Posted on

Potatoes

As a Whatcom County potato royal, assuming agnatic primogeniture, I was naturally interested in a recent feature in Science on worldwide potato production. Potatoes have become more important for the last decade, especially in India and China.

My father and grandfather raised potatoes for sale directly to grocery stores. Now, only seed potatoes are grown commercially in Whatcom County. Raising seed potatoes is more exacting than raising potatoes for food. Heroic efforts are required to ensure that the seed runs true to type. For example, seed potatoes must be rotated with other crops to ensure that strains don’t intermingle. Sustaining an acre of seed potatoes requires control of several acres of land that can be rotated through other crops like hay and corn.

In the 1960s, world food production soared in what was called the Green Revolution, much different than today’s Green New Deal. The Green Revolution was the result of newly developed strains of cereal grains, mostly wheat and rice, with higher yields, shorter growing seasons, and greater disease resistance. Coupled with modern fertilizers, pest and herbicides, and mechanized farming, world food supplies in increased rapidly and health improved. The current rise in prosperity in India and China is partially due to the Green Revolution which preceded the current computer technology revolution.

Potatoes did not play a large role in the Green Revolution due to a peculiarity in the genetic mechanism of potatoes, which is different from most species. Compare potatoes to humans. Except for sperm and egg cells, each human cell has two sets of identical chromosomes. Sex is all about recombining chromosomes from a sperm and egg into a new double set. Sometimes children inherit the best traits from each of their parents. But they can also inherit the worst of each. Most of the time the combination is a mix of good and bad. In the long scheme of things, this continual mixing produces a variety of offspring that are able to thrive in a wide variety of challenging environments.

Potatoes are different. They can have as many as six copies of each chromosome. When potatoes pollenate and produce seeds (potato sex), the potential variation is huge because there are so many moving parts that can be fitted together in so many ways. More variation means more chances for beneficial varieties. But the combinations are random. Some are good, some are bad.

In the long term, bad combinations that fail to thrive, die and disappear. But in the short term, you have failing plants. Farmers don’t want to waste time and effort growing failures. This is why potatoes are not grown from seed: the farmers never know what they will get from a potato seed. Therefore, potatoes are propagated from pieces of the potato tuber (the part you eat) instead of seed. Without the tingle of sex, the resulting plants are identical to their parents. After all, no one grows spuds for the excitement.

But propagation by cuttings has problems. Seeds are miracles of packaging. Kept dry, a sack of seeds (like wheat or rice kernels) is good for several years without special handling. Add warmth, water, and nutrients, and plants spring up. A single pound of wheat seeds can yield twelve thousand wheat plants. A pound of seed potatoes will yield around ten potato plants. Not only do you need more pounds of seed potatoes than pounds wheat seed for a crop, seed potatoes have to be kept from freezing and they can’t be kept over very easily for a second season.

In addition, developing new strains of potatoes is more difficult than creating new strains of cereal crops. Potato variations may be plentiful but getting a promising potato to breed true is often difficult and time consuming.

If they are so much trouble, why bother with potatoes as a food crop? The answer is simple: my grandpa could get more potatoes with less effort from his land than he could wheat or oats. And he could sell potatoes directly to grocery stores instead of selling it a milling company that would take their share of the profits from the finished product. That meant more profit for him.

My grandpa only raised wheat and oats for his cattle. He could feed them grain directly or take it to the feed mill in Ferndale to have it ground to make it more palatable and nutritious for the cattle , but he never sold grain to a middle man.

Potatoes are good human food directly from the ground. Although potatoes have less protein than wheat, potato protein is more usable for humans. A person eating only potatoes will live longer and be healthier than a person eating only wheat bread. We all know that a diet from a variety of sources is best, but not everyone in the world can make the choices that are effortless for most Americans.

Oddly, the Irish potato famine, which caused the 19th century wave of Irish immigration to the US, was the result of a disastrous combination of potato characteristics: potatoes grew easily in Ireland and the population increased on a sustaining diet consisting mostly of potatoes. Unfortunately, all the potatoes in Ireland were genetically identical due to propagation by cuttings. When a disease, the blight, hit, the entire potato harvest was affected for several consecutive years and the people starved.

