacked them on top of each other.  This created ridges with a small trench nearby.  Because the ridges were raised up, they heated up in the day earlier and retained heat.  They were dense roots so they held onto the nutrients in the soil and because of the grass resisted erosion.  The densely packed Wacho also resisted weeds.  Because the soil held more nutrients, they didn't need fertilizer (guano).  The fallows from where the sod had been dug up acted like natural drains when it rained.  

This method had been perfected and used from most likely Inca times in Peru and used successfully into Ireland hundreds of years later.  Until, they are told differently.

"Activist like Andrew Wight and Jethro Tull wanted farmers to release soil nutrients by deep thorough plowing, to plant every bit of terrain, to change the land with fertilizer, use ruthless weeding, and maximize yields by efficient harvesting.  Believers in technology, they viewed the newest factory made harrows, drillers and harvesters as God given tools to accomplish these goals."

They got rid of the Wacho growing methods, a decade later the potato blight all but destroyed the potato.  It is quite a harrowing story reading about the Great Famine. 

"During the next forty years, researches attributed the blight to ozone, air pollution, static electricity, volcanic action, smoke from steam locomotives, excessive humidity or heat, gases from the recently introduced sulfur match, and emanation from outer space, various insects..."

New technology and wanting efficiency replaced common sense and experience.  Even giving the name Lazy beds also makes it seem like they were subtly looking down on this growing method, instead of using the name Wacho.

It is interesting seeing the blame placed on various ideas because the real cause was unknown.  It is interesting to see how science was espoused over experience.  This can still be seen in coaching/therapy and almost every profession.  There must be a balance in, this is the way we have always done it and science says we should do it this way.

One quote that has stuck with me, " was simply the latest and worth pathogen to take advantage of the new scientific agriculture, ...on a terrain shaped for technology and not biology."

Makes me wonder how modern life is shaping the biology we call the human body.