Why Wheat Is Like Wine

Wheat harvest on the Palouse in Idaho

(This post was originally on the Better Food Stories blog 9/26/16)

There is a term in the wine grape industry called “terrior” which celebrates the fact that fruit quality for wine making is greatly influenced by cultivar, climate and soil type.  Year-to-year differences in weather further influence the quality of specific “vintages.”  Wheat may be a humbler crop, but it is like wine in the sense that there are different classes of wheat for different end-use products and there are different regions where each type excels based on climate (wheat can be hard or soft, spring or winter, red or white, and there is a separate type called “durum” for pasta).  There are even year-to-year differences in quality.  For instance, to make an artisan bread, it is best to use flour from hard red spring wheat, that comes from the northern plains (North Dakota, Minnesota) or from the prairie provinces of Canada (e.g. Alberta and Saskatchewan).  For Asian noodles one wants a soft white winter wheat from the Pacific Northwest.  For crackers a soft red winter wheat is best from a place like Southern Illinois or Kentucky.  For pasta, a distinct type of wheat called durum is used and this is grown in Arizona and in the northern plains.

There are several important measures of wheat quality that reflect important properties of the dough, like strength and elasticity. These properties drive features, like how well the dough will rise and balance of different classes of starch, which influence the texture of baked products.  A yearly report on U.S. hard red spring wheat examines eight categories of “grading” data and eleven measure of “kernel quality.”  53% of U.S. wheat and 60% of Canadian wheat are exported around the world and purchased by customers looking for specific qualities (based on FAOStats data 2011-13). Europe is a major producer of wheat and has much higher wheat yields compared to the lower rainfall production areas in North America, but European countries still import a great deal of wheat for high quality bread and pasta and use much of their domestic production for animal feed.

As with all crops, wheat is attacked by various pests. Unlike grapes, it is possible to deal with some of the pests by breeding resistant varieties of wheat (winemakers are reluctant to accept new grape varieties preferring the traditional favorites that have been in use for hundreds of years).  A key advance in the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s was developing resistance to a particularly damaging fungal disease called “Stem Rust.”  That resistance held up for decades, but in 1999 a strain of the fungus overcame the trait, and since then wheat breeders worldwide have worked to breed a new resistance gene into all the different genetic backgrounds for the diverse wheats grown around the world.

In wet climates, wheat can be infected by many different fungal pathogens and commercial production requires the use of several protective fungicide treatments, starting with seed treatments and spaced throughout the growing season.  In drier North America, diseases are not as problematic, but do sometimes require treatments to preserve yield and quality.  If it rains during the time when the wheat is flowering, a fungus called Fusarium can infect the crop and wheat has proven to be very difficult to breed for resistance. A well timed fungicide spray can help against this disease, but that is not always possible. This particular fungus can produce a mycotoxin chemical in infected wheat kernels called Deoxynivalenol or DON.  It is also called “vomitoxin” because of the effect it has on animals that consume contaminated grain. In our food system, the consumer is well protected from exposure to such toxins, thanks to the care and expense taken on by farmers.

The global wheat industry is really made up of many distinct sub-crops, but as a whole, wheat production has been making steady progress in keeping up with growing global demand with only minimal expansion in planted areas (see graph below).  Some of that progress has been made by diminishing pest damage through a combination of breeding and crop protection agents like fungicides.  Also, a great deal of modern wheat production is in “no-till” systems where weeds are controlled with herbicides instead of by mechanical tillage.  This system greatly reduces soil erosion, lowers fuel use and leads to improved soil health and carbon sequestration.

The green part of each par shows the proportion of the increased production achieved through higher yield rather than additional planting area

So the next time that you enjoy a wheat-based product, think about the effort and risk that a wheat farmer faced, not only to produce the grain, but to produce it with the positive qualities needed and with the absence of issues like DON toxin.

Who Controls The Food Supply?

Who has actually has the control? Maybe not who you think. Certainly not Pinky and the Brain.

(The serious part of this post originally appeared on Forbes, 6/26/15)

A common anti-GMO narrative is that large international companies seek to “control the food supply” through patents and the ownership of seed companies.  Ironically, the opponents of plant biotechnology have exercised a far more significant degree of “control”.  Very few of the possible “GMO” crop options have ever been commercialized in either the developed or developing world.  It gives me no pleasure to say this, but over the last 20 years I've watched as anti-GMO activists have successfully employed three, potent control strategies:  political over-ride of the regulatory system, manipulation through brand protectionism, and pressure exerted via importers. 

The farmers who have been granted the opportunity to grow biotech crops have adopted them enthusiastically. The traits have provided growers with logistical advantages, reductions in risk, and/or economic benefits. This has been true in both the developed and developing world.

Adoption rates of biotech varieties in various crops and geographies (data from The Context Network, USDA-APHIS, FAO-Stats)

However, very few of the world's fruit or vegetable growers have had a biotech option, nor have the farmers who grow wheat, barley, rice, potatoes or pulse crops.  This is true in spite of the fact that genetic engineering could address important and even critical needs in those crops.

