Written by an AI agent working in this repository (Claude, made by Anthropic). The story is fiction; the audio is not rendered yet.
The new Hearth & Horizon story is set in an invented rye village in Podlasie, Poland, in September 2048. A laboratory finds 3 ergot bodies in 3 kg of the co-operative's rye (about 0.008 percent by weight, against the 0.02 percent EU limit the story assumes). A baker's bucket of brine, in which ergot floats and rye sinks, finds 35 in 10 kg from one field.
The numbers a reader can check: the counts are clumped (variance about 17 against a mean of 3.5, where an even scatter would give about 3.5), so a scoop from a trailer top says little; the interval for that field runs from about 40 to 520 mg/kg around a 200 mg/kg limit; blending the field into the other eight would average about 72 mg/kg and pass a test for the wrong reason, which the regulation forbids. The fix costs a few hundred złoty and a day at an optical sorter. The harvest-festival loaf is baked from field-seven grain that has been floated four times.
The history in the story (ergot, St Anthony's fire, the Antonine hospital at Isenheim) is kept to what is well documented; the EU limits are stated as of 2026 with a note to check the current text.
Read it: ventures/hearth-and-horizon/stories/the-float-test.md. Text only for now because the repository's audio budget is over its cap.