6 ms·

Xylella Fastidiosa: A crisis brewing in Europe's olive groves

112 points by indigodaddy 2y ago

mensetmanusman 2y ago
Cases like these build support for indoor farming if externalized costs of black swan events and pesticides are incorporated into the cost calculation. Outdoors wins always from a power efficiency standpoint, but disease can flip the balance.
- kreyenborgi 2y ago
  > The most practical strategy, for now, is to plant olive varieties that are naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa to prevent future outbreaks and minimize potential losses. It seems rather to be yet another argument for polycropping and taking care of genetic variety and adapting to local conditions, instead of trying even harder to hammer nature into a grid.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    I agree. Biodiversity in agriculture is severely lacking. The good news is that we have heritage seeds. However, we don't have the capacity to ramp that stock up quickly. The main issue is that farmers will choose the best seeds for the current conditions/risks. This leads to a consensus winning variety. There's no benefit to the farmer to plant "inferior" seeds for an event that has yet to happen.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      A "biodiversity subsidy" sounds like a kind of agricultural-assistance I could get behind, although the devil is always in the details. One concern that comes to mind: If a certain variation is more-susceptible to a particular disease or pest, and becomes a beachhead or reservoir--fun mixed metaphors there--for infection.
      - giantg2 2y ago
        Yeah, this would probably be best served by some biosecurity program at the USDA or a handful of universities.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    Reading more, there appear to be just two cultivars naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa. Spain already grows hundreds of cultivars of olive trees, though only three are used for the bulk of the olive oil. So replacing those with resistant ones would reduce diversity.
    - kreyenborgi 2y ago
      A different monoculture is not the solution to the problem of a monoculture. Replacing all of them with the resistant ones would reduce biodiversity (perhaps the resistant ones are susceptible to other diseases, perhaps the nonresistant ones will at some point be resistant to a new disease). See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture The main problem with polyculture being that it assumes local farmers are smart and cunning individuals who find (perhaps unorthodox) solutions in constrained, complex and realistic environments because their livelihoods depend on it (or because they got an interesting idea and couldn't let it go), and who know more about their challenges than random hn commenters like me, instead of being mindless drones that can be replaced/interchanged at will by central overlords with complete control over the panopticon food factory.
- culi 2y ago
  Disease is not a problem if we stop practicing monocultures. The added labor costs associated with polyculture still end up being less than the added energy costs of indoor farming
  - adalacelove 2y ago
    From TFA: While the focus has been on olives, the bacterium’s ability to infect such a broad spectrum of plants makes it an agricultural nightmare, particularly in regions where multiple crops are grown in close proximity.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. This issue is very common. Another example is the Cavendish banana. I believe the article advocates for planting resistant varieties.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
        >They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. I know that not everyone is a horticulturalist. Allow me to explain why this is dumb. It is true that for a crop like tomatoes, you might just grow any old mongrel seed, and that the tomatoes will still produce... even if yields are off 30% or 40%. Monocropping in that case is about increasing yields, not making the impossible possible. This is simply not true with most orchard tree crops (or grapes, or about half the sorts of food crops you've enjoyed all your life). An apple, for instance isn't just a monocrop of closely related sibling plants... each Fuji or Pink Lady apple you've eaten is a genetic clone of any other of that type. They are literally cloned through grafting (and sometimes rooted cuttings). If we want to get really technical, each tree is technically a chimera, with only the crown being Pink Lady, the low trunk and roots will be something like M.111 (another variety that you don't eat it's fruit). Hell, sometimes there's even a third type in the middle of the two called an "interstock". What would happen if you didn't clone apple varieties? You wouldn't eat apples anymore. Every apple tree would produce its own kind of fruit, some might be just as good as Fuji or Yellow Delicious or any of the others you're familiar with. But there'd only ever be one tree of that. Apples do not grow true to seed. Some would be little golf-ball-sized crab apples. Others would be completely tasteless. Or dry and pithy. Or nasty-looking things that always split while growing. Maybe farmers would still grow them as feed for hogs (but productivity is also a genetic trait, and you've just struck a death-blow against having a large number of highly productive trees). Maybe they'd be grown to make alcohol (more applejack or cider than apfelwein I'd think). But apples as a desert fruit would be gone. And it's like this for many, many crops. Hell, even something like wheat... you can complain about monocropping, but these new varieties that they use actually resist diseases better (not to mention prevented who knows how many famines through increased yield). This is the argument of someone who whines about GMO crops and shops at Whole foods, a certain political type whose preferred policies seem designed to just make food more expensive and scarce. >Another example is the Cavendish banana. There are plenty of banana cultivars... few of them of the sort that people in the developed world enjoy. It's the same problem as all of the other. But for Cavendish (and a tiny handful of other varieties), you'd have no bananas at all.
