Kudzu, the vine that never ate the South (2015)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-180956325/

by NoRagrets • 2 years ago

75 79 2 years ago

anthk• 2 years ago

It autodetected hardware well under a red hat...

dang• 2 years ago

Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35934578 - May 2023 (47 comments)

Kudzu, the vine that never truly ate the South (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668829 - June 2020 (40 comments)

The Secret Life of Kudzu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20593633 - Aug 2019 (9 comments)

The Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Never Truly Ate the South - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10113294 - Aug 2015 (18 comments)

calebio• 2 years ago

I have a constant battle with Kudzu every year. I wish we could find an easier way to kill the stuff, or transform it into something else.

That being said, goats will dig down and eat the hell out of the stuff.

giraffe_lady2• 2 years ago

It's edible if you want to go through the trouble. It's a variety of arrowroot which has a lot of uses in east asian food traditions. I like the tea.

dpflug2• 2 years ago

Unless you get them very young, eating the leaves is reminiscent of chewing sandpaper. Now you have me wondering if it would be palatable juiced, maybe as part of a smoothie.

NikkiA2• 2 years ago

And often used as a digestive aid/folk-medicine

ddfs123• 2 years ago

My recent most favourite quote is "Anything is edible at least once".

nemo44x2• 2 years ago

Doesn't Roundup control it effectively?

greenie_beans3• 2 years ago

no, not at all

Sohcahtoa82• 2 years ago

I have English ivy around my house, which isn't quite as invasive as kudzu, but still a major nuisance.

Roundup does basically nothing. The leaves are thick and waxy and so don't absorb herbicide effectively. Supposedly, applying a more concentrated formula on a weekly basis for a month can work, but I don't like the idea of spraying that much glyphosate.

plasma_beam• 2 years ago

It wraps all around trees and other desirable plants, and has shoots under ground that can extend many feet away. Digging it up is the only solution but even that is exceedingly difficult. I’ve learned to live with it.

supportengineer• 2 years ago

Doesn't that stuff kill bees and fireflies as well?

samch• 2 years ago

As others have said, RoundUp / glyphosate doesn’t always handle these tougher plants. I’ve had good results with Crossbow: https://www.winfieldunited.com/products/herbicides/crossbow/...

Not sure if that is readily available in all regions, though.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Goats sounds like a good idea. And once they eat all the kudzu, you can eat the goats.

thfuran2• 2 years ago

But would they taste good of all they've eaten is kudzu? Maybe they should feast on sage and rosemary.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

Salt, mulch, barriers, and/or poisons like glyphosate.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 2 years ago

I used to live in Maryland, and saw Kudzu do some impressive work. Acres of land are covered by one patch.

I now live in New York, and it's starting to show up here.

Fun times ahead...

nemo44x2• 2 years ago

I think the point of the article is that Kudzu isn't really a threat and hasn't taken over nearly as much as people perceive.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 2 years ago

I saw it do some impressive stuff. These articles pop up, from time to time, but you need to see it in action.

NBJack• 2 years ago

Numbers wise, sure, there are certainly more invasive species out there.

The trick with Kudzu is that, unlike ligustrum sinense, it invades in a much more literal sense, covering both other plants and the ground itself as far as it can. It 'universally' impedes the growth of other plants, and arguably makes terrain less traversal (if only because it covers what's underneath).

dpflug2• 2 years ago

It may not be an ecological danger, but it can be a pain. Yes, other vines can grow as quickly, but most of them have smaller leaves and less propensity to carpet entire areas. I think the visual impact may make it feel more impactful and lend to its mythologization.

foobarian• 2 years ago

Plant some Japanese knotweed next to it and watch them fight to the death!

ChrisMarshallNY5• 2 years ago

I think the knotweed will win.

If I'm not mistaken, you can't sell a house, in the UK, if there's knotweed on the property.

technothrasher• 2 years ago

I'll put up the oriental bittersweet that is slowly taking over and pulling down all my trees as a contender in that fight.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

Does higher CO2 make it grow faster?

sqeaky5• 2 years ago

Not likely in any appreciable way like the conspiracy theorists are putting forward.

I bet if you had lab controlled environments you could find some optimal level of CO2 for it to grow in if you could guarantee no pests or competitors. But those detractors will change with CO2 levels too. Also, beneficial things for the plant in question will change too, like other plants that fix soil nutrients and polinators. It is simply too complex of a question to truly know and tiny changes in a superficially positive direction could have wildly unexpected negative impacts from an unmodeled directions.

So... I don't know and I doubt anyone does unless they have studied the whole ecosystem for a long time.

kstrauser2• 2 years ago

A 30% change in my lifetime (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...) is neither a conspiracy theory nor tiny.

