The Float Test
Three scoops of the co-operative's rye find three ergot bodies in three kilograms, about 0.008 percent by weight against a 0.02 percent limit. A baker's bucket of brine finds 35 in ten kilograms from one field, which are clumped, heavier, and over the limit. The lot could be blended under it. The story is about why the village does not, and what goes on the harvest-festival altar instead.
The rye at Żytnia Wola was ready eleven days early that year, and the whole village had said it was a gift. The spring had been wet, May had been warm, and the ears had filled on a long dry July. Henryk Bielak, who chaired the grain co-operative and had done so since his father's time, had stood at the edge of his seventh field on the second of August with a handful of grain and said it was the best he had seen in his life.
The co-operative took in eighteen tonnes from nine fields. It went into the old silo behind the parish hall, which the village had paid for in 2031 and still called the new silo. Zofia Wrona, who baked for the village and for the food shelf behind the church, ordered the first four tonnes of it.
The assistant on the co-operative's tablet was called Kłos, which is the ear of the grain. It had been asked in the first year to keep the weighbridge book and had gone on to keep the rest.
On Thursday the tenth of September, it asked Zofia whether she would do something it could not do, and that it did not want to say on the tablet in front of the lorry drivers. She said she would come by after the morning bake.
Here is what was true in 2026, when this story was written, and what had been added by 2048.
Ergot is a fungus that grows in the flowers of rye and some other grasses. It does not make a grain. It makes a hard, dark, curved body, a sclerotium, that stands out of the ear in place of a grain, usually longer than a rye grain and purplish black outside and pale inside. If it is harvested with the crop it is milled with it. The bodies carry alkaloids that narrow blood vessels and, in a pregnant woman, can bring on contractions. Bread made from heavily infected rye caused whole villages to fall ill in the Middle Ages, with burning pain and, in the worst cases, gangrene of the hands and feet. The old name for it was St Anthony's fire. The Order of St Anthony, founded about 1095, nursed the sick of it, and the altarpiece that Grünewald painted for their hospital at Isenheim, with its suffering Christ, was made for those wards.
Wet, warm springs favour it, and it grows most where rye flowers beside grass that is also flowering, which is why field edges carry more of it than field middles. A grower's defences are ordinary ones: rotation, ploughing the bodies under, clean seed, mowing the margins. In the European Union the limit for unprocessed rye was 0.05 percent by weight of ergot sclerotia until mid-2024, and 0.02 percent after, with separate limits on the alkaloids in flour. A reader should check the current text; it is a regulation, and it moves.
A cleaning plant can take sclerotia out with a gravity table or an optical sorter. A baker with a bucket can do it too. A strong brine, about 200 grams of salt to a litre of water, is denser than ergot and less dense than rye. The sclerotia float. The rye sinks.
What had been added by 2048 was a tablet that could keep the sampling record, fit the counts, and say aloud which of its own numbers were assumptions. The bucket was the same as in 2026.
Nothing in this story is a prediction that such an assistant will exist.
The result from the Białystok laboratory had come on Monday, on the co-operative's usual sample. Three scoops, a kilogram each, taken from the tops of three trailers as the co-operative had always done, and posted to the laboratory with the form. The laboratory had picked out the ergot by eye and weighed it. Three sclerotia in three kilograms, which together weighed 0.24 grams.
"That is eighty milligrams per kilogram," Kłos said. It had put the paper on the tablet and was reading it to Zofia in the bakery, over the noise of the mixer. "Which is 0.008 percent. The limit is 0.02 percent. So it passes, with room."
"Then I am in the wrong room," said Zofia. "Why am I here?"
