by Dan Barber
Wheat was (and still is) the last of the big grains to be bred almost entirely through the land-grant institutions, without the influence of corporate money. Why? Because seed companies sell commercial hybrids, which provide both higher-yielding and more uniform plants, and force farmers to buy new seed every year. Since wheat is self-pollinating, saving seed for the next generation is cheap, easy, and free from private enterprise.
“Wheat is the last frontier,” Steve told me. More than half of all wheat growers still save their seed, he said, “and if they’re not saving seed, a land grant is saving or improving seed for them. That’s an astronomical number from any modern agricultural context.”
Monsanto’s vision for a Roundup-resistant wheat would likely increase harvests and, at least initially, the farmers’ income. But because the seeds would be patented, farmers would no longer be permitted to save them, and, having lost that tradition, they would likely never return to it.
“The only way to control wheat is to offer something farmers can’t produce themselves,” Steve told me. “You Roundup Ready it and all of a sudden you’ve cornered the market on the big enchilada. I mean, can you blame them for wanting to do this? If you’re a shareholder at the annual board meeting and you hear the equivalent of ‘Next year our company will begin to corner the world’s wheat market,’ you’d be saying, ‘Right on, way to go, sounds great.’”
The longer Steve sat across from the Monsanto executives without showing enthusiasm for their proposal, the more confused they became. Were the Roundup-resistant wheat to succeed, Steve would profit enormously in the form of royalties for his work. Steve’s department chair would win, too, since the university receives a share of the royalty payments, helping to offset the steep reductions in government funding. Which is why Monsanto felt so confident in arranging the meeting. Each breeding program they visited before Steve, and all the ones they visited after, entered into a partnership of some kind to profit from the research. Although at the time of writing this it is not yet commercially approved, genetically engineered wheat will likely flood the market—and dominate it—in the next decade.
The meeting descended into awkward silence. “They were basically waiting for me to jump up and down and thank them for the opportunity. And the head of my department, he just about wanted to kill me. But what I said is that for ten thousand years farmers have been improving wheat, saving these improvements and planting them again the following year. The right to replant what you harvest is among the oldest rights of humankind. Biotechnology removes that right. How can a land-grant university actively dismantle a ten-thousand-year-old tradition? The answer is: pretty easily. I didn’t want to be complicit in that. So I said no, and I walked out. That started eleven years of unpleasantness.”
After his meeting with the Monsanto executives, Steve became known as something of a renegade. He talked openly about his opposition to genetically modified crops, and large-scale farmers increasingly questioned his work. Convinced that genetically modified wheat would be accepted soon and that other university breeding programs were ready to release seed, they feared that Washington state wheat would be left behind.
Steve’s colleagues, for their part, became more spirited in their opposition to his leadership. “Finally one day I went to my department head and I said, ‘Look, I can fight this for another twenty years, or I can move on and make way for someone else to do this job.’ He agreed. And that was that.”
Steve decided to leave the department. Even though his relationship with WSU had become fraught, he landed another job with the university, as director of the Mount Vernon Research and Extension Center, a six-hour drive to the west. Given that he had chaired the famed wheat-breeding program on the main campus, the move was a little like leaving a vice president position at General Motors in Detroit to run one of the branch offices in Kalamazoo.
The position did not call for an expertise in wheat breeding. In fact, the research center had never in its history been involved with wheat breeding. “I was hired to direct the center. I was done with wheat. I was there to serve the needs of farmers with a very rich tradition of growing specialty fruits and vegetables.”
But on the drive to his final interview for the position, Steve noticed a wheat field and pulled off the freeway. His wife, Hannelore, took photos. A few hundred yards down the road, they saw another wheat field. And then another. “I thought, Holy shit. There’s wheat all over this place. Why don’t we know about any of this?”
It turned out that the Skagit Valley wheat was all soft wheat bound for places like Korea and Singapore, to be made into noodles and soft breads. The farmers of Skagit were using wheat rotations in place of buying expensive fertilizers.
