Xylella Fastidiosa: A crisis brewing in Europe's olive groves
everymansci.com
everymansci.com
"Nighttime harvesting. Machines used to vacuum olives from trees at night can suck in and kill birds. This practice is used to preserve the olives' flavor, but it's a recent development that's harmful to birds."
It is kind of like getting rid of cats and after that wondering why so many rats and the plague, or the Cultural Revolution famine after that mass extermination of birds there.
Sorry for the nitpick. I believe you are referring to the Four Pests campaign, which was part of the Great Leap Forward (1950s) rather than the Cultural Revolution (1960s)
or recently, in EU, we must kill the wolf, but the deer is eating the small trees in the forests.
1. The lab, led by Professor Rodrigo Almeida, is studying economically important grape diseases, focusing on Grapevine leafroll disease and Grapevine red blotch disease [1].
2. They're developing an AI tool for fast and accurate disease identification in vineyards, which could be a game-changer for disease management.
3. Their work combines molecular biology, ecology, and bioinformatics, using advanced techniques like genomics.
4. A recent study led by Kai Blaisdell showed that mealybugs efficiently transmit Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3 under field conditions, with disease symptoms appearing throughout the plant one year after infection [2].
5. Their focus seems to be more on understanding and managing plant diseases using various molecular and ecological approaches [3].
This research is crucial for the wine industry, especially in regions like Northern California. It's not quite "genomics on the brink of the discovery what was penicillin through crispr", but it's still cutting-edge work that could have significant impacts on grape cultivation and wine production.
References: [1] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/research/ [2] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/category/lab-news/ [3] https://nature.berkeley.edu/almeidalab/publications/
It seems only russia shows some interest in them - ans mostly for military purposes
As to why not, they dont “scale out” like other generalized pharmaceuticals or medicine. Phages need a bunch of patient specific diagnostics and revision to be effective against the specific target. Thats why you see people fly to romania for a month of treatment, and not order the bacteriophages from romania.
These therapies are the largest focus of cancer research in the US right now with enormous funding behind them, despite having the same weaknesses you point out as bacteriophages.
I had no idea people did this!
I'm not sure what questions get asked on entry to Romania...
The USSR's "research" was not great either. It mostly consisted of practical methods of evaluating environmental samples and concentrating/purifying phages.
Used to show interest. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, most of that's just been a dumpsterfire.
I realize that are many factors skewing the observation: trees may be sick without us noticing, most of the trees die very early and we observe ones that get mature, some trees are in fact visibly sick etc. What I don't know is if these factors combined explain it all or not. My gut feeling tells me that without an adaptive immune response trees must be sick way more often than we see, but I have no proof.
The programming language Rust is named after a type of fungus that attacks plants.
It's out there, but trees don't run around screaming, so it's not something that people tend to notice.
I know a lot of the old Elm trees in Princes Street Gardens, beneath Edinburgh Castle, were replaced by Limes. Of course the problem is more widespread than than just the one city, or the one country:
Sometimes you can see tress dripping sap from cuts or other damage, which I understand to be part of how they defend against disease. My parents had a tree that I remember dripped for many years before falling over in a storm. They also had a cherry tree that had a ring of dried sap bubbles on the stump of a large pruned branch.
I found this which discusses the compartmentalization model of tree immune systems: https://botany.one/2019/09/trees-fight-infections-by-buildin...
As indicated in the article, there are olive varieties immune to the disease, so it would make a difference.
Love me some pears.
Only a few people have replanted olive trees using species resistant to Xylella.
We also had anti scientific movements that opposed to the destruction of olive trees in a radius big enough to prevent the bacteria to spread to other plants. Farmers also tried to delay the process of trees eradications by packing the judicial courts with appeals. Some singers (such as Al bano, I think caparezza as well) also expressed to listen to the farmers and to not touch the olives, when scientists has been saying for years "listen, we don't have a cure, we can't cure the plants, we can only contain it before it spreads to wider areas".
