The Sun Also Rises

Over our Earth’s 4.543 billion year history, life has largely been content with remaining in the sea. However, over the last several hundred million years, some species began to grow restless enough to slowly start venturing into freshwater rivers and lakes and finally onto dry land. Though cyanobacteria had moved into freshwater reservoirs around a couple of billion years ago, they had not yet made the transition to terrestrial life. The first plants to do so only began colonizing the land around 0.5 billion, i.e., 500 million, years ago, and the first arthropods and arachnids followed not long after – as geologic time is reckoned. They were the first creatures to breathe air.

One small step for a fishapod, one giant leap for your inner fish

Around 50 million years later, the first vertebrates made their way up onto the land. They evolved from lobe-finned fish, of which coelacanths are a modern example. These first vertebrates resemble and, in fact, evolved into a branch of four-limbed land animals (tetrapods), so they have colloquially become known as ‘fishapods.’ 

As eons of time passed, the first fauna and flora to make a living on dry land evolved to fill ecological niches that hadn’t existed before. This adaptive radiation produced a surfeit of terrestrial species over a relatively short period of time. As these animals, plants, fungus and other life populated the land, they created and occupied a huge number of interconnected and interdependent ecological niches in every terrestrial biome. Mass extinctions followed by new radiations of ever more complex species occurred again and again, which ultimately included angiosperms (flowering plants), two of which are essential to beer production, namely hops and grain.

Children of the barleycorn

As one age followed another, around 0.000012 billion years ago, or 12,000 years before the present, bipedal savannah apes, i.e., humans, who had already migrated across the world’s continents during the last Ice Age, began domesticating plants and animals for their own purposes by making them dependent upon human intervention for their survival. Even then, Homo sapiens practiced agriculture in harmony with Mother Nature for a long time but eventually became very good at eliminating all life in an area except for the species they wanted to cultivate for their own ends.

So, for 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, any terrestrial species able to survive as part of the complex web of life within a certain ecosystem had use of the land. This changed when humans resolved to take over areas for farming just the one species they had selected for cultivation. Collectively, humans seem to not quite grasp that by doing so, they not only extinguish complex ecosystems but harm themselves in the process.

From Babylon to Londinium

In a fascinating and largely forgotten chapter in history, humans tried – and failed – at this the first time. Perhaps we should take heed. Mesopotamia is known for its many firsts: The first cities were founded there, Eridu earliest among them, and the first mass migration into cities occurred there as well. This region also gave us the first accounting and the first writing system (cuneiform), the first intensive agriculture with plowed and irrigated fields, the first great kings (e.g., Gilgamesh and Sargon of Akkad), the first empire, the first law codes, the first standing army, the first astronomy, the sexagesimal (base-60) number system we still see on our clocks and the first large breweries – to name just a few. To sate the hunger and safely quench the thirst of these first city dwellers, grain cultivation reached a level unheard of up to that time, with yields to rival those of the modern heartland of North America. The rich alluvial soils between the rivers fed the people for many centuries and likewise bequeathed humanity with a rich and storied history, from legends about the Creation, the Flood from urban centers like Ur, Uruk (‘Gilgamesh built the walls’), Babylon, Nineveh and beyond. Loaves of bread and jugs of beer were sacrificed to the gods in gratitude for the abundance of the land. Grain cultivation spread west to Europe, where bread and beer eventually fueled urban development there as well. Much later, London, the bustling heart of the British Empire, became the largest city in the world by the mid-19th century.

Tell-tell antiquity

However, climate conditions in Mesopotamia changed. After millennia of intensive agricultural practices, the lush soils serving as the first breadbasket of civilization were completely spent. The residents of the first cities also became the unfortunate first to experience a ‘Dust Bowl.’ Lower Mesopotamia remains a lunar landscape today. Only the ‘tells’ (artificial mounds created over millennia of habitation) rising above the plain through mirages in the intense heat still stand as a stark reminder of the great civilizations that once thrived there. During this time of scarcity, the migrants trudging west to find greener pastures preserved their tribulations in what is now called the ‘Patriarchal Age’ of biblical literature.

Life finds a way

Though our presence on Earth as farmers has been very short over the course of geologic time, we have had a huge impact on the life striving to exist on our tiny blue planet suspended in the fathomless void of space. Michael Crichton wrote the following in his book Jurassic Park: Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

Fortunately, many farmers are again placing their trust in Mother Nature by attempting to recreate lost ecosystems whose interactive relationships keep one another in check in a natural and less harmful way. By cultivating crops and raising animals in cooperation with rather than in opposition to a particular biome, farmers are reaping not only ecological but also economic rewards

Wild and unkempt

Pollinators and beneficial insects require biodiverse ecosystems where they can thrive. The decline in wildflowers and other beneficial plants in the last hundred years is primarily due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Fewer animals are allowed to graze on land, and the use of fertilizers and pesticides has greatly increased. Letting things simply grow may be the solution. For instance, wildflower meadows are seen by some as unruly and unkempt, especially in winter when they mainly consist of long grass, but Mother Nature is by her very nature somewhat unruly and unkempt. She’s just not into tidy, green lawns or fields, because this is where biodiversity is at its lowest.

Growing hops and hope

One unique approach for encouraging biodiversity is now being supported by modern technology. As mentioned in the previous installment of this column, the project in Eichelberg, a close collaboration between the Hop Research Center in Hüll and the Interessengemeinschaft Qualitätshopfen Niederlauterbach e. V. (IGN), was established to promote biodiversity in hop cultivation. The land management for the project is administered by three IGN farms over a total area of 85 hectares. To date, a wide variety of habitats have been created. Among the flagship species of the project are the woodlark, the partridge and the tree sparrow. These and other species specific to hop fields clearly define the objectives of biodiversity conservation, making it possible to measure the results. Their habitat is found in and around hop fields of the Hallertau, where they have unfortunately become rare in recent years.

Mighty Mites

Predatory mites, such as Phytoseiulus persimilis, are natural enemies of the pests known as two-spotted spider mites. The predatory mites can be spread over the areas under hop cultivation. They eat spider mites and thus help to reduce damage to the hop plants. This year, predatory mites were released on a hop farm in the biodiversity corridor in Eichelberg. This year was the first time a drone was used to uniformly distribute them across hop fields. The results were very encouraging, because a clear reduction in infestation by the two-spotted spider mite was evident.

Hopefully, more farmers around the world will adopt such strategies, since it will ultimately be in their favor to do so. Mother Nature is like a dealer at a casino. We may win a few hands now and again, but we’re in her casino, and everyone knows that at the end of the day, the house always wins.

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