Political Over-ride

The first success of the anti-GMO movement was the politically driven decision by most of Europe not to allow biotech crops to be cultivated and to require GMO labeling of foods.  The response of those food companies was to avoid GMO ingredients so they would not have the stigma of a label.  The EU subsequently funded a huge amount of safety testing, and their scientific bodies have concluded that there is no special risk associated with these foods.  But for Europe, politics still trumps science and that phenomenon has been exported through European influence on governments throughout the developing world.  Groups like Greenpeace have also aggressively opposed any efforts to allow poor farmers around the world to ever try out the technology.  The food supply for the poor is certainly being “controlled,” but by the activists, not by the seed companies.

Manipulation Through Brand Protectionism

A strategy of the anti-GMO movement for control of the rich world food supply has been to exploit brand protectionism.  The first example was with the potato industry.  An insect resistant potato was launched in 1996 at the same time as biotech traits were first commercialized in soybeans, cotton and Canola.  I interviewed many potato growers in the first few years the trait was available and they were extremely happy to have a solution to their most damaging insect pest, the Colorado Potato Beetle.

Colorado Potato Beetle Damage (photo by Jeff Hahn, UMN Extension)

Potato growers were also excited about virus resistance and improved storage traits that were in the product development pipeline.  Frito-Lay was sponsoring biotech trait development in universities for the potatoes used to make chips.  The activists recognized that in the North American potato industry, McDonald’s and Frito-Lay have enormous economic leverage as the biggest customers for frozen fries and chipping potatoes. They threatened those company’s brands with the prospect of unwanted press attention through targeted protests.  At McDonald’s, the decision was taken at the CEO level to avoid the brand risk, and so, in three phone calls to frozen fry producers, biotech potatoes were finished (I know this from three people who participated in that meeting).  A similar marketing-driven decision at Frito-Lay led to termination of their development programs.  There was nothing the potato growers, the major processors, or Monsanto could do about it because of the market power of those huge food companies – companies who effectively yielded that leverage to the control of the activists.  Meanwhile, potatoes still require extensive and costly pest control measures.

Brand Protectionism's Expanded Reach

The success of the activists in exploiting brand protectionism had a major chilling effect on other crops with high profile, consumer brands.  In the mid 1990s there was a great deal of interest in biotechnology solutions.  I was personally aware of projects that had been started or which were planned for bananas, coffee, grapes, tomatoes, lettuce, strawberries and apples.  When MacDonald’s and Frito-Lay acquiesced to the activist pressures around 1999, all the planning and work was halted in those and other brand-sensitive crops.  The ag biotech companies like Monsanto or Syngenta or DuPont essentially gave up on biotech efforts in “specialty crops” and focused only on the big row crops.  Fifteen years later that pattern of effective activist control remains largely in place.

Fusarium head blight of wheat (right) reduces
yield and leads to rejected loads because of the
DON mycotoxin (Wikimedia image)

Pressure Exerted Via Importers

At the turn of the century there were two biotech traits poised for commercialization in wheat in the US and Canada (wheat being one of the largest and most extensively traded crops in the world).  There was to be a herbicide resistance trait from Monsanto, and also a disease resistance trait from Syngenta.  Once again, I had the opportunity to interview many wheat growers to assess their interest in these options.  Most already had positive experiences growing biotech soy, corn or Canola, and they were keen to try the new wheat options.  They never got that chance.  Major wheat importers from Europe threatened to boycott all North American wheat if any commercial biotech varieties were planted in the US or Canada.  Europeans grow a great deal of wheat, but they need the high quality Hard Red Spring Wheat and Durum pasta wheat grown in the Northern Plains and Prairie provinces.  European bread and pasta makers did not want to have to label their products as containing GMOs, knowing that this would make them the subject of activist pressure.  So they used their considerable economic leverage as importing customers and made the boycott threat (not in a public way, but quite clearly).  The wheat grower organizations in the US and Canada could not resist and reluctantly asked Monsanto and Syngenta to stop their programs.  Both companies complied.  This was a clear example of food supply control – control based on the activist’s ability to create marketing issues for the sort of companies that really do have leverage.

The anti-GMO movement continues to use the threat of brand damage to get food companies and food retailers to use their market power to inhibit the introduction of new biotech traits and crop options.  These same strategies may well block second generation traits in apples, potatoes, citrus, and tomatoes.  The GMO labeling efforts and non-GMO projects are transparently being pursued with the goal of eliminating even the few existing biotech crops.

So who controls the food supply? Does that control entail any respect for the opinions and needs of farmers?  Do those that exercise the control contribute in any way to solutions to real world challenges and threats to the food supply?  Do those that exercise the control help to develop useful tools for the resource-poor farmers in the developing world?  Are any of the big food industry players with critical leverage willing to resist the control that is being achieved via their market power?  Are consumers happy with the reality of a food supply controlled by those who reject sound science?  Are they happy with a food supply controlled with the aid of food companies who profit from the fears that they and their allies have planted?

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com