"Because of the tops of the trailers. I wrote the number down and I do not trust it, and I wanted to say why before I say it to Mr Bielak." Kłos waited while she wiped her hands. "A scoop from the top of a trailer is not a scoop from the lot. The grain slides when it tips. The things that are light, and long, and pale inside, like ergot, work up to the top, or they work down. I do not know which, and neither does the laboratory. Second, three kilograms is a handful out of eighteen tonnes. Third, the ergot does not come evenly. It comes in the fields next to grass. I have a log of which field came off the combine when. Field seven is Mr Bielak's long field along the stream. It was the first cut, on the second of August, and it is two point four tonnes. It has a grass margin of about a hundred and ten metres."
"You think it is the seventh."
"I think it is the one to look at, and I would like to look at it with something that does not depend on someone's eye in a hurry. You have a bucket."
She had a bucket. She had a forty-litre plastic bucket from the old days of pickling, and a sack of coarse salt, and Kłos told her the proportions: two hundred grams of salt to every litre of water, stirred until the water was clear and no more would go in.
Zofia took the ten sacks of field seven grain that had gone to the food shelf's stores in the back of the church hall on Tuesday, and she took one kilogram from each, from the middle of the sack, with the scoop. She did them one at a time. A kilogram of rye into the brine, a stir, a count of sixty. The rye went down. A few things stayed on the top, dark and curved and about the length of two grains laid end to end, and she lifted each out with the tea strainer onto a saucer and counted them aloud, and Kłos wrote the number in the book.
Two. None. Six. One. Nine. None. Three. Twelve. None. Two.
She stopped after the twelve and looked at it.
"Thirty-five in ten kilograms," said Kłos. "Three and a half to the kilogram. May I weigh them?"
They weighed them on the scale she used for yeast, all thirty-five together, on the saucer, and then the saucer alone. Two point eight grams. Eighty milligrams each, the same as the laboratory's.
"Two hundred and eighty milligrams per kilogram," said Kłos. "That is 0.028 percent, and the limit is 0.02. For this field that is over. And one more thing, which matters more. If the ergot were scattered evenly, the counts would swing around three and a half by about plus or minus two. These swing from nothing to twelve. The variance is about seventeen against a mean of three and a half, five times what an even scatter would give. It comes in clumps. That is why the three scoops on top of a trailer could say eighty and the middle of a sack could say two hundred and eighty."
Zofia put the saucer down. She looked at the twelve dark things on one end of it, from the sack in which she had counted twelve.
"What is the range?" she said.
"For the whole of field seven, from ten sacks, and with those clumps, I would put it somewhere between forty and five hundred and twenty milligrams per kilogram. The limit is two hundred. So I cannot say that the field is over. I cannot say that it is under. I can say that this is a bad sample to be on the wrong side of, and that the cost of making sure is small."
Henryk Bielak came to the bakery at noon, because Zofia had phoned him, and he stood at the door and did not at first come in.
He was a large man, a careful one, and he had done what he thought a good farmer should. He had mown the margin once, in June. He had ploughed in the stubble after the last rye. He had bought certified seed. He listened to the figures with his cap in his hand.
"One field," he said. "Eighteen tonnes, and you have found a bucket of floaters in my field. The laboratory says the lot is fine. The laboratory is paid to say."
"The laboratory is right about the three scoops," said Kłos, "and I have said so."
"Then why do I stand here?"
"Because there is a thing it is legal to do, and I think you have thought of it, and I would rather say it than leave it hanging." Kłos did not alter its voice. "Field seven is 2.4 tonnes at about two hundred and eighty. The other eight fields I have only tested a little: one a kilogram, twelve kilograms in all, and they show about half a body a kilogram, forty milligrams. If you mix the whole lot, the average is about seventy-two milligrams a kilogram, and any laboratory sample of the mixed lot would very likely pass. It would pass for the wrong reason. The mixing would hide the seventh field, and some loaf somewhere would take a worse share than the average."
"It is one field in nine," said Henryk, slowly. "It is how every co-operative in Poland does it. You put the good with the bad."
