History of wheat
has been an important food plant since before the birth of agriculture and the domestication of cereals. Its production has increased in its 10,000 years of cultivation, along with the amount of land under wheat and trade in the commodity.
Domestication
s in West Asia harvested wild wheats for thousands of years before they were domesticated, perhaps as early as 21,000 BC, but they formed a minor component of their diets. In this phase of pre-domestication cultivation, early cultivars were spread around the region and slowly developed the traits that came to characterise their domesticated forms.Repeated harvesting and sowing of the grains of wild grasses led to the creation of domestic strains, as mutant forms of wheat were more amenable to cultivation. In domesticated wheat, grains are larger, and the seeds remain attached to the ear by a toughened rachis during harvesting. In wild strains, a more fragile rachis allows the ear to shatter easily, dispersing the spikelets. Selection for larger grains and non-shattering heads by farmers might not have been deliberately intended, but simply have occurred because these traits made gathering the seeds easier; nevertheless such 'incidental' selection was an important part of crop domestication. As the traits that improve wheat as a food source involve the loss of the plant's natural seed dispersal mechanisms, highly domesticated strains of wheat cannot survive in the wild.
Wild einkorn wheat grows across Southwest Asia in open parkland and steppe environments. It comprises three distinct races, only one of which, native to Southeast Anatolia, was domesticated. The main feature that distinguishes domestic einkorn from wild is that its ears do not shatter without pressure, making it dependent on humans for dispersal and reproduction. It also tends to have wider grains. Wild einkorn was collected at sites such as Tell Abu Hureyra and Mureybet, but the earliest archaeological evidence for the domestic form comes after in southern Turkey, at Çayönü, Cafer Höyük, and possibly Nevalı Çori. Genetic evidence indicates that it was domesticated in multiple places independently.
Wild emmer wheat is less widespread than einkorn, favouring the rocky basaltic and limestone soils found in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent. It is more diverse, with domesticated varieties falling into two major groups: hulled or non-shattering, in which threshing separates the whole spikelet; and free-threshing, where the individual grains are separated. Both varieties probably existed in prehistory, but over time free-threshing cultivars became more common. Wild emmer was first cultivated in the southern Levant, as early as 9600 BC. Genetic studies have found that, like einkorn, it was domesticated in southeastern Anatolia, but only once. The earliest secure archaeological evidence for domestic emmer comes from Çayönü,, where distinctive scars on the spikelets indicated that they came from a hulled domestic variety. Slightly earlier finds have been reported from Tell Aswad in Syria,, but these were identified using a less reliable method based on grain size.
Early farming
Einkorn and emmer are considered two of the founder crops cultivated by the first farming societies in Neolithic West Asia. These communities also cultivated naked wheats and a now-extinct domesticated form of Zanduri wheat, as well as a wide variety of other cereal and non-cereal crops. Wheat was relatively uncommon for the first thousand years of the Neolithic, but became a staple after around 8500 BC. Early wheat cultivation did not demand much labour. Initially, farmers took advantage of wheat's ability to establish itself in annual grasslands by enclosing fields against grazing animals and re-sowing stands after they had been harvested, without the need to systematically remove vegetation or till the soil. They may also have exploited natural wetlands and floodplains to practice décrue farming, sowing seeds in the soil left behind by receding floodwater. It was harvested with stone-bladed sickles. The ease of storing wheat and other cereals led farming households to become gradually more reliant on it over time, especially after they developed individual storage facilities that were large enough to hold more than a year's supply.Wheat grain was stored after threshing, with the chaff removed. It was then processed into flour using ground stone mortars. Bread made from ground einkorn and the tubers of a form of club rush was made as early as 12,400 BC. At Çatalhöyük, both wholegrain wheat and flour was used to prepare bread, porridge and gruel. Apart from food, wheat may also have been important to Neolithic societies as a source of straw, which could be used for fuel, wicker-making, or wattle and daub construction.
