Heritage Grains
A modern act
However just and anxious I have been
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet berries in a cup.Standing Ground — Wendell Berry
Superficially, the similarities between heritage grains and vinyl records are, if not uncanny, then at least noteworthy. They both enjoyed a long hay-day, the proverbial golden years of near universal acceptance. There was an anarchic flavour to these golden years: with relatively few means, people could trade, share, create personal mixes, free from the weight of centralisation and legislation.
Slowly, the pair were declared obsolete by the impersonal forces of efficiency, and they fell into near total disuse. They were lost from the mainstream — maintained by those on the margins, by those who paid little notice to the promise of an easeful life, if and only if underwritten by the correct corporate consumables. After years on the margins, interest slowly renews. Initially, this comes not quite from the centre, but from earnest seekers of nostalgic bent. Something has been lost, they cry, we have to find it. And these cries are largely right. Something has been lost. But it’s not something that you can name with ease. A sense, a hint, a flavour, an essence is what ignites this search. It is not strictly rational, or at least not exclusively so. It was thus that the heritage grain and the vinyl resurface.
At least, that’s one telling, told by an earnest teller of nostalgic bent. As with any attempt to claim forgotten knowledge from the past, it’s contentious. There are sides to this story. But before these sides, perhaps it is better to start with the question: what are heritage grains?
To say more, I’ll have to introduce some terminology.
Heritage grains are varieties and cultivars of cereals, for example wheat and oats, that predate so-called “modern” breeding methods. For this essay, I’ll be focusing primarily on heritage wheat. They are historic improved grains. By “improved”, I mean selected for certain characteristics, e.g. strong stems. This improvement often occurs on a vast timescale, often subconsciously, and has been happening to some degree since grains were first domesticated ~10,000 years ago. Technically speaking, this term refers to singular cultivars of old grains.
Landraces are ancient mixtures of different varieties of heritage grains. This mixture has high genetic diversity, and has a strong tie to a specific place. The precise combination of individual varieties evolves in time and place, according to the suitability to local conditions: those varieties that perform best will contribute more seed to next year’s crop. Throughout the vast majority of humanity’s interaction with wheat, we have been growing landraces.
Populations are the deliberate (re)creation of genetic diversity in a mixture of heritage grains. They are diverse by design: the modern response to landraces. Developers of new populations will find the genetic material from a diverse number of sources: gene banks, farmers in exotic land, etc. Most modern efforts with heritage grains concern heritage populations. As I write, I plan to grow a population called Mariagertoba.
Although the amount of diversity makes it hard to speak absolutely, there are some general characteristics of heritage grains. As above, they tend to be grown as populations, meaning that there is huge genetic diversity in a single field; this differs from most modern farming, which focuses on singular varieties, known as a monoculture. They tend to be taller than their modern counterparts; heritage varieties can grow up to 1.5m tall, whereas modern varieties sit somewhere near half a meter. The increased height is mirrored by increased rooting depth, making these varieties better at scavenging for nutrients deeper in the soil. They tend to be lower yielding than modern varieties. They tend to be better suited to low-input systems. They tend to make excellent bread.
So far, that’s a lot of facts, a lot of data, but not much life; a lot of how, but not much why. To those new to heritage grains, you may still be asking but why does anyone care? It’s as though I’ve explained a vinyl record exclusively in terms of it being the only lossless format for capturing analogue sound waves. A useful and true fact, but totally without soul. Allow me to try to give a little more soul to heritage grains.
It’s hard to write properly about heritage grains without mentioning John Letts. “Heritage grain” is a phrase of his coining. He’s the reason that I’m writing, and so you’re reading, about them today. He’s a farmer, brewer, botanist, and heritage grains expert: in short, a bit of a wheat-geek. (And, in my humble opinion, a bit of a legend.) It was his article in The Land magazine that introduced me to heritage grains. Reading it was one of those profound moments, one that all writers aim for, where a piece of writing actively changed the way that I engaged with the world at large. There is much brilliance contained within, but the principal impression for me was something like this: if wild grasses can grow year on year, free from disease and pest, without an arsenal of agrochemicals, why can’t we do the same with wheat, which ultimately is simply a domesticated grass? And John Letts’ answer is that we can do the same, we just need to be clever, and work with nature’s principles of diversity.
