The Trouble With Tumbleweed

bouncing across a scene tumbleweed established the Wild West as Western but more than just prompts tumbleweed are real and tumbleweed are alive well they were alive each tumbleweed starts as a tiny seed on the craggy landscape putting down roots up branches opening flowers and through the miracle of life birthing seeds itty-bitty baby tumbles to be now dropping these seeds straight down won't give the tumble tots their best Head Start so what's the parent plant to do but sacrifice their life for their children to intentionally starve themselves to die and to dry to catch the wind to shuffle off this mortal coil to bounce across the land to chance their children to find fertile ground to root two sprouts to grow two flower to continue the circle of life it's beautiful really these humble tumble rolling across the West in search of empty land to colonize are as iconic Lee West as Westerners west earning because neither are natives before the 1800s there were no homesteaders and no tumbleweed in the West tumbleweed are an invasive species and a deeply unwelcome one it's time to get real about the trouble with tumbles now you might be thinking if the West is mostly empty and tumbleweed arrived and survived what's the big deal they're kind of nice and you know what you're right kind of tumbles are like snow a little is charming but a lot is a problem and a lot a lot dangerous tumbleweed stick to things and each other once tucked humble becomes 210 a tongueless the American Interior has vast swaths of land and after a tumble terrain take over one big windstorm can drown a village under thousands of the things with people quickly finding their roads and vehicles and even homes inaccessible if you've never seen tumbles on the move or the aftermath of that it's unreal and though a tumble drift looks like a brown snowdrift this snow is full of thorns if you're thinking of a rose think again on tumbles it's all thorns brittle to break off in your skin or horse skin where it can fester clearing tumbleweed isn't just painful but also infuriating the tumbleweed drift is both bouncy and sticky you're going to have to fork them one at a time tedious at best Sisyphus Ian's at worst you might want to use industrial equipment but be careful tumbleweed are shockingly flammable dry and airy still branch dense they aren't min maxed kindling they tumbleweed will go up in flames way fast and burns way hot more on that later but even if you manage to clear the town and all the open land around the town a single missed seed contains the next tumble torrent for while many plants use flowers to attract bees to cross pollinate and reproduce not tumbles their flowers have nothing for bees instead exploding pollen directly into the wind hope you don't have allergies to cross pollinate and tumbles don't need two to tango a lone tumbleweed can foot pollinate itself so that single missed seed will grow up to be a tumble and weed containing tens of thousands of seeds hundreds of thousands if it gets large enough a single tumble tumbling to town one year it leaves a tumble trail the next and an exponential explosion thereafter and then there's the danger to agriculture which brings us to the start of this they time before tumbleweed in America and a time before homesteading it's the 1800s and the start of Westerners West earning building their first farms and tiny towns growing enough food to feed the adolescent nation was vital nearly everyone's job had to be farming and the newly created Department of Agriculture had the job of writing grow tips on how best to do that along with collecting seeds and samples from the new continent which is how all was normal until one day a letter arrived for DOA hey there's this a tumble and weed given us some trouble can you come take a gander and so she did arriving to find South Dakota in bad shape a weedy infection rapidly developing damaging the food supply these new weeds stole ground nutrients for themselves before crops could even be planted or they would grow in between crops choking them out during harvest they hurt the draft animals and clogged or broke the newly mechanized farm equipment early estimates were crop losses of 20% because of the tumbles do a tried to constrain the situation using education wanted tumbleweed kill on sight aka prickly thistle aka Callie tranches aka the wind which aka the Russian thistle this by the way is the motherland where the species is native and from where crop seed contaminated with tumble seed probably came to arrive in South Dakota on perhaps a single farm to start the infection which grew worse by the year and the Department of Agriculture's efforts to stop it were way too much land far too few people worse this new land was tumble topia and still is see this round of rectangle states it's the Great Plains the budding the great American desert an enormous stretch of land flat open windy South Dakota's neighbors had no chance nor neighbors neighbors from patient zero boom by the turn of the century the tumbleweed infection covered the interior eventually spreading north to Canada and South down to Mexico America's mountains were a barrier for a while until tumbleweed hitched a ride on the trains that had freshly connected the continent daunting over the mountains west and east to establish themselves in every spared pocket of empty land oh dear but it gets better back to fires specifically prairie fires a nice big field of dry wheat is just begging to burst into flames the only early tech to stop fires was to build fire brakes physically stopping the flames with neat straight vitally empty stretches of land the fire could not cross but more perfect tunnels for tumbles you could not make even if the fire brakes were kept clear fire makes its own wind sucking in cold air from ground level to blow out hot up and over thus transforming tumbles into fireballs to breach the break so started the first volley in the war on tumbleweed but for the Department of Agriculture to eradicate the infection from the interior farmland and towns where they did the most damage would mean not only catching every weed and seed across a third of a continent with the cooperation of two annoyed international neighbors but also finding every patch of infection across the mountains in the other two-thirds an impossible task so that's why humble weed are still here and have been around for so long and in such numbers people forget there was ever a before time but not the United States Department of Agriculture from the 1800's to 1900s to 20 hundreds still trying to rid America of the weed but so far without success that is the trouble with tumbles

