AUGUST 25TH, 1906: THE THREAT of potato blight and the reality of resulting severe food shortages and even famines was never far away during the 19th century and into the 20th century, as this editorial inThe Irish Times from 1906 indicates.
In this temperate climate the uncertainty of agricultural prospects is notorious, and, especially in Ireland, the period immediately preceding harvest time is one of acute apprehension for the farmer.
Yet, though the western farmer is always prepared for the worst, there is something appalling in the suddenness of the disaster with which the potato crop is now threatened. We are reminded of the puzzling passage in scripture which tells us that “when they awoke in the morning they were dead men”.
Three weeks ago the prospects of the Irish potato harvest were more than commonly good. Today, whole districts are stricken with the blight, and it is admitted that the present damage is widespread and serious. The warm, dull weather and heavy mists of the last fortnight are directly responsible for the appearance of the blight, and it is to be feared that the very class which will suffer most have taken the least precautions to resist it.
Two main conclusions are to be drawn from the interesting articles from our special correspondent in Connaught. The first is that the ravages of the blight are not so bad as they have been painted. We do not desire to minimise the amount of very real loss and hardship which it has already inflicted, or to pretend that there is no danger of even more serious developments. But the actual damage has been much exaggerated in certain quarters, and there is no justification for the excessively gloomy colours in which it has pleased some of our contemporaries [newspapers] to depict the immediate future.
To say, as the Freeman’s Journal has said, that “the agricultural department is plainly in a condition of despair” is to talk mischievous nonsense.
Unquestionably there will be a serious shortage in the yield of potatoes, but it is far too early to predict anything in the nature of a famine. In the first place, a spell of good weather may yet avert any really ruinous and wholesale losses. In the next place, there are many districts, even in the poorest and least fertile counties, which the blight has only very lightly affected. Finally, the early crop, gathered in long before the blight appeared, is admitted to have been above the average both in quality and quantity.
If the present situation should develop into a really alarming famine, the victim will have little reason to be grateful to the politicians who have been crying “wolf” so long that the wolf’s genuine arrival may run the risk of being discredited.
The other conclusion which we must draw is that the existing distress is largely due to the foolishly conservative methods of the western peasant-farmer. The absolute efficacy of spraying as a preventative of blight has not been proved, and is not likely to be proved if there is truth in the new theory that the disease is perpetuated in the seed itself. But it has been proved over and over again that spraying renders the plants comparatively immune.
Last year the practice was adopted in some districts of Galway with excellent results, but it would seem that many farmers expected the beneficial results of last year’s spraying to continue into this year, and so were quite unprepared for the present outbreak of disease. In spite also of the strenuous teaching of the department of agriculture and of the Congested Districts Board, too many farmers persist in the ancestral habit of sowing the same variety of seed year after year in the same plot of ground, with the inevitable consequence that the weakened tuber succumbs to the first touch of disease.
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