Let me try to explain why this is so profound. Broadly, there are two ways of growing grain today: conventionally and organically.
In a conventional system, crops are rotated; wheat might be grown two out of five years, interspersed with beans, oats, rape-seed, or barley, for example. The fertility of soil is understood as a chemical problem, and so fields are regularly dowsed in concentrated doses of nitrogen fertiliser, along with other chemicals, to compensate for growing such exhaustive crops. This is the system that dominates much of England today. Broadly speaking, the rotation in this system is to avoid pests and diseases: if one tries to grow a continuous crop of wheat, year in year out, even with the totality of modern agrochemicals, it’ll only take a few years before crop failures start to emerge. The soils became depleted after continuous exhaustive growing, and so crops become vulnerable to attacks.
In an organic system, synthetic inputs are prohibited. This means that fertility, i.e. nitrogen, cannot be bought off a shelf. The organic response is to spend years building fertility through natural means, specifically by growing restorative crops, like clover, than pump bio-available nitrogen back into the soil. Typically, a rotation would be three years of fertility-building grass lays, followed by one year of milling wheat, then one year of livestock feed, before the beginning anew. A cycle of boom-bust: four years of restoration for one year of exhaustion. The consequence of this is that organic wheats are extraordinarily land hungry: for every one field of wheat good enough for bread, there must be four fields somewhere else, growing something else, to build up the necessary fertility.
In the words of John Letts:
Organic and conventional farmers therefore agree on two widely accepted agronomic principles: 1) wheat must be grown in high nitrogen soils, and 2) wheat cannot be grown in the same field for more than one to two years without draining the soil of nutrients, and dramatically increasing losses to pests and diseases.
Said otherwise, both approaches are unified in the belief that wheat is an exhaustive crop, one that takes without giving back, thus making continual growing impossible. But this agricultural knowledge seems to be at odds with ecological knowledge: that wild grasses can grow year on year, without problem, and that wheat is ultimately a descent of these grasses. How and why did wheat, throughout its history of domestication, become so exhaustive? This is, I hope, a hint at the soul of heritage grains.
For the ecologically minded, it is hard not to look backwards. At least, that has been my experience. Hard not to look back for some golden age, when human societies were in balance with the rest of life, when things made sense. I don’t think this tendency is surprising considering the framing of our relationship to the rest of life, a framing centred around loss. Take this example:
Nearly one in six of the more than ten thousand species assessed (16%) are at risk of being lost from Great Britain. This figure is much higher for some groups such as birds (43%), amphibians and reptiles (31%), fungi and lichen (28%) and terrestrial mammals (26%)… There have also been declines in the distributions of more than half (54%) of our flowering plant species.
State of Nature report, 2023.
It’s hard to know what to do with these numbers. I’ve struggled in myself to know how to respond honestly. It’s perhaps inevitable that one looks backwards, when the whole conversation seems to be about what we have lost. Drawing the precise line, however, of just how far backwards, is the difficult task.
Backwards to the perfect medieval village. Everything is in its right place. It’s just before sunset, on a July evening. Harvest is only a few weeks away, and the town is preparing together, whilst the evening sky is filled with birdsong. Just beyond the edge of the golden wheat fields is where wild things dwell. Human agriculture in balance with the natural world. Sure, there may be famines, but perhaps they aren’t as bad as we’re told, and anyway, why let that interrupt the dreams of nostalgia?
Or maybe this isn’t far enough. Maybe the real golden age is the fertile crescent, nearly 10,000 years ago. Wheat, or its distant ancestor, is newly domesticated, and we’re now free from the hunger of winter. Life is simple. Bread has recently arrived. The world is a deeply sacred place: all of life, in its rich abundance, forms part of this great sacred mystery, with gods to venerate before harvest and gods to thank after its success.