This anti scientific behavior and this thinking of "farmers might know better than scientist" that is not only false, but dangerous when expressed by a public figure such as a famous singer, are what I were complaining about in a different comment about people being ignorant in scientific fields in italy and almost being proud of it [1]
See also [2], somewhere there he mentions California lemon production, but it may be in another webinar.
The proposal of Italian gov to kill many other plants around, stems right out of the Dark Ages. Governments of course have proven repeatedly how well they understand complex systems, Covid was still hunted down after years of spreading to the population, while i have calculated using just my mind in 10 minutes, that given an incubation rate of 2 days, 63 days maximum and it has spread to every person on the planet.
Anyway, we are gonna replace governments with 100 lines of code soon, and the problem will be solved.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEeIJcGxo00 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnNOvA3diDU
I am usually buying the cheapest extra-virgin olive oil available (in Europe), and its price has increased by more than 50% in comparison with a couple of years ago.
So using a better olive oil would not make me reduce the amount that I eat, therefore I choose the cheapest EVOO most of the time (which is still quite good, even if with a less intense flavor; since I use great amounts in cooking, the flavor is strong enough anyway).
Outdoors wins always from a power efficiency standpoint, but disease can flip the balance.
It seems rather to be yet another argument for polycropping and taking care of genetic variety and adapting to local conditions, instead of trying even harder to hammer nature into a grid.
One concern that comes to mind: If a certain variation is more-susceptible to a particular disease or pest, and becomes a beachhead or reservoir--fun mixed metaphors there--for infection.
Spain already grows hundreds of cultivars of olive trees, though only three are used for the bulk of the olive oil. So replacing those with resistant ones would reduce diversity.
The main problem with polyculture being that it assumes local farmers are smart and cunning individuals who find (perhaps unorthodox) solutions in constrained, complex and realistic environments because their livelihoods depend on it (or because they got an interesting idea and couldn't let it go), and who know more about their challenges than random hn commenters like me, instead of being mindless drones that can be replaced/interchanged at will by central overlords with complete control over the panopticon food factory.
While the focus has been on olives, the bacterium’s ability to infect such a broad spectrum of plants makes it an agricultural nightmare, particularly in regions where multiple crops are grown in close proximity.
I know that not everyone is a horticulturalist. Allow me to explain why this is dumb. It is true that for a crop like tomatoes, you might just grow any old mongrel seed, and that the tomatoes will still produce... even if yields are off 30% or 40%. Monocropping in that case is about increasing yields, not making the impossible possible.
This is simply not true with most orchard tree crops (or grapes, or about half the sorts of food crops you've enjoyed all your life). An apple, for instance isn't just a monocrop of closely related sibling plants... each Fuji or Pink Lady apple you've eaten is a genetic clone of any other of that type. They are literally cloned through grafting (and sometimes rooted cuttings). If we want to get really technical, each tree is technically a chimera, with only the crown being Pink Lady, the low trunk and roots will be something like M.111 (another variety that you don't eat it's fruit). Hell, sometimes there's even a third type in the middle of the two called an "interstock". What would happen if you didn't clone apple varieties? You wouldn't eat apples anymore. Every apple tree would produce its own kind of fruit, some might be just as good as Fuji or Yellow Delicious or any of the others you're familiar with. But there'd only ever be one tree of that. Apples do not grow true to seed. Some would be little golf-ball-sized crab apples. Others would be completely tasteless. Or dry and pithy. Or nasty-looking things that always split while growing. Maybe farmers would still grow them as feed for hogs (but productivity is also a genetic trait, and you've just struck a death-blow against having a large number of highly productive trees). Maybe they'd be grown to make alcohol (more applejack or cider than apfelwein I'd think).
But apples as a desert fruit would be gone.
And it's like this for many, many crops. Hell, even something like wheat... you can complain about monocropping, but these new varieties that they use actually resist diseases better (not to mention prevented who knows how many famines through increased yield). This is the argument of someone who whines about GMO crops and shops at Whole foods, a certain political type whose preferred policies seem designed to just make food more expensive and scarce.