Spread
Domestic wheat was quickly spread to regions where its wild ancestors did not grow naturally. Emmer was introduced to Cyprus as early as 8600 BC and einkorn ; emmer reached Greece by 6500 BC, Egypt shortly after 6000 BC, and Germany and Spain by 5000 BC. "The early Egyptians were developers of bread and the use of the oven and developed baking into one of the first large-scale food production industries." By 4000 BC, wheat had reached the British Isles and Scandinavia. Wheat was also cultivated in India around 3500 BC. Wheat likely appeared in China's lower Yellow River around 2600 BC.The oldest evidence for hexaploid wheat is through DNA analysis of wheat seeds from around 6400–6200 BC at Çatalhöyük. the earliest known wheat with sufficient gluten for yeasted breads is from a granary at Assiros in Macedonia dated to 1350 BC. Wheat continued to spread across Europe and to the Americas in the Columbian exchange. In the British Isles, wheat straw was used for roofing in the Bronze Age, remaining in common use until the late 19th century. White wheat bread was historically a high status food, but during the nineteenth century it became in Britain an item of mass consumption, displacing oats, barley and rye from diets in the North of the country. After 1860, the expansion of wheat production in the United States flooded the world market, lowering prices by 40%, and made a major contribution to the nutritional welfare of the poor.
Production and consumption
19th century
Wheat became a central agriculture endeavor in the worldwide British Empire in the 19th century, and remains of great importance in Australia, Canada and India. In Australia, with vast lands and a limited work force, expanded production depended on technological advances, especially irrigation and machinery. By the 1840s there were 900 growers in South Australia. They used "Ridley's Stripper", a reaper-harvester perfected by John Ridley in 1843, to remove the heads of grain. In Canada, modern farm implements made large scale wheat farming possible from the late 1840s. By 1879, Saskatchewan was the center, followed by Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, as the spread of railway lines allowed easy exports to Britain. By 1910, wheat made up 22% of Canada's exports, rising to 25% in 1930 despite the sharp decline in prices during the Great Depression. Efforts to expand wheat production in South Africa, Kenya and India were stymied by low yields and disease. However, by 2000 India had become the second largest producer of wheat in the world. In the 19th century the American wheat frontier moved rapidly westward. By the 1880s 70% of American exports went to British ports. The first successful grain elevator was built in Buffalo in 1842. The cost of transport fell rapidly. In 1869 it cost 37 cents to transport a bushel of wheat from Chicago to Liverpool; in 1905 it was 10 cents.In the United States
In 1830, it took four people and two oxen, working 10 hours a day, to produce 200 bushels. The geographic center of wheat-growing areas in the U.S. in 1839 was to the north and west of Washington, D.C., and it spread further over time to the far west of the country. Production conditions also resulted in extending the wheat growing areas into harsher climatic regions. Data on wheat production is available for the period between 1885 and 1930. Improvements in wheat breeding in the U.S. were an activity of the state agricultural experiment stations, while the federal officials concentrated on exploring possibilities of gaining from appropriate varieties developed in other parts of the world.After the American Civil War, the western Mississippi Valley and the Great Plains to its west, where large fertile lands were available, resulted in expanding wheat farming. By this time, better tillage equipment was in use, railroads provided better access to world markets, better trading and warehousing facilities were facilitated, and more particularly introduction of hard winter wheat. In the 1870s, Turkey red wheat, a hard variety of wheat, was introduced to the farmlands of Kansas by Russian Mennonite immigrants. This wheat variety spread quickly. New technology substantially enhanced productivity in the 19th century, as sowing with drills replaced broadcasting, cradles took the place of sickles, and the cradles in turn were replaced by reapers and binders. Steam-powered threshing machines superseded flails. By 1895, in Bonanza farms in the Dakotas, it took six different people and 36 horses pulling huge harvesters, working 10 hours a day, to produce 20,000 bushels. Following the invention of the steel roller mill in 1878, hard varieties of wheat such as Turkey Red became more popular than soft, which had been previously preferred because they were easier for grist mills to grind.