Or perhaps we go further, before agriculture, before any notion of domestic. Wild and free. Perfect egalitarian societies, free of the hierarchies that grain brings. Doing the things we are supposed to do.
Or perhaps we go back, but not to a singular moment. Go back to an amalgamation that exists only in the mind. Personally speaking, this stop has proved to be the most captivating. Wild bison graze at the edge of the medieval village. Hunter-gatherers wander wistfully down English country lanes, contented after a successful hunt, whilst the hedges burst with ripe blackberries. The ecology of nostalgia; the nostalgia of ecology.
All agricultural produce is the result of deliberate breeding. Wheat is no exception. Breeding, if deliberate, is always in response to a specific problem, at a specific historical moment. I would like to sketch the historic breeding of wheat, how and why we moved from heritage to modern grains.
As mentioned earlier, heritage grains tend to be taller than modern varieties. The wild ancestors of domestic wheat used their tall stems to outgrow competition; this survival strategy remained in the newly domesticated plant. This feature was self-selective, to the extent that only the plants that competed successfully could contribute their seed to the following year’s planting.
Furthermore, these early wheats were landraces. They grew amongst great diversity. To quote John Letts again: “these first crop populations or landraces were genetically diverse and therefore hardy, resilient and adaptable.” Each individual cultivar has its own preferred growing niche — moisture, sunlight, soil-type, etc. — and with enough diversity, chances of success in all conditions is increased: no matter the conditions of a particular growing year, or of a particular site, there was normally a large percentage of the population that would succeed in producing viable seed. However, the flip-side is that so-called “bumper years” were relatively infrequent, as it was rare to have conditions that favoured all of the diversity.
So far, so good. Diverse landraces of tall wheats. Bumper crops rare, as are total failures. As wheat proliferated globally, these landraces took on forms as diverse as the human culture that nourished them. They were suited to the minutia of local growing conditions, local diets, etc. The “problem”, insofar as plant breeding is concerned, is that tall wheat has a tendency to fall over and snap if the seed head becomes too heavy. This is known as lodging. Lodging both decreases yield and increases the work necessary to harvest the crop: not good. This happens particularly often in high-fertility soils, as the seed head puts on extra growth, and so extra weight.
In 1913, the Haber-Bosch process was invented//discovered. At high pressures and temperatures, synthetic ammonia, i.e. nitrogen fertiliser, could be produced out of thin air. (Getting to these temperatures, however, requires a significant investment of energy, namely fossil fuels; it is estimated that between 1-2% of global energy is consumed in this singular chemical reaction.) This is one of the defining moments in the development of “conventional” agriculture: mankind was now free from the need to find natural sources of fertility — animal manure, herbal lays, etc. — because it could be produced in a lab. From Wikipedia: “It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half the world's population.”
With advances in chemistry came advances in plant breeding. The abundance of synthetic nitrogen created greater risks of lodging, and so efforts were focused on making wheat shorter. This was achieved throughout the first half of the 20th century. A landrace was found growing in Japan, which may have dated back to 3rd century Korea. It had shorter stems, in response to being battered by coastal winds. This “dwarf gene” was successfully cross-bred into more conventional varieties, and became commercially available towards the end of the 1960s, into the early ’70s. This is the creation of modern wheat, per se. Furthermore, it is also in the 20th century that breeders were able to isolate single cultivars of wheat. Practices moved away from diverse landraces, and towards monocultures. This dwarf-gene monoculture practice allowed for much greater yields than ever before, as excess plant growth could be directed towards heavier heads of wheat, without the historically associated risk of lodging.