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Wonder if you could robot automate indoor gardening or beekeeping. As someone who strongly dislikes bees, but loves honey and its products I find myself wondering how to automate beekeeping so I can not interact with bees.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    They once built a robot bee that could waggle-dance inside the hive. The bees eventually started listening to it. You could put on an Oculus, and go dance-talk to them remotely. There are like 5 words in their grammar with which to communicate one idea... where to find the nectar. But the truth of the matter is they need someone to babysit and check up on them once in awhile. Make sure they're free of mites, that the colony isn't going to be unbalanced (that they might need a new queen, if something went wrong, or there's not enough brood in the comb). Wear a beekeeping suit. No reason to dislike them, they appreciate flowers, make candy, and twerk-to-talk. Seems like they're the good guys.
  - Carrok 2y ago
    Indoor gardening is very much highly automated already.
  - yyuugg 2y ago
    Have you spent any times with bees? Beekeeping really changed my opinions on bees. They are quite industrious and very gentle.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  This will sound like bullshit... but I have three indoor olives at the moment. Two were ordered as rooted cuttings a couple months back, under grow lights and getting a decent amount of new growth. A third was on the clearance rack at Lowes, it's a big bigger. But, before they get 3ft or so, they're going to have to go outside. They're already too big for my not-unimpressive grow lights. Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Trim them into bonsai.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
      - Maciek416 2y ago
        I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
- jnmandal 2y ago
  No offense but that is bunk. To grow thousands of olive trees indoors would be nearly impossible. Perennial crops like this need huge amounts of soil for their root systems, and to replace the amount of olives with indoor plantation would require a massive square footage of greenhouses. Not to mention that diseases like this can just as easily transmit indoors. Look into the American chestnut blight if you don't believe me. There almost no way to grow a tree isolated from the blight. The only viable solution in cases like these is a genetic one. In this case, we can actually top the olive and graft a disease resistant variety onto the rootstock. In some cases you may have to actually develop an entirely new tree from scratch and replant. That is why continuous research into plant genetics and breeding is so extremely important for the continuation of human society.
- petergs 2y ago
  Indoor farming is far from immune to disease. Infected inputs (seed, substrate) are just one route to contamination. See for example: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-leaf-eating-pathogen-failed-acquisition https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-...
- pezezin 2y ago
  I am from Spain. We have 340 million olive trees on 28 000 km2 of farm land. Please tell me how we are going to do it indoors. Example of an olive grove in the province of Jaén, that alone produces 20% of the olive oil in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#/media/File:Panor%C3%A1mica_olivar_Ja%C3%A9n01.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#...
  - lioeters 2y ago
    That panoramic view of the olive garden is magnificent. I didn't know olive trees are being cultivated on such huge plots of land, covering fields and hills as far as the eyes can see. Trees seem unsuitable for indoor farming, since they need tons of soil and sunlight. Also taking years to grow and mature. Indoor farming in general seem unsuitable for Spain, where there is an abundance of land and sun. Searching on this topic I learned that green houses are popular in some regions like Almería for growing fruits and vegetables. I guess green houses are something between indoor and outdoor farming. > Spain is currently the world’s third largest tomato exporter, and up to 60% of those tomatoes come from the province of Almería. > The region has around 30,000 hectares of land under cultivation, the majority of which is under plastic. It is also the most rapidly desertifying region in the country.
    - KSteffensen 2y ago
      To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.
    - pezezin 2y ago
      Something interesting about the greenhouses of Almería is that they are one of the few human constructions easily visible from space.
rvba 2y ago
Why nobody is investing serious money into bacteriophages? It seems only russia shows some interest in them - ans mostly for military purposes
- donavanm 2y ago
  IIRC the most usage is romania and bulgaria(?), not russia. As to why not, they dont “scale out” like other generalized pharmaceuticals or medicine. Phages need a bunch of patient specific diagnostics and revision to be effective against the specific target. Thats why you see people fly to romania for a month of treatment, and not order the bacteriophages from romania.
  - biotinker 2y ago
    This isn't terribly different than the latest precision medicine in the US. For example, drugs like Keytruda can only be used in the presence or absence of certain genetic markers in the tumor. Most cutting edge immunotherapy is similar; they require patient specific diagnoses and sometimes revisions. These therapies are the largest focus of cancer research in the US right now with enormous funding behind them, despite having the same weaknesses you point out as bacteriophages.
    - dullcrisp 2y ago
      Do bacteriophages work against cancer?
      - tokai 2y ago
