Wheat Around the World

Chances are that unless you live in the far north around the Artic Circle, you have eaten a wheat product in the last 24 hours. If you enjoyed your bread, pasta, pizza, cookies, cake, pretzels, couscous, crackers, wheat flakes cereal, etc. you can thank neolithic farmers in the Fertile Cresent in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers for discovering and cultivating a grass with delicious little seeds on top of a long, thin stem.

There is evidence that over 20,000 years ago Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Cresent, an area that ran from northern Egypt to modern day Iran, began harvesting wild wheat and using it as a food. In fact, archaeologist recently discovered a piece of cooked flatbread in a settlement area located in the northeastern part of what is now Jordon that was dated to 14,400 years old. Hunter-gatherers looked for the wild wheat grass, used flint tools to harvest it, then rolled it or flailed it to remove the husk around the kernel, ground the kernels with stones, sieved the flour, mixed the flour with water and kneaded it into dough, and then cooked it over an open fire. This was a time-consuming process but the bread made from the einkorn and emmer wheat that grew wild in that area was more flavorful and nutritious than the bland white flour most bakers use today.

Then around 12,000 years ago Neolithic farmers began to cultivate wheat by planting seeds from the tastiest and most productive plants. Since wild wheat naturally tends to drop its seeds as soon as they are ripe in order to propagate the next generation of plants, one of the main goals of the early cultivators was coming up with plants that held on to the seeds long enough for them to be harvested and processed. Once farmers successfully developed the cultivation of wheat, it spread rapidly in every direction.

Two types of wheat, today called emmer and einkorn, became popular for cultivating. Einkorn was more plentiful and but the kernels are smaller than emmer. Both were cultivated extensively with einkorn generally grown mostly in cooler and more mountainous regions and emmer in warmer lower valleys.

Bread made from these wild strains of wheat was rich in protein to keep the body healthy and carbohydrates to provide a high level of energy. To a large extent bread from einkorn and emmer wheat powered the building of humanity’s first cities along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Another place where the cultivation of wheat became very important was along the Nile River in ancient Egypt. For example, the staple diet of many Egyptians was beer made for barley and bread made from wheat, mostly emmer. Grains of emmer wheat have been found in Egyptian tombs so the dead would have food for their journey into the afterlife.

It is interesting that as people began to store wheat and other grains for later processing, they began to use cats for rodent control. So, in a way, wheat and cats became domesticated together. In time as domesticated cats became more important in Egyptian culture, they came to have their own goddess, Bastet, a daughter of the sun god Ra. Bastet was depicted as a goddess with a female body and the head of a cat. Cats were often mummified and buried with their owner or offered as sacrifices to Bastet or other deities.

Wheat was also important in the diet of early Europeans. At about the same time the Egyptians were growing it along the Nile River, it was being cultivated from Spain to Scandinavia and as far west as England. Mute evidence for European wheat cultivation was found in 1991 when the body of a man was found frozen in ice on a mountain near the Austrian border with Italy. The body, named Otzi the Iceman by scientists after the region where he was found in the Otzal Alps, turned out to be over 5,000 years old. Otzi has been studied in detail as to his clothing, cause of death, the weapons and tools he was carrying, and the food he had been eating. His stomach contents revealed that he was an omnivore who along with animal meat, ate a good deal of bread made with einkorn wheat.

Today wheat provides about 20% of human nutrition. Varieties of wheat grow everywhere in nearly every temperate climate on Earth that has at least 90 days of frost-free weather and 12 inches or more of annual rainfall. It is self-pollinated, so a healthy population of insect pollinators is not critical, and it grows in a number of different types of soil. Today it is grown on a larger land area, about 550 million acres, than any other food crop in the world.

As the demand for wheat increased so did the need to produce and process it quickly and efficiently. Harvesting wheat by hand is hard work and time consuming. So it was that the world welcomed a machine called a reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick along with his father and brothers in 1831 that he patented in 1834. It was basically a horse drawn wheat cutter that sent the wheat to the back of the machine where the stalks of cut wheat could easily be picked up and bundled by a worker following along behind. The McCormack reaper replaced cutting wheat with sickle or scythe.

At the time, the McCormick’s lived in Raphine, Virginia and sold only a few reapers. But as he began to market his reapers, McCormick noticed that most of his orders were coming from the Midwest. The McCormick’s decided to seek a better market for their reaper, so after his father died in 1847, Cyrus and his brothers moved to Chicago and set up a manufacturing plant there. It turned out to be a good move. By 1856 his company, Cyrus H. McCormick and Brothers, was selling over 4,000 reapers a year and American wheat production increased rapidly.

Over the years, the company went through two other name changes. In 1873 it became the McCormick Harvester Machine Company and 1902 the company, now run by Cyrus McCormick Junior, merged with the Deering Harvester Company and other small companies to become the International Harvester Corporation. In 1985 International Harvester was bought by Tenneco Corporation and merged with Case Tractor creating the Case IH brand.

The technology for harvesting wheat grew rapidly after the invention of the reaper. Today, most large-scale farmers use combine harvesters that cut the wheat, remove the outer husk, then transfer the clean grains to grain carts pulled by tractors. A large wheat combine can cut, thresh, and load several bushels of wheat per minute. From planting, to harvesting, to making the bread that winds up on grocery store shelves, the process is highly mechanized.

