The Irish Famine

By the 1840s, the lives of millions in rural Ireland depended on a single food source. Due to a land system that forced families onto tiny plots, often less than one acre, they grew the only crop that could feed them: a potato called the ‘Lumper’. It was large, watery, and yielded huge harvests from poor soil. An adult labourer might eat between 12 and 14 pounds of potatoes a day. This one crop was so efficient that it allowed Ireland’s population to double in just 60 years. But because every Lumper grown across the country was genetically identical, the entire national food supply was vulnerable. Roughly a third of Ireland’s 8.2 million people relied exclusively on this one potato for survival.