        Not in themselves. But they can apparently be used as a delivery mechanism in cancer related gene therapy. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9697857/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9697857/
  - anitil 2y ago
    > Thats why you see people fly to romania for a month of treatment I had no idea people did this!
chabska 2y ago
[flagged]
- yyuugg 2y ago
  Palm oil cultivation is wildly harmful in many cases. And palm oil is not a replacement for olive oil.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  palm oil is not a subsitute for olive oil and vice-versa. Their usage are totally different.
trhway 2y ago
As bugs is the main vector, birds immediately come to mind, and of course quick googling brings significant recent bird population decline with among other reasons (chemicals, etc.) this destruction of birds and their nesting: "Nighttime harvesting. Machines used to vacuum olives from trees at night can suck in and kill birds. This practice is used to preserve the olives' flavor, but it's a recent development that's harmful to birds." It is kind of like getting rid of cats and after that wondering why so many rats and the plague, or the Cultural Revolution famine after that mass extermination of birds there.
- lovemenot 2y ago
  >> or the Cultural Revolution famine after that mass extermination of birds Sorry for the nitpick. I believe you are referring to the Four Pests campaign, which was part of the Great Leap Forward (1950s) rather than the Cultural Revolution (1960s)
  - trhway 2y ago
    Thank you. Shame on me. I must be sent for a week to a reeducation camp.
    - alexey-salmin 2y ago
      If you knew the right answer but made a small mistake, then it's not a question of education but of concentration. Surely there must a special camp for that too.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > It is kind of like getting rid of cats and after that wondering why so many rats and the plague or recently, in EU, we must kill the wolf, but the deer is eating the small trees in the forests.
- passwordoops 2y ago
  But insect populations are also declining precipitously (e.g, 1), so killing birds might not have that much of an impact 1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118
fbnbr 2y ago
There's some fascinating research relating to this happening at UC Berkeley's Almeida Lab (https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/) on grapevine diseases, particularly relevant to the wine industry in Northern California. 1. The lab, led by Professor Rodrigo Almeida, is studying economically important grape diseases, focusing on Grapevine leafroll disease and Grapevine red blotch disease [1]. 2. They're developing an AI tool for fast and accurate disease identification in vineyards, which could be a game-changer for disease management. 3. Their work combines molecular biology, ecology, and bioinformatics, using advanced techniques like genomics. 4. A recent study led by Kai Blaisdell showed that mealybugs efficiently transmit Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 under field conditions, with disease symptoms appearing throughout the plant one year after infection [2]. 5. Their focus seems to be more on understanding and managing plant diseases using various molecular and ecological approaches [3]. This research is crucial for the wine industry, especially in regions like Northern California. It's not quite "genomics on the brink of the discovery what was penicillin through crispr", but it's still cutting-edge work that could have significant impacts on grape cultivation and wine production. References: [1] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/research/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/research/ [2] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/category/lab-news/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/category/lab-news/ [3] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/publications/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/publications/
swiftcoder 2y ago
The last news article I found about this was 5 years ago[1], have there been any significant developments since? [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52234561 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52234561
- ganzuul 2y ago
  The price of olive oil has gone up significantly.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    I guess I'm confused that the projections in TFA are largely in line with the projections in the BBC article from 5 years ago. I'd expect something to have changed in that time (whether for better/worse), and it makes me suspicious that TFA is recycling 5 year old conclusions rather than presenting novel data
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    True. I am usually buying the cheapest extra-virgin olive oil available (in Europe), and its price has increased by more than 50% in comparison with a couple of years ago.
    - indigodaddy 2y ago
      Try Kali Agri. Extremely high polyphenols and all around excellent. Free shipping to US, but not sure about if that applies for the Europe store: https://eu.kaliagri.it/collections/kali-eu https://eu.kaliagri.it/collections/kali-eu
      - amarcheschi 2y ago
        Olive leccino my beloved. It doesn't look too expensive, not cheap at all, but not so expensive
        indigodaddy 2y ago
m0llusk 2y ago
Potentially interesting how increasing biodiversity in cultivated environments with a range of trees and cover crops can increase resilience, but this thing attacks so many plants that even a biodiverse environment is likely to remain highly vulnerable.
- nickserv 2y ago
  Biodiversity should also include various varieties of the same species. In some cases it's even interesting to have wild varieties of cultivated fruit trees simply for better pollination. As indicated in the article, there are olive varieties immune to the disease, so it would make a difference.
  - undersuit 2y ago
    >even interesting to have wild varieties of cultivated fruit trees simply for better pollination. Love me some pears.
nicodds 2y ago
