Apple Harvest Mathematics · 5:37pm Jun 14th, 2019
Going to Seed provides more than one puzzle for those who love trying to decipher how Equestria works. If tales of the Great Seedling were not enough to engage your intellect, here’s another mystery: What the hay is the Confluence?
“The Confluence. A harvest a hundred moons in the makin'. When every apple comes ripe at the same time.”
Why would they do that? Of course because the plot requires new reason why Applejack and family must be very busy for a short period of time. In season 1 it was just Applebuck Season. Season 2 introduced zap apples. Now we have the confluence. But can we find a more satisfying explanation?
A quick internet search reveals some interesting articles on the role of the ethylene hormone in triggering apples to ripen in our world, and the storage techniques used by the food industry to control the chemical environment and ensure a year round supply of fruit on supermarket shelves. Talk to gardeners and they tell you trees will open their buds in the spring, triggered by rising temperatures after a cold spell. Provided the blossom is fertilized by friendly insects, they bear fruit some months later. Yet Applejack implies the confluence is a predictable event, like winter wrap up, the precise date of which can be marked on the calendar well in advance.
Can we use some fancy mathematics to muddle the issue?
Apple trees generally fruit every year, although some are biennial – producing blossom and fruit one year, then taking a year off to build up the energy to do so again. Could Equestrian apple farms include varieties, which bloom once in a much longer cycle, in the manner of the strobilanthes kunthiana shrubs of India, which bloom, all in synchrony, only every 12 years. If Sweet Apple Acres included a mix of varieties with fruiting intervals of 3, 4 and 5 years, they would only all fruit together once every 20 years.
Yet that doesn’t sound quite what AJ was referring to. It sounds like usually some apples ripen their fruit earlier in the season, and some later, but the confluence is a once-in-a-hundred-moons event when they all fruit over the same few days. This pattern could be produced if Equestrian apple trees have an internal clock to fix their fruiting at regular, but slightly different, intervals. Consider a simple model: if one variety fruits every 9 moons, and one every 11, then every 99 moons you have the confluence when they come together. But then most of the time you would get two applebuck seasons a year, which would get out of sync with the seasons. That doesn’t sound quite right.
So it doesn’t seem like there is a simple explanation. Instead there must be long complicated story of the origin of the confluence, involving magic, biology, mathematics, and possibly a mysterious antlered earth spirit.
There is also the possibility that the confluence is actually just an old mare’s tale. Maybe the tradition is programmed into their brains such that the apple family are convinced that on this particular date all apples must be harvested together. When it actually arrives they are so focussed on keeping to the schedule and collecting the apples, distracted only by the quest to capture the Great Seedling, that they fail to notice that it’s actually just a normal harvest.
A thought that came to my mind on watching the episode is: Are the Apples followers of biodynamic agriculture? This is surely worth a short explanation, as the comments after my last blog post show just how much some of my readers love discussions about pseudoscientific nonsense.
Biodynamic agriculture is at the extreme end of a spectrum beginning with conventional organic farming. Not satisfied with simply reducing artificial pesticide use and striving for a sustainable eco-friendly approach, the biodynamic movement seek to grow food in line with a cosmic order which necessitates checking the positions of the planets before planting your seeds, and burying a manure filled cow horn in your field.
From a scientific point of view, a lot of this is bullshit. However while alternative medicine practices such as homeopathy have rightly attracted much condemnation as they dangerously encourage patients to avoid effective treatments, biodynamic agriculture is not so easy to characterise as harmful. It seems the approach of shunning artificial fertilizers, in favour of compost and manure produced on the same farm, has a much lower environmental impact. And there is evidence many biodynamic farms do produce good produce. The quality of biodynamic wine has been particularly noted, although most fans of these wines acknowledge that this is probably not because harvesting at the right phase of the moon helps to direct magical energy to your fruit, but because the farmers that go to such efforts really do care about the quality of their produce.
I am now curious to know if cider produced from confluence apples has a particular taste.
Though it would explain how there always seem to be apples on the trees.
I figured the trees' fruiting cycles had just been thrown off-kilter by getting so saturated in earth pony magic (and a touch from the Everfree,) resulting in fruiting at semirandom intervals over the course of a potential harvesting season.
Alternatively, biodynamics actually work in Equestria and the harvesting confluence lines up with some manner of planetary conjunction.
Considering how many of Goldy Delicious' pets were involved in this harvest, I suspect that this particular batch of confluence cider will have a slight taste of cat pee.
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I think you're right about that, but I bet it would be some magic cycle that makes a little more sense than biodynamics. Maybe involving pegasus fertilizer and shed hydra skins.
Oh stars, I've just had a horrible thought. "Crop dusters" are a thing in Equestria... only it's about fertilizer, not pesticides.
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There do seem to be apples on the trees a lot of the time, although I don't know if there's any definite data.
It's easy to imagine that it must be confusing being an apple tree in Equestria so they end up fruiting at random times. Then is there something that brings them into alignment at the confluence?
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That's a new take on this theory.
Blood, Fish and bone is a very popular fertiliser for allotments in the UK. Fish is easy enough, but in vegetarian Equestrian society you need bird charmers and pig farmers to supply the manures, as the classical method of everyone starving due to crop death due to wasted lands could only be fixed by having an all out pesant conflict leading to their mass deaths returning the needed minerals back to the land to grow the next crop to feed the now much smaller population?
Depends on how long it takes a tree to grow to fuiting? given 13 moons in a year, and nice prime, you need 7 and 11 year trees to get the nice 1001 synchronicity?
If you really want to grow food in a monocrop organically, use algae in a closed loop hydroponic flow greenhouse loop?
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⸘Some readers got worked up about pseudoscience in the comments for the last post‽ ¡I must go and read those comments which I did not know existed until right now!
Given that natural selection would push for prime numbers for preventing predators with shorter cycles hitting the apples every time, the confluence may happen only every few hundred years, as that would be the common multiple of all of the primes. Something similar happened with cicadas a few years ago:
In 2014, 2 broods of cicadas, 1 with a 13-year cycle and another with a 17-year cycle emerged at the same time. This only happens once every 221 years.
I'd think earth pony magic could push *some* cultivars of apples into two crops a year (early summer/later fall) while some others only harvest in the late summer. This gives overlapping sequences where once summer hits, there's nothing but tree thumping until the first frost, and even then there might be a few trees left over until it freezes hard. I think I prefer the supermarket :)
This actually makes me think of flood prediction, something that still boggles my mind.