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   Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:24 JST Sarah Taber

   Y'all know what day it is 🍀

   In the US, St. Patrick's Day is strongly tied to the event that led so many Irish people to emigrate here: the famine of 1847.

   Food systems & supply chains make history.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:13 JST Sarah Taber

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     It's important to note that Ireland wasn't alone in getting hit with late blight. This disease, caused by Phytophthora infestans, was going all over Europe at the time.

     But Ireland was the only place that wound up with a famine so deep it changed the shape of the country.

     Albert ARIBAUD ✎ repeated this.
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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:13 JST Sarah Taber

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     Which is why now, people have exchanges like this.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:14 JST Sarah Taber

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     Usually when you live on potatoes, you either have them in a root cellar or dig a day's worth out of the ground at a time.

     One day, everybody went to their cellar or garden. And all the potatoes were slimy and rotten.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:14 JST Sarah Taber

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     Potato late blight is what the crop scientists call an explosive disease. The time from first symptoms to "your entire crop has melted down" is very short- days or hours.

     It hits so fast, there's a distinctive smell to it. The smell of "entire potato field in distress."

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:14 JST Sarah Taber

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     Also it has a spore that swims. So if it's wet & rainy, which Ireland usually is, all that water is a highway to late blight meltdown city.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:14 JST Sarah Taber

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     So a country of 8M people lost all their groceries in a week. And almost nobody had savings or backup food.

     Meanwhile Ireland was also growing lots of grain!

     But the people who owned most of the land kept exporting it, while subsistence farmers who rented from them starved.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:15 JST Sarah Taber

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     Most people wound up growing a potato variety that became known as the "Irish Lumper."

     It's a knobby little guy that thrives on poor, wet soils.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:16 JST Sarah Taber

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     Even after the Napoleonic War ended, English families who owned estates in Ireland got used to the income from exporting grain.

     England had various controls on exporting grain, to keep food affordable. But those laws didn't apply in Ireland.

     (A quarter = a little over 1/4 ton.)

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:16 JST Sarah Taber

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     So English estate owners & their local managers had strong financial reasons to dedicate as little of their land as possible to subsistence farmers' personal plots, and as much of it as they could to grain destined for export.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:16 JST Sarah Taber

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     The population boom, combined with the grain export boom, pushed Irish tenants' personal plots to minuscule size.

     By 1845 40% of Irish tenant farmers' plots were under 15 acres per family. 24% were under 2 hectares- which WOW, is NOT enough to support a family. AT ALL.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:17 JST Sarah Taber

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     11/ But by 1815, a few things had changed.

     The population of Ireland skyrocketed from 1M in 1600 to 8M in 1840.

     The super-high yield/acre of potatoes had a lot to do with it: adding the potato to Ireland's crop mix just allowed the land to support more people.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:17 JST Sarah Taber

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     12/ At the same time, grain was having an export boom because of the Napoleonic Wars.

     France, which was normally a grain powerhouse, was short on both labor and functional farmland to grow grain.

     Suddenly, anyone who owned large acreage could make lots of money exporting grain.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:18 JST Sarah Taber

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     9/ Potatoes arrived from the Americas in the late 1500s/early 1600s.

     And that was right around when England began seizing large amounts of land to set up plantations. (In Ireland, plantations = land grants the monarch gave to English gentry.)

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:19 JST Sarah Taber

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     8/ Starch came from oats- the grain most tolerant to wet weather- and root crops like turnips.

     Ireland's food history didn't start with the potato! Potatoes arrived into a food system that had already been fully formed since the Bronze Age.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:20 JST Sarah Taber

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     Dinner break! Keep 'em coming folks, will be back with more farm & food system facts shortly.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:20 JST Sarah Taber

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     6/ What did people in Ireland eat before potatoes?

     By all accounts, lots & LOTS of dairy. The weather's good for growing lush grass, which keeps cows well-fed enough to milk most of the year.

     Drinkable yogurt-type beverages, curds, clabbered cream, and lots & lots of butter.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:20 JST Sarah Taber

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     7/ But there's a problem: dairy is perishable. Hard aged cheeses have a longer shelf life. But those take dry conditions (part of why they're popular in the Mediterranean).

     What's a dairy farmer in cold, rainy Ireland to do?

     Bog butter, apparently!

     https://www.ucd.ie/newsandopinion/news/2019/march/14/irishbogbutterproventobe3500yearspastitsbestbeforedate/

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:21 JST Sarah Taber

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     5/ After emigrating to the US, a lot of people kept using colcannon as a side dish along with corned beef (a working-class friendly main dish in 19th century US) or other heartier options.

     But for people living on small plots in Ireland, it often served as the main dish.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:22 JST Sarah Taber

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     2/ This answers a question I'd had for a long time. When we learned about the 1847 famine in schools, the textbooks would say "People got almost all their calories from potatoes, and their fat and protein from a little bit of dairy." But I knew cows are big honkin' animals that need lots of space and food.

     If people were living on tiny plots, how were they keeping cows?

     Oh the cows were little. That helps a lot.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:22 JST Sarah Taber

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     3/ If you're eating a lot of potatoes & dairy, you gotta find a way to make it interesting!

     Enter colcannon: mashed potatoes with greens and ideally (IMO) as much milk/butter as possible.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:22 JST Sarah Taber

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     4/ There's a song about colcannon! Fittingly called "Colcannon."

     It's a little sappy but I think for a thing that stood between a lot of people & starvation, this is permissible.

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHSRbhqLfKo

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:23 JST Sarah Taber

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     I'm working to build a better food system here in the southern US. Both regions share rich land that can grow plenty of good food- and a history of deep rural poverty, thanks to what could generously be described as "poor leadership."

     There's also a lot of ingenuity in both.

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:23 JST Sarah Taber

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     So today we're doing another round!

     For every donation to the link below, I'll post one (1) fact about agriculture in Ireland- before, during, & after 1847.

     There's WAY more than potatoes. Like what's going on with these fully-grown, halfling-sized cows.

     https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mastodon

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     Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 18-Mar-2024 14:37:23 JST Sarah Taber

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     And we're off!

     1/ Ireland has a long history of smallish cattle. Here's a guy posing with a bull, with some forced perspective to make this compact king look like full-sized.

     Why small cows? They weigh less.

     That's a big plus in Ireland. When it's rainy, big heavy cows can easily tear up sod with their weight. Next thing you know the pasture is a music festival-style mudpit. The grass can take years to grow back right.

     You can avoid all of that just by having smaller cows!