A voice from the field here (Puglia, southern Italy). I can assure you that the landscape has changed drastically in a decade. Where a few years ago you could see immense expanses of green, now you see a ghostly landscape. It's incredible. Years and years have been spent inconclusively, both by politicians and by investigators, who have also wasted time with conspiracy theories. Only a few people have replanted olive trees using species resistant to Xylella.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  (I'm Italian) We also had anti scientific movements that opposed to the destruction of olive trees in a radius big enough to prevent the bacteria to spread to other plants. Farmers also tried to delay the process of trees eradications by packing the judicial courts with appeals. Some singers (such as Al bano, I think caparezza as well) also expressed to listen to the farmers and to not touch the olives, when scientists has been saying for years "listen, we don't have a cure, we can't cure the plants, we can only contain it before it spreads to wider areas". This anti scientific behavior and this thinking of "farmers might know better than scientist" that is not only false, but dangerous when expressed by a public figure such as a famous singer, are what I were complaining about in a different comment about people being ignorant in scientific fields in italy and almost being proud of it [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376014#42376351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376014#42376351
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Now we need GMO resistance to this bacterium and the shitstorm will be complete!
  - willyt 2y ago
    I wonder what the legal implications are of ignoring a disease until it spreads to your neighbour's farm. Can the neighbour sue for negligence or something?
    - gpderetta 2y ago
      you would need a functional judicial system for that.
deleted 2y ago
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gewu333 2y ago
i wonder if Xylella has already spread to beyond Europe? Are there reports of it being a problem in the middle east and north africa as well?
alexey-salmin 2y ago
Something I never understood is why trees seem to be ill so rarely. There is a gazillion infectious agents on Earth from viruses to fungi, mammals are barely keeping up even with our adaptive immune system and fever. Plants lack all of that and yet some trees live for centuries or millennia when undisturbed. I realize that are many factors skewing the observation: trees may be sick without us noticing, most of the trees die very early and we observe ones that get mature, some trees are in fact visibly sick etc. What I don't know is if these factors combined explain it all or not. My gut feeling tells me that without an adaptive immune response trees must be sick way more often than we see, but I have no proof.
- tschwimmer 2y ago
  They are sick a lot. In the United States, chestnut blight killed 4 billion trees over 40 years. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chestnut_blight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chestnut_blight
- zdragnar 2y ago
  I imagine the hard walls of plant cells helps keep bacteria and virii at bay, but there's plenty of fungi that infest trees. Oak wilt is a rather pernicious local threat. The programming language Rust is named after a type of fungus that attacks plants. It's out there, but trees don't run around screaming, so it's not something that people tend to notice.
- stevekemp 2y ago
  Dutch Elm Disease killed a whole bunch of trees in Edinburgh, Scotland. I know a lot of the old Elm trees in Princes Street Gardens, beneath Edinburgh Castle, were replaced by Limes. Of course the problem is more widespread than than just the one city, or the one country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease
- SpicyUme 2y ago
  It may be that you don't see the illness/infections unless you are looking for them or until the trees die off in sufficient numbers. I look for interesting things growing near me while walking or hiking and around here I see galls from various insects like wasps and aceria, leaves covered in bright gymnosporangium rusts, and colonies of wooly adelgids. In the summer the deciduous trees tend to get powdery mildew, and I know there are some more harmful fungi in the region which seem to be damaging living trees in a way that is not common, but also not new. Sometimes you can see tress dripping sap from cuts or other damage, which I understand to be part of how they defend against disease. My parents had a tree that I remember dripped for many years before falling over in a storm. They also had a cherry tree that had a ring of dried sap bubbles on the stump of a large pruned branch. I found this which discusses the compartmentalization model of tree immune systems: https://botany.one/2019/09/trees-fight-infections-by-building-barricades-but-how/ https://botany.one/2019/09/trees-fight-infections-by-buildin...
emporas 2y ago
I think mr. Dykstra [1] (not Dijkstra), needs to be more well known. I have some olive trees, just a hundred of them, not much, but some are monsters. There are several mistakes farmers make, that over the long run compromise the health of the plant. See also [2], somewhere there he mentions California lemon production, but it may be in another webinar. The proposal of Italian gov to kill many other plants around, stems right out of the Dark Ages. Governments of course have proven repeatedly how well they understand complex systems, Covid was still hunted down after years of spreading to the population, while i have calculated using just my mind in 10 minutes, that given an incubation rate of 2 days, 63 days maximum and it has spread to every person on the planet. Anyway, we are gonna replace governments with 100 lines of code soon, and the problem will be solved. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEeIJcGxo00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEeIJcGxo00 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnNOvA3diDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnNOvA3diDU

