Live Earth Farm Newsletter - Week 13, Season 15

One of my favorite Crops - Potatoes
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This week we will harvest our first red potatoes. Slipping my hands under the loose soil and pulling up the first new potatoes is like finding a buried treasure. Although potatoes grow underground they are not really roots. They are the swollen ends of skinny underground stems called rhizomes. To stimulate their growth, about a quarter to a third of the plant has to be covered with soil, or 'hilled up' to stimulate the formation of 'tubers.'
The so-called "Irish" potato is home to the highlands of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where it has been cultivated for over 5000 years. The cultivation of Potatoes together with the worlds 5 other major cereal grains, wheat, corn, rice, barley, and millet are the calorific engines of our civilizations. Before the Spanish invaded the Americas it was the Incas who built their empire on the cultivation of potatoes. Once the potatoes nutritional qualities and production characteristics where discovered in Europe it directly affected the peasants standard of living and profoundly influenced the history of that continent. The nutritional status of the people improved, since the cultivation of potatoes yielded 4-5 times more calories per acre than any of the traditionally grown cereal grains. Better fed people where more resistant to disease, and overall death rates declined and birth rates increased. In Ireland where the potato was probably most widely cultivated allowed them to survive without having to depend on the English grown grains. In war-torn Europe peasants planted potatoes as a kind of insurance, since potatoes could be left in the ground through the winter and dug only as needed for daily consumption. This would allow peasants to survive the raids of soldiers during wartime: soldiers usually would not take the time to dig the field to get their food, and certainly they would not do so if grains were stored in neighboring barns. The downfall of potato cultivation in Europe was that only one strain or variety of potato was being grown, very different than in the Andes where even today still hundreds of varieties are cultivated. Given the genetic uniformity, the vast acreage being grown in Ireland at the time (1845-46) and the perfect environmental conditions (cool and wet) all together caused the devastating "Irish Potato Famine", where a fungus commonly known as Late Blight (Phytophtora Infestans), wiped out most of the Irish potato crop. Hundreds of thousands of people died before public relief could be organized, and scores of thousands who survived emigrated to America. The harsh lesson of this famine is to avoid monocropping, something that continues in today's industrial agriculture model and only possible because of the arsenal of harmful pesticides being applied. In order to avoid disease pressure it is critical to rotate potatoes to different fields every year. The reason we are harvesting our potatoes relatively late this years is because our Spring was also wet and cold, however, the soil we planted them in has never been planted with potatoes before so we are fortunate to have a disease-free crop. Over the course of the season you will receive 4 different varieties of potatoes, besides the red ones we will harvest Yellow Finns, Butterballs, and two type of Fingerlings.