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Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

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Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#21

Post by fredrikholm »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #4
creyes12345 wrote: post #2

Requiring calorie-heavy diets to carry out their punishing workloads, [the Irish impoverished tenant farmers] were soon consuming between 40 and 60 potatoes every day.

That's roughly between 6000 and 10000 calories

Selective 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.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#22

Post by EGreg »

roschdal wrote: post #18
defrost wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a wealth of Irish history to catch up on it seems. https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=516

Honestly, I thought the Irish potato famine was caused by a potato plague. That's all...

Thus my comment. I am glad it can help people realize that people’s governments, economic systems and the way people organize through a crisis can play a huge role — to mitigate a major crop failure or to massively exacerbate problems.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#23

Post by StanislavPetrov »

roschdal wrote: post #18
defrost wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a wealth of Irish history to catch up on it seems. https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=516

Honestly, I thought the Irish potato famine was caused by a potato plague. That's all...

The vast majority of people who are woefully wrong about history (and current events) are being completely earnest about their beliefs.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#24

Post by defrost »

roschdal wrote: post #18
defrost wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a wealth of Irish history to catch up on it seems. https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=516

Honestly, I thought the Irish potato famine was caused by a potato plague. That's all...

Fair enough if you knew nothing else.

In reality it was the last straw after decades of English landowners pushing a rapidly increasing local population further and further into the weeds and denying access to traditional lands and their resources.

"The Irish Question" had been debated at length and from afar in the British houses of Parliment for years prior, and there were a number of small famines before the big crop failures that saw millions displaced.

It's another in a common pattern of invaders colonising a country resulting in dire outcomes for those already there.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#25

Post by amatic »

Roark66 wrote: post #5
creyes12345 wrote: post #2

Requiring calorie-heavy diets to carry out their punishing workloads, [the Irish impoverished tenant farmers] were soon consuming between 40 and 60 potatoes every day.

I'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 c…

When I was growing up, in eastern Europe, we had a small potato plot and every few days during the growing season, we would go to the plot, scrape the little red eggs from the leaves, and hand-pick the larva and adult beetles, then crush everything with our feet. I'm guessing this wouldn't scale too well for larger producers, but seemed to be working well for us.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#27

Post by ifdefdebug »

Eisenstein wrote: post #16
Roark66 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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 c…

No problem: just find an animal that has no local predator and eats the beetles and introduce it to the ecosystem. What could go wrong?

Nothing. 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.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#29

Post by ranko »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #23
roschdal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I thought the Irish potato famine was caused by a potato plague. That's all...

The vast majority of people who are woefully wrong about history (and current events) are being completely earnest about their beliefs.

W B Yeats, born in Dublin in 1865, put it like this:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#30

Post by JumpCrisscross »

EGreg wrote: post #6

It’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 late…

> the much later famines in the Bengal regions...entire British Raj came about through state capitalism

There is an interesting thread of history in the earlier 1770 famine in Bengal.

The EIC over-taxed during the famine, leading to "a large proportion of the dead [being] spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food" [1]. Dead spinners produce no textiles, which caused the Company losses. That crashed the stock and--together with a short squeeze in EIC stock and ensuing pan-European banking panic--prompted Britain's first modern credit crisis [2]. That, in turn, required a bailout from the Bank of England and, among other assistance, the Tea Act in 1773 [3], which, together with images of the EIC's ruthlessness in Bengal, caused the Boston Tea Party [4] which kicked off the American Revolution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_credit_crisis_of_1772–...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

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