Between the abstract ideals of “wild” at one end, and “domestic” at the other, it is always difficult to define the singular moment when any species — wheat, dogs, mushrooms, humans — cross the threshold from one to the other. As with all abstract notions, there’s a gap between the thing itself, and the abstraction of the thing. That being said, I would like to suggest this moment as hugely significant in this transition. Grain output increased enormously, but this could only be achieved with the arsenal of modern agrochemicals. To name one example, the shorter wheats are (obviously!) much more susceptible to competition from weed species, and so specific herbicides had to be developed to stave off the competition that had historically been managed by the long stems. Furthermore, growing monocultures, i.e. vast areas of genetic uniformity, increases susceptibility to diseases: as someone remarked to me, it’s as though every house in a street uses the same key, and we’re wondering why we keep being broken into.
The process of breeding didn’t stop with dwarf-genes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an iterative, self-reinforcing march of new varieties with new chemistry: a march towards an exhaustive crop. It is no coincidence that much of the breeding has been done by agrochemical companies: seed breeding itself is hugely costly without being terribly lucrative, as farmers can often save their seed for next year; thus, economic forces incentivise the creation of varieties that are reliant upon, or at the least receptive to, a chemistry that you can provide. This cyclical process of new breeds → new chemistry → new breeds has created the situation we now find, where, without chemistry, many modern varieties will fail, either partially or entirely. Andy Forbes, a minor celebrity in the niche world of heritage grains, explained to me that this was his entry point: he tried growing wheat on his London allotment, but couldn’t get any of these modern varieties to grow as promised, and so started his adventure down the rabbit hole of heritage grains…
It’s worth taking a bit of a detailed look at yields, particularly at the change that these breeding techniques introduced. Both to marvel at the success, in a certain sense, of these programmes, and to respond to the oft repeated claim that we need modern agrochemicals to feed the world.
A good crop of heritage grain will yield somewhere near 3 tonnes/hectare (T/ha). On average, a field in medieval Europe would have yielded somewhere near 1.5 T/ha. This difference can be explained by a better understanding of soil biology, more productive varieties (post-medieval, pre-“modern”), advancements in machinery, etc. A good organic crop, grown after the necessary years of fertility building, will yield near 5T/ha. This increase on heritage grains comes because organic farms are using modern dwarf-stemmed varieties, which can absorb high nitrogen without lodging. Finally, conventional cereal farmers will yield near 8T/ha on average, and can reach up to 10T/ha on a good year. This is a staggering increase, especially considering the baseline set by medieval farmers.
For some illustrative calculations, assume that a loaf of bread uses 500g of flour. A good heritage grain crop yields 6,000 loaves per hectare, organic near 10,000 loaves, and conventional near 20,000. London’s Hyde Park is nearly 150 hectares in size. Doing the maths gives 900,000 heritage loaves, 1,500,000 organic loaves, and 3,000,000 conventional loaves from an area the size of Hyde Park. Divide that amongst the 12-million Londoners, and you can get a feel for how much the different systems provide, and how much land is needed to grow the food we eat.
This wondrously simple calculation is precisely that: simple. Dare I say, too simple. The reality is that half of the wheat grown in this country is grown as livestock feed. My family’s farm, for example, grows wheat, barley, and beans exclusively for livestock; only one crop, oil seed rape, is grown specifically for human consumption. This is not uncommon. Grain that doesn’t reach “milling spec” sometimes becomes biscuits, but most often becomes animal feed. To quote John Letts again:
Although ostensibly created to "feed the world", HYVs are primarily used in industrialised countries to transform fossil fuels into cheap grain to produce animal products to feed affluent consumers.
As a ballpark figure, for every 10 calories fed to livestock, they will produce 1 calorie in human edible produce (meat, milk, eggs, etc.). And so these massive advances in yields, impressive as they are in their own sense, translate, in effect, to a reduction of human edible calories if fed to livestock. Simply put, 10T/ha becomes more like 1T/ha if it passes through the multiple stomachs of a cow en route.
