 Weed has been the primary staple for much of Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia for millennia. It was one of the earliest domesticated staple crops. But is it something we should rely on if we need to grow our own food? Let's talk about growing our own wheat on a subsistence scale. This is the Low Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 66 on February 24th, 2023, coming to you out of the Low Tech recording booth. Thanks for joining us today. We're going into the history and applicability of growing wheat at home. And I do need to apologize at the outset here, as you can probably hear. I'm a little under the weather as far as my throat is concerned. And so I do apologize for the slightly off sound of my voice today. Also, please don't forget to follow us on Twitter. 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If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website lowtechinstitute.org. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about homescale grain production, something that about 150 years ago, 90% of Americans would know so much more about. Today, we're just going to be able to scratch the surface to learn a little bit about the history of growing wheat, rye, barley, oats and other grains at home. And by the end of the episode, you should have a good idea of homescale grain production is something you want to try. I'll mention also a few resources to help get you started. And this is part of a talk I gave at the Garden Expo last weekend, just north of us in Madison, and that talk was filmed by Wisconsin Public Television. You can actually see the whole talk on their YouTube page. Just look for a university place under Wisconsin Public Television. You can find it or tune in sometime this summer when it will be actually on PBS Wisconsin broadcast across the state. So I'll put out things on our blog when that's coming along. And you can see the full version of this talk then. But let's get back right into grain. So before I ran the Low Technology Institute, I was a college professor with a PhD in archaeology. So when I talk about the history of grain, I'm going all the way back to the beginning. And to start at the beginning, this means the domestication of grains about 10,000 years ago. And that number changes over time as new discoveries are made. But let's say 10,000 years ago, just to be round. And we're in the Middle East and it's important to understand a little bit about where our modern grain comes from. Not only is it useful information, but it kind of gives you a sense of history when you engage in an activity that people have been doing for 10,000 years in a chain that has been unbroken until the last few decades. Think about that. In my family, for example, on my father's side, they came from Sweden 100 years ago. They and their ancestors had been growing wheat and rye for probably 500 years. My grandfather was the first person in our family history not to grow and harvest much of his own food. And I do have hours and hours of lectures on domestication, but I'm going to kind of condense that and hit the highlights today. So let's say once upon a time, 10,000 years ago, everybody on this planet was a hunter-gatherer. They moved across the landscape from camp to camp. And it wasn't that they were just, you know, going from one part of the globe to another part of the globe, they were probably going in what's called a seasonal rotation. So they had a winter camp by some hunting grounds, a spring camp by some spring resources, some plants coming up, some summer camp, and maybe a fall camp by say a salmon run or some other resource, right? So they would go from place to place each part of the year. And in the Middle East, prairies and grasslands containing the wild ancestors of wheat, rye, oats, barley, spelt and others were originally used by people who hunted game and gathered their food. They probably started gathering seeds to bulk up stews, among other things that they may have done with them. We don't really know, but they may have even been fermenting grains and making alcohol. And actually one theory of domestication says that we became farmers so we could brew beer. And as a former archaeologist, I don't have to know for a fact, but I kind of am pretty sure that this idea was come up with over beers at the pub, at some conference, right? So beer was probably involved with that idea, but it's not a bad one, brewing beer seems to be as old as making bread. So as old as domestication itself, we find evidence of fermented wine and grains. So as people were doing this seasonal sedentism and moving from place to place, they may have begun to influence the plants around them and they would have pushed plants to be more desirable. They would have wanted larger seed heads and seed heads with a less brittle rachis. And a rachis is just the piece of stem that connects seed itself to the stem, right? It's a little piece of vegetable matter. And the stronger that is, the more the seed head stays together, makes it easier to harvest, right? And so over generations likely, people would have started kind of getting rid of the plants that weren't as good and encouraging the growth of the ones they liked. And it wasn't like they were thinking in their minds, oh, let's domesticate these things. Let's make them really push their physiological makeup to be something we want. It was just expeditious at the time. Oh, these are the better plants. Let's get these and let's burn off the others, for example. Eventually, people began to actively care and propagate the plants to depend on more and more. And they're doing the seasonal sedentism. So they're pushing maybe these wheats and grasses in the summer or fall. And then let's say one year grandpa breaks his leg or grandma breaks her leg and they say, oh, maybe we should stay at this camp a little longer, right? And so maybe people began to stay at these camps longer to care for sick or old or young family members and maybe they began to do less of this seasonal sedentism. And over time, this would have evolved into full sedentary societies where people lived in one place for most of their lives. That didn't mean they didn't go out for trips to go hunting or to gather resources from far away, but that was an exception rather than their daily life. Now, growing grains wasn't necessarily the best thing