Channel: CGP Grey

Views: 5,426,823

Rating: 4.9689684 out of 5

Keywords: cgpgrey, education, farming, agriculture, tumbleweed

Id: hsWr_JWTZss

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Bubbly_Taro]

Yeah this shit is pretty unreal

[u/Hrdstyle47]

I had to clear out a spot in a vineyard that got hit with tumbleweeds. A tractor couldn't fit in between the rows, so I had to do it all by hand. It took me two full days. https://imgur.com/a/AWXuDOo

[u/AdClemson]

I had no idea they are invasive species. I always associated them as part of flora of the west. Also, since they came from Russia of all places then how are their numbers stay in check naturally there?

[u/thecorndogmaker]

Legit question for rural Americans – How do I kill the 30-50 tumbleweeds that tumble into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?

[u/TheGoodReverend]

Kudzu vs Tumbleweed. Who will win?

[u/WritewayHome]

If you enjoyed the topic, this is a broader discussion on Shifting Baselines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

It's the idea that trying to understand the reference point of an ecosystem itself is very tough because in all our minds the Tumbleweed was always considered native, but if you go back enough you see its invasive nature. Our baselines and reference points changed without us evening knowing it.

All of this is part of Systems Ecology and shows the difficult work it takes to truly make an ecosystem healthy and stable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_ecology

We learn new things every year and a good example of this is reintroducing a top level predator to an ancestral home can literally reshape the environment and ecosystem:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140128-how-wolves-saved-a-famous-park

The banks of rivers changed their size and shape with reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone as did the types of flora that started spawning there.

People always see herbivores as positive creatures and predators as negative ones, but without a proper balance there are ecosystem wide effects that can occur without us understanding why they happened.

This spawned ideas like Keystone species, which when removed from an environment completely reshape it and redefine it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

There is a lot more that can be said but hopefully this explains why Ecology is such an important topic and why sometimes preserving 100 acres to protect a single owl can have knock-on effects that end up preserving ecosystems and making lives for Humans better in the long run.

Kids, this also is why you need to go to College because you won't learn any of these topics in any meaningful depth in High School. College, if you're fortunate enough to attend, will be some of the best times of your life.

[u/dystopika]

Fascinating. This made me look up "tumbleweed removal machine", because it seemed that machines could be built that could deal with this better than using a pitchfork to individually remove each one...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH6C0Ng_AJk

[u/jazzpenis]

Interesting video! I love the homage to The Trouble with Tribbles

[u/trex005]

We need a tumbleweed predator... Then a tumbleweed predator predator... Then a tumbleweed predator predator predator... etc.

I know an old desert who swallowed a weed, I don't know why, she swallowed that weed, perhaps she'll die....