It is interesting that because of the demand for the reaper, the McCormick family had a great impact on the economic growth of the city of Chicago. Today Chicago’s McCormick Place is the largest convention center in North America and brings in millions of dollars each year to Chicago.

Like maize and other food crops, wheat has gone through a good deal of genetic modification beginning with the ancient farmers who cultivated it for seed retention. Today scientists from around the world have worked to determine the hybrid varieties of wheat that grow best in each particular environment.

For example, in the 1890s, Canadian botanist William Saunders founded the Dominion Experimental Farms near Ottawa, Canada to work on finding a wheat that grew well in North America. In one experiment he and his sons Charles and A.P. crossed wheat from India called hard red Calcutta that matured early with wheat from Poland called red fife that milled well but matured late and was subject to being frost bit. By the early 1900s they came up with a successful variety of bread wheat called Marquis that thrived from Saskatchewan to Texas. For decades Marquis was the most popular wheat in North America but lately has been largely replaced by more drought and pest resistant varieties.

Another scientist who had a great impact on the genetic modification of wheat was British botanist Arthur Earnest Watkins who lived from 1898 to 1967. In the 1930s Watkins collected wheat samples from various landraces or heritage growing sites from all over the world. His goal was to collect samples of heritage wheat that were grown “before the era of systematic plant breeding.” His collection called the Watkins Landrace Collection contains 827 wheat varieties from 32 countries and is housed in Norwich, England. Today it is used to develop wheat strains for growing in diverse climates and that are resistant to fungal diseases and insect infestation.

A problem with today’s strains of modern wheat is the large amount of fertilizers needed to maintain high productivity and adequate profit margins. Therefore, a goal of a great deal of wheat research today revolves around how to produce good crops without the use of large amounts of fertilizer, especially nitrogen and phosphorous. Unfortunately, wheat, like many other crops, depletes the soil of nutrients and requires the use of fertilizes to maintain good production. These fertilizers help wheat farmers produce higher yields per acre and earn a sustainable profit. They also enhance the amount of protein in the wheat kernels. But fertilizer runoff is getting to be a serious issue world-wide.

Most people are aware that fertilizers which are good for land crops can often cause problems if the fertilizer residue gets into bodies of water. Just like they do for corn, wheat and other land crops, nitrogen and phosphorus also stimulate the growth of aquatic plants as well, especially algae. A small amount of algae growth is good for fish that eat aquatic plants and phytoplankton, but too much can create algae blooms that choke out the water oxygen available to fish, shrimp and other marine life. The result is hypoxic zones where nearly all aquatic life suffocates and dies.

An area where this has become a problem is in the Gulf of Mexico. The major source for fresh water going into the Gulf is the Mississippi River. At 2,340 miles long from its beginning at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its vast delta in southern Louisiana, the river drains water from hundreds of tributaries in 32 states, many of which grow millions of tons of wheat, corn, soybeans, and other essential crops that are heavily fertilized. Every time rain falls on one of the fertilized fields in the crop growing regions, a certain amount of nitrogen, phosphorous and other plant enhancers make their way to the Mississippi River and head south toward the Gulf.

The result has been the creation of “dead zones” where the algae has become so thick that it uses up the oxygen that fish, shrimp, and other types of sea life need to live. The size of the dead zones varies with annual rainfall and drought and some years they can be over 8,000 square miles large. The problem is not only ecological, but economic as well. Everyone needs clean water both in our lakes and rivers and in the ocean and many fishermen earn a living catching aquatic life in the Gulf. It is sometimes not easy to balance the need for clean air and water with the need to make a profit.

The economic problem is multifaceted. Fish, shrimp, and shell fish from the Gulf of Mexico feed millions of people. In years that the algae bloom is large, fishermen, who depend on Gulf seafood for their livelihood need to go several miles farther out in the Gulf to find fish. This takes more time and more fuel to catch enough fish to run their operation profitably. Multiply this by hundreds of fishermen and it adds up to an increase of several million dollars wasted due to an environmental problem that needs to be rectified.

On the other hand, America’s midwestern farmers, like the Gulf fishermen, must make a profit from their work or they go out of business. Whereas, fertilizer is bad for the fishing business, it is good for farming. So, as with just about every human endeavor, a compromise is needed. But America requires a lot of both wheat and fish, so where do we strike the balance?

The problem is being worked on, especially in terms of coming up with fertilizers that don’t cause large algae blooms. One alternative being looked into is the possibility of replacing some of the phosphorous content in fertilizers with zinc sulfate which can enhance the development of carbohydrates, protein, and chlorophyll in the plant but does not cause excess algae blooms.

Wheat is an important crop in many nations around the world both for food and as a source of income. China produces the most wheat of any nation in the world. Yet, with its population of over 1.4 billion people, it still needs to import some wheat. Currently the largest wheat exporters in the world are Australia, Russia, United States, India, France, Germany, and Ukraine before the Russian invasion.

Wheat, maize, rice, and soybeans are the most traded food commodities in the world. And moving them from producer to consumer is essential for the health and prosperity of Earth’s eight billion people. It is absolutely essential that trade routes stay open and accessible to all nations.

It is unfortunate that the production and transportation of wheat and other food crops have become the victims of needless political bickering. There are numerous natural disasters that negatively affect world food production making farming a risky endeavor even when environmental conditions are favorable. We certainly do not need power-hungry politicians exacerbating the problem.

Ted McCormack