There are subtleties here. What about the grain from a conventional system that does reach milling spec? Is it always “bad” to feed grain to livestock? What about the years of out of production in an organic system, or in rotation for a conventional system? Such is the way whenever one tries to win an argument, bogged down in details and nuance. The point that I want to make is not new: the best way to feed people is to grow food for people. Ultimately, however, I need to remind myself that I am not growing food as a statistical average over the whole of the UK. My inheritance, in the broadest sense, is a conventional cereal farm that grows almost exclusively for livestock; I can change a small part of that to grow good food for real people, whilst making the landscape a richer place.
That said, perhaps it would have been best if I had simply awoken at dawn, without argument, and picked dew-wet berries in a cup.
For the ecologically minded, it can be tempting to view heritage grains as part of the return to this vague-yet-captivating golden age, when humans and the rest of life live well together. I’ve been hinting at it throughout, talking about the soul of these grains, suggesting that they can offer something that our modern systems, conventional or organic, can’t provide.
And to an extent this is true. By growing heritage grains in a way that mimics the ecology of natural grassland, John Letts has been pioneering a continuous grain cropping (CGC) system: wheat, in the same field, year on year, without loss of yield from disease or pests. That is huge! The details are explained in his article that I linked above, and they are truly fascinating — at least for someone like myself.
The take-home message is that farming practices can be designed about natural principles — plant diversity, minimal cultivation, free from agrochemicals — to produce high quality human food, whilst simultaneously enriching the surrounding ecosystem, both above and below. Old grains, grown non-exhaustively, to create wildness within the domestic.
In a line, that is my motivation to grow these grains. At their best, they tease the edges of the perfect abstractions of “wild” and “domestic”, by being both and neither at once, neither fully wild nor fully domestic. There will always be countless cascading interactions that we will never understand in an ecosystem like this, and yet we are largely the architects of such a system. Wonderful.
But these grains offer more than just CGC. In fact, they’re not normally grown in a continuous system, but as part of a diverse rotation. They’re grown for their taste, or health benefits, or to experiment with low input systems, amongst a host of reasons.
However, what I do want to suggest is that all of the above is a profoundly modern phenomena. Growing heritage grains cannot, and will not, bring back the medieval village, or the early Neolithic, nor even a small slice of this. Perhaps this is more of a note to myself, but there is no going back to some ecological golden age. It’s taken me so long to realise this that it’s worth stressing, at least to myself. To be specific, John Letts created his population of heritage grains using global gene banks, set up, at least in part, to conserve global plant genetic resources in light of the current global mass-extinction event; a deep understanding of modern agricultural science was essential to create his CGC system. The vast majorities of heritage grains, grown in any system, end up in artisan bakeries in urban centres. A friend of mine joked of his despondence that all of his work — in becoming an organic farmer, miller, seed saver, distributer, custodian, amongst everything else — was simply for sourdoughs in Shoreditch.
Gene banks and artisan bakeries are not features of the medieval village. Heritage grains are a modern act.
Glossary
Agrochemicals — the totality of chemicals available in conventional farming systems; this includes, but is not limited to: synthetic nitrogen, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides.
Bio-available — available for use by plants.
Bumper-crop//year — a good crop//year.
Cultivar — a plant variety that has been produced in cultivation by selective breeding.
Ecological niche — the specific environmental conditions favoured by a particular species//variety//cultivar.
Exhaustive — plants that degrade, i.e. exhaust, the soil that they are grown in.
Herbal-lay//Grass-lay — a mixture of plants, primarily grasses, that are grown to restore soil health. Examples of plants that one might grow include: rye, vetch, wild oats, clover, phacelia.
Herbicide — a chemical that kills weed plants, i.e. herbs. Compare to fungi-cide, which kills fungi, or pesti-cides, which kill insects. The suffix -cides means death, e.g. homicide.
Low-input system — a system of farming that uses minimal agrochemicals.
Milling specification — the requirements of wheat before it can be used to make bread. This is usually expressed as a protein percentage, and a Hagberg number.
Variety — a taxonomic rank below that of species and subspecies, but above that of form.
Leon wise smashes your mums thighs