Agriculture and Pandemics

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Interestingly, pandemics were much less common before the development of agriculture. As we gained proficiency growing food, we dealt with various offsets that led to higher incidences of disease. Margot discusses the factors related to these here. Epic Gardening Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/4ahMPmaBotanical Interests Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/4aeIIHcBook Collection Page: https://growepic.co/3TUJeVhEGHomesteading Book: https://growepic.co/4ahMUGuLearn More:5 Ancient Gardening Methods That Work in the Modern GardenConnect With Margot Kelley:Margot Kelley is a vegetable gardener of 20+ years based in Maine and the author of A Gardener at the End of the World, a memoir about gardens, seeds, and viruses written during the pandemic. Her other gardening books include Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love, & Homegrown Food, The Meadow (with Barbara Bosworth), and A Field Guide to Other People’s Trees. Website Instagram Margot’s new book (publisher site) Margot’s new book (Amazon) Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code THEBEET for 5% off your entire order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order.Get Our BooksLooking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live!He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots.Preorder Kevin’s newest book Epic Homesteading if you are looking to turn your home into a thriving homestead! Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store.More ResourcesLooking for more information? Follow us: Our Blog Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The rise of agriculture is one of the most significant things that's ever happened in human history and obviously us in our backyard gardens we're doing some sort of small version of that but
0:24.2	industrialized or large-scale agriculture has certainly helped feed the world
0:29.3	but also has a ton of interesting and potentially harmful downstream effects that we talk about all the time on this show.
0:35.9	So we have Margot Kelly back on the show, a vegetable gardener of 20 plus years, author of a gardener at the end of the world which is a book that she wrote during the
0:45.2	pandemic that recently happened and you know it's been said and then I didn't really
0:50.4	know this Margo but there there were no pandemics before the rise of agriculture.
0:55.8	Is that accurate or not?
0:58.0	It's actually mostly accurate.
1:00.2	Okay.
1:01.2	I wasn't too happy to find that out because I love my garden and my garden was like my happy place during the pandemic.
1:08.0	But as it turns out, there were some malaria outbreaks that were pretty widespread over the savanna in Africa
1:14.4	before there was agriculture but the overwhelming majority of things that have caused
1:20.7	pandemics have come after agriculture. Part of that is because we became sedentary, not sit on our but sedentary, but living in one place sedentary.
1:31.0	And so once we became sedentary, our waste accumulated and it made
1:37.5	really good environments for like gross little species. And so that's a big part of the link
1:45.2	between agriculture and pandemics.
1:48.2	And then the other part is that once we were doing that,
1:51.9	once we got good at agriculture, we started to have specialization. So then we had trade and people would go from one place to another and they would bring their bacteria with them.
2:04.0	Interesting.
2:05.0	Yeah.
2:06.0	So wait, so let's tackle the first one first.
2:08.0	I mean you said we're sedentary.
	...

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