One of the sillier ideas that is being repeated around the net is that some object or species uses humans to perpetuate itself. The genesis seems to be in the selfish gene idea and its permutations - memes, cows, dogs, solar cells, whatever. Now someone has applied the notion to crops, not for the first time, specifically lucerne, as exploiters of humans.

I’m abusing Smith’s point here, but I can’t help but marvel at the evolutionary success of the alfalfa plant. It started in Iran in the bronze age, and here it is, spread out over more than 4,000 acres of desert in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, making a good life for itself in this desert environment by exploiting our taste for milk and beef.

First, the alfalfa’s got to tame the river. The annual runoff can flood the whole valley floor, so the alfalfa got us to build levees and a big dam upstream to hold back the flood waters. Next, it needs a lot more water than nature provides. Up north of town, at a place called Angostura, the alfalfa got us to build a low dam to divert water out of the Rio Grande and into a spiderweb of irrigation ditches that envelopes the floor of Albuquerque’s central valley with the sort of beautiful ditch you see in the photo above.

Others have claimed that it isn't the crops that are using and abusing humans, it's the weeds that thrive in soils that humans disturb. Whatever. It's not a useful way to view the undeniable coevolution of living things. Everything that lives affects its environment, and all other living things adapt to a greater or lesser degree. That's life. It makes no sense to single out a single species such as lucerne. The microorganisms that thrive in such soils would be better candidates, but the whole user/usee way of seeing is deeply flawed and masks far more useful understandings.

BTW, it is more likely horses than cattle that carried lucerne from the bronze age to the present. Cattle have better digestive systems that allow them to thrive on less potent forage than horses. Lucerne, AKA alfalfa, might have a horsey origin for its name.

Alfalfa holds the distinction of being the oldest forage crop for which we have a name, yet the etymology of the word is uncertain. It may have arisen from modifications of the Persian aspo-asti (horse fodder), the Arabic al-fasfasa or the Kashmiri ashwa-bal (both meaning horse power). Some have speculated that the name most commonly used in Europe, "lucerne," may derive from the Persian word läjwärd for lapis lazuli, the ultramarine blue mineral lazurite, in reference to the blue flowers of Medicago sativa—one of the two species, with M. falcata, known as alfalfa. Early French writers referred to it as sain foin (healthy hay), although this is now the common name of a different legume species. Today, alfalfa also is known as medic, named—according to the Greek geographer and historian Strabo, who called it mhdich—for the location of its origin, the ancient empire of Media. That root clearly persists in the Latin medica, the Italian herba medica, the Spanish mielga, the Old English medick and the scientific genus, Medicago.

What most of the proposed derivations for the word alfalfa have in common, however, is acknowledgement of the plant's merits. From the beginnings of Western Civilization, farmers have recognized that alfalfa provides excellent animal feed, improves the soil, increases yields of other crops and can be used as food or medication for people. Today, despite the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, alfalfa continues to play a vital role in agriculture, and the development of new uses for this ancient legume promises to ensure a bright future.

It seems that that old debil alfalfa would have used and abused us for the past 8,000 years even if we had no taste for cow milk or beef. And the way things are going that land may soon be plowed up and used for maize since it is doubly subsidized now that the ethanol craze has gone over the top. I know, it's really SUVs that are getting us to do all these things! Poor us.