User talk:PlantpathPhD

Welcome[edit]

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Great Famine (Ireland)[edit]

Thank you for your helpful remarks, which I've largely incorporated in the article. More material would be welcome, especially a more detailed citation for Bacterial Rot. --Red King (talk) 01:07, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you.

On the subject of the reasons for the crop failure, the primary sources cited in the article were written by historians not a plant scientists. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) Wikipedia policy is that we don't make statements that we as editors think might be true or must be true, we have to find a reliable source that says so and cite it. Particularly if we have a source - A - that says X and another source - B - that says 'not X' then we have to give both views unless it can be shown (as in this case, the Andes origin theory) that source B is founded on investigation to science standards whereas source A was speculating without solid evidence. So you may well be right about the leaf wilt but we need a source that says so specifically about the 1840s failure of the potato crop in Ireland.

By the way, as to the question of proper management of seed potatoes, I think we may safely assume that susbsistence farmers couldn't have been too picky - it was as much as they could do not too eat their seed crop! In modern farming in Ireland and Great Britain (at least), virus-free seed certification is taken very seriously indeed. --Red King (talk) 16:09, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]