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Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)
- creyes12345 3y agoRequiring calorie-heavy diets to carry out their punishing workloads, [the Irish impoverished tenant farmers] were soon consuming between 40 and 60 potatoes every day.
- djmips 3y agoHow big we these potatoes I wonder.
- anon84873628 3y agoSome images and other info here: https://www.cultivariable.com/product/potato/potato-varieties/potato-lumper/ https://www.cultivariable.com/product/potato/potato-varietie...
- forgotusername6 3y agoThat's roughly between 6000 and 10000 calories
- fredrikholm 3y agoSelective breeding of potatoes started in the beginning of the 20th century; growing potatoes long to be very large increased the risk of crop failure due to blight (and other problems). Given that, combined with the lack of modern farming equipment/resources, I think it's fair to say that the average farmer didn't come close to eating 6000 calories a day. Even at very high energy expenditure levels, that would bump you way over a 100kg bodyweight.
- Roark66 3y agoI'd imagine how much actual calories that is depends on the size of the potatoes. When potatoes fail, they often do so by producing tiny tubers. The smallest I personally ate were less than an inch in diameter. Also,people who don't do any farming don't realise how much effort goes into pest/disease control. Especially with potatoes the main pest around here(central Europe) is Colorado Potato Beetle (if that is the correct name for it in English). It is an extremely resilient organism. It very quickly starts tolerating all insecticides that are allowed around here. And between seasons it gets into the ground half meter deep. So unless you want to destroy your soil there is no getting rid of it once it establishes itself somewhere. The only option is to take the crop elsewhere. It is such a pain in potato growing, during communist times it was used as a propaganda piece. There was (very likely fake) news that US was dropping that beetle from spy planes to ruin the crop. Of course the association of the beetle with one of the US's states didn't help. Another way to deal with such infestation is to pick it up by hand and lots of people did that back then and now. You can imagine how unpleasant that is. Also you end up with 5l jars full of these bugs...
- jjgreen 3y ago... around here (central Europe) is Colorado Potato Beetle (if that is the correct name for it in English) Usually just the "Colorado Beetle" in the UK at least. Little bastards.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y agoI've mostly them called 'potato bugs'
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoWould it help to switch crops around between plots or would these beetles stay in the ground for years even if they couldn't find any potato plants to feed on?
- bregma 3y agoI've had them come back after at least 10 years. Anywhere within about 100 m of a previously infested area.
- wlll 3y agoThere’s a general rule in amateur gardening that you rotate the location of your potatoes on something like a 4 year schedule. In wider agriculture you’re looking at “crop rotation”. I don’t know how this affects specific beetles etc.
- Eisenstein 3y agoNo problem: just find an animal that has no local predator and eats the beetles and introduce it to the ecosystem. What could go wrong?
- ifdefdebug 3y agoNothing. It will eradicate the potatoe bug and then go extinct for lack of prey. This is incredible! It takes two HN nerds just 5 minutes to come up with a good plan a group of scientists would have needed months to develop.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI wonder how they ate the potatoes? Cooked in what way and with what additions like butter etc.?
- projektfu 3y agoIt depends a lot on how poor one was. Some had extreme diets of potatoes and milk or buttermilk with rare variations. Others incorporated oats and other vegetables and meat when they could afford it. But the best stuff was taken for sale in Britain. Imagine 6-12 lbs potatoes and a cup or two of milk, day in, day out! https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-history/food-in-ireland-1600-1835/ https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-history/food-in-irela... Colonialism is miserable.
- ggm 3y agoYou have to eat the skins to get the vitamins and minerals
- rolandog 3y agoI wonder what size of potatoes they were back then? How many kilograms of potatoes that was? I imagine they may have been much smaller than today's varieties.
- throwawaymanbot 3y ago[dead]
- EGreg 3y agoIt’s one thing to have a bad crop. It’s another to have your government enforce some heartless economic system at the expense of people’s lives, and utterly fail at helping them by accepting foreign aid from other countries. Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much later famines in the Bengal regions[4] were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat. Irish Potato Famine was exacerbated a lot by the system of landlords and private property protections. Bengal Famine was largely exacerbated by Churchill’s policies that heavily favored the British at the expense of people on the Indian subcontinent. And of course the entire British Raj came about through state capitalism (the British East India Company getting the empire’s support and appointing governors). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) 4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
- roschdal 3y ago> the Irish Potato Famine and the much later famines in the Bengal regions were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat. Interesting, tell me more about how the economic system in Britain caused the famine in Ireland.
- EGreg 3y agoSure. The entire system that exacerbated the problem was of a thoroughly capitalist character. It revolved around the landlord class vs the poor tenants / sharecroppers, as well as exporting food at a time of famine (as did Bengal famine). You’d do well to start in the wikipedia article that I linked. Some quotes: Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism[15][16] and single-crop dependence.[17][18] Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, in part because they believed the famine was due to lacking moral character,[19][20] and only resumed later. The refusal of London to bar export of food from Ireland during the famine was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land. … Landlords and tenants Edit During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.[36] Catholics, the majority of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these absentee landlords lived in England. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export[15]—was mostly sent to England.[16] … The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie, or mitigating tradition of paternalism as existed in Britain, as the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that supplanted the Gaelic aristocracy in the 17th century was of a different religion and newer. In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that "confiscation is their common title".[39][40] According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever.[39] The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.[39][a] The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[36] They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[36] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.[41][42] As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. … Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[38] Tenants and subdivisions Edit See also: Irish farm subdivision A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine (National Library of Ireland) The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that when a tenant died, his land should be divided equally between his sons. Population growth, from about 2 million by 1700, to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[43]
- angryzor 3y ago[flagged]
- moomin 3y agoExactly, a harvest failure for a single crop does not cause that kind of devastation.
- coremoff 3y agoit does when the crop is the single staple crop used by most of the population
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoWhich it was because everything else was being exported to England.
- moomin 3y agoWhich in turn was the result of… government policy.
- MengerSponge 3y agoIreland was a net exporter of food throughout the famine
- idontwantthis 3y ago[flagged]
- Retr0id 3y agoAnd I've just identified a name for my new band.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago"absentee British landlords evicted thousands of starving peasants when they were unable to pay rent;"
- Iwan-Zotow 3y agoPotato pathogen that devastated Ireland is called England
- anotherhue 3y agoI vaguely recall reading that without the famine, Ireland's population today would be on the order of 50 million, making it a major EU player.
- randombits0 3y agoHow many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None! *This is the only known Irish Potato Famine joke.
- sys32768 3y agoThis topic reminds me of that scene from the The Field (1990) where The Bull McCabe learns that an outsider is bidding on his field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjKJnsMwHk0&t=61s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjKJnsMwHk0&t=61s