for humans. And actually, when I used to teach archaeology classes, we would sometimes have class debates. And one of those debates that I would put forward for my students was, was domestication of grains a net positive or a net negative for our society or for humans in general? And we as habitual grain eaters in our large-scale complex sedentary society would say, oh, of course, it's only beneficial to eat grains, but there are a lot of physiological reasons why grains are not actually great for us. A lot of our dietary and skeletal troubles stem from, at least pre-industrally, depending on such a few number of crops. And that means we're getting a much smaller subset of vitamins and minerals and nutrition for our bodies. And so it's only in the last half century that modern humans have grown as tall as hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers had much better health than early agriculturalists all the way up until 150 years ago because they ate a wider variety of foods. So if you think about it, hunter-gatherers, they're moving across the landscape. They're eating something different each day, eating seasonally, eating lots of vegetables, fruits, tubers, meat, and things like that. Whereas if you think about early hunter-gatherers, they're eating 2 thirds to 3 quarters of their calories are coming from these domesticated grains. And that's a really calorie-dense food, but it's not a very nutrient-dense food. So there's a lot more to go into on this, but suffice it to say, a lot more of these early sedentary agriculturalists who were depending on grain had much smaller skeletal, no, skeletons than the hunter-gatherers who were much larger and more robust and healthier. So this package of agricultural plants, tools, and know-how spread out across the ancient world, going to Asia, Africa, and Europe from the Middle East. Of course, in the New World, corn was on a similar trajectory a few thousand years after wheat, rye, and these other crops, and in Farther East Asia, rice was the predominant grain, but wheat did make inroads and was also a really important pre-industrial grain even if it's secondary to rice. By the pre-industrial era, so by the mid-1800s, well, well before the 1800s, but I'm gonna talk next about the 1800s, wheat had become and had been the primary source of calories for much of the world's population for thousands of years. So at the time of the French Revolution, which I wanna talk about now, the average French person ate about two pounds of bread per day. So I said before that two thirds to three quarters of one's caloric intake would have come from wheat. Yeah, two pounds of bread a day per person. And you have to remember that throughout history, food was a much more significant line item in the family budget. According to the USDA, we currently spend just over 10% of our household income on food. In the pre-industrial world, that was more like one third to a half the budget. And so if you think about it, growing your own food now seems kind of silly because food for us right now is so cheap. So I spend a lot of time growing food, but I'm only kind of recouping if I grew all of our own food like the year I did that, I would have only saved 10% of our budget, right? But pre-industrially, growing all my own food would have constituted about half of our expenses for the year. That makes a lot more economic sense. And so later in the podcast, I'll talk about the future and as costs of food will invariably go up as we have less access to fossil fuels, growing food at home might make more budgetary sense more than today, more than growing wheat today. But we'll talk about that in a minute. So let's get back to the French. At the time when the French were eating two pounds of bread a day, they had wild inflation in a world that had not seen much inflation in recent memory and prices rose about 65%. On top of that, they had a terrible wheat harvest for a couple of years and then a couple of nasty winters. This caught massive wheat shortages. There's a joke I like to tell. So you know how a group of crows is called a murder? Well, a group of starving peasants is called a mob and they often carry pitchforks. They're optional of course, but encouraged. So, and we've all heard the supposed phrase that Marie Antoinette said, you know, let them eat cake. Well, the first half of that sentence was, they don't have bread, fine, let them eat cake, right? And this was supposed to show the unfeeling or misunderstanding of the aristocracy versus the actual reality on the ground. Oh, they don't have bread? Well, they must have cake available so they can just eat that, right? She probably never said that but it tells you how important bread was at the time and how out of touch the leadership was. So we all know what happened with the French Revolution. Well, historians like to stress, you know, the overthrowing of the monarchy and the bringing in of a republic which is from the Latin res publica, a thing of the public and the French are known for their motto, liberty, equality, fraternity. A lot of the French Revolution could well be catalyzed by the lack of wheat. And so this kind of brings us to the question today, why would you want to grow grains? And to answer this question, we have to talk a little bit about the Green Revolution of the 1960s. And now here in Wisconsin, a lot of people know about this because the UW has a really strong agricultural tradition but basically in the 1960s, the Green Revolution was the introduction of, I guess you'd say, industrialized crops. Wheat was primary among them. And what happened was a man named Norman Borlaug interbred a couple different types of wheat, one of which was Japanese dwarf wheat. And then he bred that with some other wheat varieties to get a really highly productive wheat variety that has a huge seed head on top of a very short stock. And that short stock is really important because a really heavy wheat head might lodge or bend the stock all the way down to the ground in a heavy storm and you basically lose that crop. So this stubby short wheat with this huge outsized grain head produced more pounds of wheat per acre. And so they'll often cite that as having saved many people across the world from starvation. What they don't mention is that part of the Green Revolution requires heavy application of fertilizer, pesticides, and