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Devastating wheat fungus appears in Asia for first time
- dbcooper 10y agoWheat fungus, not yeast fungus.
- hobs 10y agoWheat Blast specifically. I always worry about our monocultures because of things like (from the article): 15k hectares destroyed to try and contain the outbreak, and some sources claim that "Yield loss to this disease can be greater than 75% in severely affected fields."[0] which seems to me that if this spreads across Asia this could be a big problem. [0]https://www.k-state.edu/wheatblast/about/ https://www.k-state.edu/wheatblast/about/
- AlgorithmicTime 10y agoI was worried for my beer for a moment
- dang 10y agoWe fixed the title.
- etatoby 10y agoIt has begun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass
- taneq 10y agoDammit I was just trying to think of a good way to reference that same book. It's unreal how much our seemingly unassailable modern society, with all its technology, relies on this one kind of plant.
- goda90 10y agoInteresting premise. I wonder if civilization would collapse, or if we'd be able to adapt our agriculture to more legumes and other vegetables quickly enough to avoid mass starvation.
- maxerickson 10y agoThe US plants more soy than wheat already so the adapting part would probably go OK. The bigger question would be the math about calories (it probably works out, meat production consumes a lot of calories). I guess we could also plant lots of potatoes (which produce more calories/acre than soy).
- hga 10y agoAnd the more meat a county eats, the more is can divert stored feed for that purpose, modulo grain sorghum, which isn't normally a human food, to directly feed humans.
- Detect 10y agoFeed Conversion Ratio (FCR) for cattle is about 10, pig 3, sheep 5, and chicken 2. That means we could feed about 10 times more people per hectacre on grains than using that grain as feed for beef. Ruminants are important for nutrient cycling and other ecosystem services, but far from efficient as a food source for humans. They are best utilized on marginal land where agriculture isn't ideal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
- hga 10y agoYeah, in the US at least, the normal pattern is to raise cows on pastures, sometimes out in the dry west fantastic acreage of it, 1,000 acre ranches can be considered tiny, 10s of thousands are not uncommon, and/or including grazing rights. Then they're sent to a feed lot for some period of time to fatten up. Ah, from the article you linked: "However, comparisons of FCR among different species may be of little significance unless the feeds involved are of similar quality and suitability." So cattle might be more efficient than appears at first glance, since as ruminants they're initially fed stuff you can't feed other animals (ADDED: including humans), especially "on marginal land where agriculture isn't ideal", or perhaps as part of a crop rotation cycle. Alfalfa is a 3-for, a rotation cycle that's not e.g. corn or soybeans, a nitrogen fixer, and tasty food for cows. And all the above isn't the best for our topic at hand, for that alfalfa and such isn't stuff we can digest, nor is silage from corn leftovers, so it mostly feedlot cow food we could redirect to humans.
- madlag 10y agoReminds me a bit too much of Interstellar's Blight. http://interstellarfilm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Blight http://interstellarfilm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Blight
- talideon 10y agoWell, given it predates Interstellar by half a century, that's more Interstellar's problem than that of The Death of Grass.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoDon't be absurd. There are dozens of wheat pathogens alone (here's my favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_rust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_rust ) and we as a civilization have been dealing with them for a long long time.
- hga 10y agoIndeed, read a infectious disease news collection source like http://promedmail.org/ http://promedmail.org/ long enough and you might be surprised we have anything to eat beyond Soylent Green. Everything you love to eat has a host of pathogens that want to eat it first.
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoTry gardening/farming. Starting with eggs. Snakes, weasels, raccoons, even the hens want them. Hawks want my chicks, as do snakes, raccoons, weasels, foxes, bobcats, and coyotes. Weasels, coyotes, foxes want the pullets and adult hens. Its like anything I want to raise is a buffet for nature. On the other hand, I have an electric fence.
- hga 10y agoSo many people have stopped their small scale chicken raising/egg production, like one family I know, after they learned "fox in the hen-house" isn't just a turn of phrase. Both my parents grew up on farms, and we kept a big garden when I was growing up, so I know this very well, although reading the article that link collects for many months was serious sobering.
- kjs3 10y agoI was thinking of "The Windup Girl", where agricorps engineer plant diseases that only their products can survive and profit when basically everything edible dies out. Not a happy book.
- badreader 10y agoLSD for the masses? :-)
- ladelfa 10y agoI can feel St. Anthony's fire burnin' in me, burnin' in me
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoYou're thinking of rye.
- simonebrunozzi 10y agoWhy does the article says "wheat fungus" but the HN title says "yeast fungus" ?