Around and around we go with the technophiles trying hard to manipulate crops to make them more adapted to the future climate. Without ever posing certain basic questions such as '“is it best to continue with this crop or to switch to plants that are already adapted to hotter climates?”
A case in point is the Zip4.5B gene recently isolated in wheat. “Now” say the heroes of the technocracy “we can genetically manipulate wheat to be climate change resistant”. Journalists leap to write articles heaping praise on this advance. Basing their articles on flawed assumptions and with a number of question not being posed. The most important of which is “who owns these new varieties?” An estimated 89 countries depend on wheat, for the most part inhabited by people with little economic power. They will be encouraged to become dependant on this “miracle” wheat to the detriment of their own agricultural sectors.
In a number of countries on the African continent where I have worked trials have been going on for years looking at how to reduce wheat dependancy and how to revalorise indiginous hot climate adapted crops. It’s funny in a way because wandering around the so-called “health-food” shops in European countries we find packets of “super-foods” including flours that come from these native African plants. Yet some people seem to want to force countries to continue to be vulnerable to climate change and dependant on imported modified seeds, we can but wonder why.
Some of the journalists reporting on this future wheat also get their facts wrong. One article I read contended that “wheat is generally accorded the lead role in triggering the agricultural revolution that created our modern world”. The journalist is perpetuating the myth that the “crescent valley” move to wheat, barley, oats etc was the first and only “agricultural revolution” ignoring the much earlier forest gardening transition and ignoring also the rice and maize (corn) revolutions. It has to be said that “revolution” is really not the right word …..
Wheat versus potatoes (temperate areas)
Yields for wheat in the UK average at 8.5 tonnes per hectare, 11 – 18 million tonnes a year. On around 1.9 million hectares.
UK average yields for potatoes exceeds 40 tonnes per hectare, ~ 5.8 million tonnes a year. On around 145 thousand hectares.
(in 2020/21 the smaller than usual UK harvest of 6.2 million tonnes when milled made 5 million tonnes of flour)
Potatoes → grown → lifted → washed → delivered → cooked → eaten
Wheat → grown → harvested → delivered→ threshed → milled → mixed with other wheat flours → mixed with water and salt etc → baked → delivered → eaten
A relatively well researched article comparing the nutritional value of potatoes versus wheat can be found here. If you go to read the article you will see that the author includes both white bread and wholemeal bread. This seems ‘unfair’ as his other figures are for PEELED boiled potatoes. This is a shame because a shed load of things like carbs, iron, thiamin, niacin etc are to be found in the skins. You can check up on the amounts here and here . Boiling potatoes also means good stuff leaching into the cooking water.
So we can produce more on less land if we grow potatoes. Potatoes yields would go down slightly but we could also transition to eating more dark coloured cultivars which contain higher levels of polyphenols. Today there are around 5000 different cultivars. Potatoes can also be transformed into a type of flour.
Research from the European Association for Potato Research contend that “For potato production in Mediterranean and Sahelian types of climate, during the heat-free period of the year, yields will go down as the suitable period becomes shorter. With a higher evaporative demand, the resource water will be used less efficiently. Potato yields in temperate climates may increase—provided that water for irrigation is available—due to a longer growing season and higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the air.”
This brings up two main points. One … it is essential that we stop this one size fits all stupidity, instead of trying to continue to grow the same old things in areas where it is becoming increasingly difficult and risky, grow something else, which is the lesson coming from countries in Africa. Two … switch away from moncultures to polycultural systems that included trees and tree crops. Having all our eggs in so few baskets is becoming increasingly dangerous, we rely too heavily on too few maincrops that are becoming more and more endangered by climate change. Mulch based systems also reduce irrigation need and potatoes can grow perfectly well in light shade.
Polycultural organic systems also provide quality food and habitat for pollinator insects which are in a catastrophic decline. This study estimates the decline in fruit, vegetable and nut yields due to pollinator decline, the researchers also estimate the number of human deaths that this is causing.
The original title of the article from the John Innes Centre reporting the discovery, by them, of the wheat gene was “New Green Revolution gene discovery sows hope of drought resilient wheat”. The first green revolution put into place large size farms completely dependant on fossil fuel based fertilisers and on synthetic pesticides/herbicides etc. This approach is massively responsible for pollinator decline. If, at the time, instead of going down the tech-mech path we had gone for polycultural agroforestry systems we wouldn’t be in many of the difficulties we find ourselves today. A final point on this is that we may be able to continue to produce some types of fertiliser using what remains in the oil wells but phosphate mines are being rapidly depleted. Crops take up some of this mineral but a considerable quantity of the phosphate added to farmland becomes mineralised and stored in the soil but unavailable to plants. It can become available again however through the action of the fungal mycelium network. Ploughing and many synthetic chemicals destroy the fungal network so eventually, and hopefully soon, ploughing must cease.
Ok, I know, a diet based predominantly on potatoes would become uninteresting after a while, even with the dozens of recipies that can be found. The point is that the climate is going into the unknown and unknowable, we will have to adapt our diets and which crops we grow. The technocrat approach puts way too much power into the hands of an elite and also tends to promote the business as usual paradigm which is so tragically failing us. People can change their diet and we need to shift away from so much wheat (it can be found in about a third of all grocery products), it is taking up too much land that could be better used.
At home people tend to stick with the same old foods, sometimes trying something new but not very often. In a restaurant or a take-away however people tend to be much more ready to try new things, maybe some of these superstar chefs could start helping out and getting people to move towards less climate change vulnerable crops?
For example, many people in temperate climates complain about slugs in their vegetable garden. Slugs are edible but people, even in countries that have a tradition of eating snails, turn their nose up at the idea of eating slugs. So here is a tip :
Clean and prepare the slugs as you would snails with some parsley or garlic butter
Find some empty snail shells and clean them well
You’ve already guessed the rest :-)