other things. And the modern continuation of that is roundup ready plants. And so basically Norman Borlaug said, if you use this type of plant and industrial production, you can create so much more wheat on the same acreage. Never mind that that wheat isn't as nutritionally diverse and good as traditional wheat, it is more calories. But again, that requires a huge amount of fertilizer input. So it's really hard to say how much of that large production is due to the wheat and the industrial production and growth, or is it just because they're putting tons of fertilizer on it? So right now wheat is very cheap because of this Green Revolution. But people might say, well, it's not worth me growing wheat at home, it's so cheap. And that's true today. And we'll talk about the future later in the podcast. So growing wheat today at home does not make a huge profit incentive. You're not gonna save yourself a lot of money, but in the future it might be really important. And we'll talk about other reasons now. So one reason is just that it's plain fun. It's really nice to be outside, working in the field, planting, watching it grow, harvesting, processing, especially if you're only doing a reasonable amount. It's really enjoyable and kind of fun. It's good to involve kids with this. Like any enjoyable task, as the scale increases and you depend on it more and more for your home provisioning or income, it does rob it of some of its enjoyment. And that's why we're talking about small scale or home scale grain production today. Another reason has to do with the Green Revolution. So it created kind of a monocrop monster. I live out in the country and if you've ever driven anywhere across this country of ours, you've seen the unending fields of corn, soybeans into a lesser extent wheat. And on the one hand, proponents, like I said before, will argue that the reason we can have such a large population on this planet and feed them all, and I don't mean to diminish people who are food insecure, that's a distribution problem, not a production problem. Opponents will argue that first of all, we have no counterfactual. We might well be able to feed people without industrial crops. We just don't have that model because it doesn't fit well into modern profit driven industrial agriculture. Monocrops though are also biologically dangerous. A single pathogen could spread across much of the United States wiping out our corn one year by having little genetic diversity in these industrial crops and high crowding. And what I mean by that is all the corn plants are right next to each other, all the wheat plants are right next to each other. And there are not a lot of, you know, like when there's a wildfire and they'll like burn or chop down a line of trees to make a fire break. Well, a pathogen spreads through corn like wildfire. And if there's fields touching fields, that pathogen will spread really easily. So there's high communication, high crowding. So the lack of genetic diversity and that tight packing of corn and other monocrops invites disaster. Grains, and I'm largely talking about wheat here have been selected for their suitability for industrial production, as I mentioned. 150 years ago, we had thousands of varieties of wheat across the world. This means we had a really large bell curve in terms of genetic diversity. With heavy selection and decreasing varieties, we open ourselves up to loss of crops on a large scale. We're putting all of our eggs in one genetic basket. And by growing small scale grains at home, you can help maintain and increase the genetic diversity of wheat. If you're interested in learning more about the loss of this diversity in the early 1900s, check out where our food come from by Naban. This is a really great kind of swashbuckling tale of early industrial plant diversity researchers. One from the Soviet Union who went across the world trying to gather in all kinds of seeds, not just wheat, but there was quite a lot of wheat involved. And his goal was to bring back to the Soviet Union as a seed bank, a breeding program to breed up more efficient types of wheat. Unfortunately, he was on the wrong side of Lysenko who was probably the most famous Soviet plant geneticist who came up with really terrible genetic arguments about the breeding practices of wheat that used social theory instead of biological theory, which is neither here nor there. He was essentially purge and fell out of favor, but his seeds were saved. And there's this amazing story through World War II in St. Petersburg. They had a building full of seeds and potatoes and all these things that were the seed stock for the post-war era, but they had to not eat them at a time when people were eating like rats in St. Petersburg. And they had to get a whole bunch of cats into the building to keep the rats away from the seed crops. They had to grow out the potatoes each year and keep away people who were trying to break in to get food to eat. It's this really crazy story, really worth a read. Again, that is where our food comes from by Navan. And if you wanted to take an active part, you could check out Ellie Rogosa's book, Restoring Heritage Grains, and her website, growseed.org, where you can buy heritage grains to grow out yourself. I'm part of a cooperative growing program with Ellie Rogosa's lab, where she sends out a pound of a type of wheat. I grow it out, I send her back two pounds, and then I can keep the rest of the wheat for myself. I'm growing Bananka, which is a Ukrainian wheat. And so by preserving all these different types of wheat, we have different suites of features like drought tolerance, and other things that might be important as the climate change is where you need that diversity to be able to adapt to a different world. And there are other obvious reasons to grow your own grain, like baking a loaf of bread that you've made from scratch. Right now downstairs, I have rye bread rising. Then I'm gonna have to take a pause here from the podcast and go need, but that is rye that I grew myself in. It's really fun to bake that up and feed it to my family. Brewing beer is something that's been done, like I said, for 10,000 years, and if you really wanna do homebrew, maybe you should grow some of the grain in your own backyard. And then there's one more less obvious reason, and that's for the future. Not only is it important to