Thos was absolutely fascinating to me on so many levels!!
FYI by going to America, they meant literally the continent. My relatives landed in Columbia first. They did not at that point differentiate between the countries except that NY had some infrastructure.
Finally got around to reading this. Great stuff, but this line caught my eye:
"Aaron Aaronsohn was the agronomist who discovered wild emmer wheat — the genetic ancestor of modern wheat — in 1906"
Wait... What? You say you talk about it in your review of "Tamed" so I guess I should read that, but you're saying that thousands of years of agriculture. Centuries and centuries of wheat being turned into bread. Somewhere in there you had to get some selective breading, even if it's unintentional, and yet despite this, there was still a wild variety out there that ended up being better enough than the domesticated wheat as a basis Aaronsohn used it instead of the varieties people had been using for centuries?
"Since the discovery of Aaron Aaronson, wild emmer has been used in breeding programs around the world, enabling the improvement of the nutritional quality of wheat grain, tolerance to diseases, and water-limiting conditions."
That was FASCINATING! I didn't know any of that about locusts, i always kinda accepted them like when they show up in The Little Prairie books, as a sort of divine-adjacent thing that happens sometimes. And now that you've explained it to me, i see why everyone was convinced it was a godly punishment, how could you even start to understand normal useless grasshoppers turning into this???
Yeah before I started researching this I didn't really understand why "plague of locusts" was such a big deal. I figured it was up there with "rain of frogs" for just being a weird thing that happens sometimes. But no, locusts are awful.
Thos was absolutely fascinating to me on so many levels!!
FYI by going to America, they meant literally the continent. My relatives landed in Columbia first. They did not at that point differentiate between the countries except that NY had some infrastructure.
Interesting, thanks for the background!
Finally got around to reading this. Great stuff, but this line caught my eye:
"Aaron Aaronsohn was the agronomist who discovered wild emmer wheat — the genetic ancestor of modern wheat — in 1906"
Wait... What? You say you talk about it in your review of "Tamed" so I guess I should read that, but you're saying that thousands of years of agriculture. Centuries and centuries of wheat being turned into bread. Somewhere in there you had to get some selective breading, even if it's unintentional, and yet despite this, there was still a wild variety out there that ended up being better enough than the domesticated wheat as a basis Aaronsohn used it instead of the varieties people had been using for centuries?
Maybe I'm missing something?
"Since the discovery of Aaron Aaronson, wild emmer has been used in breeding programs around the world, enabling the improvement of the nutritional quality of wheat grain, tolerance to diseases, and water-limiting conditions."
https://www.haifa-group.com/haifa-blog/one-hundred-years-wheat-research-history-aaronsohn-farm
Ahh... that makes more sense. It's been cross-breed, it didn't supplant previous wheat strains.
That was FASCINATING! I didn't know any of that about locusts, i always kinda accepted them like when they show up in The Little Prairie books, as a sort of divine-adjacent thing that happens sometimes. And now that you've explained it to me, i see why everyone was convinced it was a godly punishment, how could you even start to understand normal useless grasshoppers turning into this???
Yeah before I started researching this I didn't really understand why "plague of locusts" was such a big deal. I figured it was up there with "rain of frogs" for just being a weird thing that happens sometimes. But no, locusts are awful.