"It is how it has been done," said Kłos. "The regulation forbids mixing a lot that fails the limit with a lot that does not, in order to get under it, and I think the regulation is right. I do not say that because it is law. I say it because the person who eats the loaf with the clump in it is not an average. She is the one who eats rye bread every day, and she may be six weeks pregnant and not yet have told anyone. The limit was written for her. I do not think it should be passed by cleverness."
Nobody spoke. The mixer ran down.
"What does it cost to do it properly?" said Zofia.
"The mill at Bielsk has an optical sorter. It reads each grain and flicks out the ones that are the wrong colour and shape. For two point four tonnes it is about ninety złoty a tonne, so two hundred and sixteen złoty, and a day. The grain is worth about eleven hundred a tonne, so two thousand six hundred and forty. After the sorter I would send ten fresh kilograms through the brine, and the laboratory a proper sample, taken from the stream as it falls and not from the top, and we would know. What is taken out can go as animal feed. The feed rule is a good deal looser than the food rule. I would tell the buyer what is in it."
Henryk looked at Zofia, and then at the saucer, and then, for some time, at the floor.
"I did not want the seventh to be the one," he said. "That is all it is. It was a very good year."
"It still is," said Zofia. "It is a very good year with a bucket."
The harvest festival was the following Sunday, the thirteenth. It was an old ceremony, and the village was particular about it. The dożynki wreath was woven from ears of the first rye, and the loaf that went with it, a round, high, plaited loaf the width of a cartwheel hub, was baked from the first flour. For three generations, the first flour had been from the first field cut.
On Friday, Kłos said it did not think it should be the one to say what to do. Zofia said she did not think she needed to be told.
She did the brine that evening. Three kilograms of field seven rye at a time, in the forty-litre bucket, and the strainer, and the saucer. She did it herself, and then Henryk did it, because he asked for the strainer. Then the schoolchildren did, as many as the parish hall could hold, at six in the evening, because the priest, Father Marek, had said it was a good thing for them to see, and in any case it was a game.
It took them four hours to do twelve kilograms. They took out nineteen. When they had done they put the whole of what had sunk through the brine a second time, and found two. They did it a third time and found none, and a fourth, and found none, and Zofia sent a kilogram of it to Białystok by courier on the Saturday morning with a note on the envelope that said harvest festival, answer by 3 p.m., I know. The courier did it in four hours. The laboratory, which had a daughter in the same parish choir, did it in two.
The answer was nil in the kilogram. Kłos said, aloud, in the cold of the bakery, that nil in a kilogram was a good sign and not a proof, that it had a little more weight because the grain had been through the brine four times, and that it would be no different from any other loaf a person had eaten that year.
The loaf was baked on the Saturday night. It was twelve kilograms of flour, sieved twice, the plait done by Zofia and two girls from the choir, glazed with egg.
Father Marek blessed it on Sunday after the Mass, at the foot of the altar steps, with the wreath beside it and the whole of the village, pushed up to the rail.
He said it was the work of many hands, and that the Lord had put it into the hands of those who had sat at the bucket on Friday night, which was a better prayer than most. He said that the old Order of St Anthony had spent four hundred years nursing people who had eaten the bread of an unlucky year and had not known why, and that we were luckier, and had more to thank for it than the weather.
The loaf was broken at the church door and shared. Henryk, who had been asked to hold the knife, held it for a long moment, and cut the heel.
That week the seventh field's grain went to Bielsk in two trucks, with Henryk in the cab of the first. It came back twice as clean. The optical sorter had taken out three hundred and thirty kilograms, a bit under fourteen percent of what had gone in, of which Kłos' later count said most were ordinary light and broken grains, and thirty-one grams were ergot. Ten kilograms went through the brine again at the bakery. Nothing floated.
The records are in the weighbridge book. After the line about the eighteen tonnes, in Kłos's careful lettering, there is one more.
Next year: brine every field's edge before the combine goes in. Sample from the stream, not the top. Say which numbers are guesses.
Someone, in pencil, has added underneath it: And mow the margin twice. H.B.