The story of wheat

The story of wheat

For millions of years, humans spent their time travelling from one place to another, gathering edible plants and hunting animals for food and other necessities of life. Then, about 12,000 years ago, it dawned on them that instead of gathering edible plants, they could grow them. The first farms cropped up in West Asia, in a lush region watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. One of the first plants to make it into these ancient farms was a wild grass with an enticing grain on its stalk: wheat.

It was abundantly available; so, its seeds were easy to get. Once sown, it grew quickly and easily and could be harvested in just a few months. Successfully growing wheat encouraged prehistoric humans to take up farming, changing the way they had lived for millions of years. They began to settle down in one place, clear and plough fields, sow seeds, tend to them, harvest, store and consume the crop. Eventually, they began growing other kinds of crops. In time, these crops spread around the world and more groups of humans took up farming.

Wheat remained one of the most popular food crops and thousands of years later, it became the star of the Green Revolution that originated in Mexico during the 1940s. To overcome acute food shortages, scientists led by Norman Borlaug at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, engineered a new variety of wheat that could resist various diseases and yielded so much grain that, within a few years, the countries growing it had enough to not only feed their own people, but also sell to other countries. During the 1960s, this high-yielding variety of wheat was brought to India, beginning the Green Revolution here.

While ancient wheat encouraged humans to take up farming, the Green Revolution wheat dramatically changed the way we farmed. It brought in modern science and technology into farms by popularising seed engineering, advanced irrigation systems, machines for ploughing and harvesting, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. New seeds had to be bought every sowing season; using seeds from the old harvest no longer worked. All this increased the cost of farming. Yet, the bumper harvest encouraged many farmers to fill their fields with Green Revolution wheat and other varieties that followed.

While this new way of farming helped to grow more food than ever before, it also had adverse effects on the environment. Today, many farmers in India are reviving ancient varieties of wheat and returning to old ways of farming. Who could have thought that the grain that goes into our bread has so much history behind it?