“What these farmers recognized,” Steve said, “and I stress they recognized it not because they’re modern-day hippie-dippies but because they’re dead set on improving fertility, is that small-scale wheat harvests are both very good for the soil and surprisingly profitable.”
Except that, before Steve came along, there wasn’t that much profit. Exporting wheat on the cheap is more economical than purchasing fertilizer—but just barely. “When I grow wheat,” one farmer confessed to Steve, “I just want to lose less money.”
Steve started asking himself a lot of what-ifs. What if the wheat remained local? What if, instead of growing anonymous wheat in Skagit, wheat could be bred for good yield and exceptional flavor? What if there were a local market to support these distinctive varieties? Might it be possible to improve both the return for the farmer and the quality of the flour for the bakers? These questions had never been asked, because the operating assumption was simplistic: wheat was wheat, in the same way that that fresh fish had been considered indistinguishable before chefs like Gilbert Le Coze and Jean-Louis Palladin came along and created a market for small fishermen.
Steve learned that, in fact, there was a strong history of wheat in the region. From 1850 to 1950, he discovered, there were more than 143 varieties of wheat grown in Washington. And Whidbey Island, just west of the Skagit Valley, had set the world record with one wheat crop of nearly 120 bushels an acre.
“People say wheat is ‘out of place’ around here,” he said. “I always get a kick out of that. A place like Kansas is considered real wheat country. But that’s not correct. It’s not that Kansas is the best place to grow wheat—it’s that wheat is the only thing that will grow in Kansas.”
Steve brought up his idea of breeding specialty Skagit wheat with the farmers and found them surprisingly open-minded. They had nothing to lose, after all, and there was a local tradition of innovation.
“We had a breakfast with all the farmers real soon after I was hired,” Steve said. “A big, scary-looking farmer guy stands up and asks to say just one thing. I was like, Here we go, I’m going to get it about not embracing Monsanto or something. The guy starts pointing his finger even before they can get the mic in his face, and he says: ‘No matter what you do, whatever research you do, we expect your work to remain in the public interest. We don’t want you commercializing anything.’ All the other farmers in the room nodded. I started to laugh, you know? It was crazy. I’d been fighting for that very thing for twenty years, and I’d been losing the fight. Here I was, ordered to do it—the demand was that I do the right thing. I mean, I wanted to just throw my arms around the guy and hug him.”
BEYOND HEIRLOOMS
On our way to the greenhouse to see the Aragon 03 cross, Steve took me through the eight-acre research field just steps from his office. Agriculturally, it was the most arresting display of diversity I’d ever seen. The field was divided into an orderly grid of four-by-twelve-foot rows, but the overall effect was dazzling in its variation. Each row held a unique kind of wheat, creating a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes. Even Glenn’s fields looked bland by comparison.
Steve stopped and turned to me. “Whenever I’m out here, I’m standing in history,” he sai
d, sounding just like Klaas on my first visit to his farm. Since we were, technically, standing in the middle of a field trial comprised of largely untested varieties, I asked him what he meant. “All these varieties have genes that can be traced to antiquity. So I start to think about the farmer that saved them, or the community that preserved them. Stand in a tomato field and it’s like, ‘Okay, nice red fruit’ or whatever. But you’re really not going to capture any depth.”
I asked how many potential varieties he was tracking; there looked to be a couple thousand. “It’s more like forty thousand,” Steve said.
“You keep track of forty thousand different varieties?” I asked.
“Technically speaking, these are experimental lines, not varieties—not yet anyway,” he said. “But the math is just beautiful with this stuff.” The genetic variation in the field, and the potential for every plant in front of me to be bred again for even greater variety, was limitless, a theme park for extreme diversity.