But you're right in the sense that this is utterly unprecedented in our history, so we don't rightfully know how the ecosystem will react as a whole.

idunnoman12222• 2 years ago

Til that carbon dioxide making plants grow is a conspiracy theory , you should tell that to the farmers that pump it into their greenhouses

saghm• 2 years ago

In my calculus class in high school, one of the problems in the set at the end of the chapter about the rate of the growth of kudzu. None of us had heard of it (including the teacher), which I guess might be due to being in New England rather than somewhere it's more of a problem. I think I remember us thinking it was some sort of crop rather than a weed, so we were all very surprised at the super high rate of growth it used in the problem.

jdhendrickson• 2 years ago

Driving through dead forests covered in this vine on my way to PA from TX, I would respectfully disagree with their premise. When allowed to proliferate it strangled everything visible from the highway, and covered every inch of the hundreds of standing dead wood trees it had killed.

waveBidder2• 2 years ago

everything visible from the highway,

But isn't this exactly what the article is arguing?

As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade.
Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles.

causality0• 2 years ago

It's kind of ignoring the fact that as development proceeds, the ratio of "greenery within 100 yards of a road" to "forest" grows rapidly.

black6• 2 years ago

Kudzu is an edge plant; it thrives in the boundaries between ecological zones. Where open land turns into forest you see it. Right there in the tangled thicket mass of bushes, shrubs, small trees and other vining plants. Deeper into the forest the canopy blocks more light and it opens up as the opportunistic, edge plants get shaded out.

dmonitor• 2 years ago

Did it kill the trees, or did it proliferate after the trees died (and increased the direct sunlight reaching the ground)?

asynchronous132• 2 years ago

Kudzu does grow up and over live trees and kills them. It will also grow over abandoned buildings, or nearly anything really.

sqeaky5• 2 years ago

A while ago someone posted an article about stacking and freezing farmed biomass. They wanted to sequester CO2 from whatever random stuff that could be farmed cheap and frozen in the winter by hosing it down and running pipes through it then opening or closing the pipes to make it either match the air temp or resist temperature change.

Large swaths of the south simply don't have winter. But how cold does it get and how far from wintery areas is it? Is trucking a bunch of kudzu an option?

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Unless your truck is using a carbon-neutral power source, then no it's not an option. You'll emit more carbon than you sequester.

christophilus• 2 years ago

Trains might be an option, though.

sqeaky5• 2 years ago

I suspect some math is in order. A big truck can move a lot of carbon and I suspect there is some range within transport makes sense.

edit - To clarify if a big diesel truck puts X CO2 into the air to move Y tons of CO2 some distance then clearly if X is greater than Y it just doesn't make sense. But, if X is 10% of Y for 200 miles then moving biomass 200 miles might make sense.

Also the transport can be shrunk if the transport is electric. A diesel truck might dump less CO2 into the air than even a coal plant is dumping a ton of CO2 it might be dumping less (or more) per watt which might

thfuran2• 2 years ago

Even ignoring that, dry wood is only around 50% carbon. I guess the soil mass is significantly more than that of the atmosphere, but I'd still want to fairly carefully verify we wouldn't be totally screwing something else up by also sequestering the other half of wood. Of course, we'd also have to decide where to place the new wooden mountain range.

quixoticelixer-2• 2 years ago

What happens in summer?

pjc50• 2 years ago

This seems like an absurdly energy-intensive plan because you'd have to spend energy to maintain your mountain-sized pile .. which will heat itself up if it ever reaches warm enough to start decaying.

The most viable farm based approach would be "reverse coal mine": make charcoal from the biomass by reduced-oxygen combustion, then put it all in the big pit you made when you dug up all that coal.

However, there's no economic model for any of this, so carbon capture is never going to go beyond pilot schemes.

Log_out_2• 2 years ago

Have it grow on wire roap dangling over swamps,withdraw the netting end of season the greenery sinks to the bottom, zero energy effort.

naravara• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t the easiest way to be just have goats eat it and then collect and bury the poop?

asynchronous132• 2 years ago

I grew up believing many of the myths that this article addresses. So I'm hesitant to believe it entirely without verifying additional sources. In particular, this quote seems misleading:

the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland

I quickly verified this statistic. But I know that "forestland" is a specific category of land. What about non-forestland? How many acres of kudzu are there on land that is not considered forestland?

experts estimate that kudzu covers another 500,000 acres in the South’s cities and suburbs

I found this statistic about 500,000 acres quoted in several places, but didn't find which experts came up with that number. Still, it was very quick to find double the acreage in one specific type of non-forestland.

That doesn't even begin to touch non-forestland countryside (i.e. non-city, non-suburb)

The US Forest Service estimates that kudzu adds 2,500 acres each year. US Department of Agriculture estimates that it spreads by 150,000 acres per year. I don't think this is a discrepancy, just that each agency is looking at specific land types and uses.

It seems like this article is seriously cherry picking data to make it seem like kudzu is less of an issue.

mycall• 2 years ago

Another thing is why is growth not exponential and is linear per year? That seems fishy as well.

Kudzu, the vine that never ate the South (2015)

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