sensitivities, too.
“Diversity is essential to our food security, especially as the climate becomes unstable and as pests and weeds evolve to withstand the chemicals used to control them,” Jaradat said. Because commercial wheat dominates the market, it’s difficult for farmers to find heritage grains. Jaradat encourages farmers to save the seeds of their grains to share with the Heritage Grain Conservancy community seed bank. “We are continuing on-farm seed saving for evolutionary conservation of these wheat landraces,” Jaradat said. “This research has direct application to farmers. We don’t want to work in isolated labs. We need the cooperation of farmers to increase the genetic diversity for stable crops.”
“Seed saving is my most radical activity to date,” Bryce Stephens, of Jennings, Kansas, said over the grinding gears of machinery when he answered the phone. Working with the Heritage Grain Conservancy, Stephens plants the same varieties of wheat that the Mennonite women carried to Kansas in the hems of their skirts, Turkey red. It’s bronze, whiskered, and grows a majestic six feet tall across Stephens’s one thousand acres of the high plains the Cheyenne call toxto, “place of freedom.”
Stephens’s passion for this wheat pulsates through the receiver, which he was cradling against his shoulder the day I called, while installing a part under his tractor. A self-described two hundred and fifty pounds and six feet tall, this Vietnam vet turned antiwar protester is booming and loquacious. He was involved in the American Indian Movement’s armed conflict at Wounded Knee in 1973, and is quietly proud of the FBI’s prolonged interest in him.
A participant in a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto’s GMO patent-infringement claims moving through the courts in Washington, DC, Stephens is working to keep Monsanto from creating genetically modified wheat. So far, resistance among Canadian and US growers, plant scientists, and activists has been high enough to stave the development off. That is, until the spring of 2013, when, on an unnamed farm in Oregon, a farmer discovered an unrecognizable plant in his wheat field. The USDA labs confirmed this was a strain of wheat created by Monsanto in early 2000, tested in authorized fields. No one could say where this GMO wheat had come from. At stake is the $8 billion wheat export business; over sixty countries refuse to purchase GMO products.
If it is approved by our government and introduced in our fields, GMO wheat will enter rotations with corn, canola, and soybeans, which all require massive amounts of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. US government studies have documented that GMO crops require 30 percent more chemicals than non-GMO crops. While by weight, the world’s farmers produce more corn than wheat, most of that crop ends up feeding animals or in the gas tanks of cars as ethanol. As a food, wheat remains the biggest crop. The Plains states produce about 10 percent of the world’s wheat.
“Wheat kernels have been saved by farmers to plant and trade since the beginning of civilization. Why should a corporation own what farmers have been relying on and sharing for centuries?” Stephens asked. “I’m interested in maintaining the integrity of these seeds so that all organic farmers have access.” His daughter, Demetria, grabbed the phone and added, “It just seems natural to me that we would save our seed year after year. We’ve never felt the need to purchase seed.”
Turkey red wheat, planted by a handful of growers like Stephens, is in an “identity-preserved” program critical to the wheat-revival effort supported by researchers and conservationists like Jaradat. During a recent drought, Turkey red outperformed modern varieties thanks to its strong, deep root structure. Its tall height helps it compete with weeds, making fertilizers and herbicides unnecessary. In growing this grain where it has not been grown in living memory, farmers like Bryce Stephens and Father Mark Stang, of Long Prairie, Minnesota, are propagating landraces, the focus of Jaradat’s research, plants that develop and adapt to their environment naturally. In contrast to agribusiness-bred plants, landraces draw on a rich gene pool to become resilient despite the threats of drastic weather events, unstable climate, diseases, and pests.
Father Mark often weaves lessons from his fields into his Sunday sermons at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel Church. Easygoing and in his mid-forties, he is as comfortable in jeans and flannel as he is in his clerical collar. Father Mark grew up farming with his father on land that supported a family of nine kids. “My granddad planted it in the 1940s, but by the time I was a boy, my dad grew only the shrubby kind. But Turkey red goes without chemicals, and plants that can fend for themselves naturally fascinate me. Why not celebrate what God has provided us?”
Several years ago, Matt, then in his late twenties, moved to Durango, Colorado, seeking mountains, sun, crisp air, and fresh snow. After going to college on the East Coast, our oldest son had traveled through Europe and worked in Boston. But whenever he came back to Minneapolis, he’d proclaim his love for this place, biking along the Mississippi, canoeing in the Boundary Waters, and camping on Lake Superior’s shores. He’s found some of those pleasures, and more, in Colorado: he has planted a garden, has found love, likes his work teaching high school, and volunteers as a medic and firefighter.
The other day, Matt called, requesting a family recipe for gingersnaps. When my father was diagnosed with lung disease, he’d brighten and proclaim, “You are the best medicine,” every time I made the trip east to visit. In the afternoon hours when he napped, my mother and I, not wanting to leave the house, baked gingersnaps to keep busy, fill the house with the smells of ginger and spice, and temporarily reconnect with Minnesota.
In researching a magazine story about Christmas cookies, I interviewed Hilda Kringstad, a Norwegian immigrant living in Minneapolis, whose pepperkaker were always the first to sell out in the local church bake sale. “I always grind my own cardamom and nutmeg,” she said. “I learned to bake with my mother and grandmother, and though they spoke an older dialect which I didn’t understand, there was for me an air of mystery and excitement in this work that included me, and that I could immediately comprehend.”
The question of commercial viability is the biggest argument corporations use to discredit the work on heritage grains by plant researchers, medical doctors, and small, independent organic farmers. Corporate farmers are heavily invested in the equipment required to grow vast crops of short, productive commercial wheat. Is it unrealistic to expect them to change their practices overnight to plant more sustainable, healthier crops?
“Yes,” argues Dr. Don Wyse, a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota. “The responsibility of a land-grant institution is to address the key issues of our time. We should be working to solve the environmental crisis caused by conventional farming practices,” he told me when we met for coffee near the U of M’s research plots on the St. Paul campus.
“If we really expect conventional farmers to grow food that does not destroy the planet and that is good for us on a large scale, we have to provide them with a profitable alternative to these unhealthy and environmentally damaging crops,” he continued. “Farmers are running a business. They are concerned with profit and loss; they need to make a living.” The afternoon we met, Wyse was easy to spot—he entered the shop carrying a round, squat loaf of dark bread. It was warm and freshly baked with flour he’d ground from the wheat grown in the U’s trial plot. The slice he cut for me was dense, chewy, a bit dry, but very flavorful. Wyse’s long gray hair was pulled back from his receding forehead into a tight ponytail and his broad shoulders stretched his neoprene U of M training shirt. He spends his days in the test plots or hiking through the world’s most remote regions, seeking wild plants that might become sustainable crops.
“We must put our intellectual and financial resources into figuring ways to grow real food on a commercial scale,”