Steve’s mastery of it all is less conspicuous than the sheer delight he takes in playing the role of a head coach overseeing his young recruits. “Will you look at that right there?” he said, cradling a not-yet-mature seed head from a line he’d been working on for years. Steve is reflexively physical, accentuating his pronouncements with jabs, taps, and touches. I got the sense he viewed the wheats’ successes and shortcomings as his own. “Look how pretty that one is—isn’t that gorgeous? It’s called Red Chief. Not great-quality wheat. But when it’s like that we just keep it, ’cause it’s so pretty. I mean, that’s gorgeous—that yellowish red, that’s just damn pretty.”
Breeders write a kind of playbook for seeds. Different breeders have different playbooks. Steve’s approach is mainly to create new varieties by marrying desired traits from various genetic lines. He is not controlling the seed’s future as much as he is pushing it in a desired direction. And he can predict, with amazing accuracy, what the next generation will look like. Glenn’s strategy, by comparison, is more freewheeling. He’s not interested in crossbreeding varieties; if he’s pushing anything, it’s to let nature run its course and determine where it wants to go. “Sports” and outcrosses are celebrated. You could say Norman Borlaug followed an entirely different playbook, one rooted in an extreme command and control—to improve yield and efficiency at any cost.
So who has the most winning strategy? “Glenn’s work sounds great,” Steve told me when I pushed him to weigh in on the subject. “I love old ways and old things, but it is a good idea to realize that not all old varieties are good, and that ancient wheat landraces were, and are, highly adapted to their original environments. We use them and recommend them to some degree, but they are agronomically risky. Glenn is adapting them to his environment, but there aren’t many Glenn Robertses in the world.”
It was a point I’d never considered: when chefs advocate for older varieties, the assumption is that we’re advocating for the farmer, too. But Steve was saying Not so. Unless the farmer takes the time to adapt the variety to his own environment, there’s often a substantial risk in the form of low yields or poor disease resistance.
When I asked Steve if he saw his own strategy as more in line with Glenn than with Norman Borlaug, he hesitated. “I think I’m broader, actually,” he said. The landraces Glenn works with don’t make yield a priority, he explained. “I don’t apologize for breeding varieties that have good yield, in the same way that I don’t apologize for looking back at older genes. Disease resistance, flavor, functionality—we look at all of it. The idea that you can’t have one without sacrificing another is preposterous.”
“Don’t lower yields mean better flavor?” I asked.
“I know,” Steve said. “Chefs are pretty convinced of that.”
“It’s true of heirloom tomatoes,” I said.
“With wheat, yield and flavor are not in inverse proportion. There’s plenty of room for flavor.” The trade-off between yield and flavor, he explained, happens mainly in crops that, in their domesticated form, contain a lot of water. “A true wild tomato is smaller than a cherry,” he said, offering a pinch of his index finger. Wild foods tend to be more flavorful because they’re not “washed out by water.”
Steve pointed to a section of nice-looking wheat, an old French variety that he used as part of a cross. “That yielded 170 bushels of gorgeous, really flavorful, high-protein wheat last year,” he said. “That’s five tons per acre. Spectacular, right?” In Kansas, he pointed out, the average yield is 1.5 tons per acre.
“When it comes to wheat, the beauty is that you can have your cake and eat it, too,” he said. “And there isn’t one flavor gene—flavor is about an interaction and combination of genes. Thank God for that, right? Otherwise we’d be selecting for just one gene, which would probably spell disaster at some point.”
I asked Steve if nutrition in wheat worked the same way, and he said it did. However, his research has found that older varieties contained more micronutrients than newer breeds that have come along since green-revolution dwarfs were introduced. The older wheats, he discovered, had as much as 50 percent more calcium, iron, and zinc. “You don’t eat wheat by the acre; you eat it by the slice, and you’d have to eat a whole loaf of bread made from modern varieties of wheat to get the equivalent nutrition in just half a loaf made from the older varieties,” Steve said.