Today, post Green Revolution techniques have made potatoes an important new crop. Propagating potatoes by seed has become feasible, and other techniques have developed new varieties that are more productive and support two potato crops per year in some climates. My grandpa’s crop is becoming more important for world nutrition for the same reasons he became potato king: a high yield and a healthy product that is palatable without further processing.

Posted on

SR99 Tunnel Ride

This post is mostly about Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a congenital heart disease that I was born with. HCM is actually fairly common—at least 1 in 500 people have it, which is more than many well-known diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), or Muscular Dystrophy. When you hear of a young athlete suddenly dying on the playing field, the cause is almost always HCM.

A cardiomyopathy is disease of the heart muscle, distinct from coronary disease, which is disease of the blood vessels that supply the heart, typically caused by buildup of cholesterol that clogs the vessels. When a coronary artery is blocked, the result is often a cardiomyopathy caused by dying blood-starved heart muscle, a typical heart attack. HCM often causes symptoms that resemble a mild heart attack.

HCM is different. In HCM, heart muscle fibers grow thick and stiff. In my case, my heart grew in such a way that blood flow through my left ventricle was impeded. Eventually, I went to the Mayo Clinic where Dr. Werner Schaff stopped my heart for half an hour while he reshaped the interior of my ventricle by removing heart tissue. After the surgery, he told me the tissue he removed was the size of my thumb. That was in 2008.

When I returned to Whatcom County from Rochester Minnesota, I was weak, but I felt better. All my life, I felt palpitations, sessions after heavy physical labor, or for no apparent reason, my heart pounded in my chest to the point that I could think of nothing else. I assumed everyone experienced the same thing. I have not felt those pounding palpitations since the surgery.

In retrospect, I had a close call in the fourth or fifth grade. Custer, Central, and North Bellingham Elementary competed in a softball league. I was on the about the fifth string of the North Bellingham team playing Central, the elementary for the town of Ferndale. When there was no possibility of putting anyone else up to bat, I was at the plate. The Central pitcher threw a slow one, smack down the middle, no doubt because the chance that I would hit it was near zero. I saw it coming and swung. Miracle of miracles, I drove it into the outfield.

I started running. I made it to first and rounded toward second, the only time in my entire life that I have made that turn. About midway to second, my feet seemed to disappear from under me and I was engulfed in a reddish-brown fog. The next thing I knew, a crowd of kids were looking down at me and the umpire called me out. They pulled me up and I stumbled back to the bench, blaming myself for being so clumsy. So much for my baseball career.

Knowing what I know now about HCM, I believe I was lucky. Other young athletes have never left that brown fog. The most common first symptom of HCM is sudden cardiac death.

I made it until my early fifties. I’ve always liked bicycles. At that point in my life, I was riding a bike to work every day. We had bought a second home in Redmond, about six miles from the office. Most of my ride was on the Sammamish River Trail segment of the Burke-Gillman Trail, the bike super highway of the Seattle area. The trail is almost level, but I had a climb from the trail to the office on 128th in Kirkland.

I had a regular checkup with my doctor in Redmond. I mentioned that my chest ached on the uphill from the river trail. He frowned, asked me a few questions I’ve forgotten, ran an EKG, and shoved me across the hall in a wheel chair to a cardiologist. The cardiologist ordered an echocardiogram and pushed me into his echo lab. The technician performed an echocardiogram, the first of many. At one point, she called in the cardiologist to look at the screen. After a while, she gave me a cloth to wipe off the jelly she had smeared on my chest and told me to get dressed. She escorted me into the cardiologist’s office. A routine checkup had turned interesting.

The cardiologist told me that my echo-cardiogram was abnormal. He had not seen my condition often, but he thought it was idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis (IHSS), the old name for HCM.

