Note: I used to work for Dr. Matthew Kleinhenz at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, OH. I chose to put this work within science, because while related to art, Kleinhenz provides a scientific response.
Is there any blight or disease that could wipe out most of the world’s crops?
The big question: Are we ever going to be in danger — in the most extreme and speculative sense — of ever having just corn and okra to eat?
“I got the biggest kick out of this premise,” Kleinhenz said. “But if I were sitting around talking with the filmmakers I’d be a wet blanket.” Blight, disease, and all the other factors that make crops die off, he explained, don’t usually cut such a wide swath. Also, when one plant form dies off or struggles, that often opens a door for another to thrive.
“The way the biological world is constructed just doesn’t support this scenario,” he said. “There are strains of diseases that wreak havoc on individual crops and even on groups of related regions, but these have to not just be adapted to the crop but to the climate and conditions.”
There’s a fundamental tenet of plant pathology called the disease triangle. It says that for any disease to spread widely it needs three things: a susceptible host, a pathogen, and the right environmental conditions. Take any one away, and the disease won’t spread.
“It’s very unlikely that a single superbug would spread across our diverse planet, or even do as well in Alaska as Peru.”
But c’mon. Get speculative. Is there anything that makes horticulture scientists shiver just a bit?
Sure, maybe this kind of scenario isn’t likely, but is there anything — likely or not — that could radically reshape agriculture as we know it? “Well, what you can say,” he said, “is that things are changing.” Why? Two words: climate change.
Extreme weather and the effects of climate change aren’t science fiction. “This is a global phenomenon with local realities,” Kleinhenz said. He works extensively with farmers and agriculture in the Midwest, and in the extreme weather of the last couple years he’s seen unprecedented effects that have a long tail of consequences. “In 2012, for instance, there was no apple crop in Michigan, which meant that the laborers who usually harvest apples didn’t come. But this also meant that the vegetable crops they usually harvest didn’t get picked either. There are all these layers of climate effect on agriculture: social and economic layers, food, diet, health. Individual weather events can really strain the system.”
“In 2012 I was called in by several farmers in their 80s, who had never encountered weather (or challenges) like this in their entire working lives. No one who is working today had previously seen what 2012 brought.”
So could climate change be the superbug that leaves us with just corn and okra to eat?
Kleinhenz hastened to reassure here as well. “I’m not genuinely concerned about something being removed from people’s tables. What I would say is that the supply chain that provides it, the price paid for it, its availability, the way in which it is brought — those may change.”
His work with climate change and agriculture does make him concerned for the agriculture community and their way of life in the United States. “Effects of weather have always been with us and most astute know how to deal with them and over the course of a career. But the system is built to tolerate certain levels of fluctuation and when those tolerances are regularly being exceeded it sends ripples through the whole system.”
But farmers tend to find a way forward. “On a day to day basis,” he said, “I’ve always been impressed by the resilience and adaptability of that same community.”
Source: The Kitchn. Article by Faith Durand
As mentioned in my Art section [provide link], Interstellar (2014) provides an elementary vision of where agriculture could head. In this interview, Matt points out that while the concept of where we end up might be far-fetched or impossible, the reality is the biological world is changing around us at the most rapid paces in recorded history due to climate change. In other articles on this site from the domain of Rural Sociology and the Sociology of Agriculture, we see studies backing up the importance of agriculture in rural communities. As with any staple industry, agriculture holds up other industries within its proximity. When less individuals are farming in an area, there is less need for farm supply stores, less variety of seed providers, less seasonal laborers needed by the farm.
Kleinhenz also notes that climate change will affect what we eat. Today’s practices of genetically-engineered monocultures and overproduced, government-subsidized cash crops are unsustainable and leave agriculture as a fragile system. One day these norms will be disrupted and replaced, resulting in a new dietary culture in the western world and probably around the globe.
Kleinhenz’s final note about the “resilience and adaptability of [the] community” in reference to agricultural producers is backed by other studies in Rural Sociology noting a larger resilience among family farmers compared to industries and the population as a whole. Their responses to the changes in our world are important to watch and learn from.