112 points by indigodaddy 2y ago

Cases like these build support for indoor farming if externalized costs of black swan events and pesticides are incorporated into the cost calculation. Outdoors wins always from a power efficiency standpoint, but disease can flip the balance.

kreyenborgi 2y ago
> The most practical strategy, for now, is to plant olive varieties that are naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa to prevent future outbreaks and minimize potential losses. It seems rather to be yet another argument for polycropping and taking care of genetic variety and adapting to local conditions, instead of trying even harder to hammer nature into a grid.
- giantg2 2y ago
  I agree. Biodiversity in agriculture is severely lacking. The good news is that we have heritage seeds. However, we don't have the capacity to ramp that stock up quickly. The main issue is that farmers will choose the best seeds for the current conditions/risks. This leads to a consensus winning variety. There's no benefit to the farmer to plant "inferior" seeds for an event that has yet to happen.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    A "biodiversity subsidy" sounds like a kind of agricultural-assistance I could get behind, although the devil is always in the details. One concern that comes to mind: If a certain variation is more-susceptible to a particular disease or pest, and becomes a beachhead or reservoir--fun mixed metaphors there--for infection.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      Yeah, this would probably be best served by some biosecurity program at the USDA or a handful of universities.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  Reading more, there appear to be just two cultivars naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa. Spain already grows hundreds of cultivars of olive trees, though only three are used for the bulk of the olive oil. So replacing those with resistant ones would reduce diversity.
  - kreyenborgi 2y ago
    A different monoculture is not the solution to the problem of a monoculture. Replacing all of them with the resistant ones would reduce biodiversity (perhaps the resistant ones are susceptible to other diseases, perhaps the nonresistant ones will at some point be resistant to a new disease). See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture The main problem with polyculture being that it assumes local farmers are smart and cunning individuals who find (perhaps unorthodox) solutions in constrained, complex and realistic environments because their livelihoods depend on it (or because they got an interesting idea and couldn't let it go), and who know more about their challenges than random hn commenters like me, instead of being mindless drones that can be replaced/interchanged at will by central overlords with complete control over the panopticon food factory.
culi 2y ago
Disease is not a problem if we stop practicing monocultures. The added labor costs associated with polyculture still end up being less than the added energy costs of indoor farming
- adalacelove 2y ago
  From TFA: While the focus has been on olives, the bacterium’s ability to infect such a broad spectrum of plants makes it an agricultural nightmare, particularly in regions where multiple crops are grown in close proximity.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. This issue is very common. Another example is the Cavendish banana. I believe the article advocates for planting resistant varieties.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      >They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. I know that not everyone is a horticulturalist. Allow me to explain why this is dumb. It is true that for a crop like tomatoes, you might just grow any old mongrel seed, and that the tomatoes will still produce... even if yields are off 30% or 40%. Monocropping in that case is about increasing yields, not making the impossible possible. This is simply not true with most orchard tree crops (or grapes, or about half the sorts of food crops you've enjoyed all your life). An apple, for instance isn't just a monocrop of closely related sibling plants... each Fuji or Pink Lady apple you've eaten is a genetic clone of any other of that type. They are literally cloned through grafting (and sometimes rooted cuttings). If we want to get really technical, each tree is technically a chimera, with only the crown being Pink Lady, the low trunk and roots will be something like M.111 (another variety that you don't eat it's fruit). Hell, sometimes there's even a third type in the middle of the two called an "interstock". What would happen if you didn't clone apple varieties? You wouldn't eat apples anymore. Every apple tree would produce its own kind of fruit, some might be just as good as Fuji or Yellow Delicious or any of the others you're familiar with. But there'd only ever be one tree of that. Apples do not grow true to seed. Some would be little golf-ball-sized crab apples. Others would be completely tasteless. Or dry and pithy. Or nasty-looking things that always split while growing. Maybe farmers would still grow them as feed for hogs (but productivity is also a genetic trait, and you've just struck a death-blow against having a large number of highly productive trees). Maybe they'd be grown to make alcohol (more applejack or cider than apfelwein I'd think). But apples as a desert fruit would be gone. And it's like this for many, many crops. Hell, even something like wheat... you can complain about monocropping, but these new varieties that they use actually resist diseases better (not to mention prevented who knows how many famines through increased yield). This is the argument of someone who whines about GMO crops and shops at Whole foods, a certain political type whose preferred policies seem designed to just make food more expensive and scarce. >Another example is the Cavendish banana. There are plenty of banana cultivars... few of them of the sort that people in the developed world enjoy. It's the same problem as all of the other. But for Cavendish (and a tiny handful of other varieties), you'd have no bananas at all.