I went through a series of medications, none of which seemed to do any good. The last straw was a tread mill echo-cardiogram that the cardiologist in charge refused to complete. I had a referral to the Mayo Clinic.

That was ten years ago last November. My heart has improved steadily after Dr. Schaff’s knife work.

Last Sunday, my friend, Bill Merrow, and I rode the historic Cascade Bicycle SR99 Tunnel Ride. I was, frankly, scared, thinking about sudden cardiac death and my aborted softball career, but I also felt like I could do it. Riding through the tunnel before it was opened to car traffic was a once in a lifetime event.

So, I tried. And succeeded. Bill was forbearing, tolerating my slow speed, being passed by 10-year-olds on rocket bikes and families pulling trailer-loads of infants. I stopped once, on the final ascent of the return trip through the tunnel to let my heart slow down and a few muscles relax, but I made it.

Folks with HCM, once they have made it through young adulthood, typically live as long as anyone else. That’s my plan.

Posted on

Voles, Stories, and Owls

Voles, field mice, are among my favorite animals.

Field Mouse Skull from owl pellet. C9 Photography

My dad (Ted) used to read Beatrix Potter to my sister and me. Actually, he retold the stories in his own way and only occasionally referred to the illustrations. Somehow, Beatrix Potter’s English Lake District was transported to the fields and gardens of the Waschke Homestead. And the field mice, Dad never called them voles, were prominent characters. Dad did not have anything to say about house mice; they were pests in the barn, and he was happy to see the cats catch and eat them.

In Dad’s stories, field mice had names, characters, families, and adventures. He told gentle stories. Brave little field mice narrowly escaping marauding owls, rescued by their mouse parents. Field mice falling into holes and struggling to escape. Field mice outwitting a clever red fox crouching in hiding next to a succulent cache of tender roots. Field mice going out in the snow and catching a chill that had to be treated with hot foot baths and chamomile tea. Field mice meeting wise old chickens. Where my father ever got the idea that a chicken might be wise, I don’t know.

Voles are a separate species from house and wood mice with different diets and habits. The variety that lives on the Waschke Homestead is much larger than house mice—sometimes five inches long, plump, with longer hair, shorter tails, and never venture far from open fields. The hay and grain fields, offering cover for their labyrinthine trails and nests, teemed with them. Corn and potato fields were too open for field mice and the cows in the pastures trampled and destroyed field mouse kingdoms. But the hay and grain fields left the field mice undisturbed for months at a time and they flourished there.

The owls, foxes, barn cats, and coyotes all knew where the field mice lived. After sunset and in the early morning before sunrise, the owls fly over, and other predators nose around in the field mouse trails and dine well on field mice fattened on grass and other plants that grew in the fields.

Field mice skulls appear in owl pellets in the barn. The owls swallow the mice bones and all, then cough up the indigestible parts as pellets when they roost in the barn. The pellets litter the floor of the hay barn and the silo now. The contents of the pellets are fascinating. Jake and Monica captured the harsh beauty of a field mouse skull from an owl pellet in the photo above.

Field mice are terrifyingly prolific. A fertile female produces four or five offspring a month, who mature in a few weeks. Without the predators the field mouse population would soon run out of food. Relying on the natural curbs on their proliferation, Dad never worried about field mice affecting his crops and I don’t believe they ever did.

Hay cutting and grain harvesting was a terror for field mice. When we cut hay with a sickle cutter bar mower, in areas where the field mouse population was high, the cutting bar laid their nests and trails open to the sky and the sickle would drip with deep red field mouse blood. The disk mowers that are generally used now disperse the blood in an invisible blur.

The field mouse slaughter was also a dangerous time for cats. They liked to hunt close to the mowing, waiting to catch mice fleeing from the cutter. A cat’s instincts are not tuned to mowers cutting hay and sometimes they dive into the path of the mower instead of away. Every year or so, we’d lose a good cat to the mower.

As the field was cut, mice would run to the tall grass remaining in the center of the field, a patch that got smaller with each round of the mower. During the last few passes, the patch of tall grass in the center would rustle with fleeing field mice.