Good morning.
It’s a rainy day ahead for Whitewater, with a high temperature of fifty-four degrees.
There’s a Common Council meeting scheduled for this afternoon, at 3 p.m. The agenda is available online.
A story from Australia, Australia Pistachio Disaster Hints at Agricultural Breakdown, may be a cautionary tale for agricultural states like Wisconsin. There, a rapidly-spreading disease has unexpectedly destroyed much of the pistachio crop.
The wide cultivation of genetically uniform plant populations fosters rapid evolution among the pathogens,” said Scot Nelson, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii. “Because of this greed, new pathogens or newly reported host-pathogen combinations arise almost daily around the world….
According to Nelson, the outbreak isn’t just a function of weather. It’s likely a result of monoculture crop practices, in which just one or a few varieties of a crop are planted. Australia’s pistachios are descended almost entirely from a single cultivar developed in the early 1980s. Selected for the nuts’ flavor, aesthetically pleasing color and easy-splitting shells, the variety was an easy choice for farmers — but with that choice, the seeds of an epidemic may have been planted.
The high and unexpected cost of uniformity.