Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60SEPTEMBER 2016 41 through a painstaking process to bring it back from the brink. He employs a practice called “system of crop intensification.” Rather than drilling seeds into the ground two to three inches apart in rows spaced at about seven inches, Ward increased the space between plants to 36 inches, and rows out to 12 inches. The system keeps plants from competing with each other for resources. “You’re giving each seed all the opportunity for the nutrients, water, root space and light,” Ward says. “Our yields can be 10-fold what they can be in a typical planting. For a seed growout, this is a no-brainer.” Ward started all the seed in green- houses and eventually transplanted about 1,200 plants into the field. Another 500 were kept inside in case a weather event damaged the field crops. A small reserve was set aside in case the whole system failed. In the first year, Ward and his team harvested 145 pounds. He’ll plant around 100 pounds this fall with the hopes of turning it into 2,000 pounds. After another planting, Ward believes he’ll have enough seed to put Purple Straw back onto the market for any interested growers. Ancient Grains There are economic reasons to pre- serve or resurrect a long-forgotten grain. The health attributes of ancient grains, as well as consumer desires for new-to-them foods, have driven sig- nificant sales of grains such as quinoa. Quinoa, however, isn’t a grain that was lost and then found, says Glenn Roberts, president and CEO of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation and founder of Anson Mills, a grower and miller of heirloom grains. Now one of the hottest “superfood” grains on the market, quinoa has long been a staple in South America and has been contin- ually grown in the American Southeast for generations. “‘What’s old is new again,’ could be quinoa’s tagline, joining other heritage grains such as farro and freekeh (both ancient forms of wheat) in the parade of superfoods tantalizing health-con- scious eaters,” writes the Poughkeepsie Journal’s Karen Miltner. Roberts says quinoa has been so suc- cessful in part because it fits well into this consumer trend for something new and exotic, what USA Today refers to as the “quinoa craze.” “People are eating quinoa because someone told them it was good for them, and it’s tasty, and the story is great,” says Roberts, whose company is not growing or selling Purple Straw. He adds that Purple Straw wheat was lost and has been found, and that’s an even better story. Add to that the fact that it’s a nutritious grain, and the appeal should be widespread. “You’re kind of eating in a time machine. You’re nourishing yourself in another era,” Roberts says. “The demand for something like this — if the story really has integrity, that had a presence in the colonial era to the modern times — is vertical, especially at the beginning.” Shields believes the story is indeed there for Purple Straw wheat. It stood the test of time, succumbing not to pests, disease or the climate, but to a need for higher yield. It was prominent until the 1970s because it tasted good, and that was a sign of good nutrition to many people who worked for centuries to improve their foods through breeding and selection processes. “Landraces were shaped over long periods of time, and their antiquity goes back in some cases thousands of years,” Shields says. “These grains were bred for flavour, because flavour was — in preliterate societies — the signature of nutrition. “It was the assurance you were get- ting what you needed to survive. You are getting the wisdom of a popula- tion that survived and grew wheat for a millennium or hundreds of years.” The Science of it All Purple Straw has the romantic story of a food lost and found, and could be a crop that offers economic oppor- tunity for farmers. It also has, locked within itself, a host of genes that one won’t find within many of the modern hybrids that dominate wheat fields around the world. Lee Hickey, a research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Alliance for Agriculture & Food Innovation, tracks down landrace grains to find the genes that have been left behind. Standard breeding processes focus narrowly on specific traits, such as yield, and the genes that confer those traits are selected for. Others are lost. “There’s a lot of inbreeding, and if you’re not selecting for every single trait that might be important in the future, you might be losing genetic diversity for those traits,” Hickey says. Hickey is working with 300 wheat vari- eties from Russia that had been pre- served in seed banks and comparing them with modern hybrids. He is seeing that the modern varieties have many genes in common, whereas the landraces have a much larger array of genes and novel alleles. “I’m interested in mining these old his- torical varieties for more useful genes to plug into modern varieties to make them stronger or more drought toler- ant,” Hickey says. “They’re almost like a treasure chest of genetic diversity, essentially because they didn’t go through this intense selection breeding process we’ve gone through over the last 60 to 80 years.” Hickey says Purple Straw would be an interesting candidate because, like the others he studies, it has stood the test of time, and its genetics certainly played a role in that. “We face a great challenge in feeding a growing population of nine billion to 10 billion by 2050,” Hickey says. “We need more genetic diversity to tackle these problems, and these varieties are a great place to start.” Brian Wallheimer