He stopped to talk with one of his graduate students about a new trial. I kept walking. Every few feet revealed wildly different clusters of wheat plants—some dark and nearly mature, and others lightly colored, faintly white, even, with just a hint of a seed head developing. Some were so tall they towered over me like a canopy. The last time I had seen wheat this tall, I was with Glenn, in his test field at Clemson University.
Since Steve was occupied with his student, I phoned Glenn on a whim and described the scene. He was in perfect form. “Hell, yeah, wheat is tall. But you’re focused on the wrong end up,” he said. “It’s the root system that really blows the mind.”
I asked Glenn what he thought about wheat that had been crossbred in a laboratory, rather than in a landrace system like his. “How do I feel about it? I feel great about it. I’d say any way we can bring back nutrition and flavor back into wheat—which is the same damn thing, as every chef knows—any way we can do it, by landraces like I do or by inventing new varieties in a laboratory, like the ones you’re looking at, I’m all for it. Because wheat is fundamental. It’s everywhere in our culture. And if it’s not correct, the culture starts crashing down.”
He paused for a moment. “People always ask me, Hey, Glenn, how are you going to feed the world with a landrace, mixed-agriculture system? I tell them I have no idea how to feed the world. No clue. But what you’re standing in over there in Skagit is perhaps one answer to our future.”
When Steve returned to continue our walk, I told him I was starting to rethink my obsession with the wheats of antiquity as the only way to ensure better flavor. In a field of forty thousand exciting new possibilities, how could I not?
“Heirlooms are fine,” he said. “We don’t have to be antagonistic towards them, but we can move beyond them. If you look at an heirloom anything, it’s stopped, genetically; someone took a moment in time and froze it. But that’s not how they were developed in the first place—whether it’s a tomato or a grain or an apple. They were constantly improved.” Steve said he tries to continue that improvement by crossing landrace and heirloom wheats with modern, regional varieties.
“Like the Aragon 03,” I said.
“Right. The question was: Can we improve the flavor of Aragon 03? Can we improve disease resistance for the farmer? Can we improve the nutritional value by, say, upping the iron and zinc? We looked at it, and we doubled it for free just by selecting for it.”
“For free?” I asked.
“‘For free’ means it doesn’t affect the yield,” Steve explained. “And you don’t have to go and
pull it out of a jellyfish and put it into wheat. There’s a tremendous amount of variation in the wheat already; some lines have more nutrition, others have less. It’s all about capturing the characteristics you want. This is really no different than what has been practiced for ten thousand years in wheat, adapting lines to your own environment. It’s what everyone did.”
Steve said this kind of work is critical to the renaissance in local grain. “One hundred years ago, Maine had about thirty thousand acres of wheat, all milled and consumed locally. Today there’s basically zero wheat grown in Maine. Zero wheat grown in Vermont, zero wheat grown in New Hampshire. And yet there are suddenly farmers starting to plant small amounts of wheat as part of their rotations—likely because a local market of passionate chefs and bakers are interested in flavorful whole grains.”
The problem, he said, is that these farmers are often, like Klaas, planting very old varieties with low yield—the problem with heirloom anything—or they’re planting conventional varieties with no flavor. “Without a breeder to support the continual betterment of the plant, an alternative to conventional wheat will never establish itself.”
When I later told Klaas what Steve had said, expecting an elegant counterargument, he instead heartily agreed. “That’s just it,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of choices out there. You can’t just call up a seed company and buy old seed—heirloom, landrace, or whatever. Not if you want to plant two hundred acres. Not even if you want to plant fifty acres.”
Klaas explained that, while his and Mary-Howell’s seed business has helped in some ways to fill that niche, they didn’t have the time or the resources for experimental breeding. I asked him if the answer was to have a Steve Jones–like breeder in his corner of New York state.
“What you need,” he said, “is a Steve Jones in every corner of every state.” Neither of us acknowledged the irony that, when Congress created the land-grant system 150 years ago, it provided the means to do exactly that.