Conventional Vs Heritage Wheat Yields
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- čas přidán 25. 08. 2024
- ‘Whether you are a farmer or an eater, the challenge is to grow good food and balance the need for biodiversity and planet cooling with the yield penalty.’ Ian compares our crop of heritage wheat, grown with no inputs and low carbon footprint, with the control plot of conventional wheat which yields more but also costs more. It’s the next chapter in the English breadmaking story.
FarmED is the new Centre for Farming and Food Education based at Honeydale Farm in the Cotswolds.
Our mission is to accelerate the transition towards regenerative farming and sustainable food systems by providing space and opportunity for inspirational education, innovative research, practitioner-led knowledge exchange events and personal development.
The farm is a diverse mix of low input arable and temporary grass, and organic permanent pasture. Our trial plots include blocks of sainfoin, herbal ley, barley, heritage wheat, wild bird seed and various cover crops. The grassland is managed by mob grazed sheep.
At the heart of FarmED are two impressive eco-buildings - one providing space for conferences, lectures, workshops and special events; and the other a farm to fork kitchen and food space, and a regenerative business incubator.
Our audience includes local communities, schools, universities, researchers, farmers, new entrants, foodies, businesses, environmental groups and policy makers.
Our Website - www.farm-ed.co.uk
if you count kilocalories from petroleum needed to produce food via industrial methods, it works out that it takes more energy to produce the food than the food contains. so it's a net loss of energy. I'm not sure that any kind of farming can produce food for 8 + billion people without destroying the environment, but i am pretty sure that the way we're going now is NOT working. Best solution would be to voluntarily reduce family size, and voluntarily produce as much food, fiber and energy / power as possible in your own community. my 2 cents.
Nah. With regenerative agriculture you can get rid of all the pesticides and fertilizers and produce more bushels the acre and far more calories because the livestock numbers (for cover crop management), will quadruple.
Also if all families had a little garden to grow veges and a few dedicated to growing the bread for local areas there would never be food shortages or problems, there was a study done where a bunch of families got chickens from a government and egg sales dropped profits in the hundreds of thousands
Source?
The best video I've found on the topic so far, especially to understand the acreage and output differences. I would love to be able to compare product differences (e.g. comparing loaves of bread or other baked goods) but in general, I think we have lost so much by ignoring heritage wheat varieties. There used to be hundreds that were better suited for different climates. I also wanted to note that height difference. So many now would consider that a waste, but back in the day, that extra straw was extremely useful to have. Modern wheat varieties are less than half as tall in many cases which on a small scale (especially homestead) setting is actually less useful overall.
Hello, great video. Where can I get the heritage wheat seed mix from? I would like to grow my own wheat. I am in North Wales. Also, how many loaves of bread can I get from a square metre on it roughly and how much do I need to sow roughly? Thank you
The video is missing some critical points. I grew a side by side plot comparison between a wheat from the 1800s and a modern wheat with no inputs. The 1800s wheat out yielded the new wheat by 300%.
How?
@@SebNutter because the new varieties are designed to be used with inputs. there are a lot of varieties of grain that were better than now. Flax is one of them.
Given that people like me and many others struggle to understand acreage values, having farmers speak in terms of loaves of bread or pints of beer makes a lot of sense. You need to win the public over, not me, as I'm sold by everything FarmED does (check out their social media channels), but by talking their language, you'll make the conversations go further.
Growing a large amount of different heritage varieties in the same field is an odd choice if you are using a harvester and it's not animal feed. The moisture content and ripeness will have a larger variation and make it difficult to harvest effectively. It's hard enough with a single variety if the field doesn't turn at the same time.
Great video Ian. Looks fantastic.
The heritage wheat did not produce that much 100 years ago as yours did now. 20 bu/ac was a good yield then compared to 100+
You mention taste. It would be interesting to analyse the nutrient and phyto nutrient density of the two samples. How much of the respective samples does one need to eat to obtain the same level of nutrition?
Excellent.
Here’s a thought, Ukraine’s 10% of global wheat production is unavailable right now and a number of the world’s poorest nations are facing the possibility of starvation! Can you imagine what would happen if 50% of the worlds wheat suddenly disappeared off the market? I guess we could clear more land to grow new acres of the old unproductive wheat, but where does that leave the environment? I say bigger yields to feed a hungry world and use up less land!
Klaus