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Wonder if you could robot automate indoor gardening or beekeeping. As someone who strongly dislikes bees, but loves honey and its products I find myself wondering how to automate beekeeping so I can not interact with bees.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  They once built a robot bee that could waggle-dance inside the hive. The bees eventually started listening to it. You could put on an Oculus, and go dance-talk to them remotely. There are like 5 words in their grammar with which to communicate one idea... where to find the nectar. But the truth of the matter is they need someone to babysit and check up on them once in awhile. Make sure they're free of mites, that the colony isn't going to be unbalanced (that they might need a new queen, if something went wrong, or there's not enough brood in the comb). Wear a beekeeping suit. No reason to dislike them, they appreciate flowers, make candy, and twerk-to-talk. Seems like they're the good guys.
- Carrok 2y ago
  Indoor gardening is very much highly automated already.
- yyuugg 2y ago
  Have you spent any times with bees? Beekeeping really changed my opinions on bees. They are quite industrious and very gentle.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
This will sound like bullshit... but I have three indoor olives at the moment. Two were ordered as rooted cuttings a couple months back, under grow lights and getting a decent amount of new growth. A third was on the clearance rack at Lowes, it's a big bigger. But, before they get 3ft or so, they're going to have to go outside. They're already too big for my not-unimpressive grow lights. Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Trim them into bonsai.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
    - Maciek416 2y ago
      I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
jnmandal 2y ago
No offense but that is bunk. To grow thousands of olive trees indoors would be nearly impossible. Perennial crops like this need huge amounts of soil for their root systems, and to replace the amount of olives with indoor plantation would require a massive square footage of greenhouses. Not to mention that diseases like this can just as easily transmit indoors. Look into the American chestnut blight if you don't believe me. There almost no way to grow a tree isolated from the blight. The only viable solution in cases like these is a genetic one. In this case, we can actually top the olive and graft a disease resistant variety onto the rootstock. In some cases you may have to actually develop an entirely new tree from scratch and replant. That is why continuous research into plant genetics and breeding is so extremely important for the continuation of human society.
petergs 2y ago
Indoor farming is far from immune to disease. Infected inputs (seed, substrate) are just one route to contamination. See for example: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-leaf-eating-pathogen-failed-acquisition https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-...
pezezin 2y ago
I am from Spain. We have 340 million olive trees on 28 000 km2 of farm land. Please tell me how we are going to do it indoors. Example of an olive grove in the province of Jaén, that alone produces 20% of the olive oil in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#/media/File:Panor%C3%A1mica_olivar_Ja%C3%A9n01.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#...
- lioeters 2y ago
  That panoramic view of the olive garden is magnificent. I didn't know olive trees are being cultivated on such huge plots of land, covering fields and hills as far as the eyes can see. Trees seem unsuitable for indoor farming, since they need tons of soil and sunlight. Also taking years to grow and mature. Indoor farming in general seem unsuitable for Spain, where there is an abundance of land and sun. Searching on this topic I learned that green houses are popular in some regions like Almería for growing fruits and vegetables. I guess green houses are something between indoor and outdoor farming. > Spain is currently the world’s third largest tomato exporter, and up to 60% of those tomatoes come from the province of Almería. > The region has around 30,000 hectares of land under cultivation, the majority of which is under plastic. It is also the most rapidly desertifying region in the country.
  - KSteffensen 2y ago
    To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    Something interesting about the greenhouses of Almería is that they are one of the few human constructions easily visible from space.

