Grain Blight
The rust and smut of standing grain, carried on the wind from field to field and worst on tired soil, that thins the ears and can halve a basin harvest.
Overview
Grain blight is what the basin farmer means by a field that "fills with weeds and blight" (see Grain). It reddens the stalks or blackens the ears in early summer, and the harvest comes in light. One blighted summer is a lean winter. Blight on fields that have been forced to give two harvests a year is the slow ruin of a district.
Cause
Two blights do most of the harm, both living things too small to see. The rusts grow on leaf and stem and shed a red dust that the wind carries from field to field; the smuts live in the ear itself and travel on seed. Both take hold worst on wheat sown again and again on the same ground, whose tired soil grows weak plants. A warm, damp early summer brings them on.
Salt blight, the soil ruined by salt after a flood or a bad watering, is another thing entirely, though farmers use the one word for both.
Who It Strikes
Wheat most, being the most demanding grain; barley and oats less. Rested fields suffer least, and fields worked without a fallow year most.
Signs and Course
In late spring a farmer walking the field finds pale flecks on the leaves. Within weeks they burst into rows of rust-red pustules, and the dust comes off red on hands and hems. Stems weaken and lodge in the rain, the leaves wither early, and the ears fill thin and light. Where smut has the ear, it swells black and bursts into a sooty powder at threshing, and the grain is lost. At harvest the stooks look full enough; the threshing floor tells the truth.
Contagion
The rust dust rides the wind, so a blighted field spreads blight to its neighbours and down the valley. Smut passes with the seed corn and the straw of last year's crop.
Treatment and Its Limits
The fallow year is the best defence and the oldest: rested soil grows strong grain, and farmers who change the crop on a field break the blight's hold on it. Burning stubble, keeping seed only from clean fields, and sowing late after a wet spring all help.
Verdant Sense reads a field's health before the rust shows. Harvest Blessing strengthens a crop against a hard year, but cannot redeem exhausted land by itself. Green Renewal feeds spent soil at high cost, and cannot undo salt blight. Every forcing of growth draws on the soil and must be paid back with rest, or the next blight is worse.
Mortality
Blight kills no one directly. A bad blight year can halve a basin harvest, and then the hungry winter and the spring before the next harvest kill the old, the very young, and the poor.
Lore and Belief
Basin villages take blight for Anvelle the Harvest-Mother's displeasure, and in the failing districts they are not far wrong: the farmers read her signs of crops withering overnight and a sour smell in the air as warning that she will withdraw her blessing. Those who keep her rest-year say blight follows the broken fallow. Others blame a red star, a neighbour's curse, or wind off the Witnessfields.
A blight year fills the basin roads with hungry men and the woods with outlaws, and the basin still curses the lord who hanged the first villagers to break into his granary, and the second winter, when there were too many to hang.
In the Medieval Era
Blight is met every few summers somewhere in the Confluence Basins, and it is worst where the corridor's demand for grain has forced the second harvest and skipped the fallow (see The Human Corridor Orders). Farmers who keep Anvelle's rest-year resist those levies, and the blight in the failing districts is their argument. Nature casters are hired to save a lord's best fields; the village fields wait on rest that the levies do not allow. A short basin harvest is felt as far up as the Dwarven holds that buy basin grain.