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Tuesday, January 19, 2021

The Crown Rust Tempest in a Teapot

OATS

 

Trevor Lake noticed it for the first time while walking through a ripening oats field on an otherwise-glorious July morning—July 26th, 2025, to be precise. Somehow, the individual plants looked more … well … tired than they should. He pulled one entire plant up and examined the roots, then the leaves where he noticed reddish splotches forming. He examined a few more plants, walked in toward the middle of the field and discovered that the spots were fewer, but still general. It seemed as if someone had gone through the field with a sprinkler of rust-coloured paint. The worst areas were right along the creek bank.

                Trevor knew what it was: Some variety of fungal rust. But only after looking it up on line and realizing that there were several dozens of oat diseases ranging from viral to bacterial to fungal, Crown Rust being the most common. He’d grown mostly canola and wheat until the passing of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had shifted the demand toward locally-grown and consumed food crops, and the price of canola plummeted.

                Over coffee at the PetroCan on the highway that runs through Shermen, Saskatchewan, Trevor announced what he had seen, thinking to warn neighbours who’d made the same crop-switch for the same reasons.  “You’d better look at your oats,” he said, “especially you, Sam. You’ve got Buckthorn growing along the creek and it’s a primary host for the fungus’ sexual development.”

                “What?”

                “What?” was exactly what Trevor had said when he first waded through Danika Thompson’s column in GRAINEWS. He’d read it three times before concluding that his oat crop would probably be lucky to return input costs, that he should have bought a resistant strain of seed. “The fungus develops on the Buckthorn and migrates to live on oats … and sometimes barley, I think.”

                “What the hell is Buckthorn?”

                “Well, it’s that shrubby plant with the little yellow flowers and … and, I think, black berries.”



                Sam’s face wore a mask of skepticism. It was, in fact, Sam’s default look whenever problems went in search of solutions. “I’ll bet Monsanto or Bayer are behind this … again,” he said. “You’re probably gonna tell me next that there’s a spray I can buy for five-thousand dollars that’ll fix the problem!”

                The Monsanto/Bayer “conspiracy” to rob farmers of as much of the profits of their hard work as possible was a perennial topic at coffee row, ever since Percy Schmeiser got shafted for planting seed on which Monsanto held an exclusive patent. That was way back in the 1990s, before the two companies joined forces to perfect the art of “ripping all the profit out of agriculture and turning it over to rich corporate owners and shareholder men in suits, laughing all the way to the bank”. At least that’s how Willie Turner loved to put it to anyone prepared to listen. Willie didn’t farm; he and Don Castle were local business interests who were well aware of the fact that their good fortunes leaned heavily on the success or failure of local agriculture.

∞∞

Everybody who lives in or near one knows that rural towns have mysterious networks down which news and opinions flash at the speed of light. The dilemma of the oat crops was particularly vexing to John and Cecil Skowring who were in the middle of building a mill to capitalize on farming changes by producing locally-grown, locally-consumed rolled oats. The content of the PetroCan coffee row conversation, plus the Skowring’s complaints about their misfortune, plus the unbridled assertions on everything by Sam and his wife, Mabel, got pumped into the network in minutes. Like a Corona Virus, peculiar versions of the Crown Rust story spread through town and countryside. The Buckthorn/fungus transmission version was far too complicated to transmit in casual conversation. What wasn’t too complicated and got digested and regurgitated were the following:

  • ·         Bayer put spores into their RoundUp chemical so farmers would have to buy their remedy for Crown Rust,
  • ·         The Canola people were spreading rust spores with crop-spraying planes to urge farmers back to buying their seed,
  • ·         The Robin Hood Mill in Saskatoon was conspiring with the canola people and Bayer/Monsanto to shut down the mill in Shermen before it even opened,
  • ·         There actually was no such thing as Crown Rust; just a story made up by Trevor for some unknown reason.

The favourite explanation was the one involving crop-spraying planes; a few farmers had used them to spray RoundUp in spring; everyone had seen and heard the planes; there were far too many to just be doing weed spraying. What’s more—some said—Buckthorn isn’t a thing … nobody’s ever heard of Buckthorn and they’d know it if it existed.