rvba 2y ago

Why nobody is investing serious money into bacteriophages? It seems only russia shows some interest in them - ans mostly for military purposes

donavanm 2y ago
IIRC the most usage is romania and bulgaria(?), not russia. As to why not, they dont “scale out” like other generalized pharmaceuticals or medicine. Phages need a bunch of patient specific diagnostics and revision to be effective against the specific target. Thats why you see people fly to romania for a month of treatment, and not order the bacteriophages from romania.
- biotinker 2y ago
  This isn't terribly different than the latest precision medicine in the US. For example, drugs like Keytruda can only be used in the presence or absence of certain genetic markers in the tumor. Most cutting edge immunotherapy is similar; they require patient specific diagnoses and sometimes revisions. These therapies are the largest focus of cancer research in the US right now with enormous funding behind them, despite having the same weaknesses you point out as bacteriophages.
  - dullcrisp 2y ago
    Do bacteriophages work against cancer?
    - tokai 2y ago
      Not in themselves. But they can apparently be used as a delivery mechanism in cancer related gene therapy. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9697857/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9697857/
- anitil 2y ago
  > Thats why you see people fly to romania for a month of treatment I had no idea people did this!

chabska 2y ago

[flagged]

yyuugg 2y ago
Palm oil cultivation is wildly harmful in many cases. And palm oil is not a replacement for olive oil.
prmoustache 2y ago
palm oil is not a subsitute for olive oil and vice-versa. Their usage are totally different.

trhway 2y ago

As bugs is the main vector, birds immediately come to mind, and of course quick googling brings significant recent bird population decline with among other reasons (chemicals, etc.) this destruction of birds and their nesting: "Nighttime harvesting. Machines used to vacuum olives from trees at night can suck in and kill birds. This practice is used to preserve the olives' flavor, but it's a recent development that's harmful to birds." It is kind of like getting rid of cats and after that wondering why so many rats and the plague, or the Cultural Revolution famine after that mass extermination of birds there.

lovemenot 2y ago
>> or the Cultural Revolution famine after that mass extermination of birds Sorry for the nitpick. I believe you are referring to the Four Pests campaign, which was part of the Great Leap Forward (1950s) rather than the Cultural Revolution (1960s)
- trhway 2y ago
  Thank you. Shame on me. I must be sent for a week to a reeducation camp.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    If you knew the right answer but made a small mistake, then it's not a question of education but of concentration. Surely there must a special camp for that too.
hulitu 2y ago
> It is kind of like getting rid of cats and after that wondering why so many rats and the plague or recently, in EU, we must kill the wolf, but the deer is eating the small trees in the forests.
passwordoops 2y ago
But insect populations are also declining precipitously (e.g, 1), so killing birds might not have that much of an impact 1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

fbnbr 2y ago

There's some fascinating research relating to this happening at UC Berkeley's Almeida Lab (https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/) on grapevine diseases, particularly relevant to the wine industry in Northern California. 1. The lab, led by Professor Rodrigo Almeida, is studying economically important grape diseases, focusing on Grapevine leafroll disease and Grapevine red blotch disease [1]. 2. They're developing an AI tool for fast and accurate disease identification in vineyards, which could be a game-changer for disease management. 3. Their work combines molecular biology, ecology, and bioinformatics, using advanced techniques like genomics. 4. A recent study led by Kai Blaisdell showed that mealybugs efficiently transmit Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 under field conditions, with disease symptoms appearing throughout the plant one year after infection [2]. 5. Their focus seems to be more on understanding and managing plant diseases using various molecular and ecological approaches [3]. This research is crucial for the wine industry, especially in regions like Northern California. It's not quite "genomics on the brink of the discovery what was penicillin through crispr", but it's still cutting-edge work that could have significant impacts on grape cultivation and wine production. References: [1] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/research/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/research/ [2] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/category/lab-news/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/category/lab-news/ [3] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/publications/ https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/publications/

swiftcoder 2y ago

The last news article I found about this was 5 years ago[1], have there been any significant developments since? [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52234561 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52234561

ganzuul 2y ago
The price of olive oil has gone up significantly.
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  I guess I'm confused that the projections in TFA are largely in line with the projections in the BBC article from 5 years ago. I'd expect something to have changed in that time (whether for better/worse), and it makes me suspicious that TFA is recycling 5 year old conclusions rather than presenting novel data
- adrian_b 2y ago
  True. I am usually buying the cheapest extra-virgin olive oil available (in Europe), and its price has increased by more than 50% in comparison with a couple of years ago.
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    Try Kali Agri. Extremely high polyphenols and all around excellent. Free shipping to US, but not sure about if that applies for the Europe store: https://eu.kaliagri.it/collections/kali-eu https://eu.kaliagri.it/collections/kali-eu
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      Olive leccino my beloved. It doesn't look too expensive, not cheap at all, but not so expensive
      - indigodaddy 2y ago

m0llusk 2y ago

Potentially interesting how increasing biodiversity in cultivated environments with a range of trees and cover crops can increase resilience, but this thing attacks so many plants that even a biodiverse environment is likely to remain highly vulnerable.

nickserv 2y ago
Biodiversity should also include various varieties of the same species. In some cases it's even interesting to have wild varieties of cultivated fruit trees simply for better pollination. As indicated in the article, there are olive varieties immune to the disease, so it would make a difference.
- undersuit 2y ago
  >even interesting to have wild varieties of cultivated fruit trees simply for better pollination. Love me some pears.