>Another example is the Cavendish banana.
There are plenty of banana cultivars... few of them of the sort that people in the developed world enjoy. It's the same problem as all of the other. But for Cavendish (and a tiny handful of other varieties), you'd have no bananas at all.
You bring up apples and other orchard fruits. Yes, in production you want things like uniformity and yield. But from a long term survival standpoint, you want some diversity, such as through preservation of heritage varieties or allowing some seeds to grow and selecting from them. Otherwise, you end up with a very short list of possible options when faced with new diseases. You need some genetic pool to select resistant rootstock from. It also prevents things like genetic and epigenetic adaptations to the environment (see progressive cold hardening). Of course the economics of it discourages farmers from selecting currently inferior varieties for crops. But perhaps a biosecurity program could fill that gap.
You don't get to have that. It's just not an option. All these polyploidals do not work like that. You can have uniformity (which people want anyway), or you can have fruit that's so bad no one wants to bother growing it. There's no middle ground.
"The origin of the Xylella outbreak in Italy can be traced back to a single coffee plant imported from Central America in 2008. Researchers found that the bacterium in the infected coffee plant adapted to thrive in olive trees, setting the stage for the crisis that would unfold over the next decade. By 2015, the disease had spread beyond Apulia, affecting regions across France, Spain, and Portugal. The rapid spread of this bacterium has left scientists and farmers alike scrambling for solutions."
As someone who strongly dislikes bees, but loves honey and its products I find myself wondering how to automate beekeeping so I can not interact with bees.
But the truth of the matter is they need someone to babysit and check up on them once in awhile. Make sure they're free of mites, that the colony isn't going to be unbalanced (that they might need a new queen, if something went wrong, or there's not enough brood in the comb). Wear a beekeeping suit. No reason to dislike them, they appreciate flowers, make candy, and twerk-to-talk. Seems like they're the good guys.
Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.
That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow.
If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-...
Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
But the Spanish monks who gave gave California olive trees were on to something. If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate. This obviates the need for sheltering the tree much or at all.
No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world. No hate though, I've got an olive tree indoors too (though just in a window).
Yeh, "Mission" olives. One of the cuttings is that. Allegedly one of the most cold-hardy cultivars. It might survive outside with our winters (yay global warming) if I get the trunk to about 4" before it has to make its own way outdoors. Hoping anyway.
>No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world.
Oh, for sure. These are my end-of-the-world olive trees. Mostly keeping them inside now because it's winter. Starting in March, they should be able to go outside until Halloween or so. I should be able to get more cuttings off of each (Mission, Pendolino, Arbequina), and make several dozen trees. But some will always be indoors as mother trees for more cuttings.
And yeh pineapples are absurd. But my daughter just finally nailed getting the tops to root... putting them in a jar of water just rots the crown here (air quality, humidity? dunno). She dried one out until it looked dead, then trimmed the bottom a bit more, and there was nice living tissue, a pretty yellow. That was able to be put to moisture, and it rooted in a few weeks. The greenhouse square footage for something like "one pineapple a month" would be on the order of 350sqft, and we're unclear if they can be staggered. Sometimes these plants decide to all bloom at once, even if some are overdue and others premature.
We have a list of "things we can't live without if the rest of you monkeys shit the bed and and can't sell it to us anymore".
If anyone knows anybody at Foundation Plant Services at UCB and would like to do me a favor, private message me? Just need someone to put in a word for me.
> We have a list of "things we can't live without if the rest of you monkeys shit the bed and and can't sell it to us anymore".
Not trying to be obtuse about this because I get it... but if we end up in this situation, I think olives and pineapples will be one of our least concerns. Both are great plants to grow and experiment with. I also grow olives, fruits, all kinds of berries, etc. But due to the rather interconnected nature of both the global economy and the global climate system, it may be that if we ever begin to see items like that in widespread failure we could simultaneously be overwhelmed w/ larger problems. Lets say massive food price inflation, isolated famines/shortages, and ultimately total base calories for our diet.