                Trevor was horrified by the rumours and theories, especially after the whole thing was being attributed to him as the perpetrator of fake news, or possibly as a co-conspirator with who-knows-how- many people and companies that stood to benefit. How Trevor would benefit wasn’t included in this narrative; it was enough that he was making up a story about Buckthorn and fungi and other bullshit to cover his tracks. (“Most likely, Bayer is cutting him a fat check,” was a nuance that would be added later.)

                 Sam never checked his oat fields. Possibly because he felt more comfortable with the conspiracy theories than with the thought that come harvest time, his crop would be two-thirds or less of what he’d anticipated, and his swather and combine pickup would turn a rusty red as he harvested. He vaguely remembered stories of wheat rust in the 1950s; surely crop rust wasn’t a thing anymore.

                In desperation, Trevor tracked down freelance writer Danika Thompson, thinking to bring her to Shermen if she’d be willing to verify his news as being factual, not fake. “Why don’t you just have them read my column, you know, the one you referred to?” She had too much going on to come out now, she said.

                Trevor thought about that, but given the community climate, he guessed that the reporter would be construed as another attempt by him to cover his ass. He was right; he realized it when he got replies to emails he sent to Don, Willie and Sam. 

            There's no arguing with conspiracy theory; anything you say to the contrary tends simply to prove that you’re either in on the plot … or else have been taken in by it.

                Trevor wanted to scream, “Why the hell are you all so damned dumb?” But what would be the point? It wasn’t their lack of smarts that bound them to see conspiracy behind their problems; Sam was known to be a successful farmer and Don and Willie passable businessmen. 

                He went on line and printed all the references to Crown Rust … it made him feel better to know that he was right … according to the experts. He also read somewhere that conspiracy theories arise when there’s a power, wealth or education imbalance. That it’s natural to assume that there are elites with the power, wealth or education that allow them to move things and events … while common folk have too little of any of the three to allow them to move anything of importance, and so they feel like they’re always being done to instead of doing. They resent their powerlessness.

                He’d also read that conspiracy theories generally arise only for momentous things, like presidential assassinations, pandemics, unusual fires and such. That big things call for big explanations. This puzzled Trevor because his bringing up this Crown Rust thing was surely a tempest in a teapot. He should have been thanked for his research. He could only assume that the Monsanto/Schmeiser debacle was the big event, and he’d only been guilty of reopening that festering resentment.

                The messenger often takes the first bullet.

                What startled him most was the research that showed how impossible a massive conspiracy can be. To successfully scatter rust spores across the province would take both the cooperation and the absolute secrecy of a great many people. If among all those cooperating conspirators even one person should experience a twinge of conscience and “blow the whistle,” the conspiracy would have to collapse. Even in a family’s conspiracy to give Uncle Ike a surprise birthday party, the likelihood of total solidarity around the plan almost never happens. The article Trevor read and reread ended with, “There are no really big conspiracies, even though there are plenty of little ones.”

                Harvest came early and by August 20th, Trevor had his oats in the bin and had washed the rust off his equipment. He went out with his tractor and a few cables and began pulling up all the Buckthorn shrubs along the creek and burning them. He was minding the bonfire when he noticed Sam’s pickup dusting across the oat stubble. Sam pulled up, exchanged a perfunctory greeting with Trevor and after a minute of both staring into the fire, said, “You never told us which variety of oats is resistant to this rust stuff.”

                Trevor pulled out his notebook and pen and wrote a couple of names, tore off the sheet and handed it to Sam. “These aren’t guaranteed to be perfect, but tests have shown them to suffer the least from Crown Rust.

                In the end, the only defenses against conspiracy-theories-run-amok … are facts. Facts experienced first hand or, at least, facts endorsed by a trusted friend.  Trevor decided that if he had the whole thing to do again, he’d invite Sam over, ask him if he knew what was happening with his oats and have him come up with the answers.

                But then, Sam had been known more than once to declare that behind the internet and the “mainstream media,” there existed a massive plot to keep the public ignorant and confused, to “bamboozle us with lies and bullshit.” At a conversation like this once, Trevor had imagined a field of thousands of reporters, social media billionaires, fat-cat politicians and corporate elites charging at an unsuspecting public with syringes full of lies ‘n bullshit, all having agreed in advance that this inoculation would be in everyone’s best interests.

                He sighed and forked another Buckthorn shrub onto the fire, watched it flare, heard it sizzle.            

 

 

                 



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