nicodds 2y ago

A voice from the field here (Puglia, southern Italy). I can assure you that the landscape has changed drastically in a decade. Where a few years ago you could see immense expanses of green, now you see a ghostly landscape. It's incredible. Years and years have been spent inconclusively, both by politicians and by investigators, who have also wasted time with conspiracy theories. Only a few people have replanted olive trees using species resistant to Xylella.

amarcheschi 2y ago
(I'm Italian) We also had anti scientific movements that opposed to the destruction of olive trees in a radius big enough to prevent the bacteria to spread to other plants. Farmers also tried to delay the process of trees eradications by packing the judicial courts with appeals. Some singers (such as Al bano, I think caparezza as well) also expressed to listen to the farmers and to not touch the olives, when scientists has been saying for years "listen, we don't have a cure, we can't cure the plants, we can only contain it before it spreads to wider areas". This anti scientific behavior and this thinking of "farmers might know better than scientist" that is not only false, but dangerous when expressed by a public figure such as a famous singer, are what I were complaining about in a different comment about people being ignorant in scientific fields in italy and almost being proud of it [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376014#42376351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376014#42376351
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Now we need GMO resistance to this bacterium and the shitstorm will be complete!
- willyt 2y ago
  I wonder what the legal implications are of ignoring a disease until it spreads to your neighbour's farm. Can the neighbour sue for negligence or something?
  - gpderetta 2y ago
    you would need a functional judicial system for that.

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gewu333 2y ago

i wonder if Xylella has already spread to beyond Europe? Are there reports of it being a problem in the middle east and north africa as well?

alexey-salmin 2y ago

Something I never understood is why trees seem to be ill so rarely. There is a gazillion infectious agents on Earth from viruses to fungi, mammals are barely keeping up even with our adaptive immune system and fever. Plants lack all of that and yet some trees live for centuries or millennia when undisturbed. I realize that are many factors skewing the observation: trees may be sick without us noticing, most of the trees die very early and we observe ones that get mature, some trees are in fact visibly sick etc. What I don't know is if these factors combined explain it all or not. My gut feeling tells me that without an adaptive immune response trees must be sick way more often than we see, but I have no proof.

tschwimmer 2y ago
They are sick a lot. In the United States, chestnut blight killed 4 billion trees over 40 years. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chestnut_blight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chestnut_blight
zdragnar 2y ago
I imagine the hard walls of plant cells helps keep bacteria and virii at bay, but there's plenty of fungi that infest trees. Oak wilt is a rather pernicious local threat. The programming language Rust is named after a type of fungus that attacks plants. It's out there, but trees don't run around screaming, so it's not something that people tend to notice.
stevekemp 2y ago
Dutch Elm Disease killed a whole bunch of trees in Edinburgh, Scotland. I know a lot of the old Elm trees in Princes Street Gardens, beneath Edinburgh Castle, were replaced by Limes. Of course the problem is more widespread than than just the one city, or the one country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease
SpicyUme 2y ago
It may be that you don't see the illness/infections unless you are looking for them or until the trees die off in sufficient numbers. I look for interesting things growing near me while walking or hiking and around here I see galls from various insects like wasps and aceria, leaves covered in bright gymnosporangium rusts, and colonies of wooly adelgids. In the summer the deciduous trees tend to get powdery mildew, and I know there are some more harmful fungi in the region which seem to be damaging living trees in a way that is not common, but also not new. Sometimes you can see tress dripping sap from cuts or other damage, which I understand to be part of how they defend against disease. My parents had a tree that I remember dripped for many years before falling over in a storm. They also had a cherry tree that had a ring of dried sap bubbles on the stump of a large pruned branch. I found this which discusses the compartmentalization model of tree immune systems: https://botany.one/2019/09/trees-fight-infections-by-building-barricades-but-how/ https://botany.one/2019/09/trees-fight-infections-by-buildin...

emporas 2y ago

I think mr. Dykstra [1] (not Dijkstra), needs to be more well known. I have some olive trees, just a hundred of them, not much, but some are monsters. There are several mistakes farmers make, that over the long run compromise the health of the plant. See also [2], somewhere there he mentions California lemon production, but it may be in another webinar. The proposal of Italian gov to kill many other plants around, stems right out of the Dark Ages. Governments of course have proven repeatedly how well they understand complex systems, Covid was still hunted down after years of spreading to the population, while i have calculated using just my mind in 10 minutes, that given an incubation rate of 2 days, 63 days maximum and it has spread to every person on the planet. Anyway, we are gonna replace governments with 100 lines of code soon, and the problem will be solved. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEeIJcGxo00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEeIJcGxo00 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnNOvA3diDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnNOvA3diDU