Nearly two million people are estimated to have fled that famine-stricken country between the mid-1840s and the mid-1850s11—altogether a massive loss of population in a small country. Yet the very same kind of potato was grown in the United States—where Ireland’s potatoes originated—with no crop failure. The source of that crop failure has been traced to a fertilizer used in planting potatoes on both sides of the Atlantic. That fertilizer contained a fungus which flourished in the mild and moist climate of Ireland, but not in the hot and dry summers of Idaho and other potato-growing areas of
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