maintain genetic diversity, but we also have to be thinking about a future where we use less fossil fuels. If we are used to a cheap food model where high quantities are created for very little costs because we have the use of diesel to run tractors, what's gonna happen in two or three decades when that's not really possible? Preserving the knowledge of how to grow grains at home may become a vital skill that we need to maintain. But after this episode, you might be thinking that growing grain is too much work on a subsistence scale, and on one hand, I definitely agree with you. I have another podcast out last year about talking about why potatoes are probably a better staple crop, especially if you're learning to grow your own food. It takes a lot less work. You can grow, let's say, two thirds of your caloric needs for the year in only 40 hours of labor. That's nothing really in the scheme of things. That's why potatoes were such a useful crop when they came about in South America and then also when they spread to Europe and elsewhere. You can see more about the potato growing on our YouTube page, and you can see more about growing wheat on our YouTube page. If you're convinced and you wanna grow wheat already, go to our YouTube page. I just go to YouTube and search for Low Technology Institute or Low Tech Institute, and you can find all of our videos on both growing potatoes and growing wheat. I'm doing a series right now on growing wheat. I currently have the planting wheat out, and that's important because it's spring, and you could plant spring wheat, oats, barley, and other spring crops. Whereas if you wanna grow winter wheat, then you'll wanna plant that in the fall. But that's a story for another day. Okay, so what would the future of wheat look like? Right now, like I said, industrial wheat kind of rules the roost. It's real cheap. You can get about 80 bushels and a bushel weighs about 60 pounds of wheat from an acre. And so when you grow it yourself though, you're only gonna get about 25 bushels per acre. So that's a third. And this is why industrial wheat is so hard to compete with. But remember that industrial wheat is getting a lot of fertilizer put into it. I don't know what my heritage wheat would do if I fertilized at a level that the industrial wheat guys do. So it's really not a really fair argument. If I grew some industrial wheat without fertilizing it, I wonder how much that would yield. Maybe that's something I'll try out next season, just as a comparison. But what I mean to say is in the future, as we have no access to diesel, how are we gonna plant? How are we gonna plow? How are we gonna harvest? And the only way to really do this, at least right now, is to go back to animal traction. And I've done growing wheat without really tilling the field first and I gotta tell you the weeds are just better at growing than the wheat, right? Wheat and other domesticated crops are kind of like race cars. They go real fast. They do real well in the right conditions. But if you take a Formula One car or something and you put it on a regular street, it's gonna scrape the bottom. It's gonna have breakdowns and troubles that my Honda Fit will just scoot around no problem. And so weeds are kind of like more of a utility vehicle. They can thrive in just about any conditions. Whereas wheat, they need a little more specialization. And so there's a huge learning curve for wheat in terms of the harvest and planting of it. It's just so much more of a complicated crop. Yeah, it is really productive and the seeds are able to be stored practically indefinitely under the right conditions. But the onboarding, the learning curve is just so much higher and steeper than, say, four potatoes. And so I don't know what the future of wheat would hold. If I were the benevolent dictator of the future, it might be something that I would encourage communities to get into or at least a couple of people in different communities to get into so that there would be somebody in the neighborhood who would know how to grow this crop because it is a useful under the right conditions. It can be really productive. And it has been supporting large scale complex, densely populated societies for 10,000 years. And there's a reason for that. The problem is it's just there's so many steps in the process that unless you've practiced that ahead of time, it's really hard to just pick it up. Whereas potatoes, you literally can pick them up off the ground. Wheat is so much more complicated. And so it's really important. And that's why we grow wheat. It's not, we're not growing wheat for saving ourselves money. We grow wheat because it's important to preserve and teach that skill set. So this summer, just like every summer in July, we will probably have another wheat and rye harvesting class where people can come over and learn how to use a sickle and a scythe to harvest wheat, to bind it, to let it dry out in the field, what to look for and then how to process it, which means threshing to knock the grains off the head, winnowing to blow the chaff away from the seeds and then grinding how to turn it into useful flour. Because all of those things have learning curves associated with them and it's not as easy as you think. And so for us, it's really important to maintain this continuity of knowledge. And then it's kind of what we're all about here at the Low Technology Institute. So wheat is kind of a perfect encapsulation of something that isn't today economically viable, but is a really important skill to maintain for a less certain future. So that's it for this week. The Low Tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me, Scott Johnson, and co-produced edited by Hina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Low Tech recording room. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thank you to our forester and land steward level members, Sam Braun, Marilyn Skirpon, and the Hambuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more about the Low Technology Institute, membership, and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly at Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our music today was Fireplace off the album Winter Lo-Fi by Holisna. That song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share like license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks so much and take care.