So while I don't disagree with your sentiment at all I would just say that I hope you have things like grains and staples on that list. Sweet potatoes are a relatively nutrient-rich and calorie dense food that are technically perennial and can be grown in similar format to how you describe your olives and pineapples (take them indoors in winter, use some greenhouses to extend season, etc). Bananas are similarly useful if you are in the right climate. In the biosphere 2 experiment, sweet potatoes constituted the bulk of their diet (source: https://ecotechnics.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Advances-...). In a worst case scenario we might even end up in victory garden type situation and need to plant corn, beans, etc wherever we have space to do so.
> anybody at Foundation Plant Services at UCB
As for this, I'm not in your region so I have no connections there but I highly recommend just finding a few names and emailing them about your project. I've done similar with people all over the and I normally do get a reply. Most recently an Israeli horticulturalist I had read about on HN responded and gave me germination tips for some trees I am growing after I emailed her.
Happy gardening mate. :)
Lower priority sure. But, people who only pay attention to the highest priorities are likely to be miserable even if they make it.
>So while I don't disagree with your sentiment at all I would just say that I hope you have things like grains and staples on that list.
I have things like Megasphaera hexanoica and Clostridium acetobutylicum on the list. Grains are there, but the truth of the matter is until I can secure acreage that stuff's put on hold. Am trying to find one of the old pull-type combines, some other equipment (I have storage if I can buy them now).
>but I highly recommend just finding a few names and emailing them about your project.
They're not interested in talking to me. Their minimum order's a little high for a cultivar of pistachio I need for rootstock, doesn't seem to be any other option. One or two nurseries will sell a single sapling for $70 or so, but multiplying that into the 20 or 30 trees I want to start with will take a long time. They sell seed for $1 each, but their minimum order's a bit absurd. Told me "that's just two pieces of budwood to get you to the minimum"... what am I going to do with budwood when I'm buying rootstock seed right this moment? My current plan is to just get terebinthus and vera seed, grow both, and hybridize them myself. Only a 10 yr setback, shouldn't be a problem.
I am doing some similar projects. I've got some acreage planted with chestnuts and a few other select trees. Going on three years now of planting. I haven't done a good job documenting things but putting together a talk about agriculture so maybe that will change.
> Their minimum order's a little high for a cultivar of pistachio I need for rootstock, doesn't seem to be any other option.
Sounds like you need some friends/neighbors/comrades to throw in with you on a group order. I have been in a similar place myself; I've roped a lot of friends into these schemes now. Last month I had 7 lbs of chestnuts sent to my buddy while I was out of the country haha.
To grow thousands of olive trees indoors would be nearly impossible. Perennial crops like this need huge amounts of soil for their root systems, and to replace the amount of olives with indoor plantation would require a massive square footage of greenhouses.
Not to mention that diseases like this can just as easily transmit indoors. Look into the American chestnut blight if you don't believe me. There almost no way to grow a tree isolated from the blight.
The only viable solution in cases like these is a genetic one. In this case, we can actually top the olive and graft a disease resistant variety onto the rootstock. In some cases you may have to actually develop an entirely new tree from scratch and replant.
That is why continuous research into plant genetics and breeding is so extremely important for the continuation of human society.
Example of an olive grove in the province of Jaén, that alone produces 20% of the olive oil in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#...
Trees seem unsuitable for indoor farming, since they need tons of soil and sunlight. Also taking years to grow and mature. Indoor farming in general seem unsuitable for Spain, where there is an abundance of land and sun.
Searching on this topic I learned that green houses are popular in some regions like Almería for growing fruits and vegetables. I guess green houses are something between indoor and outdoor farming.
> Spain is currently the world’s third largest tomato exporter, and up to 60% of those tomatoes come from the province of Almería.
> The region has around 30,000 hectares of land under cultivation, the majority of which is under plastic. It is also the most rapidly desertifying region in the country.